Why Marx Was Right Paperback – April 24, 2012

This book is an excellent introduction to Marx’s thought, whether for class assignment or general reading. However, it is not flawless. First, what makes it excellent? As Eagleton observes, Marx is a much “travestied” thinker. (239) Perhaps the most regrettable travesty is the widespread misrepresentation of Marx as an angry, heartless, malevolent determinist, who wants to violently impose a cruel, totalitarian communist system on the world. In ten short, readable chapters, Eagleton addresses the most common and egregious misrepresentations and misconceptions about Marx’s Marxism.

Very much to the contrary of the demonizing propaganda, Eagleton shows that Marx was a humanist with a big heart who was driven by outrage over the way the mass of humanity is being ruthlessly exploited and kept ignorant about its own nature. Marx agreed with Aristotle that man is a political animal. Beyond the Great Greek, Marx condemned the way in which people were being prevented from realizing their true nature. As political animals, people need to have a real role in their political self-determination. Capitalism frustrates the realization of this natural need by presenting a façade of democracy, behind which a ruling class makes the core decisions necessary to serve its own interests at the expense of the self-realization of the masses. They even control the consciousness of the masses by keeping them ignorant of their needs, and telling them they are free individuals. Thus, folks fail to even become aware of the needs they have, and the power they have to throw off their shackles and to fulfill those needs.

Marx’s mission was as much educational as it was political. Far from being an anti-individual “collectivist,” Marx saw communism as a system in support of Free Individuality, a system in which the primary aim is the free development of each and the free development of all. As Eagleton notes, Marx envisioned communism as a system that could deliver on the promise made by the Enlightenment’s Liberal philosophy of individual freedom for self-development. Indeed, Marx’s central critique of capitalism is that it reduces the individual to a fragment of a person, and an appendage to a machine. In capitalism, the individual is forced to develop only those work skills necessary to produce a profit for the capitalist. In communism, as Marx envisioned it, the necessary work would be done to meet the basic needs of everyone, and this would be done in ways that enabled everyone to participate in all the important decision making processes, economic and political. Marx wanted true democracy for all, not just democracy on Election Day. Also, Marx wanted to avoid violence where possible, and said that people in representative democracies like Great Britain and the USA could change the system through elections.

While his presentation of Marx’s Marxism is excellent in its emphasis on Free Individuality, Eagleton misconstrues Marx in at least three notable ways. Marx was totally committed to Human Emancipation. But Eagleton doesn’t seem to get that point. He confuses that with political emancipation – like for oppressed groups (such as women, LGBT, racial groups, etc.). Marx intended communism to Free Humanity from oppression, not just through reforms group by group, but through revolution if necessary. He made this clear in his essay On the Jewish Question. Secondly, Marx did NOT use communism as his standard by which to criticize capitalism. He never defined communism by specifying what kind of institutions it would have. His focus was always on inhumane social relations in the capitalist system, their nature and causes. Marx left it up to folks in the future to make their own institutions as necessary. But Eagleton writes of communism as if it were Marx’s Shangri-La, or a final resting place for the human soul, like the Christian Heaven. (See my essay Formal Axiology and Karl Marx.)

Finally, bordering on the ridiculous, Eagleton suggests that everyone in a communist system will be an aesthetic, like himself – a professional literary critic in England. He seems to envision a Man of Leisure, or an English Gentleman, passing his days painting portraits of his garden. Sorry, bro. People will still have to work, but work will be freely organized so that it both produces the necessities of life in abundance, and empowers all the workers to fulfill their nature as political animals, or species beings. Do as you please after work. That’s Marx’s idea of the good life.

William J. Kelleher, Ph.D.

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.

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.

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.

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

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?"

Simply dazzling.

great book! clearly debunks many intentionally planted misconceptions that the john birchers and southern white plantation owners may not want you to know about.