Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton

It’s easy to imagine that Terry Eagleton has been sitting on this manuscript for decades. Eagleton, Britain’s eminently provocative, quotable cultural theorist and public intellectual, has long championed a kind of no-nonsense Marxism allergic to both liberal appropriation and post-modern skepticism. In works from Literary Theory: An Introduction to On Evil, Eagleton gained wide audiences with the kind of accessible and forceful prose rare on the academic left. The long monograph Why Marx Was Right adds another essential volume to the project, but it’s an unusual and, in some ways, untimely book.

Eagleton begins, “What if all the most familiar objections to Marx’s work as mistaken? Or at least, if not totally wrongheaded, mostly so?” In ten short chapters he answers what he takes to be ten of the most common and trenchant objections: from the ostensible failures of socialist experiments to Marx’s apparently reductive materialism to the contention that all the most important political movements of the last thirty years have abandoned Marxian frameworks.

These are an eclectic set of objections written with particular political adversaries in mind – some, obviously under the sway of capitalist ideology, others coming from faddish ivory tower postmodernism which “falsely imagines the unchanging to be everywhere on the side of political reaction.” But the criticisms seem cherry-picked, voiced by invisible adversaries, and so particularly susceptible to Eagleton’s pithy barbs.

This might bother readers expecting a balanced consideration in the tradition of Robert Heilbroner’s Marxism: For and Against. But those looking for a highly appealing vision of Marx and Marxism will enjoy this account. Here they’ll find both a corrective reading meant to persuade skeptics and ward off fashionable misinterpretation, as well as the philosophical account that has animated Eagleton’s own political and intellectual interventions. (Needless to say, some might find his dismissals of post-colonial theory particularly contentious, to say nothing of his flattened description of “post-modern” critique.)

There are plenty of controversial debates in Marxology that Eagleton casts aside: assuming, for instance, deep continuity between the so called early and late Marx; asserting Marx and Engels’s equal and unproblematic co-authorship; and drawing upon late volumes of Capital that many scholars ignore. But there are other, developing interpretations that Eagleton beautifully engages, especially those that give Marx his due as a writer and thinker in the Aristotelian tradition concerned with the political conditions for human flourishing.

And yet sympathetic readers of Marx might find this book strange, even untimely. After all, we are only a few years removed from a serious crisis in capitalism, and from a veritable Marx renaissance – a rare historical moment in which it seemed Marx (at least as a theorist of capital) wasn’t being attacked. For a time non-Marxist journalists and academics at least pretended to take Marx seriously, and the financial crisis invited some serious self-reflection about the production of imaginary value in the credit economy. And yet that crisis makes few cameos in a book that could add a strong voice to capital’s growing chorus of critics. Framing the book as a defense concedes too much, and it’s a losing strategy at the tail end of that crisis and that renaissance.

Still, this highly appealing version of Marx makes a persuasive case for the continued relevance of Marxist critique in a world defined by vast inequalities, class division, and exploitation. One could do worse than begin reading or re-reading Marx through Eagleton’s engaging account.

Reviewed by Aaron Greenberg

Why Marx was Right by Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 2011
Cloth. 225 pp. $25.00
ISBN-13: 9780300169430