I finished this book today while waiting for my wife to come out of surgery. All went well and she should recover quickly. Meanwhile, what better time to contemplate the issue raised in Terry Eagleton's book: Why Marx was right (Yale University Press, 2011). Among the many things one could say about Marx's writings is that most people seem to have an opinion about them even though they never have read his work. I suspect that most of them probably never will read the work. That makes a book like this useful if one wants a quick tour. Much like many of us are prone to create our lover rather than find out who she or he might really be, many seem to react to Marx with a knee jerk response without realizing that the real object of their reaction is their own creation. In other words they can hate Marxism without ever really knowing what it is. For these reasons alone this book is worth reading rather carefully. The author writes well, clearly, honestly and with an established record of good writing in the past. He has a scholar's respect for the facts. The book is organized into ten chapters , each dealing with a common criticism of Marx. Read on below and I'll give you my take on his book as well as some of my own prejudices.
Chapter 1 deals with the notion that " Marxism is finished". The world has changed and events have left Marx in the past. If you accept my introductory statements about critics who have never studied Marx with any care, this certainly would be an excuse for that lack of effort.
Here I have to interject one of my prejudices about Marx. As a systems theorist and a student of complex systems in particular, I find the advent of Marx's writings a demonstration of a very important concept. Things take on meaning within a context. Remove them from the context or change the context substantially and their meaning can either change with these changes or become statements out of context without a frame of reference. When Marx wrote he was reacted to very strongly. That Reaction has dominated my 75 years on the planet. Why did the capitalist world find it so necessary to expend so much energy trying to refute Marx? Marx created this reaction. It was there earlier in lesser forms but his writings brought them out in force. Has this situation changed? Only in the frequency with which it comes up. try to make a serious statement praising his writings and watch the vitriolic response.
Eagleton puts this into perspective. He makes it clear that the issue is not Marxism as a way of life but Marx's critique of Capitalism. In this context it is not easy to dismiss Marx, especially today. So the issue really boils down to what happens if we revisit Marx in the context of today's Capitalism. Doing that is the only way to judge the viability of his critique. I venture to say, along with Eagleton, that much, if not most of it will stand up to that test.
Judge that contest with the knowledge that Capitalists own media and industries and other sources of power to spread their ideas. What have they accomplished? In that context Marx's writings are alive and well as a critique of the system that dominates the world today.
Chapter 2 deals with the issue of Marxist theory vs practice. To support the attack opponents of Marx parade out a list of social experiments that were performed by self proclaimed "Marxists" and which can be clearly shown to have "failed". The baby need not be discarded with the bath water. Here's one point he makes:
Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears; it is just that it has survived long enough to forget about much of this horror, which is not the case with Stalinism and Maoism. If Marx was spared this amnesia, it was partly because he lived while the system was still in the making.
Mike Davis writes in his Late Victorian Holocausts of the tens of millions of Indians, Africans, Chinese, Brazilians, Koreans, Russians and others who died as a result of entirely preventable famine, drought, and disease in the late nineteenth century. Many of these catastrophes were the result of free market dogma, as (for example) soaring grain prices thrust food beyond the reach of common people. Nor are such monstrosities as old as the Victorians. During the last two decades of the Twentieth century, the number of those in the world living on less than two dollars a day has increased by almost one hundred million.
He has much more to say on this, but I am going to have a lot to say without presenting more here. Please consult the book if you need more evidence of how such lines of criticism only hold up if one looks at one side of the issue.
Chapter 3 deals with the claim that "Marxism is a form of determinism". In this chapter the author rhetorically asks: "what is distinctive about Marxism?" He rules out some of the common choices to answer this. It is not socialism, communism, revolution, social class, the notion of the proletariat, alienation, or the concept of a cooperative society free of exploitation. These were there already when he wrote and made use of them. Here's his answer:
Two major doctrines lie at the heart of Marx's thought. One of them is the primary role of the economic in social life; the other is the idea of a succession of modes of production throughout history.
These ideas survive well and are anything but deterministic. They follow along with developmental ideas integrated into evolutionary biology. (I'll have more to say about this in a book I am helping Jim Coffman write). They survive and can be woven into an even broader theory once the evolution of technology is put into perspective. The circular causality between technological innovation and economic growth are at the heart of Capitalism's success as well as its major problem.
Chapter 4 confronts the charge of Marx having "utopian" ideas. Marx clearly saw the reality of what human beings were like. He never saw humanity as "perfectible". He did recognize that being a wage slave took most of one's energy and left little time for fulfillment. What he focused on was the creation of better human institutions than Capitalism as a way of organizing societies. The betterment of the human condition is a commonly stated goal of almost any politician, for example, and we certainly don't see these ideas as utopian. Much more is said about this in the chapter and I recommend it for its scholarly content.
Chapter 5 looks at the charge that "Marxism reduces everything to economics". Here again my own work and especially that in progress stems from Marx's rejection of the reductionism that fuels capitalism and especially the science that serves Capitalism with machine like models for all of nature. Only by seeing the ramifications of economics in a holistic context can we begin to grasp why the march towards global catastrophe that Capitalism is driving us on i9s so hard to do control. Only if we see the interplay between culture, the way we produce things, and our political belief structure can we appreciate how deep the roots of economic ideas go. We can thank Marx for opening our eyes to these networks of causality. Again the author has much more to say on this but the charge is reductionist in its own nature.
Chapter 6 explains what Marx really means by materialism. Here again straw men abound. The concept of materialism used by Marx does not resemble the easy marks these straw men represent. Here's a glimpse of the author's view:
Materialism for Marx meant starting from what human beings actually were, rather than from some shadowy ideal to which we could aspire.....In a boldly innovative move, Marx rejected the passive human subject of middle-class materialism and put in its place an active one. ............whatever else they were men and women were first of all agents......who transformed themselves in the act of transforming their material surroundings...
Among other things this is consistent with the most modern forms of complexity theory I know. Nor does one shrug off George Lakoff for being a "materialist" when he uses the notion of embodiment in his reconstruction of philosophy and, especially, political philosophy.
Chapters 7, 8 and 9 deal with t6he "obsession with class", "violent political action", and the "power of the state" in much the same way as above. The straw men are exposed and Marx's deeper and more dynamic and holistic views are clarified.
Chapter 10 deals with movements outside of Marxism and shows their relation to what Marx wrote.
I'll close by relating just one aspect of these and again try to show how marx integrated his ideas into a coherent whole.
Let's take feminism as an example. Few would recognize that what Marx meant by labor exploitation and "the proletariat" originated in large part with his view of women and their exploitation. The most demeaning notions of the role of women in society stem from their production of new labor through child birth. I would venture to say that what he saw then we see now in the anti abortion and anti birth control actions all around us. What fuels these repressive stances? It very possibly originates in the fear that if cut free from this as their central role women will deprive future Capitalists of the laborers and cannon fodder that they need so much. He only starts there. Next he examines the kinds of jobs and pay available to women if they do try to break free.
An interesting sidelight is the fact that the Bolshevik revolution began on Women's Day.
I probably did not do the book justice but you need to see for yourself. I found it delightful reading!