Free Why Marx Was Right by Terry Eagleton Page B

though it feels
as though it does. But there are also conservatives who reject this myth of the
Fall on the grounds that every age has been just as dreadful as every other.
The good news for them is that things are not getting worse; the bad news is
that this is because they cannot deteriorate any further. What governs history
is human nature, which is (a) in a state of shocking disrepair and (b)
absolutely unalterable. The greatest folly—indeed, cruelty—is to dangle before
men and women ideals that they are constitutionally incapable of achieving.
Radicals just end up making people loathe themselves. They plunge them into
guilt and despair in the act of cheering them on to higher things.
    Starting from where we are
may not sound the best recipe for political transformation. The present seems
more an obstacle to such change than an occasion for it. As the stereotypically
thick-headed Irishman remarked when asked the way to the railway station:
''Well, I wouldn't start from here." The comment is not as illogical as
some might think, which is also true of the Irish. It means ''You'd get there
quicker and more directly if you weren't starting from this awkward,
out-of-the-way spot.'' Socialists today might well sympathise with the
sentiment. One could imagine the proverbial Irishman surveying Russia after the
Bolshevik revolution, about to embark on the task of building socialism in a
besieged, isolated, semidestitute country, and remarking: ''Well, I wouldn't
start from here.''
    But there is, of course,
nowhere else to start from. A different future has to be the future of this
particular present. And most of the present is made up of the past. We have
nothing with which to fashion a future other than the few, inadequate tools we
have inherited from history. And these tools are tainted by the legacy of
wretchedness and exploitation by which they descend to us. Marx writes in the Critique of the Gotha Programme of how the new society will be stamped with
the birthmarks of the old order from whose womb it emerges. So there is no
''pure'' point from which to begin. To believe that there is is the illusion of
so-called ultra-leftism (an ''infantile disorder,'' as Lenin called it), which
in its revolutionary zeal refuses all truck with the compromised tools of the
present: social reform, trade unions, political parties, parliamentary
democracy and so on. It thus manages to end up as stainless as it is impotent.
    The future, then, is not
just to be tacked on to the present, any more than adolescence is just tacked
on to childhood. It must somehow be detectable within it. This is not to say
that this possible future is bound to come about, any more than a child will
necessarily arrive at adolescence. It might always die of leukaemia before it
does. It is rather to recognize that, given a particular present, not any old
future is possible. The future is open, but it is not totally open. Not just
any old thing could happen. Where I might be in ten minutes' time depends among
other things on where I am now. To see the future as a potential within the
present is not like seeing an egg as a potential chicken. Short of being
smashed to smithereens or boiled for a picnic, the egg will turn into a chicken
by a law of Nature; but Nature does not guarantee that socialism will follow on
the heels of capitalism. There are many different futures implicit in the
present, some of them a lot less attractive than others.
    Seeing the future like
this is among other things a safeguard against false images of it. It rejects,
for example, the complacent ''evolutionist'' view of the future which regards
it simply as more of the present. It is simply the present writ large. This, by
and large, is the way our rulers like to view the future—as better than the
present, but comfortably continuous with it. Disagreeable surprises will be
kept to the minimum. There will be no traumas or cataclysms, just a steady
improvement on what we have already. This view