socialism

HISTORY GETS THE LAST LAUGH

Capitalists were triumphant when they saw off
socialism. But will 
they live
to regret it?

Terry Eagleton
Saturday May 18, 2002
The Guardian (UK)

One of the darker ironies of the 20th century is that
socialism 
proved 
 to be
least possible where it was most necessary. To go
socialist, you 
need
material resources, democratic traditions, cooperative
neighbours, a
flourishing civil society, an educated populace; and
it was just 
these 
 vital
ingredients of the project which colonialism had
denied to its 
premodern,
poverty-stricken clients. As a result, one bitter
irony bred 
another: the
effort to build socialism in these dismal conditions
led straight to
Stalinism, and a bid for freedom twisted inexorably
into its 
monstrous
opposite.

The present century looks set to be dominated by a
rather different 
sort of
irony. Capitalism greeted the millennium with one are
brandishing 
The 
 Wealth
of Nations and one foot triumphantly planted on the
corpse of its 
socialist
rival; yet scarcely had the century turned before this
victory began 
to 
 look
suspiciously pyrrhic. Indeed, we may yet see the
capitalist world 
glancing
nostalgically back at the socialist project it screwed
so 
effectively.
Socialism, after all, is out to expropriate the
propertied classes, 
not to
exterminate them. Its weapons are general strikes and
mass struggle, 
not
anthrax and dirty nuclear bombs. Its aim is for people
to live in 
plenty,
not for them to scavenge their scanty grub from
war-scarred urban 
deserts.
Socialism was the last chance we had of defeating
terrorism by 
transforming
the conditions which give birth to it; and those who
helped to send 
it
packing - not least those among them whose offices are
rather high 
off the
ground - ought to be licking their lips for the
taste of ashes.

Could it be, then, that in defeating socialism,
capitalism will turn 
out to
have undone itself into the bargain? What if those who
run
the show have turned up their noses at the one thing
that might have
guaranteed their survival, physically if not
politically? Marx
described the working class as capitalism's
gravediggers; but to see 
these
useful functionaries off the premises may simply be to
end up digging your own grave. For the wretched of the
earth have 
not of
course retired; they have simply changed address.
Whereas Marx 
looked for
them in the slums of Bradford and the Bronx, they are
now to be 
found in 
 the
souks of Tripoli and Damascus; and it is smallpox, not
storming the 
Winter
Palace, that some of them have in mind.

To this extent, The Communist Manifesto has been both
challenged and
vindicated. It was right to predict that poverty and
wealth would 
polarise
sharply on a global scale; and it was right, too, that
the 
dispossessed
would rise up against their rulers as a result; it was
just thinking 
more
of mills than the World Trade Centre, trade unions
rather than 
typhoid. But
if Marx really was wrong about the working class, then
this is bad 
news for
the transnational corporations, since what one might
see as having 
stepped
into their shoes then has the savagery of despair, not
the 
confidence of
collective strength. Those who announce that Marx's
industrial 
proletariat
has sunk without trace should be reaching for the
anti-radiation 
tablets,
not for the champagne.

A few years back, there was much dust and heat about
the "end of 
history".
What this portentous phrase meant was that since
capitalism was the 
only
game in town, significant political conflicts were now
as passe as
sideburns. This is both obtuse and untrue, but that's
not the point: 
we 
 knew
that much before September 11. It is rather that we
now have 
dramatic
evidence that the end of history might eventually
spell the end of 
history
in a rather less metaphysical sense. The fact that
capitalism now 
has no
real rivals in the official political arena is
precisely what causes 
the
unofficial rancour that can blow enormous holes in it,
including 
nuclear
ones.

Socialism may have seemed a dark threat to those with
most to lose 
from it,
but at least it is a secular, historically-minded,
thoroughly modern 
creed,
a bastard offspring of liberal enlightenment. It has a
deep-rooted 
contempt
for political terrorism, whether it denounces it as
immoral or just
petty-bourgeois. Unlike fundamentalism, whether of the
Texan or 
Taliban
variety, it doesn't dismiss alternative life-styles or
symbolist 
poetry 
 or a
cellarful of chianti; it just inquires why these
things somehow 
always end
up in the hands of a few. Unlike fundamentalism, too,
it is 
earth-bound and
iconoclastic, sceptical of high-minded ideals and
absolutes.

The same might be said of American pragmatism, which
always 
preferred
turning a fast buck to brooding on the infinite. But
the more 
terrorism
occupies the space vacated by socialism, the less
pragmatic America 
is 
 bound
to become. Indeed, it may well end up defending itself
from Islamic
fundamentalists by becoming every bit as fearful of
freedom as they 
are, in
which case it will have nothing left to defend and
both parties will 
have
lost and won. In a curious duo of strangers and
brothers, your enemy
conquers by persuading you to turn into a monstrous
mirror image of 
 himself.
If you really want to unmask liberal freedoms as
hollow, the best 
way is to
attack them with suicide bombers rather than
sociological essays, 
since 
 such
attacks, by provoking authoritarian measures, bring
about the 
bogusness the
bombers perceive as surely as the eye picks out a
constellation in 
the
stars. And since Americans, as the most conformist
bunch of 
individualists
on the planet, have a tradition of safeguarding their
freedom by
authoritarian means, they are particularly vulnerable
to being 
discredited
in this way.

Liberal values are not, in fact, bogus; it is just
that they cannot 
escape
the taint of hypocrisy. The fatal flaw of liberal
capitalist states 
is that
they are by nature opposed to fundamentalism, yet
cannot survive 
without 
 it.
Only a state with a few absolute values up its sleeve
can finally 
contain
the anarchy of the marketplace and the human
unhappiness it breeds. 
But 
 what
such states get up to makes a mockery of those values
all the time.

George Bush really does believe in religion, and
believes in nothing 
of the
kind. Bin Laden's thugs may be morally obscene
fanatics, but they 
don't 
 have
that particular problem. They simply want a brutally
benighted 
state, not a
state which is continually forced to defend its
enlightened values 
by
brutally benighted means. And it may be that in
detonating that 
built-in
contradiction in the west, they will score their most
signal 
victory.
Unless, of course, the left stages a comeback in the
meantime. 
Indeed, in a
way it already has; it is just that it, too, has
changed its 
address. What
used to be known as socialism is known today as
anti-capitalism. 
Hardly a
major difference.

Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory at the
University of
Manchester.

comment@guardian.co.uk


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