Why Marx was right: an interview with Terry Eagleton
Born and brought up in Salford, Manchester to working-class Irish immigrant parents, Eagleton won a place to read English literature at Cambridge, where he studied under Raymond Williams. As an academic at Cambridge and later Oxford, he became known for his Marxist readings of English literature, and for his advocacy of continental theory.. His book Literary Theory (1983) became the classic primer on the subject, and.. Eagleton has continued to provide theoretical analyses of a host of subjects from prosody to postmodernism in a critical voice that is provocative, accessible, and erudite. Eagleton’s recent book Why Marx Was Right seeks to summarise and renovate Marxist principles in the context of the global financial crisis and a climate of resurgent anti-capitalism.
So: why was Marx right?
Someone asked me that last night at a talk, and I mentioned Greece. There’s irony in the fact that in the midst of the most affluent civilization history has witnessed people are scavenging in rubbish baskets for food. That’s the kind of contradiction I think Marx was talking about. I also stressed how much Marx admired the way that capitalism had in a very short space of time accumulated such wealth—material, spiritual, cultural—but that it couldn’t do that without the contradiction of generating inequality at the same time; we’re seeing a stark instance of that in Greece today. So that’s the kind of thing I’d point to to show the relevance of Marx. Even within the anti-capitalist movement, Marx is not a majority presence. One has to say that. It’s partly because of the discrediting of Marxism by Stalinism, which will take a long time for the Marxist left to recover from. But I’m not myself madly concerned about whether people stick the label “Marxist” onto themselves as long as they take a critical stance towards the present situation. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves.
Do you think at this point in history “Marxism”, “communism”, “socialism”, “leftism” are basically interchangeable? Would you insist on sharp distinctions?
No, what I’ve said in a sense suggests that they’re not, in that you can be a good leftist and thinker of the anti-capitalist movement without being particularly indebted to Marxism. I wouldn’t lean too heavily on the need for Marx to be right, though it’s true I suppose that Marxism has been the mainstream anti-capitalist critique within the left. What strikes me is the dramatic way the situation has changed since, say, the turn of the Millennium. At the turn of the Millennium, history was supposedly over. Capitalism was in a peculiarly confident and arrogant phase. And then, from the fall of the World Trade Centre onwards, there has been the so-called War against Terror, the enormous capitalist crisis, the Arab Spring, societies like Greece teetering on the brink of radical change, a majority of American youth saying they prefer socialism to capitalism. Nobody could have predicted that ten years ago. So I think that what’s brought Marxism or at least socialism back on the agenda is of course the capitalist crisis. It’s not because people have suddenly started reading Marx or a new generation of leftists has spontaneously emerged. It’s that crisis always makes a system visible, it always makes its limits visible, and systems don’t normally like that, and therefore people are able to cast a new critical eye on them.
You spoke of the fact that Marx didn’t feel a revolution needed to be violent. Do you feel that what is now going on in response to the crisis & its aftermath is the beginning of a revolution in his sense?
I think it might be slightly rash to say so. I think I would want to wait and see. Socialists have traditionally talked about pre-revolutionary situations. I’m not sure I’d characterise it as that. Also, of course, Marx was against prediction, and what predictions he produced were grotesquely mistaken. I would say that it’s always rash to overestimate the fall of the power of the system. They have more tanks than we do! On the other hand, capitalism like any other political system can’t really work without a certain degree of credibility. It doesn’t need people to congratulate it, but it does need them to be at least passively collusive with it. The situation in Greece now is not like that, the situation in Greece now is I think raw anger on the part of people who are by no means naturally radicals. And it’s not out of the question—we don’t know—that that mood could spread through Europe. People in my view only go for a radical alternative when they think the present system is bust beyond repair. As long as they think it will yield them some meagre benefits, they’re likely to hang in there, because the perils and obscurities of change are such as to daunt people. But if it turns out that the system can’t yield people that, because a whole nation grubbing in dustbins is not out of the question, then there’s no reason why people shouldn’t consider an alternative.
You say somewhere, I think it’s in The Gatekeeper (2002), your autobiography and memoir, that it’s of great consolation to you that you’ve avoided the typical trajectory of going from being a youthful radical to being an old Tory. But there has been a kind of a movement towards dealing with big metaphysical themes in your recent work, I think: tragedy, evil, religion, love, death. Have you been conscious of that shift?
As far as avoiding the cliché of angry young man to the dyspeptic old reactionary, I guess a reason I haven’t done that is because, as I argue in the Marx book, the reason why people stopped being leftists [in recent decades] was not necessarily that they changed their views about the system, but that they found it too hard to break. There was disenchantment with the alternative, in the rampant years of boom, of Thatcher, of Reagan, of cowboy capitalism, of neoliberalism. There just seemed no way that you could feasibly change it. That’s depressing in one sense but encouraging in another. It wasn’t that people threw in their hats with the system because of how marvelous it was (apart from one of my most radical Marxist students ever who became a stockbroker, because he became convinced that capitalism was the best thing since Michelangelo). So that was the reason that I hung in there, and many other people did.
I suppose one of the advantages of a left downturn, ironically, is that it gives you time to think around politics, not to fetishise it. Politics isn’t the be-all and end-all...Read more:
http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/
So: why was Marx right?
Someone asked me that last night at a talk, and I mentioned Greece. There’s irony in the fact that in the midst of the most affluent civilization history has witnessed people are scavenging in rubbish baskets for food. That’s the kind of contradiction I think Marx was talking about. I also stressed how much Marx admired the way that capitalism had in a very short space of time accumulated such wealth—material, spiritual, cultural—but that it couldn’t do that without the contradiction of generating inequality at the same time; we’re seeing a stark instance of that in Greece today. So that’s the kind of thing I’d point to to show the relevance of Marx. Even within the anti-capitalist movement, Marx is not a majority presence. One has to say that. It’s partly because of the discrediting of Marxism by Stalinism, which will take a long time for the Marxist left to recover from. But I’m not myself madly concerned about whether people stick the label “Marxist” onto themselves as long as they take a critical stance towards the present situation. It doesn’t matter what they call themselves.
Do you think at this point in history “Marxism”, “communism”, “socialism”, “leftism” are basically interchangeable? Would you insist on sharp distinctions?
No, what I’ve said in a sense suggests that they’re not, in that you can be a good leftist and thinker of the anti-capitalist movement without being particularly indebted to Marxism. I wouldn’t lean too heavily on the need for Marx to be right, though it’s true I suppose that Marxism has been the mainstream anti-capitalist critique within the left. What strikes me is the dramatic way the situation has changed since, say, the turn of the Millennium. At the turn of the Millennium, history was supposedly over. Capitalism was in a peculiarly confident and arrogant phase. And then, from the fall of the World Trade Centre onwards, there has been the so-called War against Terror, the enormous capitalist crisis, the Arab Spring, societies like Greece teetering on the brink of radical change, a majority of American youth saying they prefer socialism to capitalism. Nobody could have predicted that ten years ago. So I think that what’s brought Marxism or at least socialism back on the agenda is of course the capitalist crisis. It’s not because people have suddenly started reading Marx or a new generation of leftists has spontaneously emerged. It’s that crisis always makes a system visible, it always makes its limits visible, and systems don’t normally like that, and therefore people are able to cast a new critical eye on them.
You spoke of the fact that Marx didn’t feel a revolution needed to be violent. Do you feel that what is now going on in response to the crisis & its aftermath is the beginning of a revolution in his sense?
I think it might be slightly rash to say so. I think I would want to wait and see. Socialists have traditionally talked about pre-revolutionary situations. I’m not sure I’d characterise it as that. Also, of course, Marx was against prediction, and what predictions he produced were grotesquely mistaken. I would say that it’s always rash to overestimate the fall of the power of the system. They have more tanks than we do! On the other hand, capitalism like any other political system can’t really work without a certain degree of credibility. It doesn’t need people to congratulate it, but it does need them to be at least passively collusive with it. The situation in Greece now is not like that, the situation in Greece now is I think raw anger on the part of people who are by no means naturally radicals. And it’s not out of the question—we don’t know—that that mood could spread through Europe. People in my view only go for a radical alternative when they think the present system is bust beyond repair. As long as they think it will yield them some meagre benefits, they’re likely to hang in there, because the perils and obscurities of change are such as to daunt people. But if it turns out that the system can’t yield people that, because a whole nation grubbing in dustbins is not out of the question, then there’s no reason why people shouldn’t consider an alternative.
You say somewhere, I think it’s in The Gatekeeper (2002), your autobiography and memoir, that it’s of great consolation to you that you’ve avoided the typical trajectory of going from being a youthful radical to being an old Tory. But there has been a kind of a movement towards dealing with big metaphysical themes in your recent work, I think: tragedy, evil, religion, love, death. Have you been conscious of that shift?
As far as avoiding the cliché of angry young man to the dyspeptic old reactionary, I guess a reason I haven’t done that is because, as I argue in the Marx book, the reason why people stopped being leftists [in recent decades] was not necessarily that they changed their views about the system, but that they found it too hard to break. There was disenchantment with the alternative, in the rampant years of boom, of Thatcher, of Reagan, of cowboy capitalism, of neoliberalism. There just seemed no way that you could feasibly change it. That’s depressing in one sense but encouraging in another. It wasn’t that people threw in their hats with the system because of how marvelous it was (apart from one of my most radical Marxist students ever who became a stockbroker, because he became convinced that capitalism was the best thing since Michelangelo). So that was the reason that I hung in there, and many other people did.
I suppose one of the advantages of a left downturn, ironically, is that it gives you time to think around politics, not to fetishise it. Politics isn’t the be-all and end-all...Read more:
http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/an-interview-with-terry-eagleton/
