Could Marx really be our saviour?

POLITICS: Why Marx Was Right,By Terry Eagleton, Yale University Press, 224pp. £16.99

One of the most insightful observations on the practice of politics came from the pen of Garret FitzGerald. “Democratic governments tend to be subject to such strong pressure from vested interests,” he noted, “that many of their decisions operate against the interests of society as a whole.” Reform-minded politicians grope for solutions to this dilemma. They assemble coalitions that have a stake in the reforms proposed, and seek sources of political cover to help withstand detrimental interest-group pressures. The World Trade Organisation, for all its faults, provides an illustrative example. It helped keep at bay, over the current crisis, the demands for protectionism that lengthened and deepened the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Democratic regimes also face problems in enacting policies whose benefits will appear over the longer term but whose costs must be borne upfront. Autocracy, though, is much more likely to throw up stagnation and famine, as it did in China under Mao, than the dramatic economic growth instituted by Deng Xiaoping.

Karl Marx has little to offer on these practical questions of how to get from where we are to where we might want to be. I met recently with a senior economic adviser to the South African government who had been a committed Marxist for most of his life. When I asked if anything in Marx assisted him in his current job, he shook his head wistfully.

The renowned literary theorist Terry Eagleton remains a believer, and believes that the global crisis and the stresses of globalisation will bring Marx to the fore again. Here he provides us with a short, witty and highly accessible jaunt through Marx’s thought in preparation for the second coming.

Each of the book’s 10 chapters begins with a set of familiar preconceptions of Marx that Eagleton then seeks to show are unfounded. Some of his own preconceptions, though, are on equally shaky ground. In particular, global poverty and global inequality have fallen rather than risen over recent decades as growth in the vastly populous nations of India and China outstripped that of the West. The second coming may be less imminent than he supposes.

The picture he paints is of a less dogmatic and less forbidding Marx than many might have supposed. Marx’s thought, though – like (with luck) everyone else’s – evolved over his life, and it is unfortunate that the passages Eagleton selects from the thousands of pages that Marx published are dated by reference to modern editions rather than by when they first appeared.

The vision of a just society that emerges (most likely from Marx's early romantic phase) strikes me as utopian. Every believer in liberal democracy and competitive capitalism can point to some society or another that offers glimpses of the desirable. For believers in equality and a degree of bureaucratic competence, it might be Sweden, Japan or, even among poor countries, the real-life Botswana of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.The standard response that "the true Marxist society has never yet appeared" must surely raise questions about its practicability.

Although Eagleton criticises the human-rights abuses of the former Eastern European regimes and of Mao, he argues that they succeeded in dragging large swathes of the world’s population from feudalism into the modern era and providing them with some frugal comfort. But the land reforms promoted in capitalist East Asia by US administrations after the second World War – and indeed the Irish land reforms of the late 1800s and beyond – achieved the same at far less cost. And the largely more benign postcolonial socialist experiments in Africa all collapsed, just as the Soviet bloc did, because they could not generate sufficient economic growth.

Marx’s thought has contributed little to contemporary economic analysis or even political science. Its influence looms larger in the study of history, where his emphasis on social forces displaced the tendency to focus on “great men”, and is strongest in sociology. The section of the book I found most enlightening, though, was chapter 6, on his contribution to pure philosophy and impact on psychology.

Chapter 2, on the organisation of society in a Marxist future, I found the most dispiriting. Eagleton points to the amount of time taken up in capitalist administration and suggests that “there is no obvious reason why the time taken up by a socialist alternative should be greater”. But consider, if you can keep the revolver and bottle of whiskey out of reach, one of his options for the socialist alternative to the problem that we are apparently now “deprived of the power to decide whether we want to produce more hospitals or more breakfast cereals”. His solution? “Resources would be allocated by negotiations between producers, consumers, environmentalists and other relevant parties, in networks of workplace, neighbourhood and consumer councils . . . At every stage, public debate over alternative economic plans and policies would be essential . . . Prices would be determined not centrally, but by production units on the basis of input from consumers, users, interest groups and so on.”

This breaches one of the most basic rules of economics: that you can set either price or quantity but not both. If you try, you will get, as in the Soviet era, unwanted stocks of some goods and shortages, queues and black markets for others. And think of all those meetings. It adds a new dimension to Oscar Wilde’s quip that “the trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings”.

Frank Barry is professor of international business and economic development at Trinity College Dublin