Why Marx Was Right

by Terry Eagleton

  It is true, even so, that Marx insists on the central role played by the economic (in the narrow sense of the word) in history to date. But this is far from a belief confined to Marxists. Cicero held that the purpose of the state was to protect private property. The ''economic'' theory of history was a commonplace of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. A number of Enlightenment thinkers saw history as a succession of modes of production. They also believed that this could explain rank, lifestyles, social inequalities and relations within both family and government. Adam Smith regarded each stage of material development in history as generating its own forms of law, property and government. Jean-Jacques Rousseau argues in his Discourse on Inequality that property brings war, exploitation and class conflict in its wake. He also insists that the so-called social contract is a fraud perpetrated by the rich on the poor to protect their privileges. Rousseau speaks of human society fettering the weak and giving powers to the rich from the outset—powers that ''irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, established for all time the law of property and inequality . . . and for the benefit of a few ambitious men subjected the human race thenceforth to labour, servitude and misery.''4 The law, Rousseau considers, generally backs the strong over the weak; justice is for the most part a weapon of violence and domination; and culture, science, the arts and religion are harnessed to the business of defending the status quo, flinging ''garlands of flowers'' over the chains which weigh men and women down. It is property, Rousseau claims, that lies at the root of human discontent.

  The great nineteenth-century Irish economist John Elliot Cairnes, who regarded socialism as ''a rank outgrowth of economic ignorance'' and was once described as the most orthodox of all classical economists, observed ''how extensively the material interests of men prevail in determining their political opinions and conduct.''5 He also remarked in the Preface to his book The Slave Power that ''the course of history is largely determined by the action of economic causes.'' His compatriot W. E. H. Lecky, the greatest Irish historian of his day and a virulent antisocialist, wrote that ''few things contribute so much to the formation of the social type as the laws regulating the succession of property.''6 Even Sigmund Freud clung to a form of economic determination. Without the need to labour, he considered, we would simply lie around the place all day shamelessly indulging our libidos. It was economic necessity which jolted us out of our natural indolence and prodded us into social activity.

  Or take this little-known piece of historical materialist commentary:

  The inhabitant [of human society] must go through the different stages of hunter, shepherd, and husbandman, then when property becomes valuable, and consequently gives cause for injustice; then when laws are appointed to repress injury, and secure possession, when men by the sanction of these laws, become possessed of superfluity, when luxury is thus introduced and demands its continual supply, then it is that the sciences become necessary and useful; the state cannot subsist without them . . .7

  Not the reflections of a Marxist with a quaintly archaic prose style, but the ruminations of the eighteenth-century Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith, who was a devout Tory. If the Irish seem to have been particularly inclined to the so-called economic theory of history, it was because it was hard to live in such a down-at-heel colony, dominated as it was by the Anglo-Irish landowning class, and overlook such matters altogether. In England, with its complex cultural superstructure, economic issues were less painfully evident to poets and historians. Today, many of those who would scornfully reject Marx's theory of history behave for all the world as though it were true. These people are known as bankers, financial advisors, Treasury officials, corporate executives and the like. Everything they do testifies to their faith in the priority of the economic. They are spontaneous Marxists to a man.

  It is worth adding that in a pleasing symmetry, the ''economic theory of history'' was born in and around Manchester, just as industrial capitalism was. It was his time in the city, Engels remarked, which first made him aware of the centrality of the economic. Since his father, as we have seen, ran a mill there which supported both Engels and (for much of the time) Marx himself, this insight, one might say, began at home. The well-heeled Engels acted as the material base to Marx's intellectual superstructure.

  The claim that everything for Marx is determined by ''economics'' is an absurd oversimplification. What shapes the course of history in his view is class struggle; and classes are not reducible to economic factors. It is true that Marx sees classes for the most part as groups of men and women who occupy the same place within a mode of production. But it is significant that we speak of social classes, not of economic ones. Marx writes of the ''social'' relations of production, as well as of ''social'' revolution. If the social relations of production have priority over the forces of production, then it is hard to see how something baldly labelled ''the economic'' can be the prime mover of history.

  Classes do not exist only in coal mines and insurance offices. They are also social formations, communities as much as economic entities. They involve customs, traditions, social institutions, sets of values and habits of thought. They are also political phenomena. In fact, there are hints in Marx's work that a class lacking political representation is not in the full sense a class at all. Classes, he seems to suggest, only truly become classes when they become conscious of themselves as such. They involve legal, social, cultural, political and ideological processes. In precapitalist societies, so Marx argues, these noneconomic factors are of especial importance. Classes are not uniform, but reveal a good deal of internal division and diversity.

  Besides, as we shall see shortly, labour for Marx concerns a great deal more than the economic. It involves a whole anthropology—a theory of Nature and human agency, the body and its needs, the nature of the senses, ideas of social cooperation and individual self-fulfillment. This is not economics as the Wall Street Journal knows it. You do not read much about human-species-being in the Financial Times. Labour also involves gender, kinship and sexuality. There is the question of how labourers are produced in the first place, and of how they are materially sustained and spiritually replenished. Production is carried on within specific forms of life, and is thus suffused with social meaning. Because labour always signifies, humans being significant (literally, sign-making) animals, it can never be simply a technical or material affair. You may see it as a way of praising God, glorifying the Fatherland or acquiring your beer money. The economic, in short, always presupposes a lot more than itself. It is not just a matter of how the markets are behaving. It concerns the way we become human beings, not just the way we become stockbrokers.8

  Classes, then, are not just economic, any more than sexuality is simply personal. In fact, it is hard to think of anything that is just economic. Even coins can be collected and displayed in glass cases, admired for their aesthetic qualities or melted down for their metal. To speak of money, incidentally, is to grasp why it is so easy to reduce the whole of human existence to the economic, since there is a sense in which this is exactly what money does. What is so magical about money is that it compresses such a wealth of human possibilities into its slim compass. It is true that there are a great many things in life more valuable than money, but it is money which gives us access to most of them. Money allows us to engage in fulfilling relationships with others without the social embarrassment of suddenly falling down dead of hunger. It can buy you privacy, health, education, beauty, social rank, mobility, comfort, freedom, respect and sensuous fulfillment, along with a Tudor grange in Warwickshire. Marx writes wonderfully in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of the protean, shape-changing, alchemical nature of money, the way you can conjure such a dazzling array of goods from its unremarkable form. Money is itself a kind of reductionism. It packs whole universes into a handful of copper.

  But even coins, as we have seen, are not raw economics. In fact, ''the economy'' never appears in the raw. What the financial press calls ''the economy'' is a kind of pha
ntom. Certainly nobody has ever clapped eyes on it. It is an abstraction from a complex social process. It is orthodox economic thought which tends to narrow the notion of the economic. Marxism, by contrast, conceives of production in the richest, most capacious kind of way. One reason why Marx's theory of history holds good is the fact that material goods are never just material goods. They hold out the promise of human well-being. They are the portal to so much that is precious in human life. This is why men and women have struggled to the death over land, property, money and capital. Nobody values the economic simply as the economic, other than those who make a professional career out of it. It is because this realm of human existence folds so many other dimensions into itself that it plays such a key role in human history.

  Marxism has often been accused of being a mirror image of its political opponents. Just as capitalism reduces humanity to Economic Man, so does its great antagonist. Capitalism makes a deity of material production, and Marx does just the same. But this is to misunderstand Marx's notion of production. Most of the production that goes on, he insists, is not true production at all. In his view, men and women only genuinely produce when they do so freely and for its own sake. Only under communism will this be fully possible; but meanwhile we can gain a foretaste of such creativity in the specialized form of production we know as art. John Milton, Marx writes, ''produced Paradise Lost for the same reason that a silkworm produces silk. It was an activity of his nature.''9 Art is an image of nonalienated labour. It is how Marx liked to think of his own writings, which he once described as forming ''an artistic whole'' and which he penned (unlike most of his disciples) with a meticulous attention to style. Nor was his interest in art purely theoretical. He himself wrote lyric poetry, an unfinished comic novel, a fragment of verse drama and a sizeable unpublished manuscript on art and religion. He also planned a journal of dramatic criticism and a treatise of aesthetics. His knowledge of world literature was staggering in its scope.

  Human labour has rarely been of a fulfilling kind. For one thing, it has always been coerced in one way or another, even if the coercion in question is simply the need not to starve. For another thing, it has been carried on in class-society, and thus not as an end in itself but as a means to the power and profit of others. For Marx, as for his mentor Aristotle, the good life consists of activities engaged in for their own sake. The best things are done just for the hell of it. We do them simply because they belong to our fulfillment as the kind of animals we are, not out of duty, custom, sentiment, authority, material necessity, social utility or fear of the Almighty. There is no reason, for example, why we should delight in one another's company. When we do so, however, we are realizing a vital capacity of our ''species being.'' And this in Marx's view is as much a form of production as planting potatoes. Human solidarity is essential for the purpose of political change; but in the end it serves as its own reason. So much is clear from a moving passage in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts:

  When communist workmen gather together, their immediate aim is instruction, propaganda, etc. But at the same time they acquire a new need—a need for society—and what appears as a means has beTERRY EAGLETQN

  come an end. Smoking, eating and drinking, etc, are no longer means of creating links between people. Company, association, conversation, which in its turn has society as its goal, is enough for them. The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.10

  Production for Marx, then, means realizing one's essential powers in the act of transforming reality. True wealth, he claims in the Grundrisse, is ''the absolute working-out of human creative potentialities . . . i.e. the development of all human powers as an end in itself, not as measured on a predetermined yardstick.''11 Beyond class-history, he writes in Capital, can begin ''that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom.''12 The word ''production'' in Marx's work covers any self-fulfilling activity: playing the flute, savouring a peach, wrangling over Plato, dancing a reel, making a speech, engaging in politics, organising a birthday party for one's children. It has no muscular, macho implications. When Marx speaks of production as the essence of humanity, he does not mean that the essence of humanity is packing sausages. Labour as we know it is an alienated form of what he calls ''praxis''—an ancient Greek word meaning the kind of free, self-realising activity by which we transform the world. In ancient Greece, the word meant any activity of a free man, as opposed to a slave.

  Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted a society where the economic no longer monopolised so much time and energy.

  That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. Where you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by an affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as ever these predecessors did.

  Marx's work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure. Free self-realisation is a form of ''production,'' to be sure; but it is not one that is coercive. And leisure is necessary if men and women are to devote time to running their own affairs. It is thus surprising that Marxism does not attract more card-carrying idlers and professional loafers to its ranks. This, however, is because a lot of energy must be expended on achieving this goal. Leisure is something you have to work for.

  SIX

  Marx was a materialist. He believed that nothing exists but matter. He had no interest in the spiritual aspects of humanity, and saw human consciousness as just a reflex of the material world. He was brutally dismissive of religion, and regarded morality simply as a question of the end justifying the means. Marxism drains humanity of all that is most precious about it, reducing us to inert lumps of material stuff determined by our environment. There is an obvious route from this dreary, soulless vision of humanity to the atrocities of Stalin and other disciples of Marx.

  W hether the world is made of matter, spirit or green cheese is not a question over which Marx lost much sleep. He was disdainful of such large metaphysical abstractions, and had a brisk way of dispatching them as idly speculative. As one of the most formidable minds of modernity, Marx was notably allergic to fancy ideas. Those who regard him as a bloodless theorist forget that he was among other things a Romantic thinker with a suspicion of the abstract and a passion for the concrete and specific. The abstract, he thought, was simple and featureless; it was the concrete that was rich and complex. So whatever materialism meant to him, it certainly did not revolve on the question of what the world was made out of.

  This, among other things, was what it meant to the materialist philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, some of whom saw human beings as mere mechanical functions of the material world. Marx himself, however, regarded this kind of thought as thoroughly ideological. For one thing, it reduced men and women to a passive condition. Their minds were seen as blank sheets, on which they received sensory impressions from the material world outside. And out of these impressions they formed their ideas. So if these impressions could somehow be manipulated to produce the ''right'' kind
of ideas, human beings could make steady progress towards a state of social perfection. This was not a politically innocent affair. The ideas in question were those of an elite of middle-class thinkers who were champions of individualism, private property and the free market as well as justice, liberty and human rights. Through this mind-altering process, they hoped in a paternal sort of way to influence the behavior of the common people. It is hard to believe that Marx subscribed to this kind of materialism.

  This is not all that materialist philosophy meant before Marx got his hands on it. In one way or another, however, he saw it as a form of thought closely bound up with the fortunes of the middle classes. His own brand of materialism, as developed in his Theses on Feuerbach and elsewhere, was quite different, and Marx was fully conscious of the fact. He was aware that he was breaking with an old style of materialism and originating something quite new. Materialism for Marx meant starting from what human beings actually were, rather than from some shadowy ideal to which we could aspire. And what we were was in the first place a species of practical, material, bodily beings. Anything else we were, or could be, had to be derived from this fundamental fact.

  In a boldly innovative move, Marx rejected the passive human subject of middle-class materialism and put in its place an active one. All philosophy had to start from the premise that whatever else they were, men and women were first of all agents. They were creatures who transformed themselves in the act of transforming their material surroundings. They were not the pawns of History or Matter or Spirit, but active, self-determining beings who were capable of making their own history. And this means that the Marxist version of materialism is a democratic one, in contrast to the intellectual elitism of the Enlightenment. Only through the collective practical activity of the majority of people can the ideas which govern our lives be really changed. And this is because these ideas are deeply embedded in our actual behavior.