Is Marx more diminished than enhanced by Terry Eagleton’s defence of him?This article titled “Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review” was written by Tristram Hunt, for The Observer on Sunday 29th May 2011 01.30 UTCAs the IMF dishes out its medicine in Lisbon, Dublin and Athens, and the limitations of neo-liberalism become more apparent, the moment is surely right for a compelling account of Karl Marx’s relevance to the modern world. And in campus conferences, continuing sales of Das Kapital, and even the words of Pope Benedict XVI (moved to praise Marx’s “great analytical skill”), there is a growing appreciation for Marx’s predictions of globalisation, rampant capitalism, and the instability of international finance. As the Times put in the middle of the 2008 crash: “He’s back!”But Marx also remains the target of any number of lazy slurs. The easiest way to kill off debate about Marxism is to jump straight to the Stalin show-trials, Soviet gulags, and Khmer Rouge Year Zero. The philosophical beliefs of a mid-19th-century denizen of the British Museum are all too quickly elided with the most terrible atrocities of the 20th century as an all-purpose intellectual get-out card.So Terry Eagleton – literary critic, liberal-baiter, Marxist man of letters – has set himself the task of explaining why Marx was right. “What if all the most familiar objections to Marx’s works are mistaken?” he begins. His plan is to take on “10 of the most standard criticisms of Marx and try to refute them one by one”. He does so, he believes, at a time when capitalism is uniquely in crisis: “the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon it is”. Or as Friedrich Engels used to put it: “This time there’ll be a dies irae such as has never been seen before… all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree.”But for any admirer of Eagleton or Marx, the book is a disappointment. There is none of the logical precision, winning prose or intellectual ambition displayed most recently in Eagleton’s Yale lectures on faith. Part of the problem is the structure. This is a work of intellectual rebuttal, as chapter by chapter Eagleton takes on a century of misreading Marx. All of which means he is fighting on an enemy territory of dreary objections. For example, there’s a long attempt to justify the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the Leninist aftermath, as well as the East German system of childcare – not something, I imagine, Marx and Engels themselves would have bothered with.The consequence of such deviations is that there is little sense of the anger, brio and bravado of Marx and Engels; none of the humour, irony and creativity so central to the Marxian heritage. Instead, this book reads like a rapidly crammed set of notes for an American midwest college course. There’s an array of lecture-hall style jokes and fairly worthless hyperbole. In no credible sense do one in three children in Britain today “live below the breadline”.Thankfully, amid the banalities, there lurk some wonderful passages. Eagleton is right to stress the centrality of democracy to Marxian communism, as well as explain so successfully the nature of free will within Marx and Engels’s account of history. This is all very much the humanist, Paris Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.Eagleton also stresses the modernity of Marx’s thinking and how, for example, he saw the nature of social class shifting with the progress of capitalism. “As long ago as the mid-19th century, he is to be found writing of the ‘constantly growing number of the middle-classes’ … men and women ‘situated midway between the workers on the one side and the capitalists on the other.’” This is a long way from the hackneyed dichotomy of proletarian and bourgeois.There is also a touch of the old Eagleton when he deploys Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure to explore the interaction of culture and materialism. When it comes to Jude Fawley, we need to appreciate that “Oxford University is the ‘superstructure’ to Jericho’s ‘base’.”However, Eagleton’s touch is less sure when it comes to the human condition under communism. In trying to rebut claims of utopianism, he goes too far in suggesting that “Marxism holds out no promise of human perfection” and “envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist”. Engels, though, was clear that the ascent from socialism to communism entailed a metaphysical change. Under the leadership of the proletariat, humanity achieves true freedom liberated from its animal instincts: “It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”Here was the quasi-theological endpoint of Marxism and it would have been more rewarding if Eagleton, such an intriguing catholic thinker, had expanded upon the Judaeo-Christian assumptions underpinning much of Marx’s heaven on earth. But perhaps that was too close to the bone.In the end, this is another worthy volume in the rarely scintillating Marx-Engels interpretative canon. Useful for undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame, but not for anyone else interested in the drama, insights, and majesty of Marxism. Marx might well have been right about an awful lot, but sadly Eagleton fails to make you care very much. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhy Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – reviewRelated posts:Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of powerThe Wizard of Oz – reviewThe latest word on globalisation
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Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/29/why-marx-was-right-by-terry-eagleton-%E2%80%93-review
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May 29 2011, 11:40am | Comments »
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If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam
I don’t know what class will be protesting today – squeezed, strugglers. But will they resist the fiction that class no long matters? If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam.
This article titled “If you earn less than the average wage, you’re not middle class. It’s all a scam” was written by Suzanne Moore, for The Guardian on Saturday 26th March 2011 09.00 UTC My cafetiere is pink. Shocking pink. I am shocked myself, as I reckon now I must be the most middle-class person ever to have lived. For this is one of the ways we now reckon class. According to pollsters. So disturbed was I that I checked its make. Boden? Aaaah! No, Bodum, and I need glasses. This is not product placement by the way, I am simply trying to place myself in class terms. If class is now deemed to be about what one consumes as opposed to being about what one produces, I might as well put it out there: my coffee maker. Judge me not by my ancestors, but by my penchant for vividly coloured kitchenware. Posher friends, or at least some people who claim to know about food, scoff at my cafetiere and say I should make coffee in those proper French metal things, and they are probably right and they shall inherit the land. I won’t inherit the land, nor, I imagine, will the classes who drink instant coffee. They probably don’t deserve to. I mean, have they no aspirations, these non-real-coffee-drinking low-lifes? They are probably the same type of people whose children don’t read 50 books a year, I bet. Really, there is no hope. Seven out of 10 people now define themselves as middle class, so we may just look up or down on the three who don’t. Presumably they just tick the box marked “non–dom” or “can’t be arsed”. Who is to know? But really there is more to it than cappuccinos. I am shocked at the bloodless coup that has been achieved here. As social mobility has faltered over the last 20 years, we have the majority of people “self-certifying” as middle class. Certified is the right word, if you ask me. Delusions of grandeur are one thing. Delusions of being middle class when you earn less than the average income, and are indeed struggling, may suggest the class war is not going that well. It’s really difficult maintaining a class war when everyone says that they are on the same side. And believe me, I try. I hate to argue with Lady Gaga (deeply middle class) but I wasn’t Born This Way. I was born another way and got on and got out somehow. My cohort is probably the last generation to achieve real social mobility. And if you now look at the studies, despite the myth constantly repeated, it’s not grammar schools that made the difference. To change one’s class position leaves one in a kind of no-man’s land, unable to share the nostalgia for the good old working classes, but always willing and able to rubbish one’s new milieu. Much about working-class life is deathly dull and about anaesthetising oneself into numbing stupidity. The nobility of manual work was a necessary fiction. No man would live half their lives underground if they had another choice. No woman now happily gets up in the middle of the night and leaves her children to go and clean office floors. What has happened is that the main political parties cottoned on to the idea of aspiration being a vote-winner exactly at the same time when those aspirations could not be met for many in a globalised economy. Home-owning, self-reliance, a decent job for life, nice holidays, a taste for authenticity and real “experiences” came to define us. What we bought, rather than what we produced, became our core identity. As any fule kno, or OK, any old Marxist, this is not what social class actually means. This is reducing class to the trivia of etiquette and consumer power. The reality has been that as we produce fewer and fewer goods, our patterns of employment have become more haphazard and confused across the class spectrum. People on incredibly low wages are still required to look smart, present immaculate CVs and be respectful, even when on hideously short-term contracts. This may make them “feel” middle class. Alongside this, every politician has tried to wrap us up in some warm, fuzzy blanket of uniform classlessness. Last year Gordon Brown was promising that Labour would create “more middle-class jobs than ever”, and would also represent “the mainstream majority”. What on earth did this mean? Is it any more true than Osborne’s more obvious lie, “We’re all in this together”? The coercion of smooth, achievable middle classness was brought about under New Labour. Triangulation, remember, meant there need be no more class conflict or fights between workers and bosses. We were just floating in a perfectly harmonious world where things could only get better. The real working class remained problematic, and the workless morphed into what we now call the underclass. When Charles Murray started using that word in the mid-90s we reeled. The poor were not just people, he said, who didn’t have money, they were also morally impoverished. Now we use that word and others like it all the time: Chavs, “urban”, people from estates. Look at these people and their vulgar desire for instant gratification. Even instant coffee. Middle-class “values”, on the other hand, mean what? Some idea of restraint, of naturally knowing what’s good and being prepared to work for it. And, er, having a Ford Focus. If you don’t mind being defined by vote-hungry politicians or people who want to sell you stuff, then go for it! But I am sorry to say that when you are earning less than the average wage, even though your work may be sedentary rather than manual, don’t kid yourself, people. This is a massive scam, this horrible mutation of all into some homogenised vision of middle-classness. The old word for it was hegemony. Which, I can see, is as about as fashionable as class war. But when Gramsci described a culture in which the ruling class “persuades” the lower classes to accept its values, he could have had little idea of how parties of “the left” would also bring this about. But the rush for the centre ground means just that. The old collectivities of unions or the bonds of manual work have given way to individual fear and loathing in the workplace. Technology means outsourcing, and has been a liberation for some, but for others it means total loss of autonomy, and a working life that is under constant observation. The problem now is that mere aspiration, middle-class or not, is not enough. As if it ever was. The much-derided aspiration of the young – to become famous without necessarily having any talent – is no less nutty than many current political aspirations. We are to have growth without investment. Daft. We are all to stand tall and proud while we lop off the limbs of the public sector. Crazy. I don’t know what class of people will be protesting today. They may well be squeezed. Strugglers, downsizers. Or not from any of these marketing categories. They may simply be registering the fact that their individual interests are actually not those of the ruling class. Some may think they are middle class, and some indeed may be. Whether they resist the fiction that class no longer matters is surely much more significant than how they drink their coffee. For these new decaffeinated, tepid definitions of class are nothing like the real thing. And certainly not for the likes of us.
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March 26 2011, 8:48am | Comments »
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Wisconsin is making the battle lines clear in America’s hidden class war
From Wisconsin, class politics emerges into the US news, but the interpretation here has more to do with culture and aspirations than the relationships to the means of production. And who is responsible for these ‘distorting filters of media representation’?
This article titled “Wisconsin is making the battle lines clear in America’s hidden class war” was written by Gary Younge, for The Guardian on Sunday 27th February 2011 17.59 UTC You can tell a great deal about a nation’s anxieties and aspirations by the discrepancy between reality and popular perception. Polls last year showed that in the US 61% think the country spends too much on foreign aid. This makes sense once you understand that the average American is under the illusion that 25% of the federal budget goes on foreign aid (the real figure is 1%). Similarly, a Mori poll in Britain in 2002 revealed that more than a third of the country thought there were too many immigrants. Little wonder. The mean estimate was that immigrants comprise 23% of the country; the actual number was about 4%. Broadly speaking, these inconsistencies do not reflect malice or wilful ignorance but people’s attempts to make sense of the world they experience through the distorting filters of media representation, popular prejudice and national myths. “The way we see things is affected by what we know and what we believe,” wrote John Berger in Ways of Seeing. “The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” When it comes to class, Americans have long seen themselves as potentially rich and perpetually middling. A Pew survey in 2008 revealed that 91% believe they are either middle class, upper-middle class or lower-middle class. Relatively few claim to be working class or upper class, intimating more of a cultural aspiration than an economic relationship. Meanwhile, a Gallup poll in 2005 showed that while only 2% of Americans described themselves as “rich”, 31% thought it very likely or somewhat likely they would “ever be rich”. But trends and ongoing events are forcing a reappraisal of that self-image. Social mobility has stalled; wages have been stagnant for a generation. It is in this light that the growing resistance to events in Wisconsin must be understood. The hardline Republican governor, Scott Walker, has pledged to remove collective bargaining rights from public sector unions and cut local government workers’ health benefits and pension entitlements. As the prospect of becoming rich diminishes, many are simply trying not to become poor. Inequality of income and wealth has been more readily accepted in the US because equality of opportunity has long been assumed. The absence of the latter raises serious questions about the existence of the former. This tension brought thousands to the streets in all 50 states to support the Wisconsin unions last weekend. For Walker’s measures to pass, a certain number of local senators must be present in the chamber for the vote. To prevent that happening, the entire Democratic delegation fled the state and is refusing to return until Walker agrees to negotiate. Meanwhile, thousands of pro-union demonstrators have descended on the state capitol to protest, sparking solidarity rallies nationwide. Polls suggest the public is siding with the unions locally and nationally. A survey last week showed 53% against cutting benefits and pay for government workers and 61% opposed to removing collective bargaining. Even conservative polls suggest a majority in Wisconsin is opposed to Walker’s attempt to eliminate collective bargaining. Coming so soon after Republican electoral victories at federal and state level, Walker might have anticipated an easier ride for his agenda than this. After all, membership of unions is at an all-time low and public support for them does not fare much better. Moreover, support for unions ordinarily falls when unemployment rises. But these are no ordinary times. For if organised labour has fallen out of favour, the illusion that you can make it on your own is not far behind. A Pew survey in 2008 – before the banking system imploded – showed that fewer Americans than at any time in 50 years thought they were moving forward in life. The number of those who don’t believe you can get ahead by working hard has doubled in 10 years. Half the country thinks its best days are behind it. While many may question the role of the unions, few believe firing 12,000 government workers, as Walker has pledged to do, is the answer. Walker’s case is as predictable as it is weak. Government workers, he claims, have higher pay and better benefits than others in a bloated state that must slim down if it is to keep running. This is hardly true. Accounting for age and education, US local government employees earn 4% less than their private sector counterparts. Yes, the shortfall in pensions is real. But if the political will existed, calamity could be avoided with a fairly modest increase in the budget allocation. Union members do generally enjoy better benefits. That’s the whole point of being in a union: to improve your living standards through collective action. And that is precisely why Republicans like Walker want to crush them. His agenda has nothing to do with redressing a fiscal imbalance and everything to do with exploiting the crisis to deliver a killer blow to organised labour. If fixing the budget deficit were really Walker’s priority, he would not have waved through $140m in tax breaks for multinationals or refused to take federal funds for transport or broadband development. Like 10 other states, he might even have raised taxes progressively. None of these contradictions are particular to Wisconsin. Similar stories could be told as far away as Ireland and as nearby as Indiana, where Democrats also fled the state to defeat a union-bashing bill. Nor are they coming exclusively from the hard right. Democrats in the US and social democrats around Europe are attacking unions too, albeit with less relish. What Wisconsin does offer is a transparent illustration of the ideological sophistry and political mendacity driving these attacks. But having started this fight in such a brazen manner, Walker has little option but to pursue it to its bitter end. That is why it has taken on national significance. Faced with an existential threat, the labour movement has broadened its horizons and galvanised a pluralistic, national opposition. That is a precondition for success but by no means a guarantee. Last weekend’s demonstrations do not necessarily reflect a new sense of class consciousness, but they do suggest the potential for it. The idea of a class system where only a handful can ever be truly wealthy intrudes awkwardly on a culture rooted in notions of self-advancement, personal reinvention and rugged individualism, even if it is closer to reality. Old habits die hard. The weekend protests were organised under the banner “Save the American Dream”. Democratic politicians, funded by both unions and corporations, pretend not to take sides, casting the national conversation not in terms of bosses and workers or wages and profits but of rich and poor. The problem with this, explains Michael Zweig, the director of the centre for the study of working-class life at the State University of New York, is that “most people want to be rich and most of them don’t know what rich is. If you put class in terms of power, you start to get to the source of the problem.” Leaders like Walker are making it clear which side of the class divide they stand on. A growing number of Americans, it seems, have begun to understand that this is precisely the problem and are discovering the source of their own power.
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February 27 2011, 12:09pm | Comments »
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Working Class Hero - Lennon Cover
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October 31 2010, 11:47am | Comments »
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Working Class Hero John Lennon cover Andy Roberts
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August 27 2010, 2:06pm | Comments »
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