LOTS OF PEOPLE DIED to prove how deadly Marxism’s ineluctable violence can be. Re-arranging property and people always leaves a very high body count. Most of us learned the hard lessons. For the last quarter-century, all Marxists have had to cling to is the great pretence of an impossible hypothesis: if only Marxism had followed plan B instead of plan A, none of that inconvenient history would have happened. Of course, another history would have happened, and only the romantic faith of the true believer can pretend it would be any different. Thus we have the condescending optimism of Terry Eagleton and Eric Hobsbawm, two men left alone on a plain littered with corpses, waving their red flags, singing the old songs, and claiming, really, it didn’t have to be this way.

But it did. “There is a sense in which the whole of Marx’s writing boils down to several embarrassing questions,” Eagleton writes before proceeding along Marxism’s well-worn rhetorical path. Poor Eagleton. He doesn’t even know what questions to ask. “Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists,” he writes in Why Marx Was Right, published this month by Yale. Drunks and junkies say the same thing. The theory: recognizing one has a problem is the first step to solving it. Not so when Marx is the drug.

By TERRY EAGLETON [Chronicle of Higher Education] – The political movement which [Marx’s] 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?

Continued at the Chronicle of Higher Education |

St. Karl: just like ‘one of the founders of the great religions’.

By TERRY EAGLETON [London Review of Books] – Only recently has Marxism been back on the agenda, placed there, ironically enough, by an ailing capitalism. ‘Capitalism in Convulsion’, a Financial Times headline read in 2008. When capitalists begin to speak of capitalism, you know the system is in dire trouble. They have still not dared to do so in the United States.

There is much else to admire in How to Change the World…A chapter on the 1930s contains a fascinating account of the relations between Marxism and science – it was the only period, Hobsbawm points out, when natural scientists were attracted to Marxism in significant numbers. As the threat of an irrationalist Fascism loomed, it was the ‘Enlightenment’ features of the Marxist creed – its faith in reason, science, progress and social planning – which attracted men like Joseph Needham and J.D. Bernal. During Marxism’s next historical upsurge, in the 1960s and 1970s, this version of historical materialism would be ousted by the more cultural and philosophical tenets of so-called Western Marxism. In fact, science, reason, progress and planning were now more enemies than allies, at war with the new libertarian cults of desire and spontaneity. Hobsbawm shows only qualified sympathy for the 1968ers, which is unsurprising in a long-term member of the Communist Party. Their idealisation of the Cultural Revolution in China, he suggests with some justice, had about as much to do with China as the 18th-century cult of the noble savage had with Tahiti.

‘If one thinker left a major indelible mark on the 20th century,’ Hobsbawm remarks, ‘it was he.’ Seventy years after Marx’s death, for better or for worse, one third of humanity lived under political regimes inspired by his thought. Well over 20 per cent still do. Socialism has been described as the greatest reform movement in human history. Few intellectuals have changed the world in such practical ways. That is usually the preserve of statesmen, scientists and generals, not of philosophers and political theorists. Freud may have changed lives, but hardly governments. ‘The only individually identifiable thinkers who have achieved comparable status,’ Hobsbawm writes, ‘are the founders of the great religions in the past, and with the possible exception of Muhammad none has triumphed on a comparable scale with such rapidity.’

Continued at the London Review of Books | More Chronicle & Notices.