In Praise of Marx（马克思赞）

By Terry Eagleton
translated by merleau
Praising Karl Marx might seem as perverse as putting in a good word for the Boston Strangler. Were not Marx's ideas responsible for despotism, mass murder, labor camps, economic catastrophe, and the loss of liberty for millions of men and women? Was not one of his devoted disciples a paranoid Georgian peasant by the name of Stalin, and another a brutal Chinese dictator who may well have had the blood of some 30 million of his people on his hands?
赞扬马克思就像为波士顿杀人王说好话一样错误。马克思的理论难道不应该为独裁、群众谋杀、劳动改造、经济灾难和成百万男女自由的丧失负责吗？他的忠实信徒难道不是一个叫斯大林的，患偏执狂的乔治亚（格鲁吉亚）农民......
The truth is that Marx was no more responsible for the monstrous oppression of the communist world than Jesus was responsible for the Inquisition. For one thing, Marx would have scorned the idea that socialism could take root in desperately impoverished, chronically backward societies like Russia and China. If it did, then the result would simply be what he called "generalized scarcity," by which he means that everyone would now be deprived, not just the poor. It would mean a recycling of "the old filthy business"—or, in less tasteful translation, "the same old crap." Marxism is a theory of how well-heeled capitalist nations might use their immense resources to achieve justice and prosperity for their people. It is not a program by which nations bereft of material resources, a flourishing civic culture, a democratic heritage, a well-evolved technology, enlightened liberal traditions, and a skilled, educated work force might catapult themselves into the modern age.
事实是，面对共产主义世界的巨大灾难，马克思承担的责任并不比耶稣面对最后审判承担的责任更多。首先，马克思不屑于这种观点，认为社会主义会在俄国、ZG这样极端贫穷、长期落后的国家中扎根。如果它确实这么做了，那结果只会是马克思所说的“普遍性缺乏”，意思是不仅穷人，所有人都会贫困。它将会意味着“古老的污秽事业”的循环——或者，用一个较少情感的翻译，“同样的落后废物”。马克思主义是关于富有的资本主义国家应该利用它们巨大的资源为它们的人民实现正义与繁荣的理论。它并不是某种计划，使得缺乏物质资源、丰富市民文化、民主遗产、发展良好的科技、被启蒙的自由主义传统和熟练的、受教育的劳动人口的国家能够跨越进入现代世纪。
Marx certainly wanted to see justice and prosperity thrive in such forsaken spots. He wrote angrily and eloquently about several of Britain's downtrodden colonies, not least Ireland and India. And the political movement which his work set in motion has done more to help small nations throw off their imperialist masters than any other political current. Yet Marx was not foolish enough to imagine that socialism could be built in such countries without more-advanced nations flying to their aid. And that meant that the common people of those advanced nations had to wrest the means of production from their rulers and place them at the service of the wretched of the earth. If this had happened in 19th-century Ireland, there would have been no famine to send a million men and women to their graves and another two or three million to the far corners of the earth.
马克思当然想看到正义、富裕在这些落后的地区实现。他愤怒和雄辩的为几个在英国暴政统治下殖民地写作，不仅仅是爱尔兰和印度。而且由他的工作所引发的政治运动，在帮助弱小国家摆脱其帝国主义统治者方面，比其他任何政治思潮做的都多。但马克思还没有愚蠢到这个地步，去设想社会主义能够在这样的国家中建立而没有更加发达国家的帮助。这意味着那些发达国家的大众不得不从他们的统治者那里夺得生产技术来为地球上贫困的一些人服务。如果这发生在19世纪的爱尔兰，那么就不会有饥荒使得一百万人丧生，两三百万人被送到远东。
There is a sense in which the whole of Marx's writing boils down to several embarrassing questions: Why is it that the capitalist West has accumulated more resources than human history has ever witnessed, yet appears powerless to overcome poverty, starvation, exploitation, and inequality? What are the mechanisms by which affluence for a minority seems to breed hardship and indignity for the many? Why does private wealth seem to go hand in hand with public squalor? Is it, as the good-hearted liberal reformist suggests, that we have simply not got around to mopping up these pockets of human misery, but shall do so in the fullness of time? Or is it more plausible to maintain that there is something in the nature of capitalism itself which generates deprivation and inequality, as surely as Charlie Sheen generates gossip?
有这么一种感觉，全部马克思的著作可以被浓缩为几个令人窘迫的问题：为什么西方资本主义积累了超过人类历史上所得到的财富，却仍然在克服贫穷、饥饿、冲突和不平等问题上显得无力？使少数人获益却给多数人带来贫困侮辱的机制是什么？为什么私人的财富与公众的赤贫紧密结合？或者是否是像好心的自由主义改革者所建议的那样，我们不应该急着去处理这些人类的罪恶，而应该在长期中解决？还是更真实的是，在资本主义自身的本质内，包含了某种东西必然会形成贫困和不平等，就像查理辛必然会带来八卦一样？
Marx was the first thinker to talk in those terms. This down-at-heel émigré Jew, a man who once remarked that nobody else had written so much about money and had so little, bequeathed us the language in which the system under which we live could be grasped as a whole. Its contradictions were analyzed, its inner dynamics laid bare, its historical origins examined, and its potential demise foreshadowed. This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a Bad Thing, like admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco smoke in your children's faces. On the contrary, he was extravagant in his praise for the class that created it, a fact that both his critics and his disciples have conveniently suppressed. No other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal.
马克思是第一个谈论这些术语的思想家。这个贫困潦倒的犹太人，这个独一无二的、写了如此多关于金钱的内容而自己却拥有如此少金钱的人，遗赠给我们一种语言，通过它我们生活在其中的体制能够从总体上被把握。它的矛盾被分析了，它的内在动力被赤裸裸的揭示了，它的历史起源被检验了，它潜在的死亡被预示了。这并不是在暗示马克思把资本主义简单地看作一个坏东西，就像赞扬莎拉•佩林或是往你孩子脸上吐烟一样。相反，他甚至是过分地赞扬了创造这个制度的阶级，这个事实无论在他的反对者还是支持者那里都能得到证明。在历史上没有其他社会制度，他写道，被证明如此具有革命性。在短短几个世纪里，资产阶级就几乎消除了他们封建主义敌人在地球上的全部痕迹。他们积累了文化和物质财富、创造出人的权利、解放了奴隶、推翻了独裁者、拆除了帝国、为人类的自由战斗到死，并建立了一个真正的全球文明的基础。没有文件像《共产党宣言》一样花费如此多的赞美在这些历史成就上，即使是《华尔街日报》也没有。
That, however, was only part of the story. There are those who see modern history as an enthralling tale of progress, and those who view it as one long nightmare. Marx, with his usual perversity, thought it was both. Every advance in civilization had brought with it new possibilities of barbarism. The great slogans of the middle-class revolution—"Liberty, Equality, Fraternity"—were his watchwords, too. He simply inquired why those ideas could never be put into practice without violence, poverty, and exploitation. Capitalism had developed human powers and capacities beyond all previous measure. Yet it had not used those capacities to set men and women free of fruitless toil. On the contrary, it had forced them to labor harder than ever. The richest civilizations on earth sweated every bit as hard as their Neolithic ancestors.
然而，这仅仅是故事的一部分。有把现代历史当做一个迷人的进步史的人，也有把它看作一个冗长噩梦的人。马克思，带着惯常的倔强，认为它两者都是。文明的每一次进步也带来了野蛮的新的可能性。资产阶级革命的伟大口号——“自由、平等、博爱”——同样是马克思的口号。他仅仅在质询，为什么没有暴力、贫穷和冲突，这些理念就不能付诸实践。资本主义发展人类权力和能力的程度超过以往所有的制度，但它仍然不能用这些能力使得人免于无结果的徒劳。相反，它迫使人们劳作地更加辛苦。地球上最富有的文明，和他们新石器时代的祖先劳动的一样艰辛。
This, Marx considered, was not because of natural scarcity. It was because of the peculiarly contradictory way in which the capitalist system generated its fabulous wealth. Equality for some meant inequality for others, and freedom for some brought oppression and unhappiness for many. The system's voracious pursuit of power and profit had turned foreign nations into enslaved colonies, and human beings into the playthings of economic forces beyond their control. It had blighted the planet with pollution and mass starvation, and scarred it with atrocious wars. Some critics of Marx point with proper outrage to the mass murders in Communist Russia and China. They do not usually recall with equal indignation the genocidal crimes of capitalism: the late-19th-century famines in Asia and Africa in which untold millions perished; the carnage of the First World War, in which imperialist nations massacred one another's working men in the struggle for global resources; and the horrors of fascism, a regime to which capitalism tends to resort when its back is to the wall. Without the self-sacrifice of the Soviet Union, among other nations, the Nazi regime might still be in place.
马克思认为，这并不是因为自然的匮乏，而是因为资本主义体制创造其巨大财富的特殊的、悖论性的方式。对一些人的平等意味着对其他人的不平等，对一些人的自由则给多数人带来压迫和不幸。这个体系对权力和利润贪婪的追求把其他国家变成了殖民地，人类进入了经济游戏，可这种力量却超出了他们的控制。它用污染和饥荒毁灭地球，用残暴的战争在地球上留下伤疤。一些马克思理论的批评家对在俄国和中国发生的群体性罪恶有着恰当的愤怒，但他们很少以同样的愤怒回忆起资本主义制度种族灭绝的罪行：在十九世纪末亚非，导致无法统计的数百万人丧生的饥荒；第一次世界大战的大屠杀，其中帝国主义国家为了争夺全球资源而杀害为彼此工作的人；以及法西斯主义的恐怖，一个资本主义在走投无路时不得不求助的制度。没有苏联的自我牺牲，在其他国家，纳粹政权可能仍然在执政。
Marxists were warning of the perils of fascism while the politicians of the so-called free world were still wondering aloud whether Hitler was quite such a nasty guy as he was painted. Almost all followers of Marx today reject the villainies of Stalin and Mao, while many non-Marxists would still vigorously defend the destruction of Dresden or Hiroshima. Modern capitalist nations are for the most part the fruit of a history of genocide, violence, and extermination every bit as abhorrent as the crimes of Communism. Capitalism, too, was forged in blood and tears, and Marx was around to witness it. It is just that the system has been in business long enough for most of us to be oblivious of that fact.
当马克思主义者在警告法西斯主义的危险时，所谓自由世界的政治家还在疑惑希特勒是否像他被描绘的那样是个坏人。当代几乎所有马克思的支持者都拒绝了斯大林和M的罪行，而很多非马克思主义者依然在精力充沛的为德瑞斯顿和广岛的破坏辩护。现代资本主义国家是建立在种族灭绝、暴力、消灭剩余的历史的成果，它和共产主义的罪行一样令人厌恶。资本主义，同样在血和泪中被铸造，而马克思在旁边见证了它。仅仅是由于这个制度已经运行了足够长的时间，以至于我们中的大多数没有察觉到这个事实。
The selectiveness of political memory takes some curious forms. Take, for example, 9/11. I mean the first 9/11, not the second. I am referring to the 9/11 that took place exactly 30 years before the fall of the World Trade Center, when the United States helped to violently overthrow the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende of Chile, and installed in its place an odious dictator who went on to murder far more people than died on that dreadful day in New York and Washington. How many Americans are aware of that? How many times has it been mentioned on Fox News?
政治记忆的选择性采取了一些奇特的形式。拿9/11为例，我指的是第一个9/11，而不是第二个，是世贸中心倒下之前30年的那个9/11。当时美国支持暴力推翻了智利由民主选举产生的Salvador Allende政府，然后扶植建立了一个可憎的统治者，他谋杀了远远比在纽约和华盛顿可怕的那一天死去的多得多的人。有多少美国人知道这回事？它在福克斯新闻上被提到过几次？
Marx was not some dreamy utopianist. On the contrary, he began his political career in fierce contention with the dreamy utopianists who surrounded him. He has about as much interest in a perfect human society as a Clint Eastwood character would, and never once speaks in such absurd terms. He did not believe that men and women could surpass the Archangel Gabriel in sanctity. Rather, he believed that the world could feasibly be made a considerably better place. In this he was a realist, not an idealist. Those truly with their heads stuck in the sand—the moral ostriches of this world—are those who deny that there can be any radical change. They behave as though Family Guy and multicolored toothpaste will still be around in the year 4000. The whole of human history disproves this viewpoint.
马克思并不是一个幻想的乌托邦主义者，恰恰相反，他通过与他周围的乌托邦主义者的激烈论辩开始了自己的政治生涯。他对一个完美的人类社会所抱有的兴趣与克林特•伊斯特伍德一样，而且他从来没有用过这么荒谬的字眼。他不相信男女会在神圣性上超越天使长加百列。他更相信这个世界能够可行地被建造成一个相对更好的地方。在这一点上他是一个现实主义者而不是一个理想主义者。那些把他们的头埋到沙子里的人——这个世界的道德鸵鸟——是那些否认存在着任何激进改变的人。他们表现得好像《恶搞之家》和多彩牙膏直到4000年也依然存在一样。全部的人类历史否定了这一观点。
Radical change, to be sure, may not be for the better. Perhaps the only socialism we shall ever witness is one forced upon the handful of human beings who might crawl out the other side of some nuclear holocaust or ecological disaster. Marx even speaks dourly of the possible "mutual ruin of all parties." A man who witnessed the horrors of industrial-capitalist England was unlikely to be starry-eyed about his fellow humans. All he meant was that there are more than enough resources on the planet to resolve most of our material problems, just as there was more than enough food in Britain in the 1840s to feed the famished Irish population several times over. It is the way we organize our production that is crucial. Notoriously, Marx did not provide us with blueprints for how we should do things differently. He has famously little to say about the future. The only image of the future is the failure of the present. He is not a prophet in the sense of peering into a crystal ball. He is a prophet in the authentic biblical sense of one who warns us that unless we change our unjust ways, the future is likely to be deeply unpleasant. Or that there will be no future at all.
激烈的变化，确实，可能并不会更好。也许我们所见证的唯一的社会主义制度是由逃离了核武器屠杀和生态灾难的少数人被迫建立的。马克思甚至不爱讲可能的“全部政党的共同毁灭”。作为一个见证了英国工业资本主义恐怖的人，他不愿对自己的后代空想。他所说的全部就是在这个星球上，有充足的资源去解决我们大部分的物质问题，就像1840年代的英格兰有足够的食物去养活爱尔兰挨饿的人口好几次。我们分配我们产品的方法是决定性的。众所周知的，马克思并没有提供给我们如何采取不同方式的蓝图。他以对未来的少言而出名，而未来的唯一形象是现在的失败。他并不是一个凝视水晶球的预言家，而是一个具有可靠的宗教直觉的先知。他警告我们除非改变我们不公正的方式，未来很可能会非常痛苦，或者根本就没有未来。
Socialism, then, does not depend on some miraculous change in human nature. Some of those who defended feudalism against capitalist values in the late Middle Ages preached that capitalism would never work because it was contrary to human nature. Some capitalists now say the same about socialism. No doubt there is a tribe somewhere in the Amazon Basin that believes no social order can survive in which a man is allowed to marry his deceased brother's wife. We all tend to absolutize our own conditions. Socialism would not banish rivalry, envy, aggression, possessiveness, domination, and competition. The world would still have its share of bullies, cheats, freeloaders, free riders, and occasional psychopaths. It is just that rivalry, aggression, and competition would no longer take the form of some bankers complaining that their bonuses had been reduced to a miserly $5-million, while millions of others in the world struggled to survive on less than $2 a day.
社会主义，因此，并不取决于人性的一些奇迹的改变。在中世纪晚期，一些维护封建制度，抵御资本主义价值观的传教者认为资本主义永远不会运作，因为它违反了人性。今天一些资本主义者以同样的方式说社会主义。毫无疑问，在亚马逊盆地的某处有一个种族，也坚信如果一个男人被允许和它去世的兄弟妻子结婚，那么这样的社会秩序不可能存在。我们总是倾向于绝对化我们自己的状况。社会主义并不驱逐敌对、嫉妒、凌侵、占有、统治和竞争。这个世界上依然会有欺凌弱小的人、骗子、白吃白喝者、无业游民和时不时的精神病患者。只不过这些敌对、凌侵和竞争不会再采取这样的形式，一些银行家抱怨他们的收益被减少到“很少”的500万美元，而同时在世界上成百万的人依然在每天不到2美元的花费下挣扎着生存。
Marx was a profoundly moral thinker. He speaks in The Communist Manifesto of a world in which "the free self-development of each would be the condition of the free self-development of all." This is an ideal to guide us, not a condition we could ever entirely achieve. But its language is nonetheless significant. As a good Romantic humanist, Marx believed in the uniqueness of the individual. The idea permeates his writings from end to end. He had a passion for the sensuously specific and a marked aversion to abstract ideas, however occasionally necessary he thought they might be. His so-called materialism is at root about the human body. Again and again, he speaks of the just society as one in which men and women will be able to realize their distinctive powers and capacities in their own distinctive ways. His moral goal is pleasurable self-fulfillment. In this he is at one with his great mentor Aristotle, who understood that morality is about how to flourish most richly and enjoyably, not in the first place (as the modern age disastrously imagines) about laws, duties, obligations, and responsibilities.
马克思是一个具有深切道德关怀的思想家。他在《共产党宣言》描述了一个世界，在其中“每个人的自由发展是全部自由发展的条件”。这是一个指导我们的理想，而不是一个能够完全实现的现实。但这种语言是非常重要的。作为一个具有浪漫主义色彩的人类学者，马克思坚信个体的独特性，这个信念从始至终渗透在他的写作之中。他对独特感觉具有热情，而对抽象观念十分厌恶，尽管有时候他也认为这些观念必须如此。他所谓的唯物主义扎根于人的身体之中。一次又一次，他都在说社会就是无论男女都能以他们自己独特的方式意识到自身独特力量和能力的地方。他的道德目标是愉悦的自我实现，在这一点上马克思和他伟大的导师亚里士多德一样，都明白道德是关于如何使人富足和快乐的，而不是把法律、使命、义务和职责放在首位（这是现代社会凄惨的想象）。
How does this moral goal differ from liberal individualism? The difference is that to achieve true self-fulfillment, human beings for Marx must find it in and through one another. It is not just a question of each doing his or her own thing in grand isolation from others. That would not even be possible. The other must become the ground of one's own self-realization, at the same time as he or she provides the condition for one's own. At the interpersonal level, this is known as love. At the political level, it is known as socialism. Socialism for Marx would be simply whatever set of institutions would allow this reciprocity to happen to the greatest possible extent. Think of the difference between a capitalist company, in which the majority work for the benefit of the few, and a socialist cooperative, in which my own participation in the project augments the welfare of all the others, and vice versa. This is not a question of some saintly self-sacrifice. The process is built into the structure of the institution.
这个道德目标是如何与自由主义-个人主义不同的？区别是对马克思来说，要完成真正的自我实现，个体必须在他人身上找到它。这并不是一个每个人都在做自己的工作以保持同他人隔离的问题，这样的情景甚至完全不可能。他者必须成为一个人自我认识的地平，同时他/她为一个自我提供了现实。在人际关系的层面上，这就是爱；而在政治的层面上，这就是社会主义。马克思的社会主义简单来说，就是无论设置什么机构，都要让这种交互性在最大的可能范围内发生。想想这和一个资本主义公司的区别，在其中大多数人为了少数人的利益而工作；而在一个社会主义合作社，我自己的参与增加了所有人的福利，反之亦然。这并不是什么圣洁的自我牺牲的问题，这种进步性被建构在这种机构的自身结构之中。
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. Marx thought that capitalism had developed the forces of production to the point at which, under different social relations, they could be used to emancipate the majority of men and women from the most degrading forms of labor. What did he think we would do then? Whatever we wanted. If, like the great Irish socialist Oscar Wilde, we chose simply to lie around all day in loose crimson garments, sipping absinthe and reading the odd page of Homer to each other, then so be it. The point, however, was that this kind of free activity had to be available to all. We would no longer tolerate a situation in which the minority had leisure because the majority had labor.
马克思的目标是休闲而不是劳动。成为一个社会主义者的最好理由，除了使那些你厌恶的人恼怒之外，就是你不想去工作。马克思认为资本主义已经把产品的力量发展到这样的程度，无论在什么社会关系下，它们都能被用来使男女从最繁重的劳作下解放出来。那么他认为我们之后应该干什么？无论我们想干什么都行，像伟大的爱尔兰社会主义者奥斯卡•王尔德一样，如果我们选择一整天穿着宽松的深色衣服混日子，喝着苦艾酒，相互读着荷马的奇特诗篇，那么我们就可以这么做。然而关键在于这种自由必须对所有人都是可得的。我们不能忍受少数人享受闲适因为大多数人必须劳作。
What interested Marx, in other words, was what one might somewhat misleadingly call the spiritual, not the material. If material conditions had to be changed, it was to set us free from the tyranny of the economic. He himself was staggeringly well read in world literature, delighted in art, culture, and civilized conversation, reveled in wit, humor, and high spirits, and was once chased by a policeman for breaking a street lamp in the course of a pub crawl. He was, of course, an atheist, but you do not have to be religious to be spiritual. He was one of the many great Jewish heretics, and his work is saturated with the great themes of Judaism—justice, emancipation, the Day of Reckoning, the reign of peace and plenty, the redemption of the poor.
换句话说，使马克思感兴趣的是，一个人可能会误导精神，而不是物质。如果物质现实必须被改变，它将使我们从经济的压迫下获得自由。马克思自己沉迷于世界文学的阅读中，他为艺术、文化和文明的交谈而高兴，在机智、幽默和愉悦中陶醉。他当然是一个无神论者，但你要成为一个具有精神气质的人，不一定要信教。马克思是许多伟大的犹太异教徒之一，而且他的工作也浸透着犹太教的伟大主题——正义、解放、审判日、和平富足的制度，以及对穷人的救赎。
What, though, of the fearful Day of Reckoning? Would not Marx's vision for humanity require a bloody revolution? Not necessarily. He himself thought that some nations, like Britain, Holland, and the United States, might achieve socialism peacefully. If he was a revolutionary, he was also a robust champion of reform. In any case, people who claim that they are opposed to revolution usually mean that they dislike certain revolutions and not others. Are antirevolutionary Americans hostile to the American Revolution as well as the Cuban one? Are they wringing their hands over the recent insurrections in Egypt and Libya, or the ones that toppled colonial powers in Asia and Africa? We ourselves are products of revolutionary upheavals in the past. Some processes of reform have been far more bloodstained than some acts of revolution. There are velvet revolutions as well as violent ones. The Bolshevik Revolution itself took place with remarkably little loss of life. The Soviet Union to which it gave birth fell some 70 years later, with scarcely any bloodshed.
但是，什么是可怕的审判日？难道马克思的观点不是人类需要一次流血的革命吗？这并不是必需的，马克思自己认为一些国家，像英格兰、荷兰和美国，可以和平地实现社会主义。如果马克思是一个革命者，他也同样是一个强硬的改革派。在任何情况下，那些声称他们反对革命的人，通常意味着他们不喜欢某种特定的革命而不是其它。那些反革命者像敌视古巴革命一样敌视美国大革命吗？他们反对最近在埃及和利比亚发生的起义吗？或者是亚非那些推翻殖民统治的革命？我们自己就是过去革命运动的产物，一些改革的程序甚至比革命更血腥。有天鹅绒的革命，也有暴力的革命，而布尔什维克革命的发生本身就具有死伤小的特点。几乎没有任何流血事件的俄国革命，维持了苏联70年。
 
Some critics of Marx reject a state-dominated society. But so did he. He detested the political state quite as much as the Tea Party does, if for rather less redneck reasons. Was he, feminists might ask, a Victorian patriarch? To be sure. But as some (non-Marxist) modern commentators have pointed out, it was men from the socialist and communist camps who, up to the resurgence of the women's movement, in the 1960s, regarded the issue of women's equality as vital to other forms of political liberation. The word "proletarian" means those who in ancient society were too poor to serve the state with anything but the fruit of their wombs. "Proles" means "offspring." Today, in the sweatshops and on the small farms of the third world, the typical proletarian is still a woman.
马克思的一些批评者拒绝一个国家统治的社会，但马克思自己也是如此。虽然较少是出于底层人的原因，但马克思厌恶政治国家的程度和茶党一样多。一些女权主义者可能会问，马克思支持维多利亚式的家长制吗？确实如此，但是一些（非马克思主义的）现代评论家已经指出，在20世纪60年代，正是一些从社会主义和共产主义阵营中走出的男性，加入到女权运动的再兴起中，把女性的平等权当作其他政治平等形式的重要部分。“无产阶级”这个词，在古代社会指的是那些穷人，除了他们的子女，没有任何东西去服务于国家。 “preles”这意味着“后代”。今天，在第三世界国家的血汗工厂和小农场，典型的无产阶级依然是一个女人。
Much the same goes for ethnic matters. In the 1920s and 30s, practically the only men and women to be found preaching racial equality were communists. Most anticolonial movements were inspired by Marxism. The antisocialist thinker Ludwig von Mises described socialism as "the most powerful reform movement that history has ever known, the first ideological trend not limited to a section of mankind but supported by people of all races, nations, religions, and civilizations." Marx, who knew his history rather better, might have reminded von Mises of Christianity, but the point remains forceful. As for the environment, Marx astonishingly prefigured our own Green politics. Nature, and the need to regard it as an ally rather than an antagonist, was one of his constant preoccupations.
在种族问题上也是一样。在20世纪20年代和30年代，唯一坚持种族平等的人是共产主义者。大多数反殖民运动都是在马克思主义的鼓舞下进行的。反社会主义思想家路德维希•冯•米塞斯把社会主义描述为“在人类历史上最有权力的运动形式，是第一个没有局限于一个区域，而是被各个种族、国家、宗教和文明支持的意识形态运动。”更加了解社会主义历史的马克思，可能会提醒冯•米塞斯还有基督教，但即便如此这个观点仍然很有力量。关于环境，马克思令人惊讶的预言了我们现在的绿色政治。把自然当做盟友而不是对手是马克思最重视的观点之一。
Why might Marx be back on the agenda? The answer, ironically, is because of capitalism. Whenever you hear capitalists talking about capitalism, you know the system is in trouble. Usually they prefer a more anodyne term, like "free enterprise." The recent financial crashes have forced us once again to think of the setup under which we live as a whole, and it was Marx who first made it possible to do so. It was The Communist Manifesto which predicted that capitalism would become global, and that its inequalities would severely sharpen. Has his work any defects? Hundreds of them. But he is too creative and original a thinker to be surrendered to the vulgar stereotypes of his enemies.
马克思为什么会重新回到当代的议程上？答案，讽刺性的，是因为资本主义。无论什么时候你听到资本主义者在谈论资本主义，你就知道体制陷入麻烦了。通常情况下，他们更喜欢用一个更平稳的字眼，像“自由事业”。最近的经济危机迫使我们再一次思考我们作为一个总体生活在其中的体制，而马克思是第一个这么做的人。是《共产党宣言》预言了资本主义将会全球化，而不平等会严重的尖锐化。他的工作有什么缺点吗？成百个缺点，但他是一个太有创造力的思想家，以至于不能屈服于他那些庸俗老套的敌人。
Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor at Lancaster University, in England; the National University of Ireland; and the University of Notre Dame. His latest book, Why Marx Was Right, was just published by Yale University Press.