The Future and the Left

In times like these, the very appearance of an essay like Oliver Eagleton’s offers a glimmer of hope.footnote¹ His critique of my work is both historically conscious and generous towards the often less-than-successful endeavours of an older generation; he maps new paths with impressive commitment and knowledgeable insight into the complexities of the terrain ahead. A promising new cohort of the left is already emerging. Eagleton raises important issues of both theory and politics, and I shall respond to them in turn.

First, though, a quick re-cap. In ‘The World and the Left’, I argued that the great dialectical processes that had helped drive social advance for a century after 1870 had stalled, defeated in part by the powerful capitalist offensive known as neoliberal globalization. The emergent international left of the 21st century was now faced with the toxic legacies of capital’s onslaught—soaring inequality, climate chaos, inter-imperial rivalries. These tendencies offered no dialectical direction, not even for elementary human development. ‘The World and the Left’ examined the forms and repertoires of the new left—the alterglobalists, the climate movement, indigenous and peasant movements, slum-dwellers, feminists, trade unionists; the urban uprisings of the Arab world, Latin America’s pink tide, Latin Europe’s indignados, Anglophone democratic socialists—and attempted an evaluation of its weaknesses and strengths, in light of the social, ecological and geopolitical challenges that confront it.

In his response, Eagleton sketched out a history of my work and formation, registering a shift ‘from an engagé standpoint towards an Olympian one’ around the turn of the century, amid uncertainty over whether Marxism would retain its relevance in the new era.footnote² Drawing on my Science, Class and Society (1976), he questioned the claim that the great social dialectics of the 20th century have stalled—or that ‘Marxian dialectics have been surpassed’. The halting of ‘labour’s forward march’ did not preclude the emergence of further dialectical processes: might the triad of ‘ecology, geopolitics, inequality’ harbour systemic contradictions comparable to those between the forces of production and the relations of production analysed by Marx? For Eagleton, ‘the rise of fossil capital and the recoil of climate breakdown constitutes a dialectic in the strictest sense’—‘the system’s “developmental logic” subverts itself’.footnote³ Furthermore, he argued, the dialectic of climate crisis is bound up with the dynamic of geopolitics: ‘the two are inextricable and co-constitutive’, the rise of us hegemony and the shift to an oil-based world economy mutually reinforcing each other after 1945, while the deregulation of finance and orchestration of global manufacturing from the 1970s on constituted ‘another turning point in the history of fossil capital, one which strengthened both the imperial matrix and its energetic foundations’—albeit paving the way for China’s rise as carbon-spewing workshop of the world and potential challenger to us geopolitical supremacy.footnote⁴

How else to describe this trajectory, Eagleton asked, if not as ‘an endogenous dialectic in which forces of fossil-backed production enter into contradiction with relations of American domination?’footnote⁵ Inequality might not have the same dialectical structure, he conceded, since it is not an inevitability that oppressed populations will rise up against their rulers—but given the effects of environmental collapse and geopolitical tension, there was every reason to expect these antagonisms to intensify. Eagleton agreed that these structural trends lacked a progressive character: ‘rather than prefiguring emancipation, these binaries merely pit differently destructive forces against each other.’ The 21st century marked the transition away from a hopeful, future-oriented dialectic towards a darker one, with the nationalist right the main beneficiary of popular discontent. The left might still re-ground itself, however, as the only current to offer a genuine alternative—this time by working against the dialectical dynamics of history, rather than with them, while drawing on its own past as a living resource.footnote⁶

It will be obvious even from this brief summary that Eagleton’s is a great and thought-provoking essay, bound to stimulate wider debate. As I understand it, Eagleton’s theoretical critique focuses on two characteristically central questions: the analytical and political relevance of Marxism today, and the contemporary power of dialectics. My relationship to Marx and Marxism has certainly changed since my youth. Working on my ‘Marxist trilogy’ in the 1960s and 70s, my ambition was to make historical materialism the social science, for progressive scholars at least, while incorporating new thinking from the field.footnote⁷ In retrospect this project was, of course, unrealistic: it ran up against the confines of entrenched academic institutions but also, and more importantly, against the limitations of classical 19th-century Marxism.

But I would keep the question mark in From Marxism to Post-Marxism?.footnote⁸ More broadly, I would summarize my position as Marxism Plus, in the sense of a continuing commitment to Marx’s emancipatory reason, to historical materialism and to inquiries that take social dialectics as broadly directive of analysis. The ‘Plus’ also meaning a refusal to treat Marxism as a manual to be implemented, and instead to see it as a political and intellectual commitment, combined with an openness to other analytical approaches when these seem appropriate. An example would be my recent work and activism on inequality, understood as the distribution of life-chances—a matter that Marx the scholar never concerned himself about; inequality was a necessary consequence of capitalism and would disappear with it.footnote⁹

The importance of inequality has grown with our distance from socialism, and academic as well as civic interest in the phenomenon has surged since the financial crisis. ‘In-equality’ is also a question of norms, the importance of which classical Marxism never recognized. Marx had some good arguments against the invocation of norms and rights by the liberal ideologues of his time. But after Auschwitz and the military dictatorships of Latin America, ‘human rights’ have become a forceful normative argument—to the point of being geopolitically weaponized by the us and the eu. The great Durban strike of 1973, which set in motion the endgame of South African apartheid, was driven by the demand for ‘human dignity’.footnote¹⁰ Similarly, in my research on sex-gender-family structures for Between Sex and Power, and on relations between the built environment and modes of rule for Cities of Power, driven by curiosity about, inter alia, family law and urban symbolism, I chose to navigate outside the Marxist orbit, while remembering its lessons on capitalism. But Marx was always larger than Marx-ism, and for me the ‘categorical imperative’ of the Young Marx remains a valid lodestar: ‘to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, despicable being.’footnote¹¹