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

and that at times its outcome can be
predicted with certainty. Take, for example, the question of socialism. Marx
appears to regard the advent of socialism as inevitable. He says so more than
once. In the Communist Manifesto, the fall of the capitalist class and
the victory of the working class are described as ''equally inevitable.'' But
this is not because Marx believes that there is some secret law inscribed in
history which will usher in socialism whatever men and women may or may not do.
If this were so, why should he urge the need for political struggle? If
socialism really is inevitable, one might think that we need do no more than
wait for it to arrive, perhaps ordering curries or collecting tattoos in the
meanwhile. Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism. In the
twentieth century, it played a key role in the failure of the communist
movement to combat fascism, assured as it was for a time that fascism was no
more than the death rattle of a capitalist system on the point of extinction.
One might claim that whereas for the nineteenth century the inevitable was
sometimes eagerly expected, this is not the case for us. Sentences beginning
"It is now inevitable that . . .'' generally have an ominous ring to them.
    Marx does not think that
the inevitability of socialism means we can all stay in bed. He believes,
rather, that once capitalism has definitively failed, working people will have
no reason not to take it over and every reason to do so. They will recognize
that it is in their interests to change the system, and that, being a majority,
they also have the power to do so. So they will act as the rational animals
they are and establish an alternative. Why on earth would you drag out a
wretched existence under a regime you are capable of changing to your
advantage? Why would you let your foot itch intolerably when you are able to
scratch it? Just as for the Christian human action is free yet part of a
preordained plan, so for Marx the disintegration of capitalism will unavoidably
lead men and women to sweep it away of their own free will.
    He is talking, then, about
what free men and women are bound to do under certain circumstances. But this
is surely a contradiction, since freedom means that there is nothing that you
are bound to do. You are not bound to devour a succulent pork chop if your guts
are being wrenched by agonizing hunger pains. As a devout Muslim, you might
prefer to die. If there is only one course of action I can possibly take, and
if it is impossible for me not to take it, then in that situation I am not
free. Capitalism may be teetering on the verge of ruin, but it may not be
socialism that replaces it.
    It may be fascism, or
barbarism. Perhaps the working class will be too enfeebled and demoralized by
the crumbling of the system to act constructively. In an uncharacteristically
gloomy moment, Marx reflects that the class struggle may result in the ''common
ruination'' of the contending classes.
    Or—a possibility that he
could not fully anticipate—the system might fend off political insurrection by
reform. Social democracy is one bulwark between itself and disaster. In this
way, the surplus reaped from developed productive forces can be used to buy off
revolution, which does not fit at all neatly into Marx's historical scheme. He
seems to have believed that capitalist prosperity can only be temporary; that
the system will eventually founder; and that the working class will then
inevitably rise up and take it over. But this, for one thing, passes over the
many ways (much more sophisticated in our own day than in Marx's) in which even
a capitalism in crisis can continue to secure the consent of its citizens. Marx
did not have Fox News and the Daily Mail to reckon with.
    There is, of course,
another future one can envisage, namely no future at all. Marx could not
foresee the possibility of nuclear holocaust or ecological catastrophe. Or
perhaps the ruling class will be brought low