The English Marxist and cultural critic has a piece up at The Chronicle Review dubbed “In Praise of Marx.”
He begins by disavowing the connection between Marx and RES (“Real Existing Socialism,” not Eagleton’s term) by claiming that Marx is “no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition.” Perhaps, but I wonder if the immense difference in the passage of time between the theorist and the execution of their ideas strains this analogy. But putting that aside, he absolves Marx because he never intended for Communism to be put in to practice in backward countries like Russia, et al., nor would he defend the obviously anti-democratic nature of RES. This is all well and good, but he then goes on to spend more time criticizing Capitalism and defending western communists than he does interrogating RES for what it in fact was, if not the ideas of Marx in practice (mediated by professional revolutionaries).
Interestingly, Eagleton does not in fact say that the Soviet Union and the CCCP were not Socialism, something I’ve heard from many a leftist. It’s implied in his refusal to link Marx to those regimes, but his focus on the failings/crimes of Capitalism leads me to think he’s willing to admit they were, but that, well, their “opposite” is worse. Indeed, like a card carrying member of the Communist Party of mid-century, he appears to consider Fascism Communism’s opposite. Genocide and “extermination” are thrown in for good measure to bulk up the general category anti-Marxism (read “Capitalism”) and render it on the whole worse than Communism. (As if extermination and ethnic cleansing weren’t features of Communism too?) I find this quote telling:
Some critics of Marx point with proper outrage to the mass murders in Communist Russia and China. They do not usually recall with equal indignation the genocidal crimes of capitalism: the late-19th-century famines in Asia and Africa in which untold millions perished; the carnage of the First World War, in which imperialist nations massacred one another’s working men in the struggle for global resources; and the horrors of fascism, a regime to which capitalism tends to resort when its back is to the wall.
Is this a fair juxtaposition? Which “genocidal crimes of capitalism” is he thinking of here? Were late 19th century famines carried out in the name of Adam Smith, Carl Menger or Frederic Bastiat, with statues of their likeness adorning public spaces under the jurisdiction of colonial regimes? In the case of Fascism, that regime (or “those regimes” if you want to get loose with it) specifically denounced capitalism (and its rhetorical sibling, “plutocracy”), a fact worth mentioning. Unlike RES, they didn’t even pay their supposed economic system lip service. In this effort at forced symmetry, Eagleton overlooks the obviously highly ideological nature of the Communist regimes in question, while attributing an explicitly “Capitalist” character to a diverse collection of phenomena little inspired by the theoretical nature of the battle between liberal economics and Marxism. Nationalism, mercantilism, colonialism – none of these were the anti-Marx per se, much less self-conscious embodiments of free enterprise. The false dichotomies continue:
Almost all followers of Marx today reject the villainies of Stalin and Mao, while many non-Marxists would still vigorously defend the destruction of Dresden or Hiroshima.
He contrasts two dictators responsible for millions of deaths across many decades to two acts of destruction carried out during wartime – in a war against Fascism no less!
Modern capitalist nations are for the most part the fruit of a history of genocide, violence, and extermination every bit as abhorrent as the crimes of Communism.
This is unfair. This is like saying that everything in Russia that came before the Bolsheviks is the fault of the Bolsheviks. What we’re comparing are the crimes of Communism vs. the crimes of Capitalism, as expressed by those who declare themselves to be one or the other. Or maybe we’re not? I’m not sure. The author makes it difficult to know.
Eagleton unfortunately takes what could be a discussion about the relative responsibility for creative synthesizers such as Marx for political action taken in their name and puts it in the service of contemporary partisanship, including an obligatory swipe at Fox News for neglecting the “other” 9/11, namely that of Chilean president Allende’s 1971 overthrow with US help. As if Fox or CNN or any other domestic news source would ever find it sensible to give equal time to both events.
And of course there’s this blockbuster quote:
How does this moral goal differ from liberal individualism? The difference is that to achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings for Marx must find it in and through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others. That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one’s own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one’s own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism.
Seriously?
None of this is to say that Marx was responsible for Communism, just that relatively speaking his ideas would appear to have more to do with RES than the idea generators of what we call “free enterprise,” “capitalism” (and I suppose “neo-liberal economics”) have to do with, well, all those things Eagleton really dislikes.
*I should add that if it’s in fact true that Marx himself coined the term “capitalism,” then Eagleton’s argument probably holds, but at the expense of critical analysis itself. If Marx gets to define what Capitalism is no matter how much the “bourgeois economists” might protest, then no sincere debate can take place.
April 23, 2011 at 2:47 pm
I enjoyed this. Eagleton’s essay was such a tissue of lies that untangling them would take a lifetime.
No Marxist society has ever done anything but commit atrocities in praxis.
Eagleton claims that the Marxists are green. And yet, what happened to the Aral Sea? What happened at Chernobyl?
He attempts to draft Oscar Wilde into the socialist movement, but in The soul of man under Socialism, Wilde makes fun of socialists, and says he’s instead for Individualism.
Imagine how long Wilde would have lasted amongst the Khmer Rouge.
Eagleton is a squirrelly nut.
April 23, 2011 at 3:13 pm
I would say that the USSR was not socialism as Marx et al described it, but that the US in the 1950s WAS socialism as Marx described it. Not a disaster, but better in some ways and worse in others when compared to the capitalist system Marx saw in the US in his time.
April 23, 2011 at 10:57 pm
I haven’t read the Eagleton piece yet, so not defending it. But presumably if you compare RES to anything, it has to be “really existing captialism”, rather than some idealization of Adam Smith’s. So it would have to include, for example, the actions of the Belgians in the Congo — their extraction operations resulted in the deaths of somewhere between 5 and 10 million people. Was that capitalism? It was certainly done in pursuit of profit.
If I had to defend Marx I would point out that his value as an analyst and critic of capitalism, where he was strong (some of the time), is not affected by his proposals for alternatives, which were half-assed at best.
But on the whole I agree with Phil Agre’s advice that the left should ditch Marx and invent something better. Even not taking into account the content of Marx, worshipping a long-dead German and his 19th-century worldview is not a forward-looking thing to do.
April 24, 2011 at 5:54 am
Well put.
April 23, 2011 at 11:50 pm
I haven’t read the Eagleton piece yet, so not defending it. But presumably if you compare RES to anything, it has to be “really existing captialism”, rather than some idealization of Adam Smith’s.
Even then, where is the evidence the Belgians in the congo, etc. ever placed Adam Smith on a pedestal the way RES did Marx?
April 24, 2011 at 12:26 am
Maybe I’m dense, but I utterly fail to see the salience of that particular point.
I presume you will agree that capitalism and communism are not duals or mirror-images of each other, but historical movements with their own structure and dynamics. So if statues of Adam Smith were not required to enable capitalism’s rape of the Congo, whereas the USSR did find it useful to erect statues of Marx, so what?
I see the Brits recently did erect a statue of Adam Smith, some 50 years after their own smaller-scale imperial genocide in Africa. Does that count?
April 24, 2011 at 5:55 am
Again, well put.
Muppetblast, you’re a bright commenter, I expect better from you.
April 24, 2011 at 9:16 am
mtraven says:
I think you are. You start off by conflating colonialism with capitalism and end up with implying that the actions of the Belgians (and their results) are somehow the equivalent of the results of the application of RES in Russia and subsequently the USSR, so they balance out.
In addition you seem to be unaware of the whole discussion around the return on empire being negative, certainly by the time the Germans and the Belgians started to get involved.
April 24, 2011 at 10:53 am
mtraven,
I’m saying that if Marx gets to determine what Socialism is, and RES fails the test and thus absolves him of intellectual responsibility, then who gets to decide what Capitalism is? Marx? That’s bogus and circular. Eagleton? Even worse, given he’s no economist but rather a neo-Marxist cultural critic with an axe to grind vis-a-vis markets.
If Eagleton had limited himself to only discussing why RES was not legitimate Marxism he’d be on stronger ground (in the way libertarians will point out that the USA is not really Capitalism and reference, say, Mises). But he goes beyond this and turns the table targeting Capitalism instead, implicitly suggesting that even if Marx were intellectually responsible, “hey, Capitalism’s worse.”
It would be like, as I say above, a libertarian using Mises to claim the US is not capitalism but then quickly shifting gears to complain about the horrors of communism as opposed to capitalism. By leaping into foreign territory it demands the input of a non-libertarian. Even worse for Eagleton, Mises – or even Adam Smith – are not/were not publicly celebrated and taught as orthodoxy to school children to the extent Marx was in the supposedly non-Marxist RES regimes. Again, I’m not saying that they really were Marxism realized, but the burden is on Eagleton to make a stronger case for why Marx is absolved but Capitalism is responsible for all these awful things without any guide to what Capitalism really is.
I presume you will agree that capitalism and communism are not duals or mirror-images of each other.
Right, so why does Eagleton act like they are?
So if statues of Adam Smith were not required to enable capitalism’s rape of the Congo, whereas the USSR did find it useful to erect statues of Marx, so what?
But this is telling isn’t it? Makes you wonder if Adam Smith, then, was an actual inspiration. The USSR erected statues of Marx, so we know that he was (even if they bastardized him).
April 24, 2011 at 12:23 pm
Lorenzo from Oz had a punchy post on this too: http://lorenzo-thinkingoutaloud.blogspot.com/2011/04/humpty-dumpty-analysis.html
I second his endorsement of Kolakowski for those who are interested in the actual connection between Marx and RES.
April 24, 2011 at 1:15 pm
I’m saying that if Marx gets to determine what Socialism is
Who says he does? There was socialism before Marx and non-Marxist socialisms after.
I’ve now read Eagleton’s article and agree, it has numerous weak spots, many of which you’ve identified.
If I can ask a meta-level question: why is there this tendency (in Eagleton, and in the commenters here) to view everything as a polarized struggle between capitalism and communism? I grew up in the Cold War, but I imagine most of the people here are younger and don’t have living memories of that world. So why refight it? It seems to produce tortured thinking. That is, the crimes of the Stalin are a legitimate subject of inquiry, the responsibility of Marx’s thought for them is a separate issue which also is a legitimate subject, but neither has anything to do with who did or didn’t raise a statue of Adam Smith.
My theory is that the post-1989 world is just much harder to understand than the relatively simple polarized world of the Cold War, where it was easy to pick a side and and ideology. So there’s a tendency to worship the old gods (Marx, the market) because the names of the new gods are not yet known.
April 25, 2011 at 2:51 am
I think there’s an “A vs. B, pick a side” sized hole in the brains of even fairly smart people, and it has a strong distribution.
April 25, 2011 at 5:16 pm
Nicely put back atcha.
April 25, 2011 at 12:38 pm
Eagleton is engaging in a pattern that’s all to familiar on the left. When the tyranny of a regime like the Soviet Union’s is pointed out, the answer is that it is not “true communism” (whatever that is). But hope always springs eternal among the left-wing intelligentsia. After the falsity of Duranty’s glowing reports from the Soviet Union became all too obvious, what did the New York Times do? It described first Mao, then Castro, as “agrarian reformers,” and gave them generally favorable coverage, until their rule turned out to be a dreary reprise of the Soviet experience, or worse. Then great hopes were placed in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, and most recently we have seen Venezuela’s Chavez sucked up to openly by predictable left-wing figures here in the U.S. (e.g., Sean Penn).
When the charismatic left-wing strong man du jour turns out to be another murderous despot, the first reaction of the American left will be to deny it; then to support him quietly; and after he finally falls, and his bloody record is made public for all to see, these worthies will pronounce that “real Marxism has never been tried.”
What explains the fascination of the intelligentsia with egalitarianism and collectivism? I think it lies in their sense that an economy based on private property and open markets does not adequately reward their merits. The great majority of academics I have met, whatever their professed political beliefs may have been, are very conscious of status and credentials. It offends their sensibilities that a successful undertaker or farm-implement dealer in some small town in fly-over country should make more money and enjoy more deference than a university professor. This unsatisfactory state of affairs is blamed on capitalism, which is a mere haphazard collection of customs and ad-hoc lawmaking, not to be compared with a systematically-designed ideology like that of Marx.
Egalitarianism in most cases is not based on a real wish for all people to be equal in social and economic condition. It is rather the stratagem of those who wish to advance their own social and economic status at the expense of others whose status is higher. Rather than working to advance themselves within the extant structure of civil society, they seek to alter political arrangements so as to cast down those whom they envy and despise, and to exalt themselves in their stead. Marxism is an ideology designed to order for this purpose.
April 25, 2011 at 5:18 pm
Hm, how does your theory explain this guy?
April 26, 2011 at 11:15 am
There have always been limousine liberals. Their motivations may range from some sort of quasi-religious guilt at having been born with silver spoons in their mouths, to a clever pursuit of political advantage through demagoguery, seeking to rise from mere privilege to real power on the shoulders of the lower classes. Kropotkin probably belonged to the former category. Lenin (a scion of the minor nobility) belonged to the latter.
My remark was not a “theory,” nor was it intended to account universally and exclusively for the phenomenon. It was just an observation of what appears to me to be the reason behind egalitarianism in most cases. Note well that academic leftists are hardly on the bottom rung of the socioeconomic ladder. In comparative terms they are well above the middle, but still don’t think they are high enough. Thus they seek to pull off and kick down those who at the moment stand above them.
April 26, 2011 at 2:33 pm
It takes a singularly stunted imagination to refer to Kropotkin as a “limousine liberal”. This I guess is an illustration of what enraged all those 19th/20thc revolutionaries about the bourgeoisie, that they not only have conquered the world but insist that everybody else see it in the most blinkered and reductive terms. Fortunately they no longer dominate the culture as they once did.
April 26, 2011 at 3:49 pm
What’s the matter with describing him as a limousine liberal? Would you like “Learjet leftist” better? The Wikipedia article about Kropotkin says that he rejected the use of his princely title at age 12, but that did not stop him from enrolling in an elite school reserved for the sons of the nobility, from later accepting a military commission, serving in administrative positions, and generally enjoying the perquisites available in his country to persons of his class and wealth. How is it “blinkered and reductive” to take note of these facts?
Whatever we call people of this character, they are a distinct and identifiable social type. A good current example is the Democratic governor of Minnesota, Mark Dayton. He is a scion of a wealthy family that formerly owned a department-store chain, and has seemingly spent his entire public career trying to salve his politically-correct conscience about having lived all his life in the lap of luxury. He likes to demonize the rich (whom he defines as having incomes over something like $125,000/yr), and proposing to soak them with higher taxes. Some years ago I met a woman who had worked as then-Senator Dayton’s personal chef. All of his public lamentation about the supposedly unjust distribution of wealth was never enough to persuade him to give up its personal advantages. That he supposes $125K to be a rich man’s income shows only how divorced he is from reality. You surely can’t afford a personal chef on that sort of money.
Acceptance of the natural inequality of persons, and that it inevitably orders the conditions of both rich and poor, is not blinkered and reductionist – it is realistic. As H.L. Mencken observed, in his published debate with a socialist back in 1910, when Kropotkin was alive and kicking:
“…the typical low-caste man is entirely unable to acquire that power of ordered and independent reasoning which distinguishes the man of higher caste. You may, by dint of heroic endeavors, instil into him a parrotlike knowledge of certain elemental facts, and he may even make a shift to be a schoolmaster himself, but he will remain a stupid and ignorant man, none the less. More likely, you will find that he is utterly unable to assimilate even the simplest concepts. The binomial theorem is as far beyond his comprehension as an epigram in Persian. And this inability to understand concepts formulated by others is commonly but the symptom of a more marked incapacity for formulating new concepts of his own, In the true sense, such a being cannot think. Within well-defined limits, he may be trained, just as any other sentient creature may be trained, but beyond that he cannot go.
“The public school can never hope to raise him out of his caste. It can fill him to the brim – but then it must stop. He is congenitally unteachable. A year after he has left school, he has forgotten nearly all that he learnt there. At twenty-one, when the republic formally takes him into its councils, he is laboring with pick and shovel in his predestined ditch, a glad glow in his heart and a strap around his wrist to keep off rheumatism…”
It would be bracing and welcome if such candid thinking dominated our culture today. Unfortunately, what dominate are the vapid pieties of egalitarianism, all too often voiced by persons at or near the top of fortune’s greased pole, whether by virtue of naive idealism or of cynical demagogy.
April 26, 2011 at 7:03 pm
Well, for one thing, he wasn’t a liberal. For another, he was a serious biologist and intellectual whose work on cooperation is still relevant today. But to you, apparently, the fact that he was a upper-class person concerned with anything except his own privileges is enough to disqualify him from any real consideration.
April 27, 2011 at 11:27 am
“Liberal” is used very loosely today. Certainly Kropotkin was not a liberal in the nineteenth-century sense exemplified by John Stuart Mill. But a person holding his views would probably now be called liberal or progressive here in the United States. “Limousine progressive” is not alliterative. Have the good humor to allow for a little poetic license!
I do not doubt that Kropotkin was sincere in his beliefs and motivations. But the gods of the copybook headings with slaughter and terror return, and remind us that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. Sincere, humanitarian leftists enabled the Soviet Union to come into existence, and supported it throughout its existence, turning a blind eye to the internal terror upon which its authority depended – the KGB and the Gulag – right up until it collapsed.
It is not the hypocrisy of the limousine left that disqualifies them from consideration. The repeated consequences of their misguided idealism, and their failure to learn from them, do. “Real existing socialism” may not meet Mr. Eagleton’s smell test now, but what do you suppose he, and all the rest of the academic left, will do when the next would-be left-wing caudillo comes along? Just as they did with Mao, Castro, Ortega, Chavez, or Zelaya, they will close ranks around him in the hopes that maybe it will turn out better this time.
People of this ilk are important enablers of authoritarian leftism. That’s why Kropotkin was permitted to live in the Soviet Union and granted a public funeral – in recognition of his past services to collectivism. Lenin’s term for such types was “useful idiots.” They were cultivated for years in the free world by Soviet agents like Willi Münzenberg, and there are a lot of them still around. You often appear to be one.
April 27, 2011 at 4:40 pm
Kropotkin was an anarchist revolutionary. While “liberal” has a wide range of meanings, it most definitely does not include that. Ask Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi what they think about eliminating the state.
George Soros, perhaps, is a “limousine liberal”, since I’m sure he has a very nice limo and he devotes his energy to promoting actual liberalism (under the rubric “open society”, which is close enough). If his underlying motives are guilt or some weird need to build status over and above that granted to billionaires, well, who the fuck cares?
Did you just accuse me of being a dupe of a power that hasn’t existed for over 20 years? I must be very stupid indeed.
April 27, 2011 at 5:02 pm
There are lots of old comsymps still around. They are idiots useful to someone – if no longer to the Soviets, then to Chavez, or Zelaya, or Obama – the next pied piper down the pike who promises to lead the way to the big rock candy mountain. They yearn for any country but their own, and anyone who will abolish private property, of which they always think someone else has too much.
Kropotkin may have wished to eliminate the state; Marx, too, promised that the state should eventually wither away. Something funny happened on the way to Utopia, didn’t it? Reality intervened.
April 25, 2011 at 2:03 pm
[...] to TGGP’s Entitled to an Opinion post: Egalitarianism in most cases is not based on a real wish for all people to be equal in social and [...]
April 25, 2011 at 3:38 pm
The first problem with the “we’ve never had real communism” trope is that communists have never come close to proving that we ever could have real communism. Marx honestly thought the day would come when ever man could be a literary critic. He was right. IMDB and Amazon.com have arrived and we’ve learned that not every man’s opinion is worth reading. Marx also seemed to have no concept of the time and effort it takes to train people and get them up to speed in working a job. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, he thought anyone could do anything and that we would all want to clean Honeybuckets for our fellow men with no extra reward out of a natural altruism that was supposedly the product of a human liberated from the false consciousness of capitalism. How anyone took his wishful thinking seriously is beyond me. Sure, communist regimes didn’t go about their revolutions just as Marx had expected, but Marx also didn’t predict the direction of capitalism very well. Parts of his theory range from obviously false to unfalsifiable. Marx was also vague on many details of how the revolution was supposed to work, leaving lots of wiggle room for later interpreters.
The second problem with this apology for communism is that it assumes that it was the failure to implement things by the book that made communist regimes disasters.
The truth is that you can motivate large numbers of people over a period of time in only two ways: incentives and coercion. Marxists tend to throw out incentives because they lead to socioeconomic stratification. That leaves only coercion.
Of course, the likes of Eagleton could be taken more seriously if they had been highly critical of the way communist regimes were implemented during their existence rather than attacking them after they’ve departed. (I exclude, of course, the spell of anti-Stalinism among the Trotskyites before Western communists resumed their usual Soviet apologetics continuing until the fall of the Berlin Wall.)
Finally, of course, Marxists ignore transaction costs along with practically all modern economics. Market coordination and managerial coordination are efficient in their respective realms. You can’t design your own custom television as easily or cheaply as you can purchase a mass manufactured one because the transaction costs are too high. Technological advancement can make one form of coordination more effective than the other, but Marxism cannot.
April 25, 2011 at 9:50 pm
Michael Vassar, I haven’t read Marx first-hand, but how was the U.S in the 1950s Marxist? The sine-qua-non of Marxism is the proletariat seizing the means of production and overthrowing the bourgeois class/property system. Total public expenditures in the U.S were typically under 20% of GDP in the 1950s, and from 5-10% in the 1860s-1870s, so true communism would need spend less than 45-50% publicly to be closer to the 1950s.
I don’t find much point in comparing theoretical capitalism with theoretical communism. There can be some utility in comparing theoretical vs real of one single thing (normative comparison would be unfair, but descriptively we can say how it is similar vs dissimilar), or real vs real of two single things.
Mencius Moldbug puts me in the mood to defend real existing colonialism. Hong Kong and Singapore were British colonies, and were among the best governed parts of the world. King Leopold was a terrible ruler of the “Congo Free State”, but his rule would seem to be an outlier among colonies. Actual Belgian colonial rule stacks up pretty well against post-independence Congo. I haven’t read it but here‘s a paper examining the effect colonialism, protectionism and war had on the economic growth of colonies. If we are going to count bodies, we could include excess deaths upon initial colonization entirely to colonialism, and then if there is a lull in killing during a pax imperia, equally attribute the deaths during independence struggles to colonialism and anti-colonialism.
April 26, 2011 at 11:49 am
It’s worth pointing out, too, that colonialism is not particularly capitalist. Capitalism is not the simple pursuit of profit. People pursued profit long before the emergence of the kind of commerce and industry characterized as “captalist.” For all his faults, Marx was careful to distinguish between feudalism and capitalism. Colonialism seems a much more feudal institution than a capitalist one.
Leopold’s Congo more resembled a feudal estate in its operation, with the near serfdom of its population, its corvées, the overlord’s power of life and death over his tenantry, etc., than it resembled a capitalist institution such as a factory, bank, wholesale house, or retail store.
Indeed, the British East India Company, far from being a purely capitalist enterprise, was from the start a government-sponsored enterprise, more akin to Fannie Mae than to a truly capitalist private-sector business. When it finally collapsed in the aftermath of the rebellion of 1857-8, it was taken over by the British government. “Lemon socialism” existed long before British Leyland.
It is doubtful that any of the colonial empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries met the first requirement of capitalism, namely, turning a consistent profit. They ceased to exist in good part because they were too expensive for the imperial powers to maintain. It would be absurd to read “Recessional” or “The White Man’s Burden” as hymns to capitalism. No one could confuse their spirit with that of “Atlas Shrugged.”
April 26, 2011 at 7:45 pm
“Almost all followers of Marx today reject the villainies of Stalin and Mao, while many non-Marxists would still vigorously defend the destruction of Dresden or Hiroshima.”
Doesn’t he have a point here? Wartime or not, those two holocausts were deliberate acts of slaughter (as opposed to the “collateral damage” that’s often a side-effect of targeting combatants).
May 3, 2011 at 2:09 am
It would help if Marxists learned to reject guys like Lenin, Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot before they happened.
Both acts were committed during times of war between democratic and non-democratic states and both acts have always had their fair share of critics in the capitalist world.
In any event, I don’t recall the Soviets rushing to apologize for brutalizing the German population in the wake of WWII. In fact, Marxist regimes seem to be exceptionally unapologetic where in concerns war crimes.
April 27, 2011 at 3:27 am
“Doesn’t he have a point here? Wartime or not, those two holocausts were deliberate acts of slaughter (as opposed to the “collateral damage” that’s often a side-effect of targeting combatants).”
Perhaps, but what do they have to do with capitalism?
April 27, 2011 at 3:29 am
Touché, though TGGP didn’t critique it from that angle.
April 27, 2011 at 3:43 pm
*I meant to say: mupetblast didn’t critique it from that angle.
May 10, 2011 at 10:41 pm
Eagleton’s from a Trotskyist background (former member of the International Marxist Group, if I’m not mistaken). They believed that the USSR was a degenerated workers’ state, i.e., not socialism, but better than capitalism. Eagleton’s piece is consistent with that position.