Why Marx Was Right

decades discredit a theory that sees change as being of its very essence? Besides, Marx himself predicted a decline of the working class and a steep increase in white-collar work. We shall be looking at this a little later. He also foresaw so-called globalisation—odd for a man whose thought is supposed to be archaic. Though perhaps Marx’s ‘‘archaic’’ quality is what makes him still relevant today. He is accused of being outdated by the champions of a capitalism rapidly reverting to Victorian levels of inequality.
In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable case to argue. By 1986, many of them no longer considered that it had. What exactly had happened in the meanwhile? Was it simply that these people were now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had Marxist theory been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Did we stumble upon a long-lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke? It was not that we discovered to our dismay that Marx was in the pay of capitalism. This is because we knew it all along. Without the Ermen & Engels mill in Salford, owned by Friedrich Engels’s textile-manufacturing father, the chronically impoverished Marx might well have not survived to pen polemics against textile manufacturers.
Most critics of Marxism today do not dispute the point. Their claim, rather, is that the system has altered almost unrecognizably since the days of Marx, and that thinger relevant. Before we examine this claim in more detail, it is worth noting that Marx himself was perfectly aware of the ever-changing nature of the system he challenged. It is to Marxism itself that we owe the concept of different historical forms of capital: mercantile, agrarian, industrial, monopoly, financial, imperial and so on. So why should the fact that capitalism has changed its shape in recent
Something had indeed happened in the period in question.From the mid-1970s onwards, the Western system underwent some vital changes.There was a shift from traditional industrial manufacture to a ‘‘postindustrial’’ culture of consumerism, communications, information technology and the service industry. Small-scale, decentralised, versatile, nonhierarchical enterprises were the order of the day. Markets were deregulated, and the working-class movement subjected to savage legal and political assault. Traditional class allegiances were weakened, while local, gender and ethnic identities grew more insistent. Politics became increasingly managed and manipulated.
The new information technologies played a key role in the increasing globalisation of the system, as a handful of transnational corporations distributed production and investment across the planet in pursuit of the readiest profits. A good deal of manufacturing was outsourced to cheap wage locations in the ‘‘underdeveloped’’ world, leading some parochially minded Westerners to conclude that heavy industry had disappeared from the planet altogether. Massive international migrations of labour followed in the wake of this global mobility, and with them a resurgence of racism and fascism as impoverished immigrants poured into the more advanced economies. While ‘‘peripheral’’ countries were subject to sweated labour, privatized facilities, slashed welfare and surreally inequitable terms of trade, the bestubbled executives of the metropolitan nations tore off their ties, threw open their shirt necks and fretted about their employees’ spiritual well-being.
Why Marx Was Right
TERRY EAGLETON
Preface
This book had its origin in a single, striking thought: What if all the most familia objections to Marx’s work are mistaken? Or at least, if not totally wrongheaded, mostly so?
ONE
Marxism is finished. It might conceivably have had some relevance to a world of factories and food riots, coal miners and chimney sweeps, widespread misery and massed working classes. But it certainly has no bearing on the increasingly classless, socially mobile, postindustrial Western societies of the present. It is the creed of those who are too stubborn, fearful or deluded to accept that the world has changed for good, in both senses of the term.
That Marxism is finished would be music to the ears of Marxists everywhere. They could pack in their marching and picketing, return to the bosom of their grieving families and enjoy an evening at home instead of yet another tedious committee meeting. Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire.