SOURCE: Eagleton, Terry. “Marxism and the Future of Criticism.” In Writing the Future, edited by David Wood, pp. 177-80. London and New York: Routledge, 1990.

In the following essay, Eagleton discusses the difficulty of dealing with the future in terms of Marxist literary theory.

Marxists differ from most other theorists in that for them the future is at once the most crucial and most neglected historical tense. A Marxist is only secondarily enthused by the current hermeneutical or deconstructive wrangles over the knowability or otherwise of the past, and the relation of past to present, since for Marxism there is no important knowledge of either past or present which is not always under the sign of a possible or desirable future. History is to that extent for a Marxist constructed backwards—not just, as many would agree, from the present, but from a calculable future of that present, which...