Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton

Author:Terry Eagleton
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3, pdf
Published: 2011-05-12T15:53:24+00:00

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Marx was a materialist. He believed that nothing exists but matter. He had no interest in the spiritual aspects of humanity, and saw human consciousness as just a reflex of the material world. He was brutally dismissive of religion, and regarded morality simply as a question of the end justifying the means. Marxism drains humanity of all that is most precious about it, reducing us to inert lumps of material stuff determined by our environment. There is an obvious route from this dreary, soulless vision of humanity to the atrocities of Stalin and other disciples of Marx.

W hether the world is made of matter, spirit or green cheese is not a question over which Marx lost much sleep. He was disdainful of such large metaphysical abstractions, and had a brisk way of dispatching them as idly speculative. As one of the most formidable minds of modernity, Marx was notably allergic to fancy ideas. Those who regard him as a bloodless theorist forget that he was among other things a Romantic thinker with a suspicion of the abstract and a passion for the concrete and specific. The abstract, he thought, was simple and featureless; it was the concrete that was rich and complex. So whatever materialism meant to him, it certainly did not revolve on the question of what the world was made out of.

This, among other things, was what it meant to the materialist philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, some of whom saw human beings as mere mechanical functions of the material world. Marx himself, however, regarded this kind of thought as thoroughly ideological. For one thing, it reduced men and women to a passive condition. Their minds were seen as blank sheets, on which they received sensory impressions from the material world outside. And out of these impressions they formed their ideas. So if these impressions could somehow be manipulated to produce the ''right'' kind of ideas, human beings could make steady progress towards a state of social perfection. This was not a politically innocent affair. The ideas in question were those of an elite of middle-class thinkers who were champions of individualism, private property and the free market as well as justice, liberty and human rights. Through this mind-altering process, they hoped in a paternal sort of way to influence the behavior of the common people. It is hard to believe that Marx subscribed to this kind of materialism.

This is not all that materialist philosophy meant before Marx got his hands on it. In one way or another, however, he saw it as a form of thought closely bound up with the fortunes of the middle classes. His own brand of materialism, as developed in his Theses on Feuerbach and elsewhere, was quite different, and Marx was fully conscious of the fact. He was aware that he was breaking with an old style of materialism and originating something quite new. Materialism for Marx meant starting from what human beings actually were, rather than from some shadowy ideal to which we could aspire.

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