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Baby Boomers Make Their Marx Why Marx Was Right, Terry Eagletoti, Yale University Press, 272 pages
In February 2009, near the low point of the financial crisis, Karl Marx made the cover of Time-or at least its European edition-for the first time since 1948. The images provide a vivid illustration of the revival of Marx's reputation in the mainstream press since the early years of the Cold War. In the 1948 cover, an enormous, glowing-eyed Marx looms over a boiling cauldron of hellfire, whose steam forms a hammer and sickle. The 2009 version renders Marx as a computer graphic. Rather than marinating in the vapors of hell, his disembodied head floats beatifically over a cable news-style crawl text: "What Would Marx Think?"
In Why Marx Was Right, the British literary critic Terry Eagleton encourages this shift from Marx the satanic revolutionary to Marx the digital sage. As its title suggests, the book sets out to tell us not only what Marx would think, but also why he should be believed. Eagleton, who has also written recent essays on evil and atheism, is not very successful on either score. On a more subterranean level of argument, however, Why Marx Was Right is an acute, if partial, diagnosis of the bankruptcy of the European and British left.
On the surface, Eagleton structures the book as a response to ten familiar objections to Marxism. Some are theoretical, such as the claim that Marx has little to say about the postindustrial economies that characterize the contemporary West. Others are historical, and mostly revolve around the extent of Marx's responsibility for Communist despotism. To Eagleton's credit, he generally avoids straw-man formulations. His aim is to rebut the "curious notion" Marx can safely be ignored-not to show that Marx was right about everything.
Although his arguments are often elementary and sometimes glib, Eagleton deals better with theoretical than historical criticisms of Marx. It's probably right, for example, that Marx's philosophy of history is compatibilist rather than rigidly determinist where the question of free will is concerned.
Eagleton's economic history, on the other hand, would be laughable if it were not morally repugnant. Eagleton imagines that even if Stalin and Mao deprived their subjects of liberty and frequently life, Communist governments...