I am currently rereading Terry Eagleton’s little book Why Marx Was Right. I am rereading it because it seems timely and pertinent to the political season we are in, in the Church and the world; but I am also rereading it because Eagleton is such a good writer and thus delightful to read. Eagleton himself is a Marxist, but he offers a critical reading of the man Karl Marx such that I think it is helpful towards becoming discerning and critical readers and interpreters of culture ourselves. In various sectors of the evangelical churches we hear a lot about critical theory and cultural Marxism. The More ‘Fundy’ side is labeling anything having to do with ‘racial reconciliation,’ of the sort we just saw the SBC put forward, as devilishly Marxists. On the other hand, we see Social Justice proponents labeling their labelers as backwater inbreeds. I thought it would be helpful for us to get beyond this malaise, and dig into what Marxism actually does entail; per the man: Karl Marx. As I read Eagleton’s book the first time this is what stood out to me most: i.e. that Marx’s thought is not exactly univocal with what is being lifted up as cultural Marxism or Democratic Socialism in our 21^st century times. That said, I wanted to share a critique of Capitalism, from the Marxian perspective, that I actually think all people, irrespective of identity politico affiliation, ought to be able to affirm (we want to avoid genetic fallacies on either side, don’t we?). As Christians we have a higher standard for determining right and wrong, one that transcends national and ethnic boundaries; one that is grounded in the particular scandal of the Son of God made human in the assumed flesh of the God-man, Jesus Christ.

Eagleton identifies what drove Marx in his late 19^th century Western European context. Marx, according to Eagleton, saw inequalities inherent to the greater class system that he thought should be abolished; we all know this about Marx. Here Marx was able to identify a real problem, one that continues to face us today even that much more as we are now in the ‘seeded’ stage of what I think is the latter days of a Crony-Capitalism gone awry at a globalized level. Eagleton writes of Marx’s critique:

In our own time, as Marx predicted, inequalities of wealth have dramatically deepened. The income of a single Mexican billionaire today is equivalent to the earnings of the poorest 17 million of his compatriots. Capitalism has created more prosperity than history ever witnessed, but the cost—not least in the near-destitution of billions—has been astronomical. According to the World Bank, 2.74 billion people in 2001 live on less than two dollars a day. We face a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of re-sources; and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. For the first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism. The traditional leftist slogan “Socialism or barbarism” was never more grimly apposite, never less of a mere rhetorical flourish. In these dire conditions, as Fredric Jameson writes, “Marxism must necessarily become true again.”[1]

Clearly Eagleton speaks to us, of Marx, from a materialist and purely horizontal frame of reference; but I think his descriptions of things as they stand in the world paint for us the stark realities we are faced with. Marx [and Eagleton] are both right in recognizing the dire straits we are facing. We can see how classism and racism have risen again, or maybe we can see now more clearly how they never went away. As the oligarchs, corporatists, and globalists rise up off the backs of the slave classes, even if they’ve gotten wiser to how they treat the chattel, as Christians, I think it is important to identify where injustices have and are taking place. What makes this harder is that even in the recognition of these injustices classes are created insofar as identity-group-think represents distinct socio-politico classifications. This is where Marx’s vision or prescription for world harmony and leisure falls very short. As Christians I think we can recognize some of the good insights that Marx’s system is able to identify, even as that is done under the sun, and at the same time junk his prescription and displace that with the apocalyptic Gospel of God in Christ that has invaded this world system from beyond and over the sun.

I find myself at an impasse. You see, I see value in some of Marx’s more critical observations about how things are. But at the same time I am unwilling to take the form of his prescription for how the world ought to move forward. I think he is right in recognizing, at a social level, how economics affect all sorts of social realities. I think he is right to notice that the corporate class has risen to a level of imbalance and power that ought to be reserved for God alone (although Marx thinks we are gods—a sort of fatal flaw to his theorizing). So, even though he had the power of insight to identify how these material realities cohere to form the social pressures we currently live under; he fails to have adequate clairvoyance to recognize the real power of God that is required to bring the sort of social change that we all desire and know will finally be the shalom of God in Christ. I think I am somewhat contradicting myself in an earlier post I wrote. But in Marx I do think we can find someone who helps identify social ills, and how those have been organized around purely material means. This is something of the way Barth saw philosophy; it has an inherently horizontal value that cannot actually reach the sort of vertical heights required to affect real God-given and new creational change.

[1] Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven&London: Yale University Press, 2011), Loc 172, 179 kindle version.