Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

  A genuinely different future would be neither a mere extension of the present nor an absolute break with it. If it were an absolute break, how could we recognize it at all? Yet if we could describe it fairly easily in the language of the present, in what sense would it be genuinely different? Marx's idea of emancipation rejects both smooth continuities and total ruptures. In this sense, he is that rarest of creatures, a visionary who is also a sober realist. He turns from fantasies of the future to the prosaic workings of the present; but it is precisely there that he finds a greatly enriched future to be unleashed. He is more gloomy about the past than many thinkers, yet more hopeful than most of them about what is to come.

  Realism and vision here go hand in hand: to see the present as it truly is, is to see it in the light of its possible transformation. Otherwise you are simply not seeing it aright, as you would not have a full grasp of what it means to be a baby if you had not realized that it was a potential adult. Capitalism has given birth to extraordinary powers and possibilities which it simultaneously stymies; and this is why Marx can be hopeful without being a bright-eyed champion of Progress, and brutally realistic without being cynical or defeatist. It belongs to the tragic vision to stare the worst steadily in the face, but to rise above it through the very act of doing so. Marx, as we have seen, is in some ways a tragic thinker, which is not to say a pessimistic one.

  On the one hand, Marxists are hardheaded types who are sceptical of high-minded moralism and wary of idealism. With their naturally suspicious minds, they tend to look for the material interests which lurk behind heady political rhetoric. They are alert to the humdrum, often ignoble forces which underlie pious talk and sentimental visions. Yet this is because they want to free men and women from these forces, in the belief that they are capable of better things. As such, they combine their hardheadedness with a faith in humanity. Materialism is too down-to-earth to be gulled by hand-on-heart rhetoric, but too hopeful that things could improve to be cynical. There have been worse combinations in the history of humanity.

  One thinks of the flamboyant student slogan of Paris 1968: ''Be realistic: demand the impossible!" For all its hyperbole, the slogan is accurate enough. What is realistically needed to repair society is beyond the powers of the prevailing system, and in that sense is impossible. But it is realistic to believe that the world could in principle be greatly improved. Those who scoff at the idea that major social change is possible are full-blown fantasists. The true dreamers are those who deny that anything more than piecemeal change can ever come about. This hardheaded pragmatism is as much a delusion as believing that you are Marie Antoinette. Such types are always in danger of being caught on the hop by history. Some feudal ideologues, for example, denied that an ''unnatural'' economic system like capitalism could ever catch on. There are also those sad, self-deceived characters who hallucinate that, given more time and greater effort, capitalism will deliver a world of abundance for all. For them, it is simply a regrettable accident that it has not done so so far. They do not see that inequality is as natural to capitalism as narcissism and megalomania are to Hollywood.

  What Marx finds in the present is a deadly clash of interests. But whereas a utopian thinker might exhort us to rise above these conflicts in the name of love and fellowship, Marx himself takes a very different line. He does indeed believe in love and fellowship, but he does not think they will be achieved by some phoney harmony. The exploited and dispossessed are not to abandon their interests, which is just what their masters want them to do, but to press them all the way through. Only then might a society beyond self-interest finally emerge. There is nothing in the least wrong with being self-interested, if the alternative is hugging your chains in some false spirit of self-sacrifice.

  Critics of Marx might find this stress on class interests distasteful. But they cannot claim in the same breath that he has an impossibly rosy view of human nature. Only by starting from the unredeemed present, submitting yourself to its degraded logic, can you hope to move through and beyond it. This, too, is in the traditional spirit of tragedy. Only by accepting that contradictions are of the nature of class-society, not by denying them in a spirit of serene disinterestedness, can you unlock the human wealth they hold back. It is at the points where the logic of the present comes unstuck, runs into impasse and incoherence, that Marx, surprisingly enough, finds the outline of a transfigured future. The true image of the future is the failure of the present.

  Marxism, so many of its critics complain, has an impossibly idealized view of human nature. It dreams foolishly of a future in which everyone will be comradely and cooperative. Rivalry, envy, inequality, violence, aggression and competition will have been banished from the face of the earth. There is, in fact, scarcely a word in Marx's writings to support this outlandish claim, but a good few of his critics are reluctant to louse up their arguments with the facts. They are confident that Marx anticipated a state of human virtue known as communism which even the Archangel Gabriel might have a problem living up to. In doing so, he willfully or carelessly ignored that flawed, crooked, perpetually discontented state of affairs known as human nature.

  Some Marxists have responded to this charge by claiming that if Marx overlooked human nature, it was because he did not believe in the idea. On this view, the concept of human nature is simply a way of keeping us politically in our place. It suggests that human beings are feeble, corrupt, self-interested creatures; that this remains unaltered throughout history; and that it is the rock on which any attempt at radical change will come to grief. ''You can't change human nature'' is one of the most common objections to revolutionary politics. Against this, some Marxists have insisted that there is no unchanging core to human beings. In their opinion, it is our history, not our nature, that makes us what we are; and since history is all about change, we can transform ourselves by altering our historical conditions.

  Marx did not entirely subscribe to this ''historicist'' case. The evidence is that he did believe in a human nature, and was quite right to do so, as Norman Geras argues in an excellent little book.5 He did not see this as overriding the importance of the individual. On the contrary, he thought it a paradoxical feature of our common nature that we are all uniquely individuated. In his early writings, Marx speaks of what he calls human ''species being,'' which is really a materialist version of human nature. Because of the nature of our material bodies, we are needy, labouring, sociable, sexual, communicative, self-expressive animals who need one another to survive, but who come to find a fulfillment in that companionship over and above its social usefulness. If I may be allowed to quote a previous comment of my own: ''If another creature is able in principle to speak to us, engage in material labour alongside us, sexually interact with us, produce something which looks vaguely like art in the sense that it appears fairly pointless, suffer, joke and die, then we can deduce from these biological facts a huge number of moral and even political consequences.''6 This case, which is technically known as a philosophical anthropology, is rather out of fashion these days; but it was what Marx argued for in his early work, and there is no compelling reason to believe that he abandoned it later on.

  Because we are labouring, desiring, linguistic creatures, we are able to transform our conditions in the process we know as history. In doing so, we come to transform ourselves at the same time. Change, in other words, is not the opposite of human nature; it is possible because of the creative, open-ended, unfinished beings we are. This, as far as we can tell, is not true of stoats. Because of the nature of their material bodies, stoats do not have a history. Nor do stoats have politics, unless they are keeping them cunningly concealed. There is no reason to fear that they might one day come to rule over us, even if they would probably do a far better job than our present leaders. As far as we know, they cannot be social democrats or ultranationalists. Human beings, however, are political animals by their very nature—not only because they live in community with one another, but because they need some system for
regulating their material life. They also need some system for regulating their sexual lives. One reason for this is that sexuality might otherwise prove too socially disruptive. Desire, for example, is no respecter of social distinctions. But this is also one reason why human beings need politics. The way they produce their material existence has so far involved exploitation and inequality, and a political system is needed to contain the resulting conflicts. We would also expect human animals to have various symbolic ways of representing all this to themselves, whether we call it art, myth or ideology.

  For Marx, we are equipped by our material natures with certain powers and capacities. And we are at our most human when we are free to realize these powers as an end in itself, rather than for any purely utilitarian purpose. These powers and capacities are always historically specific; but they have a foundation in our bodies, and some of them alter very little from one human culture to another. Two individuals from very different cultures who do not speak one another's language can easily cooperate in practical tasks. This is because the physical body they have in common generates its own set of assumptions, expectations and understandings.7 All human cultures know grief and ecstasy, labour and sexuality, friendship and enmity, oppression and injustice, sickness and mortality, kinship and art. It is true that they sometimes know these things in very different cultural styles. Dying is not the same in Madras as it is in Manchester. But we die anyway. Marx himself writes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts that ''man as an objective, sensuous being is therefore a suffering being—and because he feels that he suffers, a passionate being.'' Death, he considers, is a harsh victory of the species over the individual. It matters to men and women, he writes in Capital, if their deaths are premature, their lives shorter than they need be because of grinding toil, or afflicted by accident, injury or disease. Communism may see an end to grinding toil, but it is hard to believe that Marx envisages a social order without accident, injury and disease, any more than he anticipates one without death.

  If we did not share so much basic common humanity, the socialist vision of global cooperation would be fruitless. Marx speaks in volume 1 of Capital of ''human nature in general and then . . . as modified in each historical epoch.'' There is a great deal about human beings that hardly varies across history—a fact which postmodernism either denies or dismisses as merely trivial. It does so partly because it has an irrational prejudice against Nature and biology; partly because it thinks that all talk of natures is a way of denying change;8 and partly because it tends to regard all change as positive and all permanence as negative. In this last opinion, it is at one with capitalist ''modernisers'' everywhere. The truth—far too banal for intellectuals to appreciate—is that some change is catastrophic and some kinds of permanence deeply desirable. It would be a shame, for example, if all French vineyards were to be burnt down tomorrow, just as it would be a pity if a nonsexist society lasted for only three weeks.

  Socialists often speak of oppression, injustice and exploitation. But if this were all humanity had ever known, we would never be able to identify these things for what they are. Instead, they would simply seem like our natural condition. We might not even have special names for them. To see a relationship as exploitative, you need to have some idea of what a nonexploitative relationship would look like. You do not need to appeal to the idea of human nature to have this. You can appeal to historical factors instead. But it is plausible to claim that there are features of our nature which act as a kind of norm in this respect. Human beings, for example, are all ''prematurely'' born. For a long time after birth they are unable to fend for themselves, and are thus in need of a prolonged period of nurturing. (It is this unusually prolonged experience of care, some psychoanalysts argue, that plays such havoc with our psyches later in life. If babies could get up and walk away at birth, a good deal of adult misery would be avoided, and not only in the sense that there would be no bawling brats to disturb our sleep.) Even if the care they receive is appalling, infants very quickly imbibe some notion of what caring for others means. This is one reason why, later on, they may be able to identify a whole way of life as callously indifferent to human needs. In this sense, we can move from being prematurely born to politics.

  Needs which are essential to our survival and well-being, like being fed, keeping warm and sheltered, enjoying the company of others, not being enslaved or abused and so on, can act as a basis for political critique, in the sense that any society which fails to meet these requirements is clearly lacking. We can, of course, object to such societies on more local or cultural grounds. But arguing that they violate some of the most fundamental demands of our nature has even more force. So it is a mistake to think that the idea of human nature is just an apology for the status quo. It can also act as a powerful challenge to it.

  In early writings like the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx holds to the currently unfashionable view that the way we are as material animals can tell us something important about how we should live. There is a sense in which you can get from the human body to questions of ethics and politics. If human beings are self-realising creatures, then they need to be at liberty to fulfill their needs and express their powers. But if they are also social animals, living alongside other self-expressive beings, they need to prevent an endless, destructive clash of these powers. This, in fact, is one of the most intractable problems of liberal society, in which individuals are supposed to be free, but free among other things to be constantly at one another's throats. Communism, by contrast, organises social life so that individuals are able to realize themselves in and through the self-realisation of others. As Marx puts it in the Communist Manifesto, "The free development of each becomes the condition for the free development of all.'' In this sense, socialism does not simply reject liberal society, with its passionate commitment to the individual. Instead, it builds on and completes it. In doing so, it shows how some of the contradictions of liberalism, in which your freedom may flourish only at the expense of mine, may be resolved. Only through others can we finally come into our own. This means an enrichment of individual freedom, not a diminishing of it. It is hard to think of a finer ethics. On a personal level, it is known as love.

  It is worth stressing Marx's concern with the individual, since it runs clean contrary to the usual caricature of his work. In this view, Marxism is all about faceless collectives which ride roughshod over personal life. Nothing, in fact, could be more alien to Marx's thought. One might say that the free flourishing of individuals is the whole aim of his politics, as long as we remember that these individuals must find some way of flourishing in common. To assert one's individuality, he writes in The Holy Family, is ''the vital manifestation of [one's] being.'' This, one might claim, is Marx's morality from start to finish.

  There is good reason to suspect that there can never be any complete reconciliation between individual and society. The dream of an organic unity between them is a generous-hearted fantasy. There will always be conflicts between my fulfillment and yours, or between what is required of me as a citizen and what I badly want to do. Such outright contradictions are the stuff of tragedy, and only the grave, as opposed to Marxism, can put us beyond that condition. Marx's claim in the Communist Manifesto about the free self-development of all can never be fully realised. Like all the finest ideals it is a goal to aim at, not a state to be literally achieved. Ideals are signposts, not tangible entities. They point us the way to go. Those who scoff at socialist ideals should remember that the free market can never be perfectly realized either. Yet this does not stop free-marketeers in their tracks. The fact that there is no flawless democracy does not lead most of us to settle for tyranny instead. We do not relinquish efforts to feed the hungry of the world because we know some of them will have perished before we can do so. Some of those who claim that socialism is unworkable are confident that they can eradicate poverty, solve the global warming crisis, spread liberal democracy to Afghanistan and resolve world con
flicts by United Nations resolutions. All these daunting tasks are comfortably within the range of the possible. It is only socialism which for some mysterious reason is out of reach.

  It is easier to attain Marx's goal, however, if you do not have to rely on everyone being morally magnificent all the time. Socialism is not a society which requires resplendent virtue of its citizens. It does not mean that we have to be wrapped around each other all the time in some great orgy of togetherness. This is because the mechanisms which would allow Marx's goal to be approached would actually be built into social institutions. They would not rely in the first place on the goodwill of the individual. Take, for example, the idea of a self-governing cooperative, which Marx seems to have regarded as the key productive unit of the socialist future. One person's contribution to such an outfit allows for some kind of self-realisation; but it also contributes to the well-being of the others, and this simply by virtue of the way the place is set up. I do not have to have tender thoughts about my fellow workers, or whip myself into an altruistic frenzy every two hours. My own self-realisation helps to enhance theirs simply because of the cooperative, profit-sharing, egalitarian, commonly governed nature of the unit. It is a structural affair, not a question of personal virtue. It does not demand a race of Cordelias.

  For some socialist purposes, then, it does not matter if I am the vilest worm in the West. In a similar way, it does not matter if I regard my work as a biochemist employed by a private pharmaceutical company as a glorious contribution to the advance of science and the progress of humanity. The fact remains that the main point of my work is to create profit for a bunch of unscrupulous sharks who would probably charge their own toddlers ten dollars for an aspirin. What I feel is neither here nor there. The meaning of my work is determined by the institution.