It’s true that creating atheists and radicals was never the Vatican’s intention. But it has certainly been among its major effects and we would be churlish to look a gift horse in the mouth. The Catholic church has done more than Richard Dawkins, Ian Paisley, humanist societies and Marxist materialists put together to discredit the whole idea of organised religion, and there will be many who feel that it deserves our heartfelt thanks for its endeavours.

The British left has also numbered some prominent lapsed Catholics among its members, which is not as surprising as it may seem.

The category of ‘lapsed’ Catholic, by the way, is just a cunning ruse on the part of the church to prevent anyone from ever leaving it. Rather than being expelled or resigning, you are simply shifted from one category to another, like someone who becomes a country rather than town member of the Athenaeum. In fact, in some respects ‘lapsed’ is a higher distinction than ‘loyal’ (think of Graham Greene), though not quite as high as ‘saint’.

As far as saints go, there is a problem in Anglo-Saxon nations such as Britain. When someone is up for canonisation (ie being made a saint), they need to have performed at least one miracle from beyond the grave in order to make the grade; and in the geographical distribution of miracles, Britain comes dismally low on the scale. This is because we are a godless, sceptical bunch compared, say, to Spaniards and Italians, where the miracle count, like the number of sunny days, is a good deal higher.

Cardinal Newman is currently up for canonisation, but it is proving embarrassingly difficult to scrape together the requisite number of miracles. The commonsensical British simply aren’t superstitious enough. There are far fewer weeping statues, bleeding icons, roses that never wither and old ladies whose cancerous tumours disappear without trace on kissing a portrait of Pope Pius XII (the one who fervently supported the Nazis). As one moves northwards from Naples to Newcastle, the problem becomes glaringly apparent. Perhaps the Pope can fix this spot of local difficulty when he arrives.

Ex-papist left

So, to resume, why is it not surprising that so many leftists should be former papists?

For one thing, Catholicism teaches you to think in communal, institutional terms. Liberal or Protestant individualism is alien to this. You just don’t grow up thinking in those terms. It is also true that the great majority of Catholics in Britain stem from working-class Irish immigrant stock, and are thus more likely to incline to the political left than, say, middle-class Anglicans.

For another thing, Catholics are properly unafraid of rational analysis. They are taught that reason is not at odds with faith, and they believe, unlike postmodernists, that the truth is vitally important. This is why, like leftists and unlike liberals, they are not particularly nervous of ideas and doctrines. They see them simply as a distillation of what millions of common men and women over the centuries have found themselves able to believe.

Finally, the Catholic church has a vigorous tradition of social thought, some of it anti-capitalist. You are urged to think of religious faith in terms of the practical social world, not in terms of some individual inner light.

It’s no accident, for example, that so many nurses, medics and community workers in the global South are Irish in background. The Irish Catholic church has a vile and disgusting record of child abuse yet an honourable one of nursing and educating the sick and deprived in the non-European world. This tradition of sending out missionaries dates back to the early Middle Ages, and Bono and Bob Geldof are among its latest examples. Both men are self-advertising versions of Irish missionaries. That they both hail from Dublin may be coincidental, but I don’t think so. They would have attended schools that drummed the notion of social conscience and responsibility into their skulls.

Making priests marry

One suggestion for tackling the child abuse problem is that when the Pope arrives in Britain, he should hold public ceremonies in which thousands of Catholic priests are forcibly, simultaneously married, as the Moonies do. Those who refuse to be married should be poisoned on the spot. Gay members of the clergy would be allowed to opt for civil partnerships, but nobody could remain celibate. The marriages, to be sure, would be rather hard on the women involved, so each wife would receive some modest compensation (let’s say £10 million apiece) by the Vatican selling off its treasures under pain of being dissolved.

This is not in fact the smartest of ideas. Most women would rather marry a badger than a Benedictine, and are curiously averse to being coerced into marriage, even for a constructive end. In any case, this wouldn’t end the abuse of small children. For one thing, quite a few Catholic clergy ignore their vow of celibacy. For another thing, it is not celibacy but paedophilia that drives these men to commit the crimes they do.

Here, perhaps, we should pause for a moment to take thought. Why have so few commentators raised the question of why paedophilia is so rampant among the Catholic clergy? Why don’t you find the same fearful epidemic of it in say, Lloyds Bank or the BBC?

It’s true that working as a priest in a parish gives paedophiles some access to children, but this can be much exaggerated. Clerics don’t spend all their time rehearsing boys’ choirs or visiting the junior school. It’s also true that the clerical collar traditionally conferred on these men a status above suspicion. But this is the exact reverse of the truth today. In Ireland nowadays, some people might cross the street when they see a priest approaching. In the old days it used to be a British landlord.

The point, surely, is that training of Catholic priests has been traditionally designed to ensure their sexual infantilisation. It is the kind of background geared to churning out young men incapable of grown-up relationships, who then turn to children instead. Children don’t make mature emotional demands you can’t fulfill.

Fortunately, this problem looks like solving itself in the long run. Last year, the number of clerical students in Ireland who were ordained to the priesthood was in single figures. Some decades ago it would have been in the hundreds. The Catholic priesthood is dying on its feet, and the latest scandals to afflict it are likely to help it to its grave. At one level, the church will no doubt patch up the situation and bounce back. At another, deeper level, it will never recover. And there are a great many men and women, some of them permanently traumatised, whose only prayer will be one of gratitude for that fact.

Terry Eagleton’s latest book is On Evil (Yale University Press)

On the contrary, the powers that determine our destiny know very well what they are up to most of the time, and continue to get up to it even though they are aware that it is morally shabby or outrageously indefensible. If it isn’t the job of the left to put them straight, it’s partly because we have better things to do, and partly because they don’t need it in any case. Besides, you don’t bring about major political change simply by changing people’s minds. It’s their interests that need to be assailed, not their opinions.

For another thing, Chomsky argued, it isn’t the rulers who need the truth, so much as those they lord it over. The role of the intellectual left is to service the dominated, not the dominators. The point, Marx commented, is not to understand the world but to change it; but nobody has ever changed a world they didn’t understand, and this is where intellectuals have a role to play. Or, if you like, the universities.

At the moment, however, there are remarkably few intellectuals hanging around universities. There are people called academics, but that’s different. Academics spend their lives researching such momentous questions as the vaginal system of the flea (the title of a Cambridge PhD thesis I once spotted); intellectuals have the rather more arduous job of bringing ideas to bear on society as a whole. And universities, once upon a time, were where they were to be found in considerable numbers.

The absence of intellectuals

If they are to be found there much less these days, it is partly because the number of public intellectuals on the left has notably declined. A group of them, including Jürgen Habermas, Salman Rushdie and Christopher Hitchens, have either defected to the political right in the wake of 9/11 or become besotted with the ‘Free World’. No militant younger generation has replaced the likes of E P Thompson and Raymond Williams, Edward Said and Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes and Hannah Arendt.

Yet the problem is not just that the intellectual left is out of favour, compared to the years in the late 1960s and 1970s when there was a thriving socialist and feminist intellectual culture in these islands. This didn’t mean that all students back then were card-carrying Marxists or feminists; it just meant that these ideas made a kind of everyday cultural sense, enjoyed a kind of general currency, as Darwinism did in Victorian times. The real problem today is that universities have largely ceased to play their classical role as sources of critique.

There simply isn’t sufficient daylight between them and society as a whole for them to do so. Universities can’t get critical leverage in a situation of which they have become an integrated part, any more than a Picasso hanging in the lobby of the Chemical Bank can make an implicit comment on finance capitalism. By and large, academic institutions have shifted from being the accusers of corporate capitalism to being its accomplices. They are intellectual Tescos, churning out a commodity known as graduates rather than greengroceries.

Managerialising the mind

The free play of the mind has been managerialised. Holding our way of life to account has yielded to accountancy. The logic of the commodity has now penetrated into the sphere of human needs and nurture, breeding pathological symptoms there. In universities, as in transnational corporations, a largely disaffected labour force confronts a finance-obsessed managerial elite.

Utility is now the touchstone of reality, in which case one might as well give up reading Macbeth: the witches’ cursing simply can’t be quantified. One can foresee the future of this situation easily enough. Before too long, academics will be offering students a menu: £80 for their most world-shaking insights; £45 for some bright but not brilliant stuff; £15 for a standard range of ideas. As far as marking essays goes, a fiver for each comment doesn’t seem too excessive. Eagerly anticipating these developments, I already have a slot on my office door into which students must insert a pound coin simply to gain admission. Since they can’t afford to buy books, I have launched a rather profitable little lending scheme.

Whereas critique assesses actuality in the light of possibility, measuring the indicative by the yardstick of the subjunctive, the ambition of advanced capitalism is not simply to combat radical ideas, or even to discredit them. It is to abolish the very notion that there could be a serious alternative to the present.

Its task, in brief, is to annihilate that perilous power known as the imagination. The past is a narrative of unbroken progress from the mollusc to monopoly capitalism, destined in the fullness of time to give birth to that avatar of the World-Spirit known as Gordon Brown. The future is simply the present plus more options. The apogee of history is the free market. It was for this that the ancient Greeks wrangled and the Levellers revolted.

Cultural custodians

When universities become incorporated, the role of the critical intellectual tends to shift outside the college walls to the writers and artists. It is they who are landed with the unenviable role of acting as the custodian of humane values in a social order that tips its hat to such values in theory while flouting them in practice. Here, too, however, there is a serious problem. Writers and artists can be relied on to be militant and robust in defence of individual freedom and civil liberties. That, after all, is the very air they breathe as professionals. Yet such a politics has its limits – it cannot really push beyond a very middle-class English liberalism.

Novelists such as Salman Rushdie, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan may be vociferous in their opposition to Islamism, but it is hard to imagine any of them speaking out in defence of, say, council workers’ wages or the right of Iraqis to defend themselves against a brutal invasion. Given their conditions of labour, writers and artists are unlikely to have much sense of collectivity.

There is something self-interested as well as valuable about their pleas for free speech. As self-appointed champions of civilisation against barbarism, they fail to see that a certain barbarism is the flipside of civilisation itself, inseparable from its smooth operation. For every cathedral, a pit of bones; for every artistic masterpiece, human wretchedness and back-breaking toil. Writing novels, like any other form of cultural activity, is made possible only by the labour of others. This isn’t a fact of which Amis and his ilk seem particularly aware.

Universities can’t be changed in isolation. To prise them loose from the grip of late capitalism, we need a society that can afford free education for its young people and academic independence from private interests.

This means transforming the economic system that currently syphons off billions of pounds for shareholder profits, fat-cat salaries, weapons, offshore tax scams, useless commodities and a good deal more.

To achieve such political goals, we need, among other things, a new generation of public intellectuals prepared to do the hard analysis demanded, and to engage in the task of spreading the word abroad. Otherwise, we shall continue with a situation in which, when Martin Amis made his odious comments about harassing and discriminating against innocent Muslims, his close friend Christopher Hitchens wrote that his remarks were simply ‘mind-experiments’, while his other close friend Salman Rushdie claimed that Amis had not spoken of discrimination at all, even though the novelist had spoken of favouring ‘discriminatory stuff’.

It is remarkable how the liberal intelligentsia reveals such a disinterested passion for truth and justice, except when it comes to its mates.

Terry Eagleton was forced to retire from his post as John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at Manchester University in July 2008

Terror first sees the light of day, like so much else in the modern world, in the French revolution. It’s from the Jacobin terror that we inherit the word terroriste, and its first translation into English as ‘terrorist’ was probably the work of Britain’s doughtiest opponent of the revolution, Edmund Burke.

As an Irishman whose relatives had been active in anti-colonial struggles, and who as a child attended a hedge school (open-air school) in County Cork, Burke knew a thing or two about terror. When the word was pronounced, he thought of the public execution of Irish rebels at Dublin Castle, not just of the guillotine. But he thought of the guillotine too, because to his mind what the French Jacobins were perpetrating was pretty much the catastrophic error committed by the British in Ireland, India and the American colonies.

Burke is usually considered by the left as a crusty old Tory, though he was in fact a liberal Whig. He spoke up courageously for American independence despite the angry protestations of his constituents, and in a spectacular trial in the House of Commons mercilessly hounded Warren Hastings, chief of the East India Company and representative of British imperialism in the sub-continent. So Burke was not an enemy of the French Terror in the way that any old reactionary would be. Instead, he saw in it the disastrous breakdown of political hegemony; and he thought that this was also the secret of Britain’s failure in some of its major colonies.

Burke was not opposed to a stiff dose of terror as such. On the contrary, he was honest enough to admit that the law itself is in a sense terroristic, and in his view it needed to be. Only in this way would it intimidate its subjects into a suitable sense of awe. And, without this meek submissiveness, all hell might break loose in London, as it had in Paris.

So terror, in his view, was not just a sudden violent irruption into an otherwise peaceful situation – there was a dash of terror about law and order itself. It was just that, with his experience of British brutality in Ireland behind him, Burke also believed that this daunting power of the law had to be softened and tempered if it was to be effective. It had to engage the affections of the people, not just their fear.

This was what Antonio Gramsci was later to call hegemony. Burke may not have had the word, but he certainly had the concept. He believed, for example, that the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in his native country had never succeeded in making the transition from a dominant to a hegemonic class. The Irish small farmers tugged their forelocks to them in public, and then waited until night fell so they could go out and smash up their property. The British ruling class, Burke considered, had developed practices and customs over centuries that bound the affections of their subjects to them. (He was obviously not thinking of Peterloo.) In Ireland, however, this had lamentably failed to happen. And if you lack hegemony, then you will be forced to use terroristic coercion instead.

Burke looked at all this in gender terms. The law was masculine, but hegemony was a way of feminising it, making it sweeter and softer. For coercion to do its work, it must drape itself in the alluring dress of a woman. The law for Burke is a cross-dresser. But there is always an ugly bulge in its decorous garments. In Burke’s eyes, women are beautiful, while men are sublime. And the most potent form of authority is one that combines the two. Like the stereotypical female seducer, the law must lull us into sweet oblivion of its own sublime terror. Like God, it is terrible to look upon with the naked eye; but if we view it through the veils of hegemony, we can find its edicts more to our taste.

As well as being one of the earliest theorists of hegemony, Burke was also one of the first theorists of sado-masochism. The two are in fact intimately related, which might have come as a surprise to Antonio Gramsci. If we come to love the law, it is because in Burke’s eyes we reap delight from being browbeaten and humiliated. Freud would say much the same a century later about our relationship to the superego. But this relish in being dominated, for both thinkers, only goes so far. If the law strips off its seductive drapery and exposes the full extent of its unlovely power – if, so to speak, it becomes a flasher rather than a cross-dresser – we will find it repulsive and revolt against it. Terror breaks out when hegemony breaks down. And this, for Burke, is what had happened in his own time all the way from Boston to Bombay.

In his own way, then, Burke acknowledged what scarcely any Western politician today is brave enough to acknowledge: that the only solution to terror is justice. Which is not to suggest for one moment that he endorsed this dreadful force that rips off the heads of innocent men and women from their shoulders. On the contrary, he was Britain’s most eloquent denouncer of it when it broke out across the English Channel. Rather, Burke is not mealy-mouthed about terror, however much he may rightly abhor it. He was bold enough to recognise that in a sense it forms part of everyday life – just as for Freud, the cruel, vindictive power of the superego, and the terrifying force of the death drive, are part of what he calls the psychopathology of everyday life. Terror is indeed an appalling, extraordinary, morally obscene event; but in a sense it is also as close to us as breathing. Only by confronting it, rather than repressing it, can we hope to get beyond it.

If the political concept of terror first took root in revolutionary France, then one vital fact about it instantly follows. Terror began as state terror, which is how it has most typically continued. The Jacobin Terror was not a strike by a secretive cabal of fanatics against the state, but a strike by a secretive cabal of fanatics known as the state. Terror has an impeccable bourgeois pedigree.

Burke was shrewd enough to see that some form of terror lies at the origin of most political states. Most states come into being by invasion, occupation, usurpation, revolution and so on. The coming of law and order was neither lawful nor orderly. This is another sense in which terror and everyday life – social life – are bound up together: without past terror, no present society. The embarrassment of the French Revolution was that it had made this truth painfully visible. Since this was a state in the tumultuous throes of its birth, it ripped the veils from that original violence – something that was true of most other states as well, but that most of them (Britain, for example) had managed over the centuries to live down. What was appalling about the Jacobin Terror from this viewpoint was not just its bloodthirsty ferocity but the fact that it let the ideological cat out of the bag. And this is certainly one reason why it put the wind up Westminster.

Middle-class capitalist societies are particularly shame-faced about the violence that founded them. This is because the middle classes, more than any other social formation, are necessarily committed to peace, stability and security. Without such a framework, capitalism cannot operate. So they are eager to make the transition from bandits to bankers. Like a hippy applying to law school, they need to put their disreputable political past behind them. They must thrust it into the political unconscious, repressing the original sin that brought them to birth. States that are too raw and recent to do this – Israel and Northern Ireland, for example – are likely to have a hard time. They are much less likely to appear natural, inevitable, time-hallowed phenomena, like Dennis Skinner or the House of Lords.

Yet living down the violence that founded the state in the first place is no easy task. This is because that furious power lives on in the present – and it lives on, of all ironic places, in the form of sovereignty itself. Terror now ceases to be anarchic, and becomes ‘sublimated’, as Freud would put it, into that majestic, intimidatory power known as law and order. Just as for Freud the superego and the id (the chaotic forces of the unconscious) are on intimate terms with each other, so, paradoxically, terror and social order draw life from one another. Terror ceases to be lawless and becomes legitimate. It no longer takes place on the cobblestones of Paris, but withdraws from public view to the prisons and torture camps of respectably established regimes.

But there is another way in which terror lives on in capitalist societies. Burke argued that market competition itself, with its ferocious struggle for dominion, was itself a strain of the revolutionary violence that founded the state, one still lingering inside it. Without these virile, aggressive energies, he thought, social life would become feminised in all the worst ways. We would simply sink into apathy and inertia. We would become excessively beautiful, rather than vigorously sublime.

It’s clear that there is no moral equivalence between blowing up a crowded bus station and driving your competitors out of business. The point is that capitalist society itself, as Marx never ceased to point out, is the most revolutionary formation in human history. It is eternally agitating, transforming, shattering, dissolving and reinventing – and all this as part of everyday life. So it is an object lesson in the way that under capitalism, turbulence and everyday life do not form a seamless narrative: first the revolutionary turbulence that launched the state, then the sedate tranquility of everyday life. On the contrary, the two are deeply interwoven. And this means that there is always a fearful instability at the very heart of such political stability, which its enemies can exploit.

The philosopher Hegel, Edmund Burke’s contemporary, saw precisely this. He, too, was a witness of the birth of the new middle-class order in France; and he, too, spotted something terrifying at its heart. The name he gave to this terror was absolute freedom – or, as he scathingly called it, ‘the freedom of the void’. Bourgeois society dreamed of a freedom so pure and absolute that it could tolerate no boundaries or restrictions. And this, in a creaturely, constricted world, was bound to present itself as a form of terror. In the end, this pure freedom even became an obstacle to itself, and thus ended up devouring itself, like the Jacobin Terror. Eventually it was the revolutionaries themselves who filled the carts trundling their way up to the guillotine.

Absolute freedom eats itself up. Yet its violence, today as in Hegel’s time, continues to infiltrate the daily life of capitalist societies. Absolute freedom means negative freedom: a freedom from all restraint, which can see limits only as barriers to humanity, not as constitutive of it. The world is imperilled not by hard-nosed cynics who insist that nothing is possible, but by wide-eyed, ‘can-do’ idealists for whom anything is possible. Most of these are known as Americans. When the ancient Greeks encountered this kind of blasphemous overreaching, they called it ‘hubris’ and looked fearfully to the skies. And it is from the skies that it has had its tragic come-uppance.

Socialism is not about reaching for the stars, but reminding us of our frailty and mortality, and so of our need for one another. In contrast, absolute freedom regards the world as just so much pliable stuff to be manipulated in whatever way takes its fancy. This is why postmodernism, or some aspects of it, is one of its latest inheritors. For all its consumerist greed, this uncompromising freedom is a virulently anti-materialist force; for matter is what resists you, and absolute freedom is as impatient with such resistance as the US is with the resistance in Iraq. The world becomes just raw material to cuff into shape. Michael Jackson’s nose is its icon. It is only when such raw materials begin to include whole people and nations that it becomes a form of deadly terror.

Most of the time, this ravaging beast called absolute freedom is kept safely caged. It is hemmed in by laws, procedures, obligations, regulations, the rights of others. Yet the dream of being the only individual in the world (for this is what such freedom would finally involve) never quite fades, given the narcissism of the human species. From time to time, then, this madness, which lurks at the very core of conventional middle-class society, breaks out anew. It is like a lunatic who gives the slip to his keeper and goes on the rampage. This is how Burke saw the Jacobins, who ended up disappearing down the black hole of their own sublime negativity.

Being alone with oneself for all eternity is a traditional image of hell, like being stuck forever with some bar-room bore. Yet it is this hellish condition, astonishingly, that the neo-conservative thugs and fanatics in the White House are most entranced by. Not for themselves, to be sure, but for their nation. Their vision of paradise is a world that holds nothing but the United States, even though it is some other people’s vision of hell.

There is one problem, however, that they, in common with the Jacobins, are unable to resolve. If you end up crushing and subjugating all the resistance around you, who will be left to tell you who you are? For you cannot work this out in isolation. Identity involves otherness. And if you find that otherness intolerable, your own sense of yourself will gradually begin to implode. You will be left knowing nothing whatsoever, least of all yourself.

The nation with its military bases in every continent is, not accidentally, the one most ignorant of geography, imagining as it does that Malawi is a Disney character. Like the Jacobins in Edmund Burke’s eyes, it is blinded by an excess of its own light. In the end, it is its own triumphal technology that helps to bring it low, as its enemies lay hands on this technology and turn it against it. Like the opponent of a skilled judo fighter, it is entangled in its own ungainly strength. It is this, not its weakness, that is its fatal flaw. And this process, by which your own brute force brings you toppling to the ground, is happening in Iraq as I write.

A future that was not somehow in line with the present would be unintelligible, just as one that was only in line with it would be undesirable. A desirable future must be a feasible one, otherwise we shall come to desire uselessly and, like Freud’s neurotic, fall ill of longing. But if we simply read off the future from the present, we cancel the futurity of the future, rather as the new historicism tends to erase the pastness from the past. The seriously bizarre utopian, the one with his head buried most obdurately in the sand, is the hard-nosed pragmatist who imagines the future will be pretty much like the present only more so. The pure fantasy of this delusion, that the IMF, Brad Pitt and chocolate chip cookies will still all be up and running in the year 5000, makes the hairy, wild-eyed apocalypticists look like spineless moderates. Whatever Francis Fukuyama may think, the problem is not that we are likely to have too little future, but too much. Our children are likely to live in interesting times.

It’s highly probable that there will be a major crisis of capitalism in the coming decades, which is not to say that it is certain – or that there will be socialism. That the future is bound to be different from the present doesn’t guarantee that it will be any better. But as the West draws its wagons into tighter and tighter circles and slams the hatches on an increasingly alienated, displaced, deprived population of the excluded (both at home and abroad), and as civic society is increasingly torn up by the roots, it doesn’t require a Nostradamus to foresee a spot of turbulence on the horizon.

You can’t let market forces rip without a lot of social featherbedding, otherwise you risk too much instability and resentment; but it’s exactly that sort of featherbedding that market forces destroy. The system undermines its own hegemony, without much need of help from the left. What is to be feared is less that history will merely repeat itself, than the prospect that it will begin to unravel while the left is dishevelled, disorganised and incapable of steering ragged, spontaneous revolt into productive channels. The problem then is that a lot more people are likely to get hurt than might otherwise be the case.

This is all the more regrettable when you consider how remarkably modest a proposal the left is really advancing. All it wants are conditions in which everybody on the planet can get enough to eat and have a job, freedom, dignity and the like. Hardly a revolutionary affair. Yet it’s a sign of just how dire things are that it would take a revolution to achieve this. That is because of the extremism of capitalism, not of socialism. That things are very bad, by the way, is the kind of simple-minded claim that distinguishes radicals from liberal reformers, but not certain conservatives. Liberals, pragmatists and modernisers cling to the Utopian delusion that there’s nothing fundamentally wrong. Conservatives see that there is something fundamentally wrong; it’s just that they tend to be mistaken about what it is. The most blatantly naïve form of idealism is not socialism, but the belief that, given enough time, capitalism will feed the world. Just how long do you let such a view run before judging it discredited?

I’ve never been very convinced, for all that, that terms like optimism and pessimism make much political sense. What matters – what’s indeed the necessary condition of any fruitful moral or political action – is realism, which sometimes leads you to be glum and sometimes to be jubilant. Realism is extraordinarily arduous. The point is to be gloomy for the right reasons, which is where the left sometimes gets it wrong. So let me briefly spell out some reasons for the left not to be discouraged.

First, I think it’s a mistake to think that the current crisis of the left has anything much to do with the collapse of communism. Few socialists were disenchanted by the events of the late 1980s, since to be disillusioned it is necessary previously to be illusioned. The last time that large numbers in the West were illusioned about the Soviet Union was in the 1930s, which is rather a long time ago. Indeed, if you want the most effective critique of that system, you have to go not to Western liberalism but to major currents of Marxism, which were always a good deal more radical in their resistance to Stalinism than Isaiah Berlin. In any case, the global left was in deep crisis long before the first brick was dislodged from the Berlin wall.

If there’s a reason for the left to feel dismayed by the end of communism, it’s more because that collapse demonstrated the formidable power of capitalism (which, through a deliberately ruinous arms race, was largely responsible for bringing the Soviet bloc to its knees), than because some precious life form disappeared with the Ceausescus. Even so, what happened in the late 1980s was a revolution, for all its horrific consequences. And revolutions weren’t supposed to happen in the 1980s.

Nor is the supposed apathy of the populace a good enough reason for feeling glum. That’s largely because it’s a myth. People who clamour against refugees and demand the right to defend their property with a neutron bomb may be unenlightened, but they aren’t apathetic. There are lots of good citizens in the north of where I live, Ireland, who are all too unapathetic. Men and women are usually only apathetic about kinds of politics that are apathetic about them. People may not currently think much of the politicians or theories of surplus value, but if you try to drive a motorway through their backyard or close down their children’s school, they will protest swiftly enough. And why not? It is rational to resist an unjust power if one may do so without too much risk and with a reasonable chance of success. Such protests may not be in the least effective, but that’s not the point at issue. It is also rational, in my view, to refuse radical political change as long as a system is able to afford you some gratification, however meagre, and as long as the alternatives to it remain perilous and obscure. In any case, most people invest too much energy in simply surviving, in immediate material matters, to have much left over for politics. But whereas the demand to be reasonable nowadays means ‘cool it’, in the 1790s it meant throwing up the barricades. Moreover, once a political system ceases to be able to provide enough gratification to bind its citizens to it, and once reasonably low-risk, realistic alternatives emerge, then political revolt is as predictable as the word ‘like’ in the conversation of a Cornell freshman. The fall of apartheid is a signal instance of this taking place in our own time.

There’s little evidence, then, that the citizenry is, in general, torpid or complacent. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that they’re considerably alarmed about a number of key issues; even if most of them are about as likely to turn to socialism as theosophy. Though – faced as we are with the Brazilian landless movement, French working-class militancy, student anti-sweatshop agitation in the US, anarchistic raids on finance capitalism and the like – one shouldn’t exaggerate the lack of leftist resistance either.

Nor can the ‘disappearing working class’ thesis survive close scrutiny. It’s true that the proletariat has shrunk in size and significance; but the proletariat, in the sense of waged industrial manual workers, isn’t quite the same thing as the working class. You don’t cease to be working class because you’re a waiter rather than a garment worker. Roughly speaking, ‘proletariat’ denotes a kind of labour, whereas ‘working class’ denotes a position within the social relations of production. (It’s partly because in Marx’s day the working class was pretty much identical with the industrial proletariat that this confusion has arisen.) In any case, even the proletariat, in a strict, technical sense of the term, has increased absolutely in global terms. It’s arguable that in global terms it has declined relative to other classes, but there was never any requirement that the working class be the majority social class for it to qualify as a revolutionary agent. The working class is the ‘universal’ class not necessarily because it is the most numerous, but because for it to achieve justice would mean a global or universal transformation of the system.

Nor is there any requirement that the working class be the most miserable and wretched of folk. There are plenty of people – vagrants, the elderly, and the unemployed (what we might today call the lumpen intelligentsia) – who are far worse off. The working class has been viewed by some socialists as the agents of revolutionary change not because it suffers a lot (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t), but because it’s so placed within the capitalist system as to be feasibly capable of taking over. Like some other radical forces, it’s simultaneously at the root and source of that system and incapable of being wholly included within it, part of its logic yet a subversion of it. If the working class, for Marxism, has a special role, it’s not because it’s especially miserable or numerous, but because it is, in the Freudian sense, ‘symptomatic’: that which represents contradiction, which, like the boundary of a field, is both in and out and manifests something of the dual or contradictory logic of the system as a whole. If it’s in some sense a ‘totaliser’ of that system, it’s because it represents the contradictions of the regime as a whole. Who else but the men and women who create the system, whose livelihood depends on it, who are capable of running it justly and collectively, and who would most benefit from such a change, should take it over?

In the ancient world the word ‘proletariat’ (proletarius in Latin) referred to those who served the state by producing children (who manufactured labour power) because they were too poor to serve it by property. The proletariat, in other words, is as much about sexual as material production; and since the burden of sexual reproduction falls more upon women than men, it’s no hyperbole to say that in the world of antiquity, the working class was a woman. As, indeed, it is increasingly today. The geographer David Harvey speaks of the oppositional forces of the future as the ‘feminised proletariat’. Those dreary old bickerings between socialists and feminists are being made increasingly redundant by advanced capitalism itself. It’s capitalism that is throwing socialists and feminists into each other’s arms. (I speak metaphorically.) Of course, these oppositional forces may fail. But that’s a different matter to their not existing in the first place.

Should the left be gloomy because Marxism has been finally discredited? No, because it hasn’t. It’s been resoundingly defeated, but that’s a different matter. To call it ‘discredited’ is a bit like calling Mozambique discredited because it was once owned by the Portuguese. If Marxism has been discredited by the fall of the Soviet bloc, then why wasn’t it already discredited in the 1960s and 1970s, when we already knew well enough what a grotesque travesty of socialism the Soviet bloc was? Marxist theory hasn’t been unmasked as intellectually bankrupt; partly because it didn’t need to be. It’s not so much out of answers as out of the question. A whole cultural and political shift has left it behind as a practical force, but hardly disproved it as a description of the world. Indeed, as a description of the world, what could be more to the point than a document of 1848 (The Communist Manifesto), which foresees a future of spreading globalisation, deepening inequalities, mounting immiseration and intensifying warfare? This is surely a lot less out of date than Maynard Keynes.

In any case, when people call Marxism discredited or irrelevant, they imply that they know just what Marxism is, which is more than I can boast. Devout anti-essentialists speak of the failure of Marxism as though we could isolate some essence of the creed that has now disintegrated. But figuring out what’s peculiar to Marxism as a doctrine is no easy matter. The concern with class? Certainly not: Marx and Engels themselves insisted that this was by no means new to them. Political revolution, class struggle, the abolition of private property, human cooperation, social equality, an end to alienation and market forces? Not at all: many leftists have shared these views without being Marxists; William Blake, for example, shared almost all of them; so did Raymond Williams, who didn’t call himself a Marxist. The economic determination of history? Well, perhaps that’s getting a little warmer; but Sigmund Freud, himself no friend of Marxism, held that the basic motive of social life was an economic one, and that without this dull compulsion we’d just lie around all day. Different material stages of history as determining different forms of social life? Well, this was pretty much a commonplace of the radical Enlightenment.

It’s the survival of socialism, not Marxism, which is important; though it may turn out that Marxism has been such a major carrier of socialism that the survival of the one is impossible without the survival of the other. What is peculiar to Marxism is a fairly technical theory of the mechanisms by which one historical mode of production mutates into another. If the working class is to come to power, it is because this is the logical result of that mechanism. But you can believe in the need for the former without believing in the latter. Marxism is often spoken of as an indissoluble unity of theory and practice; but a non-Marxist socialist can support the kinds of practice a Marxist does without adhering to the theory. So this doctrine no doubt needs to be re-examined. In the last century, petit bourgeois nationalism quite often did some of the things, politically speaking, which Marxism recommends, such as overthrowing capitalist social relations. The issue is a complex one.

Nor is socialism theoretically bankrupt in the sense of being cleaned out of ideas. There are still plenty of good leftist ideas around the place: not least a fertile, suggestive body of work on what a socialist economy might look like, on how far markets would still be necessary for certain functions, and so on. One might add, too, that the 20th century did not witness the defeat of the revolutionary impulse, merely a change of address; in its middle decades it saw the victory of the most wildly successful radical movement of the modern epoch – anti-colonialism, which swept the old empires finally from their seats of power. Socialism has been described as the greatest reform movement in history, but anti-colonial struggle has been far and away the most successful.

No, none of the reasons listed here are justifications for feeling blue. Nor is the belief that the capitalist system is impregnable. Some disenchanted radicals may hold this view, but the IMF certainly doesn’t. It’s quite aware of how sickeningly unstable the whole business is. And globalisation deepens that instability; if every bit of the world is tied up with every other bit, then a wobble at one point can mean a spasm at another and a crisis at a third.

What, then, has the left got to feel blue about? The answer is surely obvious: it’s not that the system is monumentally stable, just formidably powerful – far too powerful for us at present. Does this mean that the system will just go on and on? Not at all. It is perfectly capable of grinding to a halt without any help from its political opponents. Whether this is good or bad news is a debatable point. It doesn’t take socialism to bring capitalism crashing down; it only takes capitalism itself; the system is certainly capable of committing hari kari. But it does take socialism, or something like it, for the system to be brought down without plunging us all into barbarism. And this is why oppositional forces are so important: for resisting as far as possible the fascism, mayhem and savagery that are bound to arise from a major crisis of the system. Walter Benjamin wisely observed that revolution wasn’t a runaway train; it was the application of the emergency brake. The role of socialist ideas is, in this sense, to protect the as-yet unborn future: to offer, not a storm, but a place of shelter in the tempest that is contemporary history.Terry Eagleton is professor of cultural theory and John Rylands Fellow at the University of Manchester. His latest book is After Theory (Allen Lane, 2003)