Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton Read Free Book Online Page A

immense royal court complete with minstrels,
pages, jesters and chamberlains if everyone has to herd goats or grub for
plants all the time just to survive.
    The class struggle is
essentially a struggle over the surplus, and as such is likely to continue as
long as there is not a sufficiency for all. Class comes about whenever material
production is so organised as to compel some individuals to transfer their
surplus labour to others in order to survive. When there is little or no
surplus, as in so-called primitive communism, everyone has to work, nobody can
live off the toil of others, so there can be no classes. Later, there is enough
of a surplus to fund classes like feudal lords, who live by the labour of their
underlings. Only with capitalism can enough surplus be generated for the
abolition of scarcity, and thus of social classes, to become possible. But only
socialism can put this into practice.
    It is not clear, however,
why the productive forces should always triumph over the social relations—why
the latter seem so humbly deferential to the former. Besides, the theory does
not seem to accord with the way that Marx actually portrays the transition from
feudalism to capitalism, or in some respects from slavery to feudalism. It is
also true that the same social classes have often persisted in power for
centuries despite their inability to promote productive growth.
    One of the obvious flaws
of that model is its determinism. Nothing seems able to resist the onward march
of the productive forces. History works itself out by an inevitable internal
logic. There is a single ''subject'' of history (the constantly growing
productive forces) which stretches all the way through it, throwing up
different political setups as it rolls along. This is a metaphysical vision
with a vengeance. Yet it is not a simpleminded scenario of Progress. In the
end, the human powers and capacities which evolve along with the productive
forces make for a finer kind of humanity. But the price we pay for this is a
horrifying one. Every advance of the productive forces is a victory for both
civilisation and barbarism. If it brings in its wake new possibilities of
emancipation, it also arrives coated in blood. Marx was no nai've
progress-monger. He was well aware of the terrible cost of communism.
    It is true there is also
class struggle, which would seem to suggest that men and women are free. It is
hard to see that strikes, lockouts and occupations are dictated by some
providential force. But what if this very freedom was, so to speak,
preprogrammed, already factored into the unstoppable march of history? There is
an analogy here with the Christian interplay between divine providence and
human free will. For the Christian, I act freely when I strangle the local
police chief; but God has foreseen this action from all eternity, and included
it all along in his plan for humanity. He did not force me to dress up as a
parlour maid last Friday and call myself Milly; but being omniscient, he knew
that I would, and could thus shape his cosmic schemes with the Milly business
well in mind. When I pray to him for a smarter-looking teddy bear than the
dog-eared, beer-stained one who sleeps on my pillow at present, it is not that
God never had the slightest intention of bestowing such a favour on me but
then, on hearing my prayer, changed his mind. God cannot change his mind. It is
rather that he decides from all eternity to give me a new teddy bear because of
my prayer, which he has also foreseen from all eternity. In one sense, the
coming of the future kingdom of God is not preordained: it will arrive only if
men and women work for it in the present. But the fact that they will work for
it of their own free will is itself an inevitable result of God's grace.
    There is a similar
interplay between freedom and inevitability in Marx. He sometimes seems to
think that class struggle, though in one sense free, is bound to intensify
under certain historical conditions,