In his latest book, Why Marx Was Right, British cultural critic and academic Terry Eagleton seeks to refute what he sees as the ten most common arguments against Karl Marx and his doctrines. In the process, he provides an introduction to Marx’s ideas that is readily accessible to readers, due in no small part to the extremely witty digressions sprinkled throughout his writing. While a full review of Eagleton’s book will appear in this summer’s print edition of the Harvard Political Review, below are a few of its more humorous moments:
On the claim that “Marxism is finished” in the 21st century:
“That Marxism is finished would be music to the ears of Marxists everywhere. They could pack in their marching and picketing, return to the bosom of their grieving families and enjoy an evening at home instead of yet another tedious committee meeting.” p. 1
How the media would operate under a Marxist as opposed to capitalist regime. (Think NPR vs. Fox News.):
“Much of the media under capitalism avoid difficult, controversial or innovative work because it is bad for profits. Instead, they settle for banality, sensationalism and gut prejudice. Socialist media, by contrast, would not ban everything but Schoenberg, Racine and dramatized versions of Marx’s Capital. There would be popular theatre, TV and newspapers galore.” p. 28
Distancing Marx from charges of utopianism by contrasting him with one of his more eccentric – and less discerning – contemporaries, Charles Fourier:
“Fourier, who coined the term ‘feminism,’ and whose ideal social unit was designed to contain exactly 1,620 people, believed that in the future society the sea would turn into lemonade. Marx himself would probably have preferred a fine Riesling.” p. 68
Elucidating what Marx means when he refers to the “spirit of history”:
“Spiritual matters are not disembodied, otherworldly affairs. It is the prosperous bourgeois who tends to see spiritual questions as a realm loftily remote from everyday life, since he needs a hiding place from his own crass materialism. It comes as no surprise that material girls like Madonna should be so fascinated by Kabbala.” p. 139
Defending Marx from accusations of reducing life to sheer dullness:
“[Marx] did, however, sometimes take the fun a bit too far: he once went on a pub crawl from Oxford Street to Hampstead Road with a couple of friends, stopping at every pub en route, and was chased by the police for throwing paving stones at street lamps. His theory of the repressive nature of the state, so it would seem, was no mere abstract speculation.” p. 140
Arguing that Marxism does not squash human cultures:
“Marx himself was a formidably cultivated man in the great central European tradition, who longed to be finished with what he scathingly called the ‘economic crap’ of Capital in order to write his big book on Balzac.” p. 157
On Friedrich Engels’ (marital) infidelity:
“There is an assault on the middle-class family in the Communist Manifesto, a case which the philandering Friedrich Engels, eager to achieve a dialectical unity of theory and practice, zealously adopted in his private life.” p. 212
More on Engels’ extramarital exploits:
“Engels, who practiced sexual as well as political solidarity with the proletariat by taking a working-class lover, thought the emancipation of women inseparable from the ending of class-society. (Since his lover was also Irish, he considerately added an anticolonial dimension to their relationship.)” p. 214
By no means is Eagleton’s book a comedy, however. Why Marx Was Right makes the case for Marxism as, in the author’s words, a “plausible” political alternative to the status quo, one that remains as relevant today as it did in the 19th century. In the wake of capitalism’s biggest crisis since the Great Depression, Eagleton’s manifesto is meant – and ought – to be taken seriously.
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