Terry Eagleton was particularly keen to dismiss common criticisms of Marxism. Stalinism, he said, was something Karl Marx himself predicted as “generalised scarcity”, and would never have approved of. Trying to bring socialism to a society without wealth was fruitless, Eagleton said, since Marxism was more about providing leisure than about enforcing labour.
“If you want to understand the monstrous deformation of socialism that is Stalinism, you have go to Marxism,” he said. “There are only two reasons to be a Marxist: one is to annoy people you don’t like, your parents for instance; the other is if you don’t like working.”
From that point, he moved seamlessly through Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch (“they will find it extremely difficult to die because that is the ultimate self-dispossession”), on through purgatory, and onto sacrifice, all sprinkled with a fair selection of puns. “As Samuel Beckett said, I have a strong weakness for oxymorons,” he said.
He finished up with deeply engaged questions from the audience, many of whom clearly also worked at the interface between personal behaviour and political conduct. One questioner managed to pin him briefly to the nitty-gritty of today’s politics, however, by asking what Marx would have made of Brexit. “It’s a storm in a tea-cup,” Eagleton replied.
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