Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton Read Free Book Online

expansion of
the productive forces, and if there were no such expansion there would be no
material basis for socialism.
    Marx is surely right to
see that the material and spiritual are in both conflict and collusion. He does
not simply damn class-society for its moral atrocities, though he does that
too; he also recognizes that spiritual fulfillment requires a material
foundation. You cannot have a decent relationship if you are starving. Every
extension of human communication brings with it new forms of community and
fresh kinds of division. New technologies may thwart human potential, but they
can also enhance it. Modernity is not to be mindlessly celebrated, but neither
is it to be disdainfully dismissed. Its positive and negative qualities are for
the most part aspects of the same process. This is why only a dialectical
approach, one which grasps how contradiction is of its essence, can do it
justice.
    All the same, there are
real problems with Marx's theory of history. Why, for example, does the same
mechanism— the conflict between the forces and relations of production— operate
in the shift from one era of class-society to another? What accounts for this
odd consistency over vast stretches of historical time? Anyway, is it not
possible to overthrow a dominant class while it is still in its prime, if the
political opposition is powerful enough? Do we really have to wait until the
productive forces falter? And might not the growth of the productive forces
actually undermine the class poised to take over—say, by fashioning new forms
of oppressive technology? It is true that with the growth of the productive
forces, workers tend to become more skilled, well-organised, educated and
(perhaps) politically self-assured and sophisticated; but for the same reason
there may also be more tanks, surveillance cameras, right-wing newspapers and
modes of outsourcing labour around. New technologies may force more people into
unemployment, and thus into political inertia. In any case, whether a social
class is ripe to make a revolution is shaped by a lot more than whether it has
the power to promote the forces of production. Class capacities are moulded by
a whole range of factors. And how can we know that a specific set of social
relations will be useful for that purpose?
    A change of social
relations cannot simply be explained by an expansion of the productive forces.
Nor do pathbreak-ing changes in the productive forces necessarily result in new
social relations, as the Industrial Revolution might illustrate. The same
productive forces can coexist with different sets of social relations.
Stalinism and industrial capitalism, for example. When it comes to peasant
agriculture from ancient times to the modern age, a wide range of social
relations and forms of property has proved possible. Or the same set of social
relations might foster different kinds of productive forces. Think of
capitalist industry and capitalist agriculture. Pro TERRY EAGLETON ductive forces and productive
relations do not dance harmoniously hand in hand throughout history. The truth
is that each stage of development of the productive forces opens up a whole
range of possible social relations, and there is no guarantee that any one set
of them will actually come about. Neither is there any guarantee that a
potential revolutionary agent will be conveniently on hand when the historical
crunch comes. Sometimes there is simply no class around that could take the
productive forces further, as happened in the case of classical China.
    Even so, the connection
between forces and relations is an illuminating one. Among other things, it
allows us to recognize that you can only have certain social relations if the
productive forces have evolved to a certain extent. If some people are to live
a lot more comfortably than others, you need to produce a sizeable economic
surplus; and this is possible only at a certain point of productive
development. You cannot sustain an