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Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/05/29/why-marx-was-right-by-terry-eagleton-%E2%80%93-review

Is Marx more diminished than enhanced by Terry Eagleton’s defence of him?This article titled “Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review” was written by Tristram Hunt, for The Observer on Sunday 29th May 2011 01.30 UTCAs the IMF dishes out its medicine in Lisbon, Dublin and Athens, and the limitations of neo-liberalism become more apparent, the moment is surely right for a compelling account of Karl Marx’s relevance to the modern world. And in campus conferences, continuing sales of Das Kapital, and even the words of Pope Benedict XVI (moved to praise Marx’s “great analytical skill”), there is a growing appreciation for Marx’s predictions of globalisation, rampant capitalism, and the instability of international finance. As the Times put in the middle of the 2008 crash: “He’s back!”But Marx also remains the target of any number of lazy slurs. The easiest way to kill off debate about Marxism is to jump straight to the Stalin show-trials, Soviet gulags, and Khmer Rouge Year Zero. The philosophical beliefs of a mid-19th-century denizen of the British Museum are all too quickly elided with the most terrible atrocities of the 20th century as an all-purpose intellectual get-out card.So Terry Eagleton – literary critic, liberal-baiter, Marxist man of letters – has set himself the task of explaining why Marx was right. “What if all the most familiar objections to Marx’s works are mistaken?” he begins. His plan is to take on “10 of the most standard criticisms of Marx and try to refute them one by one”. He does so, he believes, at a time when capitalism is uniquely in crisis: “the system has ceased to be as natural as the air we breathe, and can be seen instead as the historically rather recent phenomenon it is”. Or as Friedrich Engels used to put it: “This time there’ll be a dies irae such as has never been seen before… all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree.”But for any admirer of Eagleton or Marx, the book is a disappointment. There is none of the logical precision, winning prose or intellectual ambition displayed most recently in Eagleton’s Yale lectures on faith. Part of the problem is the structure. This is a work of intellectual rebuttal, as chapter by chapter Eagleton takes on a century of misreading Marx. All of which means he is fighting on an enemy territory of dreary objections. For example, there’s a long attempt to justify the 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the Leninist aftermath, as well as the East German system of childcare – not something, I imagine, Marx and Engels themselves would have bothered with.The consequence of such deviations is that there is little sense of the anger, brio and bravado of Marx and Engels; none of the humour, irony and creativity so central to the Marxian heritage. Instead, this book reads like a rapidly crammed set of notes for an American midwest college course. There’s an array of lecture-hall style jokes and fairly worthless hyperbole. In no credible sense do one in three children in Britain today “live below the breadline”.Thankfully, amid the banalities, there lurk some wonderful passages. Eagleton is right to stress the centrality of democracy to Marxian communism, as well as explain so successfully the nature of free will within Marx and Engels’s account of history. This is all very much the humanist, Paris Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts.Eagleton also stresses the modernity of Marx’s thinking and how, for example, he saw the nature of social class shifting with the progress of capitalism. “As long ago as the mid-19th century, he is to be found writing of the ‘constantly growing number of the middle-classes’ … men and women ‘situated midway between the workers on the one side and the capitalists on the other.’” This is a long way from the hackneyed dichotomy of proletarian and bourgeois.There is also a touch of the old Eagleton when he deploys Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure to explore the interaction of culture and materialism. When it comes to Jude Fawley, we need to appreciate that “Oxford University is the ‘superstructure’ to Jericho’s ‘base’.”However, Eagleton’s touch is less sure when it comes to the human condition under communism. In trying to rebut claims of utopianism, he goes too far in suggesting that “Marxism holds out no promise of human perfection” and “envy, aggression, domination, possessiveness and competition would still exist”. Engels, though, was clear that the ascent from socialism to communism entailed a metaphysical change. Under the leadership of the proletariat, humanity achieves true freedom liberated from its animal instincts: “It is the ascent of man from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.”Here was the quasi-theological endpoint of Marxism and it would have been more rewarding if Eagleton, such an intriguing catholic thinker, had expanded upon the Judaeo-Christian assumptions underpinning much of Marx’s heaven on earth. But perhaps that was too close to the bone.In the end, this is another worthy volume in the rarely scintillating Marx-Engels interpretative canon. Useful for undergraduates at the University of Notre Dame, but not for anyone else interested in the drama, insights, and majesty of Marxism. Marx might well have been right about an awful lot, but sadly Eagleton fails to make you care very much. guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogWhy Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – reviewRelated posts:Karl Marx, part 6: The economics of powerThe Wizard of Oz – reviewThe latest word on globalisation

May 29 2011, 11:40am | Comments »

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Mervyn King: rebalance global economy or risk a trade war

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/15/mervyn-king-rebalance-global-economy-or-risk-a-trade-war

Funny the way nobody seems to ever listen to the governor of The Bank of England.

This article titled “Mervyn King: rebalance global economy or risk a trade war” was written by Larry Elliott, economics editor, for The Guardian on Monday 14th March 2011 07.05 UTC Mervyn King will be able to see for himself the devastation wrought by the natural disaster in Japan when he gives a speech in Tokyo today* stressing the need to rebalance the global economy and to head off protectionist pressures. Like the rest of us, the governor of the Bank of England could be forgiven for thinking that the gods continue to punish us mortals for the greed and stupidity of the bubble years. The first obstacle thrown in the way of recovery from the Great Recession was the ruinous cost of the crisis to sovereign states. Then, violent political unrest rippled across the world’s most significant oil-producing region, sending the cost of crude rocketing. Now, Japan has been laid low by one of the biggest earthquakes of the past 100 years at a time when its public finances are in a parlous state. In a sense, the obstacle-strewn road to redemption should come as no surprise. This was no ordinary crisis and it is proving to be no ordinary recovery. The debts that caused the global system to self-destruct back in the summer of 2007 have not gone away, they have merely been passed on to the public sector. This was always a solvency crisis, because it was clear four years ago that many banks were bust and would have gone under without the aid of governments. It is still a solvency crisis, because some countries – Greece, Ireland and soon perhaps Portugal – are struggling with the enormous cost of paying off their debts. But it is not just the small fry who are financially impaired. Japan already has a debt-to-GDP ratio of getting on for 200%, while the US national debt is now in excess of $13tn (£8tn), up from $1tn 30 years ago. This, of course, is before anything like the full impact of the ageing of the baby boomer generation has been felt. Here, then, are some predictions. Contrary to the knee-jerk reaction in the oil market on Friday, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan will be positive for growth, at least given the somewhat bizarre way statisticians calculate gross domestic product. There will be a massive reconstruction effort in Japan, which will be funded by a mixture of quantitative and fiscal easing. The rest of Asia will continue to expand briskly, leading to higher demand for oil. Crude prices will continue to rise, with Brent hitting $130 a barrel in the spring if speculation about turmoil spreading from Libya to Saudi Arabia continues. City analysts who travel to Asia and Latin America return with tales of how the emerging world is booming. It is certainly true that the big developing economies have been crucial to the recovery of the global economy since the spring of 2009. But the warning signs, flashing amber a few months ago, are now flashing red. Commodity prices, especially oil, were on a sharp upward trend before the unrest began in north Africa. Higher oil prices mean higher inflation, which in the four previous oil shocks has tended to mean higher interest rates. The European Central Bank will be the first to move, having signalled that it feels the time is right to start unwinding the ultra-expansionary policy stance of the past two years. In the UK, there will be intense pressure on the Bank of England to follow suit, not least because the ECB’s action will result in a weaker pound, making imported goods more expensive. Dearer borrowing will be a double whammy for the weak countries on the fringes of the eurozone. It will slow their growth and make the cost of paying their ruinous debts more expensive. Europe provided itself with some additional firepower to tackle a sovereign debt crisis late last week, but this will deliver only short-term relief from a problem that will eventually ensnare Spain and Belgium as well as Greece, Ireland and Portugal. The position of these developed countries is little different from that of poor countries in the 1990s: they are burdened with excessively high debts. Yet there is no Jubilee 2000 for Greece, and nor is there a bankruptcy mechanism for sovereign states. It is infra dig to suggest that bankers and bondholders should “take a haircut” for their duff decisions, and since they have declined, ordinary taxpayers will have to do so. The fundamental problem for countries such as Greece, Ireland and Portugal is that they need growth to pay off their enormous debts, yet are unable to do so because of the deflationary policies inflicted on them by the European Union and the IMF. The widening of bond spreads suggests that something is going to give sooner or later. This can either be in an orderly manner if policymakers get their act together or in a chaotic fashion if there are attempts to get through the crisis with a mixture of bluster and confusion. The debt crisis, tighter borrowing conditions and the squeeze on incomes and profits caused by higher energy costs will mean that global activity will start to cool over the coming months. Indeed, we could be quite close to the point where the main cause for concern ceases to be inflation and becomes growth. Interest rates will rise but not by nearly as much as the markets expect. In the UK, inflation will hit 5%, intensifying the policy debate at the Bank of England. If the Bank does act, a combination of tighter monetary policy and fiscal austerity will push the economy back into recession. Watch out for the second quarter of 2011: it is not going to be pleasant. Elsewhere, a deep and long recession will be followed by an unusually weak and shallow upturn, particularly given the size of the stimulus provided by central banks and finance ministries. The realisation that there will be no easy return to pre-2007 business as usual will trigger a wave of bankruptcies among firms that have been kept on life support in expectation of better times. Banks will have to own up to some of their hidden losses, resulting in a second phase of the financial crisis. This will be a bitter-sweet outcome for people like King, who have been warning that there will be no permanent solution to the crisis without addressing the global imbalances and to rein in the activities of big finance. Who knows, if things get really bad, his warnings may be acted upon? * The text of the speech was released ahead of Mervyn King’s visit, which was cancelled in the light of the earthquake.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.

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March 15 2011, 6:25am | Comments »

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I Declare Google Reader Bankruptcy

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2010/08/20/i-declare-google-reader-bankruptcy

I’ve just gone and done it, I’ve declared Google Reader bankruptcy. That means not only that I’ve marked hundreds of unread items as read (I do that regularly anyway) but that I’ve unsubscribed from everything and deleted all tags and folders as well. Here’s the screenshot to prove it: Google Reader I’m sure it’s not difficult to guess why I did this, because of the technological pseudo-complaint they call “information overload”. It’s simple to subscribe to newly discovered feeds, all too easy to accumulate hundreds of unread items, and satisfyingly tempting to hit the big “Mark As Read” button, thus rendering the whole exercise pointless. By having so many feeds in my feed reader that I could only scan through the headlines in “List View” I had become victim to the copywriters’ ploy of adding stand-out, shocking, intriguing or provocative titles – only to be disappointed so often by the substance of the article. Now I want to go back to the old method of choosing top quality feeds that I wish to follow properly, bringing up the full text of the article in front of me before deciding whether I need to read it fully, take action as a result, or skip to the next post. So here I am at day one, with an empty feed reader open to suggestions from my own readers here. Are there any RSS feeds you would like to recommend to me for the purpose of subscribing, reading regularly and inwardly digesting?

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August 20 2010, 2:45am | Comments »

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Can Countries go Bankrupt?

http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2008/11/04/can-countries-go-bankrupt

The IMF has a $250 billion bailout fund for use in emergencies to lend to countries that could go bankrupt, but this is not enough to cope with today’s mounting crises so some of the rich oil producing states are being asked to contribute to an extension fund. Ukraine accepted a 40 billion dollar loan from the IMF to avoid bankruptcy, Romania is currently negotiating and Iceland has already taken drastic measures after the collapse of its financial sector. Belarus and Hungary are also on the critical danger list but the UK and Switzerland have serious national debt and currency problems as well. Iceland has enough natural resources to survive in some way outside of the global financial system but The UK should be especially worried, as one of the main importers of goods in Western Europe. UK national borrowings also tend to be in other currencies so the debt balance will almost certainly increase as the pound sterling weakens against both the dollar and the euro, after printing and lending out huge sums of money to avert the banking and finance sector crisis. When Gordon Brown the UK prime minister went to tell the Eurozone leaders how to restructure their banking industries along the lines of the UK model this appeared as a great act of economic statesmanship, but I bet Sarkozy and Merkel had a quiet word in his ear about the UK ditching the pound and joining the euro zone eventually. The big question would be at what rate? The present rate doesn’t look too great, having fallen from 1.5 Euros to the Pound down to 1.25 over the past year or so, but as the financial crisis gets worse over the next few months the worsening terms could end up looking look more like a collapse and rescue operation rather than a dignified merger.

Posted by Andy Roberts Can Countries go Bankrupt?

November 4 2008, 7:52am | Comments »

Andy Roberts

Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton – review

Mervyn King: rebalance global economy or risk a trade war

I Declare Google Reader Bankruptcy

Can Countries go Bankrupt?

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