> But isn't your Aristotle filtered through Aquinas & Dante?
I don't know about Carl's Aristotle, but Marx's is filtered through Hegel for whom history is an "incalculable medial discipline of the intellectual and moral powers" and "law and morality ... are in and for themselves, universal existences, objects and aims; which are discovered only by the activity of thought, separating itself from the merely sensuous, and developing itself, in opposition thereto; and which must on the other hand, be introduced into and incorporated with the originally sensuous will, and that contrarily to its natural inclination." http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history4.htm
This development is brought about by the dialectic of negativity elaborated as estrangement within the labour process. A key aspect of this is what Hegel calls the "passions."
"Two elements, therefore, enter into the object of our investigation; the first the Idea, the second the complex of human passions; the one the warp, the other the woof of the vast arras-web of Universal History." http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hi/history3.htm
"Passions" are motives that, though inconsistent with the "universal," provide "the impelling and actuating force for accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large."
Marx sublates these ideas.
So, though England in India was motivated by "the vilest passions, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them":
"The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1853/06/25.htm
In Capital, the "primitive accumulation" that created the basis for capitalist private property by destroying "petty property" - "the private property of the labourer in his means of production" - is also represented as "accomplishing deeds shared in by the community at large."
According to Marx it "was accomplished with merciless Vandalism, and under the stimulus of passions the most infamous, the most sordid, the pettiest, the most meanly odious." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch32.htm
Eagleton's criticisms appear to ignore this Hegelian aspect of Marx's treatment of motives.
The ethical "universal" which this dialectic ultimately makes actual is elaborated, among other places, in Marx's account in "Comments on James Mill" of how we would produce "if we carried out production as human beings." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/
The account sublates Aristotle, "the greatest thinker of antiquity" according to Marx, on "eudaimonia," "virtue" and true "friendship." and on the social context required for the full development and actualization of the "virtues" - the "powers" - that define "human being" as "species-being."
Ted