Free Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton

future free of suffering, death, loss, failure, breakdown, conflict,
tragedy or even labour. In fact, he doesn't show much interest in the future at
all. It is a notorious fact about his work that he has very little to say in
detail about what a socialist or communist society would look like. His critics
may therefore accuse him of unpardonable vagueness; but they can hardly do that
and at the same time accuse him of drawing up utopian blueprints. It is
capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures. In The German Ideology, he rejects the idea of communism as ''an ideal to which reality will have to
adjust itself.'' Instead, he sees it in The German Ideology as ''the
real movement which abolishes the present state of things.'' 2
    Just as the Jews were
traditionally forbidden to foretell the future, so Marx the secular Jew is
mostly silent on what might lie ahead. We have seen that he probably thought
socialism was inevitable, but he has strikingly little to say about what it
would look like. There are several reasons for this reticence. For one thing,
the future does not exist, so that to forge images of it is a kind of lie. To
do so might also suggest that the future is predetermined—that it lies in some
shadowy realm for us to discover. We have seen that there is a sense in which
Marx held that the future was inevitable. But the inevitable is not necessarily
the desirable. Death is inevitable, too, but not in most people's eyes
desirable. The future may be predetermined, but that is no reason to assume
that it is going to be an improvement on what we have at the moment. The
inevitable, as we have seen, is usually pretty unpleasant. Marx himself needed
to be more aware of this.
    Foretelling the future,
however, is not only pointless; it can actually be destructive. To have power
even over the future is a way of giving ourselves a false sense of security. It
is a tactic for shielding ourselves from the open-ended nature of the present,
with all its precariousness and unpredictability. It is to use the future as a
kind of fetish—as a comforting idol to cling to like a toddler to its blanket.
It is an absolute value which will not let us down because (since it does not
exist) it is as insulated from the winds of history as a phantom. You can also
seek to monopolise the future as a way of dominating the present. The true
soothsayers of our time are not hairy, howling outcasts luridly foretelling the
death of capitalism, but the experts hired by the transnational corporations to
peer into the entrails of the system and assure its rulers that their profits
are safe for another ten years. The prophet, by contrast, is not a clairvoyant
at all. It is a mistake to believe that the biblical prophets sought to predict
the future. Rather, the prophet denounces the greed, corruption and
power-mongering of the present, warning us that unless we change our ways we
might well have no future at all. Marx was a prophet, not a fortune-teller.
    There is another reason
why Marx was wary of images of the future. This is because there were a lot of
them about in his time—and they were almost all the work of hopelessly idealist
radicals. The idea that history is moving onwards and upwards to a state of
perfection is not a leftist one. It was a commonplace of the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment, which was hardly renowned for its revolutionary socialism. It
reflected the confidence of the European middle class in its early, exuberant
phase. Reason was in the process of vanquishing despotism, science was routing
superstition, and peace was putting warfare to flight. As a result, the whole
of human history (by which most of these thinkers really meant Europe) would
culminate in a state of liberty, harmony and commercial prosperity. It is
hardly likely that history's most celebrated scourge of the middle classes
would have signed on for this self-satisfied illusion. Marx, as we have seen,
did indeed believe in progress and civilisation; but he