Terry Eagleton - Why Marx Was Right (2011)

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Capitalism is the sorcerer's apprentice: it has summoned up powers which have spun wildly out of control and now threaten to destroy us. The task of socialism is not to spur on those powers but to bring them under rational human control.

Terry Eagleton
It is capitalism, not Marxism, that trades in futures.

Terry Eagleton
The most compelling confirmation of Marx's theory of history is late capitalist society. There is a sense in which this case is becoming truer as time passes.

Terry Eagleton
When it comes to who exactly should be exploited, the system is admirably egalitarian.

Terry Eagleton
History works itself out by an inevitable internal logic.

Terry Eagleton
Modern capitalist nations are the fruit of a history of slavery, genocide, violence and exploitation every bit as abhorrent as Mao's China or Stalin's Soviet Union.

Terry Eagleton
We face a probable future of nuclear-armed states warring over a scarcity of resources; and that scarcity is largely the consequence of capitalism itself. For the first time in history, our prevailing form of life has the power not simply to breed racism and spread cultural cretinism, drive us into war or herd us into labour camps, but to wipe us from the planet. Capitalism will behave antisocially if it is profitable for it to do so, and that can now mean human devastation on an unimaginable scale. What used to be apocalyptic fantasy is today no more than sober realism. The traditional leftist slogan ''Socialism or barbarism'' was never more grimly apposite.

Terry Eagleton
The liberal state is neutral between capitalism and its critics until the critics look like they are winning.

Terry Eagleton
Socialism is the completion of democracy, not the negation of it.

Terry Eagleton
After all, if you do not resist the apparently inevitable, you will never know how inevitable the inevitable was.

Terry Eagleton
Capitalism cannot survive without a working class, while the working class can flourish a lot more freely without capitalism.

Terry Eagleton
Ivory towers are as rare as bowling alleys in tribal cultures.

Terry Eagleton
You can tell that the capitalist system is in trouble when people start talking about capitalism.

Terry Eagleton
The truth is that the past exists no more than the future, even though it feels as though it does.

Terry Eagleton
There seems to be something in humanity which will not bow meekly to the insolence of power.

Terry Eagleton