Why Marx Was Right | Full Talk | Terry Eagleton

I didn't want to say a few words about this remarkably cheap and extraordinarily attractive what that I've written um I read a little of it every night before I go to sleep marveling at the lucidity of its language the atlas of its imagery the incisiveness of its insights you too can share this ecstatic if you see me later you've got a three handshake from the author two copies you get a kiss well you might prefer to stick with Wally in that case you know somebody who wrote to me of enthusiastic letter about the book from the Australian outback and so enthusiastic was he that he said him why didn't you call it why marks is right and I wrote back and said I'm he's dead maybe it takes a long time for news you know to travel to the outback in a tree the bush I get quite a lot of hate mail as most left wingers and the public eye I suppose do but nature in her wisdoms provided that him all far right-wing cranks have the same erratic huge handwriting this is a kind of evolutionary device further nature in her wisdom has seen fit to you so that you know you steel yourself for the desire for you to get some loathsome disease you know everybody's been looking at the envelope marks has of course been an extraordinary caricature I mean what one of the most travesty of writers I think more so even I think them Freud Freud's pretty caricatured because the gauze mark is a political writer that probably cancer solve it people who think for example that Freud believes that everything comes down to sex now that's actually right being Christians so it's not Freudian I see or talk learnedly about the Freudian subconscious there's no concept of the subconscious in fact in Freud so I want in this brief time to list to talk about 10 things 10 aspects of Marx that most people don't know about you will in a few minutes know about them nobody else will you will have a certain moral and intellectual superiority to practice wherever you wish amaze your friends just points that run against the grain as it were of the most that the banal received wisdom about Marx first of all the fact that he was of course a great champion of capitalism yeah how many people in the BBC for example know that that for Marx the middle class is the European middle classes have created capitalism where the most by far for him the most revolutionary agent in history and he had undying praise for them in fact Hannah Arendt said that the opening pages of the communist manifesto or an embarrassing paean of praise to capitalism yes and Marx thought that in its brief existence capitalism had revolutionized the face of the earth they'd had accumulated fabulous riches but spiritual as well as material riches civil rights democracy as we know today feminism liberalism if it accumulated given us all of these things along with Mel Gibson and Lady gaga and so on what has to be rather shaded about this no it had swept away in an astonishingly brief period of time almost every vestige of the osteon regimes apart from a few perhaps you know not very easily observed remnant such as Prince Charles or some other why with those ears he wouldn't be easily observed it's a mystery and it was this four marks all of this enormous accumulation of progress enlightenment of liberalism of progressivism it was this that had to form the basis for socialism Marx was absolutely clear that he said without that the enormous legacy of treasures that the revolutionary middle class had deleted bequeathed to the future indeed for the most of course self-interested and discreditable and narrowly selfish reasons but nonetheless without that basis for Marx any socialism would be bankrupt from the outset in other words what he was really doing in a sense was prefiguring what came to be known as Stalinism the doomed attempt to construct socialism in the least propitious conditions in the most desperately backward conditions one of the tragedies of the 20th century I think in that respect was that socialism was most necessary where it was least possible but in a sense the whole of Marx's work argues against that he admires and praises the riches of capitalism but of course being a dialectical thinker he also sees the enormous poverty and deprivation and sheer human wretchedness that it's created so much so indeed that one might ask the question even if a just society were to stagger out from this sordid history of class oppression and conflict could any such society retrospectively justify a suffering which had gone into its making it's not a question that Marx himself particularly point poses but I think it's a question that we can how is it that in the midst of the greatest most fabulous affluence history has ever known men and women in Greece as I speak rummaging in garbage cans for food for themselves and their children what are the contradiction was Marxist asking which make poverty and wealth sides of the same coin as close as the two sides of a piece of paper why does freedom for a few turn into oppression for many why does equality twist by some constant mechanism into inequality and so what was really wanting to ask the question of what underlying mechanisms created this situation but what he looked forward to was not labor a society of labor which people associated marks but leisure Marx's whole aim was to create a society the seer society in which as far as feasible and he was pretty realistic about this men and women could be released from undignified forms of toil and drudgery his ideal society not that he talks about in those terms would thus be pretty much like Oscar Wilde's in his great pamphlet the soul of man under socialism where mark where wild in the visitors the future really as just lounging around all day in loose crimson garments sipping absinthe and reciting homer to each other and that's just the working day I wasn't him to describe the leisure time yeah ma you know Wilde was an east heat and a socialist in a very logical kind of way because he thought that the whole point ultimately of human existence was to realize one's powers and capacities purely for their own sake or to use a more technical theological term purely for the Hellenic yes like all the best things of course are done in that sense purely for their own self delighted mark stood in that tradition he wasn't East beat in manner of wild but wild would certainly but have recognized himself and his own work in that you can't actually of course pre-program or pre-draft human freedom which is one reason why Marx as a secular Jew observes the Judaic prohibition on graven images of the future graven images of the kingdom how could you possibly using the poor materials of the present predict or give an image of the future the future must in that sense go beyond the present there's no image of it available and Marxism tourist Asylum Tom the shape a socialist society would take and the only image of the future is the failure of the present as far as he's concerned and socialism for him would be to go back to the point about wild and asceticism it's a matter of production and everybody knows that Marx worked as associate of the concept of production but his notion of production is extraordinary generous and deep you know for Marx eating of peach is production you know as though is the realization of sensuous human capacities listening to Mozart is production it's not just talking about middle worthless or coalmines his idea is is idealist society in which men and women could realize their powers and capacities the phrase uses continually purely for their own self delight and that's the reason why as far as market is concerned the image of production here averts to again and again is art art is Martha's image of ideal production typical human production John simply for the love and the hell of it he was of course himself a staggeringly erudite Central European intellectual know who seemed to have read everything there was and he bitterly regretted having to spend so much time writing Capitao nobody he once said had written so much about money and had so little yes he bitterly regretted that he wanted to write his big book on Bowser which he'd planned right but he thought that it would be irresponsible of him not to write on economics and the reason he wrote on economics was not because he believed that was the be-all and end-all on the contrary as I say his ideal was leisure are not labor as far as possible he worked on economics because he wanted to diminish its tyrannical grip over human lives he wanted to as it were background the economic against the conventional rather banal wisdom of him if men and women were to realize their powers and capacities as delightful ends in themselves how does that differ from a certain classical liberal model in which everybody as it were does their own thing you know has their own space in which to fulfill themselves but pretty much as atoms in isolation from each other well marx had a kind of answer to that that really he'd be pinched from Hegel I'd be pinched a lot of stuff from Hegel which was that in any complex society men and women could only realize their capacities in and through the self realization of other people yes indeed there's a phrase of the Communist Manifesto that in socialism or communists and the self realization of each will become the condition for the self realization of all which captures just a pity kind of way that that ideal if you think of that in interpersonal terms if you think of a situation in which the self realization of one person as an end in itself is done in and through the self realization of something else you're talking about love and what Marx is really talking about is a kind of political love what will believe necessary institutions for that actually to happen think for example of a cooperative a self-governing cooperative which seems to have been part of Marx's vision of a good society it's just in the nature of those cooperatives that people by doing what they by taking part actually do augment and create the conditions for the greater self realization of the other people involved there's no need here for some kind of heroic altruism or self-conscious martyrdom or striving you know the greatest food of the greatest number that is built into the institution as it is and that seems to have been part of Marx's aim he didn't as it happens he wasn't a great champion of equality again as people think you know that his ideal Society is when we all all wear the same you know boiler suits with our National Insurance numbers stamped on the back you know and actually it's capitalism addresses everybody the same you know in track suit and trainers yeah that's the true uniformity he act Marx actually thought equality was really a bourgeois notion yeah a certain kind of abstract leveling of individuals he wasn't opposed to it just on those grounds Marx thought many bourgeois notions were highly progressive but he thought that it was falsifying it was commodities which exchanged abstractly for mark should not human beings and the reason he objected that was because he was a good old romantic humanist who was passionately devoted to the reality of the specific individual another point about Marx which fails to get through in the general consciousness he had an abiding suspicion of the abstract which meant he also had an abiding suspicion of theory yes he thought of course for the abstract was necessary in an analysis of society but he talks rather strikingly about rising from the abstract to the concrete the abstract is something you've kind of begin with something very general yes but you have to progressively refine that into that set of rich in particular determinations which constitute an individual thing and that includes an individual life well one of the rather powerful combinations in Marx's thought I think it's hard to beat you raise is the fact that he was at once an old-fashioned romantic humanist as his passion for the particular suggests but he was also an Enlightenment rationalist so that he didn't leave built of the universal he didn't relinquish his grasp on the need for global community which he thought capitalism had prepared the way for but he wanted that to be mediated in and through a respect for the individual in all of his or her diversity and plurality all of these terms long before post-modernism a part of Marx's own language he was of course as hostile to the state as the tea party is if four rather more credible reason yes state socialism for Marx would have been a contradiction in terms socialism was democratic or it was nothing democratic socialism for Marx is a tautology just as as business ethics is an oxymoron Mark's disagreed with parliamentary democracy which again with a very qualified judgment I mean marks of course was a Doughty supporter and champion of many reform bills he didn't naively opposed reform to revolution but Marx disagreed with parliamentary democracy because he thought it wasn't democratic enough it didn't extend in a popular grassroots decentralized way into society as a whole and it certainly didn't extend into the into the economy he was not again whatever people may imagine it was not a utopian thinker I've already mentioned the fact that he has a kind of embargo on predicting the future he began his career in contention with utopian thinkers various kinds he learned from people like fumio-san Seymour he didn't particularly appreciate for his dream that under utopian conditions the ocean would turn into lemonade which was a point for the claim you probably would have preferred you know a rather fine Riesling or something with anger but he wasn't the utopian and he spent much time criticizing that whole vein of political thought in the sense that he there's nothing that I know in Marxist work to suggest that he believed in a perfect society absolutely not the word on the contrary the very notion of materialism would suggest that he believed that reality was pretty messy and imperfect and unfinished there's nothing to suggest in Marx that the future you know even under socialism won't have its fair quota of cheats and bullies and freeloaders and the occasional psychopath and Simon Cowell and and so on you know absolutely nothing this work suggests that simply that we have reached a historical stage and capitalism for him is to be thanked ironically for bringing us to it where it is feasible that men and women's lives could be a lot less wretched than they are but that's very different from some dream of perfection what about revolution which is a sticking point with so many people first of all as I said Marx made no naive contrast between revolution and reform he was very stout and committed reformist and of course as far as violence goes we know that many processes are reformed have been more bloody than some revolutions there are delicate revolutions as well as violent ones but most processes of reform of a protracted period of time have involved quite a lot of violence and aggression and bloodshed people say they don't like revolutions but usually they're thinking of particular revolutions a lot of others most people approve say of the American Revolution approve of the revolution against apartheid approve of the revolutions that brought down the neo Stalin estates of Eastern Europe approve of the Arab Spring its particular revolutions that people tend to object to in doing so of course they forget very often that they themselves are the products of a long drawn-out revolutionary process which came to a particular focus of violence in the mid 17th century but which was one of those most successful revolutions which as it were wipes itself from the minds of humanity all the best revolutions are those which survive long enough to be able to be thrust into the political unconscious as though they never happened which is one reason why states which are still fairly recent Northern Ireland Israel a few others have a problem with legitimacy for Edmund Burke the great Irish political theorist longevity was legitimacy the longer you survived the more you could thrust the primordial trespass into the unconscious the better you were we know that most states were founded by revolution or occupation or invasion or usurpation or in some cases even extermination but the trick is to bring it about over a long period of time that that never actually happened um all right let me just add a couple of points and then we can talk about it marked is famous for his commitment to the proletariat and and people say well whatever happened to that surely were in a different situation well Marx was well aware that the mid majority of working people in his own society in Victorian England weren't blue-collar male factory workers at all manufacturing workers they were domestic workers and domestic workers of course were overwhelmingly women they were the skivvies and the maidservants and the cooks over the Victorian middle classes Marx was well aware of that he thought that the proletariat had a specifically important role to play in a revolutionary process but he never made the mistake of imagining but it was anything like the majority of working people in the society Pro the word proletariat of course comes from the book the word the word crowley's which is same kind of word as progeny really means offspring it means children it means those people in ancient societies who were too poor to serve the state with anything but the fruit of their wombs women who produced labour power in the form of individual human beings today in a global society the proletariat remains largely a woman remains female sweated labour throughout the world one of the most striking aspects of Marx I'll end with this is that he is and angles his thoughts about the environment are quite astonishingly ahead of their time I mean I think there's absolutely no doubt that yeah and as in the old cliche if Marx and Engels were alive today they will be in the van on ecological politics it's true that there is a so-called Promethean straight in Marxist thought which is what his enemies and projects remember and all they tend to remember on this topic as to say the Enlightenment domination of nature but Marx and Engels are much more commonly found to be talking in terms that could almost be contemporary of the necessity for the Lions of dialogue or symbiosis a friendship and exchange of energies and so on with the natural world and of course a belief recognition of how capitalism how predatory capitalism is in relation to that angles perhaps blotted his copybook a little bit on the topic he was a he rode with the Cheshire hunt but as I say you know materialism means that nothing is perfect and nobody and I think I'll end there having convinced you so completely that there's not even I think any need for dialogue on this matter so we can just repair to the nearest pub you know and did Marx have his faults lots a lot of them and some of them recorded within this remarkable book of mine and his prediction was when he did make them were lousy absolutely appalling yet he almost always got it wrong it particularly was journalism but all I'm arguing here is that he was right enough of the time to make a respect for him reasonable and he was certainly important enough to be rescued from the small savage travesties of his critics thank you very much yeah

Channel: The Institute of Art and Ideas

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Keywords: why marx was right, terry eagleton, Marxism (Political Ideology), marxist, Review, philosophy, politics, capitalism, why marx was wrong, socialism, communism, was marx right, was marx wrong, karl marx, literary theory, 21st century marxism, karl marx was right, roger scruton

Id: tYktnB7j81o

Length: 24min 9sec (1449 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 13 2012