Why Marx Was Right, by Terry Eagleton

Reading a book by Terry Eagleton is like watching fireworks. The reader can become so delighted with the rhetorical pyrotechnics that the force of the argument is lost. But for all the literary razzle-dazzle, Eagleton is a serious and determined critic of the capitalist status quo.

"This book had its origin in a single, striking thought," Eagleton begins: "What if all the most familiar objections to Marx's work are mistaken?" He then devotes each of ten chapters to refuting one of the major objections to Marx—to wit: Marx's age of factories, food riots and chimney sweeps has long been over. Marxism may be interesting as a theory, but in practice it produced Stalin and Mao. Marxist social theory is deterministic, suppressing human action in the ineluctable march of history. Marxism's goal is utopian. Marxism is reductionist and materialistic: everything is economics. The world of class struggle has passed away. Marxism supports violent revolution. The goals of Marxism can be realized only in an all-powerful state (Stalin and Mao again). Current radical movements for feminism, environmentalism and gay rights are not Marxist-inspired.

This list of Marxism's shortcomings is common coinage, and Eagleton offers convincing counterarguments. But he also makes an underlying critique of the critics that is signaled in the clever title: Why Marx Was Right. Of course, we all know that Marx was on the radical left, but what struck me over and over again is Marx's conservative cast, which undercuts so many of the complaints: Marx was  right—and on the right—because he based his analysis on a philosophy of history.