Category Archives: Karl Marx

Karl Barth’s Karl Marx: On the University Protests and Globalism

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Economic materialism, more commonly known as Marxism is, of course, the philosophy/ideology that Karl Marx constructed; that is, to the world’s demise. It’s doubtful that Marxism is actually at play in what we are currently seeing take place at America’s Universities; that is, in regard to the recent and ongoing protests. There are clearly ideologues behind the scenes who are pulling strings in a way that might be somewhat Marxist in orientation, but I’d say that really it is just straight anarchic action with the goal of creating some type of internationalist revolution (which of course is pretty Marxist, eh). The talking points of a Marxism are certainly present, but if anything, those are being touted in order to give the useful idiots something to hang onto.

I want to drill down a little further on what Marxism entails from Karl Barth’s reading of this phenomenon. I think he offers a valuable insight, and even critique towards Marxism that many of his followers might benefit from reading. So Barth:

This is where what is called “historical materialism” comes in. For it, what we have hitherto spoken of under the name of materialism is only a necessary weapon and an indispensable apologetic and polemical ally. The doctrine of Karl Marx, which is identical with this historical materialism, is undoubtedly materialism in the sense in which we have used the term, and in practice it stands or falls with the fact that it is so. Yet is so only per accidens and not per essentiam. It is certainly one of the historical limits of Marxism that it has bound itself so closely with the dogma of ostensibly scientific materialism. But we quite misunderstand it if we take it to be grounded on this, or adopt the view of older theological polemics that it is one of its evil moral fruits. The very opposite is the case, namely, that ostensibly scientific materialism, at any rate in the 19th century, acquired weight only as it was discovered, appropriated and employed by historical materialism. Over against it, historical materialism is a construction with its own origin.

In face of the modern development of community, historical materialism is 1. the affirmation in which the child at last acquires a name, namely, that the whole history of mankind at its core is the history of human economy or economic history, and that everything else, the achievement of civilisation, science, art, the state, morality and religion, are only phenomenal accompaniments of this one reality, expressions of the current relations of economic forces, attempts to disguise, beautify, justify, and defend them, occasionally perhaps even expressions of its discontent, instruments of its criticism, means of its alteration, but at all events secondary forms or ideologies form which economics is differentiated as true historical reality. The figure of man which arose in the 19th century seemed unambiguously to prove this. At any rate, this is how it was interpreted and understood by Karl Marx.

Historical materialism is 2. a critique of the previous course of human history interpreted in this way. As economic history, it is the history of a struggle between the ruling and ruled strata or classes of the community, i.e., between the economically strong and the economically weak, between the invariable possessors of the earth and all the other means of production and the others who invariably do the work which is economically productive in the true sense. In this struggle, the latter, the workers, have always been the losers, and, under the characteristic modern dominance of anonymous capital striving only for its own increase, they are the losers with an accentuated necessity—the expropriated and exploited. Those ideologies have in fact shown themselves to be only accompanying phenomena which can neither render impossible nor stop the class war which is waged with such unequal weapons, but in different ways can only confirm and further it. How very differently does Karl Marx view what the Idealists only a few decades before had celebrated as the victory of the spirit over nature?

Historical materialism is 3. a prediction concerning the future course of the history of mankind. The dominance of the possessors, which has to-day become the dominance of anonymous capital, will necessarily lead to continually new crises of production and consumption, to warlike developments and revolutionary catastrophes. Thus with an inner necessity, it moves towards a final upheaval. The proletarianisation of the masses becomes sharper and sharper, and encroaches upon greater and greater levels even of the modern middle class. The class of the oppressed, thus increasing, will gradually be automatically compelled to unify itself, and to recognise and seize the power which really lies in its hands, in order to finally and conclusively to make political, and if need be forceful, use of it, and to set up its own dictatorship in place of that of the anonymous tyrants. It expropriates those who have so far expropriated. It erects the economic and welfare social state in which there are no more exploiters and therefore no more exploited, in which all other social sicknesses vanish with their common cause, and in which morality, which in the present class-state is possible only in the form of hypocrisy, can become a genuine reality. Again, it will not be ideologies that will lead mankind to this end, but only economic material development as this is rightly understood and therefore directed at the right moment by the right intervention. This was the hope, the eschatology, which Karl Marx gave to his followers as the supreme good and as the appropriate driving motive for socialist action on the way to it.[1]

It isn’t hard to see how some people have seen in Marxism a type of a Christian heresy. The difference, of course, between Marxism and Christianity, is that the former immanentizes what classically was understood as God into the brute economic and thus materialist forces at play in an absolutely horizontal and pure nature (purus natura). A Marxist materialism presents the closed material world in an apotheosis wherein the centraldogma of all reality is a crass mechanized world wherein Utopia obtains in an abstract and atheistic way. Economic inequity, and thus classism, or sin in the Marxist lexicon, is finally vanquished by the indomitable economic spirit of production over matter. Within this production economic equity is brought into a totalized equilibrium wherein the people might experience the leisure and rest that such material production ostensibly produces.

I think some of these themes are being deployed currently on the younger minds of the world in an attempt not to bring a utopia of Marxist delight, but to simply elevate the elite few to the heights of mammonic ejaculation. Things, as I see it, are indeed that nihilistic. It turns out, after all, that people, post-Enlightened or not, are simply slaves to their base affections to the point that they will seek those first, and their own righteousness, even as that leads them into the abyss of their final dissolution; that is into the non-being their base affections are formed by.

[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. The Doctrine of God III/2 §46 (London/New York: T&T Clark, 2010), 180–81.

Marx’s Heaven on Earth: In Reduction::Hell on Earth

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Marx’s Utopia is an immanentized, existentialized NOW; not some future event, per se. In other words, Marx’s atheism collapsed what ought to be into what is, and then asks that people make what is what ought to be. Utopia is a deification of the material processes, as those are enacted by the socialized agents in that process, wherein there is equity and equality for all. It is an existentialized (not simply actualized) eschatological vision of the way the world ought to be, in contradiction to what is; when what is, is a corporatocracy rigged for the 1% to enrich themselves off the backs of the other 99% (to put this in contemporary terms). So, to speak in Christian tongue: Marx is not concerned with the future, but with the future as the present; since that’s all we have as immanentized agents ensconced in the material processes of a physicalized world. As such, without Christ as the telos and centraldogma of all creation, it is up to those left behind to the brute dialectic of materialization to irrupt an actualized eschaton that only a deified, a Messianic humanity can imagine (based upon its submission to material processes) and enact. Since it isn’t a future reality, since for Marx future realities are mythos that the weak might need, the Utopia must come now; or it will come now, once people come to this naturalized recognition of how things ought to be, in contradistinction to what currently is (in a Capitalized and Classified state)—this will be the time of the ‘second coming.’ Terry Eagleton describes Marx’s inklings on Utopia and a future eschaton this way:

There are, as it happens, far more interesting uses of the word “utopia” in the Marxist tradition. One of the greatest English Marxist revolutionaries, William Morris, produced an unforgettable work of utopia in News from Nowhere, which unlike almost every other utopian work actually showed in detail how the process of political change had come about. When it comes to the everyday use of the word, however, it should be said that Marx shows not the slightest interest in a future free of suffering, death, loss, failure, breakdown, conflict, tragedy or even labour. In fact, he doesn’t show much interest in the future at all. It is a notorious fact about his work that he has very little to say in detail about what a socialist or communist society would look like. His critics may therefore accuse him of unpardonable vagueness; but they can hardly do that and at the same time accuse him of drawing up utopian blueprints. It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. In The German Ideology, Marx rejects the idea of communism as “an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.” Instead, he sees it in that book as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

Just as the Jews were traditionally forbidden to foretell the future, so Marx the secular Jew is mostly silent on what lie ahead. We have seen that he probably thought socialism was inevitable, but he has strikingly little to say about what it would look like. There are several reasons for this reticence. For one thing, the future does not exist, so that to forge images of it is a kind of lie. To do so might also suggest that the future is predetermined—that it lies in some shadowy realm for us to discover. We have seen that there is a sense in which Marx held that the future was inevitable. But the inevitable is not necessarily the desirable. Death is inevitable, too, but not in most people’s eyes desirable. The future may be predetermined, but that is no reason to assume that it is going to be an improvement on what we have at the moment. The inevitable, as we have seen, is usually pretty unpleasant. Marx himself needed to be more aware of this.

Foretelling the future, however, is not only pointless; it can actually be destructive. To have power even over the future is a way of giving ourselves a false sense of security. It is a tactic for shielding ourselves from the open-ended nature of the present, with all its precariousness and unpredictability. It is to use the future as a kind of fetish—as a comforting idol to cling to like a toddler to its blanket. It is an absolute value which will not let us down because (since it does not exist) it is as insulated from the winds of history as a phantom. You can also seek to monopolise the future as a way of dominating the present. The true soothsayers of our time are not hairy, howling outcasts luridly foretelling the death of capitalism, but the experts hired by the transnational corporations to peer into the entrails of the system and assure its rulers that their profits are safe for another ten years. The prophet, by contrast, is not a clairvoyant at all. It is a mistake to believe that the biblical prophets sought to predict the future. Rather, the prophet denounces the greed, corruption and power-mongering of the present, warning us that unless we change our ways we may well have no future at all. Marx was a prophet, not a fortuneteller.[1]

If you think that what we are seeing in the streets of America, and all across the Western globe isn’t a Marxist enactment of an eschatological hope, you’d be sort of silly, wouldn’t you be? We are in the midst of Marx’s immanentized vision of the world enacted on the backs of the ‘useful idiots.’ Black Lives Matters (the organization), Antifa, and a plethora of other well-funded (and now by a national shakedown) leftist organizations are the useful idiots Marx knew were necessary if the sort of revolution he believed would just ‘naturally’ arise were to ever become an actuality. We have seen Marx’s vision beatified over and again in the 20th century; it never turns out well. How could it? When the center of the revolution is an abstract humanity from the risen Christ’s humanity for us, all the world ends up with is hell; rather than heaven on earth.

 

[1] Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven&London: Yale University Press, 2011), Loc 774, 782, 790, 797 kindle version. Eagleton characterization of Hebrew prophets is inaccurate, by the way; they did foretell as well, they didn’t just forthtell.

How Karl Marx Can Be Used But Not Affirmed: The Material of the Gospel is More Powerful than the Material Under the Sun

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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 21st 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 19th 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.

The Ghosts in the Material. A Critique of Materialism by a Materialist Placed Into a Theological Frame of Knowledge of God

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I am continuing to read Terry Eagleton on Marx. I just came across a very interesting critique of elitism, and of materialism itself; a critique made, indeed, by the materialist par
excellence, Marx. Let me share it with you, and then I’ll close with some commentary (as usual).

The materialist’s response to the sceptic is not a knock-down argument. You might always claim that our experience of social cooperation, or of the world’s resistance to our projects, is itself not to be trusted. Perhaps we are only imagining these things. But looking at such problems in a materialist spirit can illuminate them in a new way. It is possible to see, for example, how intellectuals who begin from the disembodied mind, and quite often end up there as well, are likely to be puzzled by how the mind relates to the body, as well as to the bodies of others. It may be that they see a bap between mind and world. This is ironic, since it is quite often the way the world shapes their own minds that gives rise to this idea. Intellectuals themselves are a caste of people somewhat remote from the material world. Only on the back of a material surplus in society is it possible to produce a professional elite of priests, sages, artists, counselors, Oxford dons and the like.

Plato thought that philosophy required a leisure aristocratic elite. You cannot have literary salons and learned societies if everyone has to work just to keep social life ticking over. Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures. (They are just as rare in advanced societies, where universities have become organs of corporate capitalism.) Because intellectuals do not need to labour in the sense that bricklayers do, they can come to regard themselves and their ideas as independent of the rest of social existence. And this is one of the many things that Marxists mean by ideology. Such people tend not to see that their very distance from society is itself socially conditioned. The prejudice that thought is independent of reality is itself shaped by social reality.[1]

What an insightful critique of a materialism idealized. The same is true of Christian theology; or it can be. This is one other reason why thinking from God’s embodied existence in the flesh of the man from Nazareth; this is why thinking that starts with the resurrection of God’s humanity in Jesus Christ is so important for all theological endeavor. It keeps theology, the wisdom of God, tethered concretely in the material world that God created and recreated. There is no ideology in a genuinely Christian frame; in other words there is no abstract knowledge of God parasiting off of the backs of broken and suffering people. God has so entered into material/physical reality that it can only be said to be suffused with his grandeur and glory as that is revealed in the punched up face of Jesus Christ. Here is where the hidden God becomes the revealed God, and the wisdom of God comes to be known in the weakness and foolishness of God. It isn’t built upon someone else’s discursive machinations about some Big Other we correlate with the living and revealed God; no, God’s knowledge is a Self-knowledge that can only be known as we come to participate in his life through his Self-mediation in Christ by the Spirit—only God can reveal God.

The way I theologized this may sound strange given Marx’s context and thought-frame. But I think his frame has interesting lines of trajectory; secularly parabolic in nature, even. We could commentate on some of the theopolitical implications of Eagleton’s insights on Marx, but I’m not going to do that right now (Eagleton’s own commentary should suffice for the moment).

[1] Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven&London: Yale University Press, 2011), Loc 1506, 1514 kindle version.

The Parody of Light in Marx’s Theology: How Marx’s Leisure Displaces the Sabbath-Rest of the Living God

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I am continuing to read Terry Eagleton’s book Why Marx Was Right, he offers some interesting commentary on what Marx believed the ideal of a communist system ought to lead to: leisure. Not that leisure would come from being lazy or non-work but that it would produce a society where wealth was so prevalent and self-sustaining—based on the cultivation of prior systems of production—that the ideal of leisure would be reached. Here is how Eagleton describes these things in Marx’s ‘theology’:

Yet only the economic in the narrow sense will allow us to get beyond the economic. By redeploying the resources capitalism has so considerately stored up for us, socialism can allow the economic to take more of a backseat. It will not evaporate, but it will become less obtrusive. To enjoy a sufficiency of goods means not to have to think about money all the time. It frees us for less tedious pursuits. Far from being obsessed with economic matters, Marx saw them as a travesty of true human potential. He wanted a society where the economic no longer monopolized so much time and energy.

That our ancestors should have been so preoccupied with material matters is understandable. When you can produce only a slim economic surplus, or scarcely any surplus at all, you will perish without ceaseless hard labour. Capitalism, however, generates the sort of surplus that really could be used to increase leisure on a sizeable scale. The irony is that it creates this wealth in a way that demands constant accumulation and expansion, and thus constant labour. It also creates it in ways that generate poverty and hardship. It is a self-thwarting system. As a result, modern men and women, surrounded by affluence unimaginable to hunter-gatherers, ancient slaves or feudal serfs, end up working as long and hard as these predecessors ever did.

Marx’s work is all about human enjoyment. The good life for him is not one of labour but of leisure. Free self-realisation is a form of “production,” to be sure; but it is not one that is coercive. And leisure is necessary if men and women are to devote time to running their own affairs. It is thus surprising that Marxism does not attract more card-carrying idlers and professional loafers to its ranks. This, however, is because a lot of energy must be expended on achieving this goal. Leisure is something you have to work for.[1]

As a general axiom I’d think it safe to say that all human beings desire more leisure and less work. But what’s not surprising, given Marx’s atheism, is that his prescription for human flourishing is generated by ‘under the sun’ thinking; as if the horizontal is all there is. For the Christian is leisure the ultimate goal? No; we’ve been recreated in the risen humanity of Jesus Christ for good works that we might live in them, in him. For the Christian in this in-between leisure is not the telos, is not the aim of our lives; instead, the aim is to live in the work of the Father in Christ ‘overshadowed’ by the Holy Spirit resulting in the completion for which creation was always already commissioned—for koinonial existence living in the shared life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit by the grace of God for us.

We might see a sort of parody between Marx’s vision and the Holy vision of God in Christ. Work is indeed required if the ‘pleasures at the right hand of the Father’ are to be enjoyed forevermore. But the work is not a self-generated or self-realizable reality; it is not something that is immanent within an isolated individual or isolated community (even of the global sort). The work that God envisions is only something that he alone can (and has) accomplish[ed] for us in our stead in Jesus Christ. The end goal of God’s vision for what it means to be genuinely human and flourishing is what that looks like in Christ’s vicarious humanity for us before the Father; a humanity that finds its source, or ground in the divine life itself (anhypostatic/enhypostatic); a humanity that God has seen fit to seat next to himself in the Son’s assumed humanity. There is eschatological leisure for the Christian, but it is a leisure that finds resplendence only in the all-sufficient all-sustaining work of God for us in Jesus Christ. Marx seeks to displace God’s place with an abstract conception of humanity thus giving humanity a divinity that it could never have of itself naturally (Gen. 3.5). God indeed wants humanity to sabbath-rest in his presence, and find utter enjoyment as we live and move in the space his triune life provides for us as he graciously has brought us into that mediated through the humanity of Jesus Christ; but this is not something that our work can produce, only his for us.

As I continue to read about Marx’s theology (that’s what I’m calling it) it certainly has a sort of parasitic reality to it; I mean it is easy to see why Marx’s thought has been called ‘Christian heresy.’ It reminds me of the Beast in the book of Revelation; he attempts to parody the reality of God’s triune life by way of offering a kingdom that replicates God’s Kingdom in Christ without having God in Christ at the center. I can see why some Christians are attracted to Marx’s thought precisely because it has wicks in it that look like the light of Christian critique; i.e. in regard to political theory. But ultimately since the source has more in common with the angel of light rather than the true Light of the world, the trajectory it will ultimately set, if ingested, cannot be one that honors the living Christ. Any system of thought that does not START with Jesus Christ, as far as I am concerned, can only produce rotten fruit; even if in the mean time it might appear to be producing wheat.

 

[1] Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven&London: Yale University Press, 2011), Loc 1426, 1433, 1440 kindle version.

Engaging With Karl Marx’s Utopia and the Future: With Some Constructively Christian Eschatologizing

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Marxism. Utopia. Realities shunned by Americans in the main; well at least until lately. I am reading Terry Eagleton’s Why Marx Was Right. Not because I want to become a Marxist, but because I want to understand Marx and the subsequent developments of Marxisms better. One concept that is often caricatured, among others when it comes to Marx’s doctrine, is the concept of Utopia. I haven’t given much thought to it myself, other than to give in to the common idea that utopia represents some sort of a heaven on earth. But as Eagleton points out, at least for Marx himself, this really couldn’t be further from the truth. So for the rest of the post we will hear from Eagleton on Marx’s understanding of Utopia and the Future.

“So will there still be road accidents in this Marxist utopia of yours?” This is the kind of sardonic enquiry that Marxists have grown used to dealing with. In fact, the comment reveals more about the ignorance of the speaker than about the illusions of the Marxist. Because if utopia means a perfect society, then “Marxist utopia” is a contradiction in terms.

There are, as it happens, far more interesting uses of the word “utopia” in the Marxist tradition. One of the greatest English Marxist revolutionaries, William Morris, produced an unforgettable work of utopia in News from Nowhere, which unlike almost every other utopian work actually showed in detail how the process of political change had come about. When it comes to the everyday use of the word, however, it should be said that Marx shows not the slightest interest in a future free of suffering, death, loss, failure, breakdown, conflict, tragedy or even labour. In fact, he doesn’t show much interest in the future at all. It is a notorious fact about his work that he has very little to say in detail about what a socialist or communist society would look like. His critics may therefore accuse him of unpardonable vagueness; but they can hardly do that and at the same time accuse him of drawing up utopian blueprints. It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. In The German Ideology, Marx rejects the idea of communism as “an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself.” Instead, he sees it in that book as “the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.”

Just as the Jews were traditionally forbidden to foretell the future, so Marx the secular Jew is mostly silent on what lie ahead. We have seen that he probably thought socialism was inevitable, but he has strikingly little to say about what it would look like. There are several reasons for this reticence. For one thing, the future does not exist, so that to forge images of it is a kind of lie. To do so might also suggest that the future is predetermined—that it lies in some shadowy realm for us to discover. We have seen that there is a sense in which Marx held that the future was inevitable. But the inevitable is not necessarily the desirable. Death is inevitable, too, but not in most people’s eyes desirable. The future may be predetermined, but that is no reason to assume that it is going to be an improvement on what we have at the moment. The inevitable, as we have seen, is usually pretty unpleasant. Marx himself needed to be more aware of this.

Foretelling the future, however, is not only pointless; it can actually be destructive. To have power even over the future is a way of giving ourselves a false sense of security. It is a tactic for shielding ourselves from the open-ended nature of the present, with all its precariousness and unpredictability. It is to use the future as a kind of fetish—as a comforting idol to cling to like a toddler to its blanket. It is an absolute value which will not let us down because (since it does not exist) it is as insulated from the winds of history as a phantom. You can also seek to monopolise the future as a way of dominating the present. The true soothsayers of our time are not hairy, howling outcasts luridly foretelling the death of capitalism, but the experts hired by the transnational corporations to peer into the entrails of the system and assure its rulers that their profits are safe for another ten years. The prophet, by contrast, is not a clairvoyant at all. It is a mistake to believe that the biblical prophets sought to predict the future. Rather, the prophet denounces the greed, corruption and power-mongering of the present, warning us that unless we change our ways we may well have no future at all. Marx was a prophet, not a fortuneteller.[1]

Before I say anymore, Eagleton’s perspective of the biblical prophet is half-baked and relies upon a certain anti-super-naturalistic approach to Holy Scripture and its Prophets and Apostles. If someone reads the Bible it is clear that its prophets and apostles believe that they are referring to something concrete and future; something that they weren’t experiencing yet, but knew because of who God is, and because he keeps his promises that they someday would, as a people, experience his promises to them. It was upon this basis that they not only forthspoke but also foretold future realities; of most significance with reference to Jesus Christ. So Eagleton is just wrong on this score (as he wrote this originally he was either an atheist or agnostic; I’ve heard of late that he may well have returned to the Catholic church).

Nevertheless, he helps to provide greater clarity in regard to what Karl Marx believed ‘utopia’ and the ‘future’ entail as realities. I think, at least with reference to Eagleton’s telling of Marx, there is some wisdom in recognizing that attempting to divine things about the future—even in the name of Jesus—can become idolatrous. Idolatrous in the sense, as Eagleton notes, that we are looking for stability and security in some abstract conception of a forthcoming history as we have designed and divined that. It is in the shadow of this idol that ethics, foreign policies, geo-political postures, perceptions of other nationalities and races, and a host of other shibboleths can be fostered and allowed to fester. As Christians we can learn something from this sort of perspective about the future, even from a materialist like Marx. It isn’t that Christians don’t have a proleptic-future oriented looking view in regard to eschatological reality; it is just that a properly Christian orientation to such things will recognize that that reality is not something that we determine or that is at our behest. Christians will recognize that God in Jesus Christ himself is the eschatos, the last thing that is not absent or in a faraway land, but that he is personally present with us in eucharistic form spread abroad in the hearts of his people by the Holy Spirit. In other words, Christians, while standing in a genuine hope for the future—i.e. the bodily resurrection secured in Christ’s resurrection for us—have not been left as orphans; we live from the future of God for us in the risen and vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ. This is not something that we could have ever secured, or divined, but it is something God could. As such, we live lively lives not of our own possession, not of our own construction, but lives put to death and risen again, over and again from Christ’s life for us. This is important: we live in a vulnerable state in regard to our grasp on the past, present, and future, but the grasp on our lives by God’s great big hands are indeed secure; yet not a reality that we have control over, but instead one that we trust can keep us from being plucked out.

Marx can provide some intellectual and even spiritual foil for the Christian, even as the materialist and atheist that he was. But he should not be given too much shrift. He rejected the living Christ, and the living God; so his perspective will be skewed, he did not have the resources to supply people with the hope that God alone can and has in Jesus Christ. Yet, I think it is important to get Marx right, particularly in regard to the nuance he had with reference to realities like utopia. By engaging with the nuance he had we might find some fruitful lines of self-criticality even as Christians. If God could use the Abimelechs, the Assyrians, and the Athenians to work his purposes; he certainly could use a Marx.

[1] Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (New Haven&London: Yale University Press, 2011), Loc 774, 782, 790, 797 kindle version.