A Primer on Marx
April 13, 2011
The Chronicle of Higher Education is not where I usually go to feed my mind. I do go there quite a lot, but for other purposes: to look for work. Imagine my surprise—and delight!—to find this article by Terry Eagleton there: In Praise of Marx
I may want to quibble here and there with Eagleton (and certainly with Marx), but his general point rings true and prescient: we ignore and demonize Marx at our own risk. (I would also add that the capitalist’s disdain for Marx is making him out to be quite the prophet.)
Hat tip to my colleague, Dan Rogers.
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You might also be interested in Was Marx Right? in Commonweal.
“I am often impatient when believers ask me: ‘Are you a Marxist?’ The best reply I can think of is a counter-question: ‘Do you brush your teeth? I mean, since the toothbrush has been invented?’ How can anyone read Amos and Isaiah, and not Marx and Engels? That would be absolute ingratitude toward a God who sends us prophets with the message that to know YHWH means to do justice. Are we not obliged to do use every analytic tool that can help us to comprehend injustice and at the same time reveal the victims of injustice as the possible forces for change that can break the spell of oppression for both the oppressors and the oppressed? Can we afford to ignore Marx at a time when I ought to be clear to every attentive observer of the misery of the Third World that capitalism neither can nor will satisfy hunger? Our economic system works for the rich, not for the other two-thirds of the human family.”
- Dorothee Soelle
“Marxist” I dunno, but “Marxian” definitely!
Anyone who isn’t at least a sympathizer with Marx’s economic analysis (leaving aside his attempt at a more totalizing philosophy) is blinded by their own self-interests, I have to think.
Might want to check this out too.
The article was a hodgepodge. Marx was wrong about everything. State capitalism is always worse than the individual variety because there is no one to play ref. Marxism has a very bad record on the environment: chernobyl, and the aral sea. He tries to draft Oscar Wilde into socialism, but Wilde himself says, no, I hate socialism, and am an individualist.
Every sentence was either ignorant or a willful lie.
Kirby: your response is even more of a hodgepodge than the original article. You are conflating Marxism (as in the thought and writings of Marx) with communism (the implementation of Marx’s ideas by others, often in ways that differ substantially from Marx himself) with socialism (a broad category of leftist/progressive thought opposed to some degree to capitalism, but in many strands anti-marxist). Further, to categorically declare that “Marx was wrong about everything” is silly. Many of his observations about society were astute, and his analytical framework has proved very fruitful in analyzing society.