Eagleton, Terry

literary theorist, author of Why Marx Was Right

The Return of Marx 一 Terry Eagleton & Kieran Allen

Andrea Cirla · Oct 10, 2025 · partial coverage

• Karl Marx
• capitalism
• crisis
• alienation
• exploitation
• commodity exchange
• utopia
• dialectics
• Terry Eagleton
• Kieran Allen
• Ireland
• socialism

Coverage note: full (about fifty minutes; YouTube auto-captions in English, generally accurate, with a few garbled words and jokes)

Core ideas

Why Marx is back (Eagleton). Eagleton opens with irony: the "return of Marx" sounds like a horror film, and his own book briefly hit the business best-seller list because bankers worry about capitalism. When capitalists start using the word "capitalism", it is a sign of crisis: "What happens in a crisis is the system which is previously invisible becomes newly perceptible", and Marx's great achievement was to frame, name and historicise it, so that "what was born can always die". He denies that Marx was responsible for Stalinism, as Jesus was for the Inquisition: socialism could not take root in backward, impoverished countries, and Marxism is a theory of how rich capitalist nations might use their resources for justice. His single "embarrassing question" is why the richest society in history cannot overcome poverty and inequality. Marx praised the capitalist middle class (human rights, the abolition of slavery, a global civilisation) but saw each advance bringing new barbarism; he was a realist, not a utopian, and a prophet only in the biblical sense of warning.

The moral Marx. Marx was a moral thinker, not a moralist: his ultimate goal is "the free self-development of each as the condition of the free self-development of all", the individual and the body being central, so that morality is about well-being (eudaimonia, as in Aristotle) and the goal is leisure, not labour. Socialism would not abolish rivalry and bullies, only change their social forms. Eagleton adds that Marx foresaw ecological concerns, that communists were nearly the only supporters of women's equality and racial equality in earlier decades, and that after the "end of history" of 2000 (9/11, Iraq, the crash, the Arab Spring) history has returned.

How the system works (Allen). Allen starts from Irish examples (welfare "fraud" propaganda against billions given to bondholders and developers through NAMA) and the "realism" imposed by the structure of the system. Against explanations by bad individuals or by conspiracies (Freemasons, Bilderberg), he gives Marx's account: capitalism is the result of alienated human abilities, our labour taken from us which then dominates us; this is why we speak of "bondholders" or "the markets" as anonymous powers. He stresses three features: exploitation (workers sell their labour power, receive less than they produce, and are free only to choose which capitalist to sell to; wage labour is also more productive than slavery, as Weber saw); a highly social but unplanned system integrated through commodity exchange, with a dynamic of accumulation unlimited by a feudal lord's belly: "The basis of capitalism is the self expansion of capital", not consumer need; and contradictions (squeezing wages while needing consumers, as in Greece; uncoordinated producers prone to crisis; intellectual property fettering productive forces such as file-sharing). Marx was not a determinist: people make history but not in conditions of their own choosing, and the contradictions are now visible.

Excerpts