In which we listen to Uncle Karl

For the politics book club, we (with some minor election fraud from me) voted on reading Terry Eagleton's Why Marx Was Right, which I nominated because a handsome man on the internet said it was good, making this the second whole book that I have read because a handsome man on the internet told me to (it was the same handsome man, too: The Only YouTuber Whomst Reads).

 

Back when I was PEWG co-chair, I spent a lot of time looking at very introductory books to recommend to new members. Some of these were. very short, like the Jacobin pamphlet The ABCs of Socialism. But I have also been looking for a good proper book-length book that is not too daunting and not too dated, and Why Marx Was Right seems like a decent candidate. It’s funny, accessible, and, at about 250 pages, long enough to get a little more detailed than a pamphlet and make you feel like you read a Real Book, but it probably won’t take you too long to get through. 

 

There were a couple things I bounced off, some of which are highly specific to me as a reader and my very particular political media diet. One of these is the framing device — the book uses a mythbusting framework, with each chapter headed by a common anti-socialist talking point or misconception about Marx, and the chapter dedicated to setting the record straight on the issue. It is a sensible framework to use for a philosophy as misunderstood and propagandized against as Marxism, especially a few years ago when this was written. As such, Eagleton is hardly the only person to have used it, and it is a common, possibly even the default, approach to explaining the basics of socialism to squeamish but potentially sympathetic liberals to spend at least as much time explaining what socialism is not as explaining what it is. In pieces for a more mainstream or beginner audience who may be very scared of the Unreasonable Leftists one hears so much about, this approach is likely to be coupled with a lot of soothing noises about how not all socialism is quite as Out There as you’ve heard and of course some people take it too far, but we’re not those leftists, we’re the reasonable leftists.

 

I have two main issues with this framing. The first is simply a matter of overexposure: I am tired of the defensive crouch of so much introductory socialist writing, especially introductory demsoc writing. Probably readers who only read one or two intro books before moving on to more intermediate theory, instead of becoming connoisseurs of the Baby’s First Socialism genre, would not end up reading enough of this to get bored with it. The other is sort of the opposite; I have certainly had my experiences with unreasonable leftists, but I have found that it is not nearly as simple as that people who are more ideologically extreme are less reasonable. Specific organizing models that make dealing with political difference as unpleasant as possible are often associated with specific tendencies; sometimes these are justified by theory, sometimes they're just legacy organizing habits, and they can easily be ported over from one theoretical tendency to another if someone gets the bad idea to do so (as in the case of DSA's own infamous "socdemcentralist" Caucus of Constant Rebranding). More often, I've found unreasonable leftists to just be individually unreasonable people who then blame their behavior on some dead theorist because they don't want to admit that they're behaving the way they are because they goddamn well want to. I worry that when you sort of vaguely present the figure of the Unreasonable Leftist to socialism-curious left-liberals without any sort of detail, they're just going to fill in "the ones that are more ideologically far from the center," as we have all been primed to, rather than any particular counterproductive organizing behavior or organization that they do not yet have any knowledge of because this is explicitly a Baby's First Socialism book.

 

Relatedly, I wasn't a huge fan of the dunks on postmodernism either; I don't know why you'd expect someone who doesn't know what Marxism is to have a detailed theoretical understanding of the excesses of academic postmodernism as a field, and without it, content-free dunking on postmodernism just reads like a right-wing dogwhistle. At least it establishes that postmodernism and Marxism are very much not the same thing, which is more than many current right-wingers can grasp. But it still reads poorly, especially alongside the specifics-free gestures toward Too Radical leftists and the explicit rejection of police abolitionism. I know Eagleton is British and the UK doesn't have every single traffic cop armed to the teeth at all times, but their cops are still cops, and they do have a long and extensively documented history of surveilling, infiltrating, and sabotaging left-wing activist movements, so... what do you mean you don't support getting rid of the police, my dude? And if you're not up for correcting liberal misconceptions about police abolitionism--which, given the number of people who, when they hear the term "police abolitionism," begin attempting to logic out what the phrase means from first principles instead of looking it up, and assume that it means that every single social function currently placed under police jurisdiction will be carried out by nobody at all, is certainly a big task--then maybe just... don't go there?

 

Despite the amount of ink I've just spilled on these three objections, they are fairly minor quibbles about jokes and off-hand comments that didn't land. Overall, the book hits a lot of tricky balances pretty well. Eagleton neither attempts to cut the entire Leninist wing off of "real" leftism (which some works I've read do) nor pretends that everything was just fine in the Soviet Union, but instead discusses the propagandized way we're taught to look at other country's histories in Western capitalist countries and the left's record of attempting to actually, seriously grapple with the political and economic problems of the USSR. He also does a pretty decent job of explaining the difference between a grand narrative, which, as a modernist theory, Marxism is, and a unified theory of everything, which it is not. We get solid, readable primers on class struggle, class formation, modes of production, base and superstructure theory, utopianism, economic determinism, what "materialism" means in political science, statism and democracy, the relationships between Marxism and other left-wing movements (frequently fraught, but definitely there), visible and invisible violence, reform and revolution, and a bunch of other concepts that you'll likely want at least a passing familiarity with if you want to be able to follow conversations among Marxists. And since Marxists have the most interesting conversations (or at least, they do when they're not just being personally nasty to each other and blaming it on Lenin), I'd overall recommend this book both for new socialists and for left-liberals who might be working in coalition with socialists, even if they're ultimately not quite convinced.

 

I also largely appreciate that the book has lots of jokes; I am a big fan of jokes, and Eagleton tells them in a dry, occasionally absurd way, and more often in a dry, completely serious observational way, like when he refers to pharmaceutical company owners as "a bunch of unscrupulous sharks who would probably charge their own toddlers ten dollars for an aspirin" in a section explaining the difference between personal morality and the structural functions of institutions.

 

I am very, very much looking forward to discussing it at book club in January, although I admit I am somewhat less looking forward to having to come up with discussion questions since there are so many things we could cover.

 

I'm pretty sure they have pizza delivery in London by now

For the BSpec book club--which, incidentally, is meeting on the same day as the politics book club, immediately after it in the same location--we elected to read Douglas Adams' The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, the second book in the Dirk Gently series, which is not nearly as famous as the Hitchhiker's Guide series.

 

For some reason I found myself a little slow to warm up to this one; it's not that the book starts slow in terms of action--in fact, it starts off very rapidly in terms of action--it's just that it took me a while to get at all invested in any of the characters, or begin to figure out what was going on enough to care about it, which left me with just the jokes, which are mostly pretty solid but often just a little bit more long-winded than I quite felt they needed to be. There are times when long, rambly bits of humor can be just as funny as the author wants them to be, but it tends to work best when used sparingly, and nothing makes a joke come off just a bit amateurish as being not quite as tight as it could be.

 

That said, by the time the story began to take something like shape, I did end up ripping through it quite quickly. The story itself is still pretty much just a series of completely bananas events, although they do all (or at least, mostly) tie back to a single Faustian plotline involving the ongoing decline of the Norse pantheon. I do like a good story where divinity runs on human belief. That said, it wasn't very deep, and I don't feel like I got much out of it except a few amusing hours. Which, to be fair, is probably exactly what I needed, given that winter in New England tends every year to be the long dark tea-time of my own soul.

 

I think it'll be interesting to see how the book club discussion goes, given that there's likely a large number of amusing jokes to revisit but little serious literary analysis to be done. I like Adams a lot as a writer but he's just not Sir Terry Pratchett.