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Why Marx was Right
By Terry Eagleton
Yale University Press, 272pp, $32.95 (HB)
Distributed in Australia by Inbooks
THE global financial crisis of 2008 was remarkable for many things, not least the process by which it converted many people to Marxism. Even more remarkably many of them were bankers, one-time Ayn Randian masters of the universe now bleating that finance was a social product, capitalism a historically bound system, and the first would need public funds if the second were to survive.
This bizarre anomaly launched a bull market of articles designed to show that while everyone was treating the financial system as a fragile and contingent historical product, Karl Marx wasn't right, a judgment usually based on the most fantastic and asinine misrepresentation of his ideas.
The process appears to have stirred British literary theorist Terry Eagleton, author of more than 30 books including the million-selling overview Literary Theory, to tackle 10 big ideas in the writings of Marx that people usually get, wilfully or otherwise, most wrong, and to present Marx's ideas "not as perfect, but plausible", the best picture we have of how the world works.
Though many chapters within dispatch misconceptions about Marx with Eagleton's characteristic insight and wit, there is a core problem with the determination to defend Marx's work as a single system, in which the more particular subtheories -- of base-superstructure and capitalist process -- are as durable as the general Marxist framework...