Terry Eagleton: “Anti-capitalism is still a brilliant idea”

With an academic career that began in Cambridge, continued at Oxford, and ended in Manchester, Terry Eagleton (Salford, England, 1943) specialized in literary theory and criticism with a Marxist perspective that he has developed in more than 40 books, including Why Marx Was Right (Tigre de Paper / Peninsula, 2011). He is in Barcelona to participate today in the Fira Literal.

Despite coming from a cultural studies background, especially literature, he ends up talking about economics and Marx...

And what about politics, eh? Partly it's because academically I was brought up at Cambridge, where there's a tradition, with people like Raymond Williams, Leavis, Empson, even Eliot, for whom literature is a very indeterminate field that extends in many directions, and one of them is culture. Then there's the rather ridiculous situation of people like me, who were trained to read Shakespeare and happen to make proclamations about the Asiatic mode of production... and I admit it's quite odd. But there have to be people who occupy a general intellectual space, especially at a time when universities are surrendering wholesale to specialization and technicalities.

Harvard is in danger of not being able to do even that, isn't it?

Well, with Trump, there's something alarming every day, and the logic behind the international student ban is to prevent access to those who disagree with him—a concrete step forward on the path toward the effective abolition of the liberal humanist university. Universities have always tried to maintain a certain distance between themselves and the rest of reality in order to develop this liberal humanist critique, but the problem is that if you maintain a certain distance, you're not very useful. In the United States, and even less so in Europe, the very existence of a liberal humanist institution is a scandal to these stupid philistines who run our society. Harvard's move is, given its implications, extremely alarming, and we can see a future in which, for example, the humanities simply won't exist.

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Defining oneself as a Marxist is not very fashionable these days...

Frankly, I don't really care; there are many different ways to be socialist or anti-capitalist, and in fact, I wouldn't staunchly defend a specifically Marxist point of view. Marxist fortunes rise and fall, but anti-capitalism remains a brilliant idea, no matter how much resistance there is. What surprises me quite a bit is that not many people have thought about what constitutes being a Marxist. Concepts like communism, class struggle, or the alienation of labor belong to some other tradition, as there are very few specifically Marxist ideas; Marxism has always been part of a much broader left perspective, sometimes more central, sometimes less so.

It seems to be going up again...

One of the few benefits the Left can point to in the recent period is that its own thinking has been enriched in many ways by feminism and issues of gender and ethnicity. So at a time when there's a general recession of the Left, there has also been, ironically, a certain intellectual enrichment of the Left, and the situation is very mixed.

The gap between rich and poor is widening and the middle classes are becoming poorer, but it turns out that the response of many is to vote increasingly to the right.

Much of what Marx prophesied in the Communist Manifesto about rising inequality has come true. It's true that many of the people committed to the left in the 1970s and 1980s stopped participating, and some have moved to the right, but many simply gave up because they stopped believing it was a historical possibility, because one cannot continue forever without hope.

And what about populism?

It's a self-contradiction in capitalism: neoliberalism is fluid, globalist, relative, provisional... postmodern, if you like, but you can't run a system like that; people need roots, stability, community, even nation, beliefs, traditions... If neoliberalism is busy uprooting all that, there will be a reaction, not from the left, but from within the very system run by neoliberalism. It's extremely interesting that the system is now caught between the Trumpists on one side and the EU bureaucrats on the other.

Neoliberal populism “People need roots, stability, community, even nation, beliefs, traditions...”

Many left-wing thinkers refine their analysis, but what about their proposals?

The thing is, problems don't always have solutions, and sometimes there's no obvious or simple way to break the system. Now, I've always thought there's a Kantian side to socialism, which isn't just utilitarian, but rather one that requires doing what you believe is right regardless of the circumstances; in other words, you have to take a stand.

You don't believe in optimism, but there's always hope, right?

My book Hope without Optimism (Taurus, 2016) It'll be released in Catalan next year, of course. Optimism seems to be a temperamental thing; there are optimistic people like there are who have red hair, while hope is very different. However, it's strange that I wrote that, because I'm not what I would call a very hopeful person. But anyway, I never really know where my books come from; they just emerge; it's almost an unconscious process.

His career has been a struggle against postmodernism.

Yes, and for many reasons, like this terrible postmodern idea of ​​being yourself: to be or become yourself, you need to work hard; it's not something that's just given to you. Another reason my Catholic background is offended by postmodernism is because, essentially, postmodernists think that conviction is dogmatic. This is why so many young people, even in the way they speak, try to avoid any substantive propositions, and it's a terrible mistake. Of course, there is dogma, but conviction isn't necessarily dogmatic, and part of conviction is being open to being wrong. I wrote somewhere that part of what a scientific proposition means is that it could be wrong, whereas there are other possible ideological claims that couldn't be wrong. I see a connection between my Catholic upbringing and almost a revolt against what we might call the sensibility of postmodernism, where, for example, it's okay not to know what you believe. I had a tutor at Cambridge who was an immensely civilized, erudite, and privileged man, and he had no idea what he believed about anything. He knew everything, had read everything, but he always ended the conversation by saying, “Well, I don’t know.” It took me a long time to realize that he didn’t need to know; there was no pressure on him. Certain people in certain situations need to know what’s going on; he didn’t. I knew there was some difference between us, but I couldn’t articulate it. When this tutor retired, he became a wine merchant, and then, of course, it was all a matter of taste.