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  • Why Marx Was Right

  • 2nd Edition
  • By: Terry Eagleton
  • Narrated by: Roger Clark
  • Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
  • 4.4 out of 5 stars (178 ratings)
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Why Marx Was Right

By: Terry Eagleton
Narrated by: Roger Clark
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Summary

In this combative, controversial book, Terry Eagleton takes issue with the prejudice that Marxism is dead and done with. Taking 10 of the most common objections to Marxism - that it leads to political tyranny, that it reduces everything to the economic, that it is a form of historical determinism, and so on - he demonstrates in each case what a woeful travesty of Marx's own thought these assumptions are.

In a world in which capitalism has been shaken to its roots by some major crises, Why Marx Was Right is as urgent and timely as it is brave and candid. Written with Eagleton's familiar wit, humor, and clarity, it will attract an audience far beyond the confines of academia.

©2018 Yale University (P)2018 Tantor

What listeners say about Why Marx Was Right

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    2 out of 5 stars

More apologetics than convincing argument

As a fairly radical leftist I was hoping for a more engaging argument. Overall it left me thinking that although Marx had good core ideas it is surrounded by antiquated 19th century baggage that holds it back. For example, Marx's championing of colonialism as a prerequisite for socialism. It also focuses on theory and philosophy with little to say on practice. Perhaps the book's main flaw is that it seeks to defend Marx personally rather than Marxism as a whole.
Hopefully modern Marxism has come along way since Marx.

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6 people found this helpful

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Great

A wonderful book for those who believes Marx is still relevant in the twenty first century

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5 people found this helpful

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Outstanding achievement

Extremely listenable writing style and very accessible to the layman. Narrated masterfully this book destroys many of the ridiculous 'Facebook meme' anti-Marx arguments and exposes them as the product of ignorance.

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2 people found this helpful

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some decent points, mostly eloquent nonsense

Sidesteps a lot of the major issues, in particular the point that socialism no longer seems the only way to achieve the kind of standard of living for the ordinary working family that has been achieved by places like Sweden and Finland

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2 people found this helpful

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A Tough Listen...

I love audiobooks for helping me listen to and get through some tough subjects, subjects that would normally have me throwing away a regular book on a dusty shelf somewhere never to be finished.

This audiobook was almost the digital version of that discarded book. It was a very tough listen from start to finish, partly because of the style of language used and partly because of the style of narration. I found myself drifting in and out of chapters, unable to focus on the content of it or take most of it in. Chapter 2 sounded almost exactly like chapter 8, with the narrator banging on about 'class society', 'the bourgeois', and capitalism, always interspersed with needless superfluous iterations of "in fact". Sentence structures so long that you miss the point of what is being said by the time you get to the end of it. This sadly seems the norm for this type of leftist ideology which dresses up subjects such as socialism with overtly academic gobbledygook. It did make me wonder whether the eccentric style of narration was the readers own method of trying to make light of what must surely have been a boring experience in recording this.

I've slogged through it to the end and still have no idea whether Marx was right or wrong, or the exact message/statement the book was making. I've listened to some great audiobooks, some several times over, but this won't be one of them.

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1 person found this helpful

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A good start in Marxist studies

easy to follow and a great insight into Marx and his legacy. Very accessible and a good starting point for the study of Marxism

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Accessible

It's genuinely impressive the extent to which left-wing political opinions get misrepresented, especially in the US. Socialism is conflated with communism, Stalisnism with Marxism, and Marxian views tend to be rejected purely by association with misunderstood, extreme takes by people connected only by a few shared foundational beliefs.

Here, Eagleton does a nicely accessible job of explaining how many of the core misrepresentations of Marx's writings are wild oversimplifications. This is likely to neatly confirm the beliefs of anyone already left-leaning. Would it change the beliefs of anyone on the right? Who knows? But then, it's unlikely many on the right would pick up a book called Why Marx Was Right in the first place.

Perhaps if they did the world might be a slightly better place.

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the humour

it was very understandable with a touch of fun attached which is nice when reading a topic on Marx

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

says so much, achieves very little

good few chapters in and we still don't have a definition really of what Marxism is, which makes it hard to appreciate the discussion. I feel like the book could do a better job of providing definitions.

narration was perfect though!

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A very good intro to Marx's thought

A good intro to Marx's thought which, though heavily biased in his favour, does acknowledge some of his flaws. It successfully presents Marx as an interesting and nuanced thinker with a vast legacy, in contrast to the simplistic Marxist straw men (Straw Marx?) presented by rightwing and liberal media, and has made me want to read him more directly.

That being said, while Eagleton acknowledges flaws at points, he elsewhere ignores or downplays them. Early on he tries to distance Marxism from Stalinism and other terrors, but later when discussing European civilisation and colonialism talks about both having positive and negative traditions, impacts, and legacies. I think the book would have benefited from applying a similar broader and more honest approach to Marxism.

Furthermore, Eagleton's tone is sometimes irritatingly smug, and the humour is occasionally grating. Roger Clark is a pleasant narrator, though I think he leans into the smugness of the text.

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