I have one more post to go on the labor theory of value. But I just sent off a letter to the editor of the London Review of Books on Terry Eagleton's  review of Edna O'Brien's The Little Red Chairs, which I'm posting here because I think that anti-communism is the demoralizing disease of what's left of the left in the West. LRB never publishes my letters because I'm not an academic or a professional writer, and because…well, that's obvious.

Terry Eagleton makes a categorical error in his review of Edna O’Brien’s The Little Red Chairs. It’s a common one made right and left by Western political writers. He places Stalin and Mao with Hitler in his moral category of “not strictly evil,” contrasting them to the “autotelic,” motivelessly malignant and therefore pure evil of O’brien’s character, Dr. Vlad. Neither Stalin nor Mao are characters in the book, but they help to establish Eagleton’s moral universe as a reviewer. So, in a way, they are off stage characters, like the one Eagleton slips into his review for reasons that remain ambiguous.This elusive character is named “the West”--which Eagleton acknowledges as having had a “high degree of responsibility” for the “political violence” that brought the evil Dr. Vlad, along with the other asylum-seekers, to Ireland, which O’brien depicts as a, corrupt neo-liberal playground. 

Eagleton allows “the West,” to slip on and off the stage in a prepositional phrase before placing him in a proper moral category, despite his “high degree of responsibility” for the “political violence”--morally neutral terms that easily slip off Eagleton’s tongue-- whereas, for Eagleton, the motiveless malignancy of Dr. Vlad “eludes presentation” and “beggars speech” (but not for “the courageous” O’Brien.) So the appearance of “the West” in Eagleton’s review is an abbreviated ambiguity that is somehow related to his understanding of the “speech-beggaring” evil Dr. Vlad perpetrates in Romantic Ireland.com’s corporate playground. Did Eagleton have to resort to fleeting euphemism in order (at least to pretend) to tell the whole truth? 

To be honest, I believe in political morality myself, and when someone glibly uses the term “the West” I think of Istvan Meszaros’ analysis of late capitalism’s "destructive production" stage, with its smug, but driven personifications going about their banal, self-validating business of violently commodifying everything--for example, manifested in austerity-ridden Romantic Ireland. com and in obscene, criminal wars that presumably “elude representation” for Eagleton but not for pop culture’s purveyors of pornographic violence (O’Brien’s portrayal of Dr. Vlad fornicating among the commodified Celts?).

It’s from this moral stance that I believe that Eagleton’s placement of Stalin and Mao with Hitler represents a categorical error. Germany--whether ruled by the self-styled “imperial socialists” of Weimar, or Hitler’s National Socialists, or Angela Merkel’s bankers--was and is of “the West” (ditto Japan). Hitler honestly claimed the same obscene, self-validating imperial rights for Germany in Poland and Russia (as did Japan in China) as the rest of “the West” practiced in the rest of the world. All appear to work ghoulishly together today.  

Whatever one thinks of them, both Stalin and Mao courageously opposed those obscene “rights.” They fought the thing itself, defensively. We should stand  unambiguously, but critically, for what they stood for. 

.