Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton Page A

monitoring and the
like. This can be difficult. But it is not half as difficult as breeding a race
of people who would vomit and swoon at the slightest sign of aggression.
    So Marxism holds out no
promise of human perfection. It does not even promise to abolish hard labour.
Marx seems to believe that a certain amount of disagreeable work would continue
to be essential even in conditions of plenty. The curse of Adam will linger on
even in the realm of abundance. The promise Marxism does hold out is to resolve
the contradictions which currently stop history proper from happening, in all
its freedom and diversity.
    The aims of Marxism,
however, are not just material. For Marx, communism means an end to scarcity,
along with an end to most oppressive labour. But the freedom and leisure which
this would grant men and women can then provide the context for their fuller
spiritual flourishing. It is true, as we have seen, that spiritual and material
development by no means always march side by side. One has only to look at
Keith Richards to recognize that. There are many kinds of material affluence
which spell the death of the spirit. Yet it is also true that you cannot be
free to become what you want when you are starving, sorely oppressed or stunted
in your moral growth by a life of endless drudgery. Materialists are not those
who deny the spiritual, but those who remind us that spiritual fulfillment
requires certain material conditions. Those conditions do not guarantee such
fulfillment. But it cannot be had without them.
    Human beings are not at
their best in conditions of scarcity, whether natural or artificial. Such
scarcity breeds violence, fear, greed, anxiety, possessiveness, domination and
deadly antagonism. One would expect, then, that if men and women were able to
live in conditions of material abundance, released from these crippling
pressures, they would tend to fare better as moral beings than they do now. We
cannot be sure of this because we have never known such conditions. This is
what Marx has in mind when he declares in the Communist Manifesto that
the whole of history has been the history of class struggle. And even in
conditions of abundance there would be plenty of other things for us to feel
anxious, aggressive and possessive about. We would not be alchemized into
angels. But some of the root causes of our moral deficiencies would have been
removed. To that extent, it is indeed reasonable to claim that a communist
society would tend by and large to produce finer human beings than we can
muster at the moment. But they would still be fallible, prone to conflict and
sometimes brutal and malevolent.
    Cynics who doubt that such
moral progress is possible should consider the difference between burning
witches and pressing for equal pay for women. That is not to say that we have
all become more delicate, sensitive and humanitarian than we were in medieval
times. As far as that goes, we might also consider the difference between bows
and arrows and Cruise missiles. The point is not that history as a whole has
morally improved. It is simply that we have made major progress here and there.
It is as soberly realistic to recognize this fact as it is reasonable to claim
that in some ways we have deteriorated since the days of Robin Hood. There is
no grand narrative of Progress, just as there is no fairy tale of Decline.
    Anyone who has witnessed a
small infant snatch a toy from its sibling with a bloodcurdling cry of
''Mine!'' needs no reminder of how deep in the mind the roots of rivalry and
possessiveness sink. We are speaking of ingrained cultural, psychological and
even evolutionary habits, which no mere change of institutions will alter in
itself. But social change does not depend on everyone revolutionising their
attitudes overnight. Take the example of Northern Ireland. Peace did not come
to this tumultuous region because Catholics and Protestants finally abandoned
their centuries-old antagonism and fell fondly into