Re: [OPE] Terry Eagleton, "In Praise of Marx"

From: Jurriaan Bendien <jurriaanbendien@online.nl>
Date: Tue Apr 12 2011 - 08:47:31 EDT

The problem with Eagleton is that, like his rightwing opponents, he is still
stuck in the rhetoric and discourse of the cold war era, but most people
have moved on from there.

Eagleton claims:

"Marx's goal is leisure, not labor. The best reason for being a socialist,
apart from annoying people you happen to dislike, is that you detest having
to work."

Leaving aside the question of whether Marx really believed this - I doubt it
very much - it raises the question of who will, then, actually "build
socialism", how they will work together, and why they would be motivated to
do so. Well, it is not going to be Eagleton's people, because they are all
having their leisure, annoying other people, or philosophizing about a
better "third way" - a sort of club of Platonic philosopher kings, serviced
by anonymous third-world slaves ushering in the background.

It is a clumsy, ludicrous and opportunist verbal diarrhoea from Eagleton,
and somebody ought to say so.

The whole problem with the contemporary British intelligentsia is
intellectual exhaustion. They suck up to a large number of intellectual
charlatans and flim-flam who are constantly spouting sexed-up garbage...
congratulating each other, relishing their hour of fame, and patting each
other on the shoulder, while they earn fat salaries at the taxpayer's
expense. They have a lot of answers... but they don't know what the
questions are.

Jurriaan

_______________________________________________
ope mailing list
ope@lists.csuchico.edu
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
Received on Tue Apr 12 08:48:24 2011

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Sat Apr 30 2011 - 00:00:03 EDT