In Praise of Marx
By Terry Eagleton
Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse
as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx's ideas
responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and
the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted
disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by the name of Stalin, and another a
brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had the blood of some 30 million of
his people on his hands?
The truth is that Marx was no more
responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was
responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the
idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically
backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would
simply be what he called "generalized scarcity," by which he means
that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a
recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful
translation, "the same old crap." Marxism is a theory of how
well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve
justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations
bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic
heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a
skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age.
Marx certainly wanted to see justice and
prosperity thrive in such forsaken spots. He wrote angrily and eloquently about
several of Britain's downtrodden colonies, not least Ireland and India. And the
political movement which his work set in motion has done more to help small
nations throw off their imperialist masters than any other political current.
Yet Marx was not foolish enough to imagine that socialism could be built in such
countries without more-advanced nations flying to their aid. And that meant
that the common people of those advanced nations had to wrest the means of
production from their rulers and place them at the service of the wretched of
the earth. If this had happened in 19th-century Ireland, there would have been
no famine to send a million men and women to their graves and another two or
three million to the far corners of the earth.
There is a sense in which the whole of
Marx's writing boils down to several embarrassing questions: Why is it that the
capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever
witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation,
and inequality? What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems
to breed hardship and indignity for the many? Why does private wealth seem to
go hand in hand with public squalor? Is it, as the good-hearted liberal
reformist suggests, that we have simply not got around to mopping up these
pockets of human misery, but shall do so in the fullness of time? Or is it more
plausible to maintain that there is something in the nature of capitalism
itself which generates deprivation and inequality, as surely as Charlie Sheen
generates gossip?
Marx was the first thinker to talk in those
terms. This down-at-heel émigré Jew, a man who once remarked that nobody else
had written so much about money and had so little, bequeathed us the language
in which the system under which we live could be grasped as a whole. Its
contradictions were analyzed, its inner dynamics laid bare, its historical
origins examined, and its potential demise foreshadowed. This is not to suggest
for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a Bad Thing, like
admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco smoke in your children's faces. On the
contrary, he was extravagant in his praise for the class that created it, a
fact that both his critics and his disciples have conveniently suppressed. No
other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a
mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost
every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up
cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves,
toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and
laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such
florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist
Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal.
That, however, was only part of the story.
There are those who see modern history as an enthralling tale of progress, and
those who view it as one long nightmare. Marx, with his usual perversity,
thought it was both. Every advance in civilization had brought with it new
possibilities of barbarism. The great slogans of the middle-class
revolution—"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—were his watchwords, too.
He simply inquired why those ideas could never be put into practice without
violence, poverty, and exploitation. Capitalism had developed human powers and
capacities beyond all previous measure. Yet it had not used those capacities to
set men and women free of fruitless toil. On the contrary, it had forced them
to labor harder than ever. The richest civilizations on earth sweated every bit
as hard as their Neolithic ancestors.
This, Marx considered, was not because of
natural scarcity. It was because of the peculiarly contradictory way in which
the capitalist system generated its fabulous wealth. Equality for some meant
inequality for others, and freedom for some brought oppression and unhappiness
for many. The system's voracious pursuit of power and profit had turned foreign
nations into enslaved colonies, and human beings into the playthings of
economic forces beyond their control. It had blighted the planet with pollution
and mass starvation, and scarred it with atrocious wars. Some critics of Marx
point with proper outrage to the mass murders in Communist Russia and China.
They do not usually recall with equal indignation the genocidal crimes of
capitalism: the late-19th-century famines in Asia and Africa in which untold
millions perished; the carnage of the First World War, in which imperialist
nations massacred one another's working men in the struggle for global
resources; and the horrors of fascism, a regime to which capitalism tends to
resort when its back is to the wall. Without the self-sacrifice of the Soviet
Union, among other nations, the Nazi regime might still be in place.
Marxists were warning of the perils of
fascism while the politicians of the so-called free world were still wondering
aloud whether Hitler was quite such a nasty guy as he was painted. Almost all
followers of Marx today reject the villainies of Stalin and Mao, while many
non-Marxists would still vigorously defend the destruction of Dresden or
Hiroshima. Modern capitalist nations are for the most part the fruit of a
history of genocide, violence, and extermination every bit as abhorrent as the
crimes of Communism. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears, and Marx
was around to witness it. It is just that the system has been in business long
enough for most of us to be oblivious of that fact.
The selectiveness of political memory takes
some curious forms. Take, for example, 9/11. I mean the first 9/11, not the
second. I am referring to the 9/11 that took place exactly 30 years before the
fall of the World Trade Center, when the United States helped to violently
overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile,
and installed in its place an odious dictator who went on to murder far more
people than died on that dreadful day in New York and Washington. How many
Americans are aware of that? How many times has it been mentioned on Fox News?
Marx was not some dreamy utopianist. On the
contrary, he began his political career in fierce contention with the dreamy
utopianists who surrounded him. He has about as much interest in a perfect
human society as a Clint Eastwood character would, and never once speaks in
such absurd terms. He did not believe that men and women could surpass the
Archangel Gabriel in sanctity. Rather, he believed that the world could
feasibly be made a considerably better place. In this he was a realist, not an
idealist. Those truly with their heads stuck in the sand—the moral ostriches of
this world—are those who deny that there can be any radical change. They behave
as though Family Guy and multicolored toothpaste will still be around
in the year 4000. The whole of human history disproves this viewpoint.
Radical change, to be sure, may not be for
the better. Perhaps the only socialism we shall ever witness is one forced upon
the handful of human beings who might crawl out the other side of some nuclear
holocaust or ecological disaster. Marx even speaks dourly of the possible
"mutual ruin of all parties." A man who witnessed the horrors of
industrial-capitalist England was unlikely to be starry-eyed about his fellow
humans. All he meant was that there are more than enough resources on the
planet to resolve most of our material problems, just as there was more than
enough food in Britain in the 1840s to feed the famished Irish population
several times over. It is the way we organize our production that is crucial.
Notoriously, Marx did not provide us with blueprints for how we should do
things differently. He has famously little to say about the future. The only
image of the future is the failure of the present. He is not a prophet in the
sense of peering into a crystal ball. He is a prophet in the authentic biblical
sense of one who warns us that unless we change our unjust ways, the future is
likely to be deeply unpleasant. Or that there will be no future at all.
Socialism, then, does not depend on some
miraculous change in human nature. Some of those who defended feudalism against
capitalist values in the late Middle Ages preached that capitalism would never
work because it was contrary to human nature. Some capitalists now say the same
about socialism. No doubt there is a tribe somewhere in the Amazon Basin that
believes no social order can survive in which a man is allowed to marry his
deceased brother's wife. We all tend to absolutize our own conditions.
Socialism would not banish rivalry, envy, aggression, possessiveness,
domination, and competition. The world would still have its share of bullies,
cheats, freeloaders, free riders, and occasional psychopaths. It is just that
rivalry, aggression, and competition would no longer take the form of some
bankers complaining that their bonuses had been reduced to a miserly
$5-million, while millions of others in the world struggled to survive on less
than $2 a day.
Marx was a profoundly moral thinker. He
speaks in The Communist Manifesto of a world in which "the free
self-development of each would be the condition of the free self-development of
all." This is an ideal to guide us, not a condition we could ever entirely
achieve. But its language is nonetheless significant. As a good Romantic
humanist, Marx believed in the uniqueness of the individual. The idea permeates
his writings from end to end. He had a passion for the sensuously specific and
a marked aversion to abstract ideas, however occasionally necessary he thought
they might be. His so-called materialism is at root about the human body. Again
and again, he speaks of the just society as one in which men and women will be
able to realize their distinctive powers and capacities in their own
distinctive ways. His moral goal is pleasurable self-fulfillment. In this he is
at one with his great mentor Aristotle, who understood that morality is about
how to flourish most richly and enjoyably, not in the first place (as the
modern age disastrously imagines) about laws, duties, obligations, and
responsibilities.
How does this moral goal differ from
liberal individualism? The difference is that to achieve true self-fulfillment,
human beings for Marx must find it in and through one another. It is not just a
question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others.
That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one's own
self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for
one's own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political
level, it is known as socialism. Socialism for Marx would be simply whatever
set of institutions would allow this reciprocity to happen to the greatest
possible extent. Think of the difference between a capitalist company, in which
the majority work for the benefit of the few, and a socialist cooperative, in
which my own participation in the project augments the welfare of all the
others, and vice versa. This is not a question of some saintly self-sacrifice.
The process is built into the structure of the institution.
Marx's goal is leisure, not labor. The best
reason for being a socialist, apart from annoying people you happen to dislike,
is that you detest having to work. Marx thought that capitalism had developed
the forces of production to the point at which, under different social
relations, they could be used to emancipate the majority of men and women from
the most degrading forms of labor. What did he think we would do then? Whatever
we wanted. If, like the great Irish socialist Oscar Wilde, we chose simply to
lie around all day in loose crimson garments, sipping absinthe and reading the
odd page of Homer to each other, then so be it. The point, however, was that
this kind of free activity had to be available to all. We would no longer
tolerate a situation in which the minority had leisure because the majority had
labor.
What interested Marx, in other words, was
what one might somewhat misleadingly call the spiritual, not the material. If
material conditions had to be changed, it was to set us free from the tyranny
of the economic. He himself was staggeringly well read in world literature,
delighted in art, culture, and civilized conversation, reveled in wit, humor,
and high spirits, and was once chased by a policeman for breaking a street lamp
in the course of a pub crawl. He was, of course, an atheist, but you do not
have to be religious to be spiritual. He was one of the many great Jewish
heretics, and his work is saturated with the great themes of Judaism—justice,
emancipation, the Day of Reckoning, the reign of peace and plenty, the
redemption of the poor.
What, though, of the fearful Day of
Reckoning? Would not Marx's vision for humanity require a bloody revolution?
Not necessarily. He himself thought that some nations, like Britain, Holland,
and the United States, might achieve socialism peacefully. If he was a
revolutionary, he was also a robust champion of reform. In any case, people who
claim that they are opposed to revolution usually mean that they dislike
certain revolutions and not others. Are antirevolutionary Americans hostile to
the American Revolution as well as the Cuban one? Are they wringing their hands
over the recent insurrections in Egypt and Libya, or the ones that toppled
colonial powers in Asia and Africa? We ourselves are products of revolutionary
upheavals in the past. Some processes of reform have been far more bloodstained
than some acts of revolution. There are velvet revolutions as well as violent
ones. The Bolshevik Revolution itself took place with remarkably little loss of
life. The Soviet Union to which it gave birth fell some 70 years later, with
scarcely any bloodshed.
Some critics of Marx reject a
state-dominated society. But so did he. He detested the political state quite
as much as the Tea Party does, if for rather less redneck reasons. Was he,
feminists might ask, a Victorian patriarch? To be sure. But as some
(non-Marxist) modern commentators have pointed out, it was men from the
socialist and communist camps who, up to the resurgence of the women's
movement, in the 1960s, regarded the issue of women's equality as vital to
other forms of political liberation. The word "proletarian" means
those who in ancient society were too poor to serve the state with anything but
the fruit of their wombs. "Proles" means "offspring."
Today, in the sweatshops and on the small farms of the third world, the typical
proletarian is still a woman.
Much the same goes for ethnic matters. In
the 1920s and 30s, practically the only men and women to be found preaching
racial equality were communists. Most anticolonial movements were inspired by
Marxism. The antisocialist thinker Ludwig von Mises described socialism as
"the most powerful reform movement that history has ever known, the first
ideological trend not limited to a section of mankind but supported by people
of all races, nations, religions, and civilizations." Marx, who knew his
history rather better, might have reminded von Mises of Christianity, but the
point remains forceful. As for the environment, Marx astonishingly prefigured
our own Green politics. Nature, and the need to regard it as an ally rather
than an antagonist, was one of his constant preoccupations.
Why might Marx be back on the agenda? The
answer, ironically, is because of capitalism. Whenever you hear capitalists
talking about capitalism, you know the system is in trouble. Usually they
prefer a more anodyne term, like "free enterprise." The recent
financial crashes have forced us once again to think of the setup under which
we live as a whole, and it was Marx who first made it possible to do so. It was
The Communist Manifesto which predicted that capitalism would become global,
and that its inequalities would severely sharpen. Has his work any defects?
Hundreds of them. But he is too creative and original a thinker to be
surrendered to the vulgar stereotypes of his enemies.
Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor at
Lancaster University, in England; the National University of Ireland; and the
University of Notre Dame. His latest book, Why Marx Was Right, was just
published by Yale University Press.
来源：《人文与社会》（2011.04.14）
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