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Terry Eagleton

Why Marx Was Right Paperback – April 24, 2012

by Terry Eagleton (Author)

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One of the foremost Marxist critics of his generation forcefully argues against Marx's irrelevancy

In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking ten of the most common objections to Marxism—that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on—he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's own thought these assumptions are. In a world in which capitalism has been shaken to its roots by some major crises, Why Marx Was Right is as urgent and timely as it is brave and candid. Written with Eagleton's familiar wit, humor, and clarity, it will attract an audience far beyond the confines of academia.

Print length

272 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Yale University Press
Publication date

April 24, 2012
Dimensions

5.25 x 0.75 x 8.5 inches
ISBN-10

0300181531
ISBN-13

978-0300181531
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Each of the chapters of this erudite and breezy . . . tract begins with a series of assertions about Marx and Marxism, which Eagleton then proceeds to debunk . . . through excursions into philosophy, political practice and literary analogy . . . Polemically charged and enjoyable."—The Guardian

"A lively defense . . . Eagleton offers a richer, more complex and nuanced picture of the father of modern socialism . . . Throughout, the author is witty, entertaining, and incisive."—Publishers Weekly

"Reading a book by Terry Eagleton is like watching fireworks . . . The list of Marxism's shortcomings is common coinage, and Eagleton offers convincing counterarguments."—Dennis O'Brien, Christian Century

"Eagleton is a compelling writer and raconteur . . . He’s a witty, insightful thinker with a penchant for glib asides and wry dashes of humor. It’s probably the only book that makes references to Tiger Woods and Mel Gibson along with Charles Fourier and Michel Foucault."—Michael Patrick Brady, PopMatters

"Professor Eagleton covers the spectrum of critiques of Marxian ideas like only an actual critic of Marx could. As such, most of the rebuttals to these critiques are well contrived and incredibly sharp."—Greg Linster, Bookslut

About the Author

Terry Eagleton is currently Distinguished Professor of English Literature at the University of Lancaster, England, and Professor of Cultural Theory at the National University of Ireland, Galway. He lives in Dublin.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Yale University Press (April 24, 2012)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0300181531
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0300181531
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.3 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.25 x 0.75 x 8.5 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,486,205 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,177 in Theory of Economics
- #2,837 in Communism & Socialism (Books)
- #3,515 in Philosophy Movements (Books)

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Karl Thomsen

Superior synopsis

Reviewed in the United States on August 31, 2016

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Nearing 60 years of age I don't have enough time to read every single thing Marx wrote that I have not already read. Mr. Eagleton seems fairly unbiased in his evaluation of Marx and his thoughts. A great place to begin the study of Marx and Marxism. Or, a great place to wrap up previous study.

8 people found this helpful

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Prometheus

A most necessary and important book

Reviewed in the United States on September 13, 2015

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A most necessary and important book about a most necessary and important man. As always Eagleton is a pleasure to read. Marx's real thought and writings have been so intellectually corrupted by rightwing idiots or left wing idealists it is beyond tragic. Eagleton does a great job at setting the record straight. Although he made a solid case he left a lot of intellectual artillery unused. I'm sure he had his reasons. Somebody should take this book and finish the job with even finer detail.

5 people found this helpful

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JORGE BUSTIOS

A good refresher.

Reviewed in the United States on September 6, 2017

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Highly recommended. This book is a necessary refresher of Marx's thoughts on philosophy, economics, politics and sociology by debunking most of more popular myths about Marxism.
Published in 2011 just when the world was painfully recovering from the financial crisis of 2008 the book also describes and analyzes the connections between the current status of capitalism and the socio-economic marxian theses.

5 people found this helpful

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not a natural

A Corrective for Those Who Pretend to have Read Marx

Reviewed in the United States on May 1, 2014

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Terry Eagleton's book "Why Marx was Right" is a skillfully written, sometimes almost poetic, mis-titled political polemic. A more suitable title would capture Eagleton's remarkably well-informed effort to demonstrate that so much that is so often found horribly wrong with common misconceptions of Marxism is sharply at odds with everything that Marx ever wrote. "Why Marx was Not Wrong" or "Marx Never Said That" would be more suitable titles, but neither grabs the prospective reader's attention or has, for many, the shock value of "Why Marx was Right." Nevertheless, the primary purpose of Eagleton's book is to set the record straight and make clear that much of the nonsense often attributed to Marx represents a misreading or, more likely, a failure to read what Marx wrote, sometimes with Engels as like-minded co-author, over the course of his lifetime.

Commonly, when an author comes to Marx's defense he or she is met with strident cries that when Marxism has been tried it has met with murderously disastrous results. Moreover, esteemed scholars such as Leszek Kolakowski and Eugene Genovese , Marxists in their youth, later concluded, no less polemically than Eagleton, that efforts to establish socialist societies were doomed not only to fail, but to almost certainly result in the tyranny and mass murder that befell Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's mainland China. However, author's with these mid-career changes in mindset are typically loathe to acknowledge that Marx would have emphatically judged that Russia and its underdeveloped neighbors in the first decades of the 20th Century, and China in the late 1940's were among the poorest choices for a revolution that would have led to establishment of effective socialist societies.

Marx's view of the conditions necessary for creation of socialism was that it be established in developed societies, not poor peasant domains ruled by a parasitic royalty or collections of barbaric war lords. In other words, in so far as Marx had a rudimentary prescription for development of a socialist society, it followed a requisite period of growth, industrialization, innovation, and diversification that typifies a mature capitalist social system. For better or worse, following Eagleton, the profit motive and its developmental outcomes necessarily laid the groundwork for emergence, gradual or with revolutionary suddenness, of a socialist society. Otherwise, there was too little to build on and too little to foster the development of human potential.

Notice that in addition to admiration for the innovative and economically productive nature of capitalism, according to Marx the transition to socialism need not involve bloodshed. It may or may not, but the decisive factor was recognition on the part of the population -- not a revolutionary elite, but citizens in general -- that capitalism had reached a point where the unending pursuit of capital accumulation was more destructive than beneficial. For example, Anthony Giddens reports in his recent book Turbulent and Mighty Continent that fully half of the world's available capital is not invested in productive activity, the kind that would create jobs and promote social and economic development. Has capitalism backed off from what it has always done best? Is this evidence of its obsolescence?

Given the foregoing observations, it's difficult to avoid thinking in terms of class, a concept once dismissed in the West as obsolete and reckoned in strictly cultural terms. It is clearly the case, however, that the capitalist mode of production is based on two fundamental classes, the one that owns and controls the means of production and finance, with members of the other, much larger class, working in whatever occupational positions capital makes available. Eagleton finds it useful, moreover, to recognize an intermediate middle class which, for the most part, is made up of members of the working class who are doing particularly well, at least for the short term. But the basic formulation is capital and proletariat.

The questions that usually follow an account such as this unmistakably imply that Marx was a leveler who wanted to create a world where any differences among people, especially with regard to material resources, were summarily eliminated. However, Marx never wrote anything to suggest that he was a leveler or that he wanted to establish person-to-person homogeneity with regard to much of anything. In fact, you'll find just the opposite if you read his essay on "Primitive Communism" in the "Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844."

Marx construed people, at birth, as possessing enormous potential for developing a broad range of talents. No two people were the same, and given that we have different interests and capabilities, the resources used by one would inevitably be more or less and different from the resources used by another. What Marx wanted was a society wherein self-actualization was more than just a quaint psychological concept from the 1940's that was kept alive by the authors of textbooks for undergraduates. Of course Marx wanted to eliminate the class-based society intrinsic to capitalism, but elimination of all material and other differences was sharply at odds with his perspective.

As one who assumed that we are all capable of producing ourselves in a variety of satisfying ways through the expenditure of intelligence, talent, and effort according to our natural capabilities, one might surmise that we have the key to Marx's understanding of human nature, something Marx termed "species being." This is the position Eagleton takes, and he develops it beautifully. I think, however, that Eagleton goes too far when he denies that Marx thought that human beings at birth were cognitively blank slates or tabula rasa.

As a materialist, meaning one who gives priority to experiential determination of the kind of people we find in any society, I think it makes a good deal of sense to invoke the blank slate metaphor. The potential for growth and development that Marx saw in each of us was promoted or thwarted, enhanced or diminished, realized or undercut by the social circumstances in which we lived. Capitalism created people whose life experiences made them combative, greedy, adversarial, demoralized, unnaturally limited ... simply by functioning according to its intrinsic, observable characteristics. A socialist society that did not provide a context within which human development was relatively unfettered by economic constraints was socialist in name only. Still, in spite the unflattering outcomes attributed to capitalism, it remained a necessary prerequisite to socialism. Capitalism provided socialism with its material foundation. It was only when the ethos of capitalism was overcome by a socialist point of view and socialist values that socialist society became possible.

But how does one imbue men and women with a socialist perspective? The very term "socialist," much as with "communist," has become in the U.S. a laughably profane political epithet. Only when everyday experience with the material world persuades the citizenry that capitalism has run its course, constrains productivity, and makes a good life ever harder to achieve will socialism become a tenable alternative to things as they are.

Given the current contradiction between prevailing anti-socialist mindsets in spite of deteriorating material circumstances, one can see why a transition from capitalism to socialism is so often dismissed as utopian nonsense. This, too, however, is something that Marx came to understand very well, and may help to explain why he never wavered in his commitment to the view that the nature of a genuinely socialist or communist society could not be precisely foreseen but had to emerge as a consequence of concrete historical development. In this and an impressive variety of additional ways, Eagleton gives compelling substance to the question "Was ever a thinker so travestied?"

14 people found this helpful

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Max Madson

He wasn't

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2019

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He wasn't.

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paul

Tired of the myth? Learn here about the real deal!

Reviewed in the United States on January 3, 2014

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First of all, this work is critical given the dominant ideology demonizing Marx. The record need be set straight and Eagleton does so brilliantly. If you seek to know the true Marx, pick up this relatively short and thoroughly well written book. It could be the first step toward understanding what a better tomorrow for all of humanity could look like.

10 people found this helpful

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uncle karl

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 13, 2017

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Simply dazzling.

2 people found this helpful

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robert

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on June 18, 2017

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Cuts right thru post-war Washinton anti-socialist propoganda. Summarily to the bold and to the point.

4 people found this helpful

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Larry Butler

Fascinating and provocative

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 22, 2013

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The most readable, well-informed and thought-provoking text on politics I have read for many years. Guaranteed to stimulate your brain, whether you start off as a sympathiser or not. Demonstrates Eagleton's lucid and engaging style to its best advantage. Highly recommended.

13 people found this helpful

Isaac Verma

Solid explanation of Marxism

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 1, 2013

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I really enjoyed reading this book, as Eagleton provides a solid review of Marxism. He uses a variety of sources from Marx's various works and is able to go into quite some depth into the practical side of Marxism, something I have yet to see from any other Marxist writer. The chapters are the right length to provide clarity on the issue being addressed but not as to waffle on and on. However, anybody who considers themselves to be already knowledgeable on the subject will find this book quite useless; for people who have only heard what they learnt in History class, this book is for you.

3 people found this helpful

Dr Big Pike

Of course he was!

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 15, 2018

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A great summary of the views of the great man.

ZYX

Quite nice

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 15, 2013

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In this book Terry Eagleton debunks every usual objections to Marxism in a clear and logical manner, and proves the validity of Marxism today.

3 people found this helpful

E. Clarke

Rattling good yarn

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 3, 2011

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You get the impression Eaglton rattled this off without pausing for breath. This kind of makes you want to hang on and keep reading. There is no denying the lifetime of scholarship that lies behind this achievement though, nor the incisiveness with which he shoots down common (usually ignorant) criticisms of Marx's work and ideas. It is all very, very convincing when it relates to Marx's analysis of (and great admiration for) Capitalism, particularly its instability and its ultimate incompatiblity with a true democacy. Its biggest weakness - which it shares with Marx - is that it offers no alternative that is remotely either plausible or appealing. I wish it did, and and no doubt it is out there, but it is not in this otherwise excellent book.

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