In Marxist tradition

Eric Hobsbawm in September 2012 at his residence in London.-AP

The historians eye allowed Eric Hobsbawm to see the Marxist tradition as always unfolding and the Marxist optic of self-reflection as a caution against the ossification of Marxs writings.

ERIC HOBSBAWMS How to Change the World has 16 essays elaborated over 400 pages. The first essay was written in 1957 and the last in 2010. Over the course of these 53 years, Hobsbawm wrote his remarkable historical quartet: The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848 (1962), The Age of Capital 1848-1875 (1975), The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (1987), and The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914-1991 (1994). The essays in the book under review do not form a central part of Hobsbawms oeuvre. They were written either as interventions into various debates, as forewords for Marx editions, or else for a monumental project undertaken by the Italian publishing house Einaudi, the multi-volume Storia del Marxismo. How to Change the World, then, is not so much a systematic study of Marxism. It does not have the range of Leszek Kolakowskis Main Currents of Marxism (1976-78), but then nor does it have its politics (Kolakowski had been a member of the Polish United Workers Party but left it after the Polish October of 1956). Neither does it have the razor-sharp arguments about Marxism that is the hallmark of Perry Andersons two putative summary volumes, Arguments within English Marxism (1980) and In the Tracks of Historical Materialism (1983). Hobsbawm loved his tradition, and it is that love which has glued together this collection.

Born in Alexandria (Egypt) in 1917, Eric Hobsbawm came to communism and then Marxism through the traumatic experience of European fascism. In the library of the Prinz-Heinrichs Gymnasium in Berlin, the young student found The Communist Manifesto, whose messianic certainties appealed to him in a Berlin headed for catastrophe. It led him to the students wing of the German Communist Party (KPD), the Sozialistischer Schulerbund (SSB) in 1932, where he was buoyed by the confidence of it members, since they showed no signs of discouragement. From 1928 to 1933, the KPD whipped the Left, making the argument that there was no difference between the fascists (Hitlers party) and the social fascists (the Social Democrats). Only in the mid-1930s did the KPD drive forward the Popular Front policyto form alliances with all parties against fascism. It was the combination of the remarkable optimism of the communists and the ecumenical Popular Front policy that marked Eric Hobsbawms Marxism. He would not leave the communist party, even as his friends in the Historians Group in Britain left it after Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956, nor would he throw himself into a sectarian corner. His was always a capacious Marxism, open to all kinds, eager to form allies, unwilling to lose hope.

The first 10 chapters of this book, Marx Today being the opening chapter and The Influence of Marxism 1880-1914 being the tenth one, are mainly either close studies of this or that Marxist text or kaleidoscopic studies of their world and their influence. Among these chapters are the brilliant 1964 introduction to extracts from Marxs Grundrisse (the full book would only appear in English in 1973, translated by Martin Nicolaus for Penguin) and the 1998 introduction to the Verso edition of The Communist Manifesto. The latter book played a central role in Hobsbawms Marxismit was clear, he writes in this collection, that by 1848, Marxist socialism had transcended the earlier socialist critiques in three respects: 1. A partial critique of socialism was replaced by a comprehensive, or total, critique of the system of capitalism and its social order; 2. Socialism was understood in terms of an evolutionary historical analysis, which means it could be shown how it emerged as a theory and a movement when it did, and why the historic development of capitalism must in the end generate a socialist society; 3. It clarified that the proletariat as a class would emerge from the fact of its existence into a political force and that this force would be the mode of transition from the old to the new society. In these three respects, then, socialism has ceased to be utopian and become scientific. These ideas emerge out of what Kolakowski called the Promethean motif in Marxism, the belief that humans can steal the gods fire to reshape a corrupted world.

The essay I have quoted from was published in 1982. Two decades later, Hobsbawm lost some of the hopefulness of the communism of his early years and of the Marxism that sustained most of his historical texts. In his memoir, Interesting Times (2002), he wrote, The twentieth century is over. The twenty-first opens on twilight and obscurity. The essays on Marx (indeed most of this volume) were written with the fact of actually existing socialism in mind and with the anticipation that some kind of breakthrough on behalf of the working class would halt the forward march of capital and turn the tide to labour. No such rupture occurred, except the rising tide of neoliberalism and climate change and financial crises that seemed not to produce an organised force to provide alternatives to a system that has shown that it is unable to heal itself. To reread these older essays reminds one of the optimism. But even this is cautious. Hobsbawms Marxism might have been learned at the knees of the British Communist Party and through the works and selections of the classics published under the auspices of the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow, but he did not subscribe uncritically to the overly formulaic Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism churned out from Moscow.

An unfolding tradition

Hobsbawms commitment to serious history-writing prevented him from being a scribe for a tradition that had already seen itself as completed. The historians eye allowed Hobsbawm to see the Marxist tradition as always unfolding and the Marxist optic of self-reflection as a caution against the ossification of Marxs writings. What could be learned from Marx, he notes, was his method of facing the tasks of analysis and action rather than ready-made lessons to be derived from classic texts. If this were the case, it is striking that this collection has so little about the new writings in the Marxist tradition through the 20th century. The last few chapters, which take the story of Marxism from 1945 to 1983 and then briefly to the present, are mostly meandering essays with occasional capsules on various historians (on Fernand Braudels economic history) or important controversies (on Eduard Bernsteins view on the evolution of socialism from capitalism). In his 1973 collection Revolutionaries, there are a few chapters on Jean-Paul Sartre and Louis Althusser, Karl Korsch and Ernst Bloch, but none of these is given extensive treatment.

In his essay on Althusser, Hobsbawm reveals what is so attractive to him about the Marxist tradition:

[Althussers approach of structural-functionalism provides] a means of liberating [Marxism] from the characteristic evolutionism of the nineteenth century, with which it was so often combined, though at the cost of also liberating it from the concept of progress which was also characteristic of nineteenth-century thought, including Marxs. But why should we wish to do so? Marx himself certainly would not have wished to do so.

The commitment to progress was one of the many enlightenment values that Hobsbawm saw as decisive to Marxism. Western Marxism had lost this commitment by the late 1950s. Hobsbawm saw it as essential. British communism, mired in intrigue and isolation, no longer practised allegiance to the future. Unhappy with the British Communist Party, Hobsbawm considered handing in his resignation. The Polish Marxist Isaac Deutscher halted his hand. In Interesting Times, Hobsbawm reflected, In practice, I recycled myself from militant to sympathiser or fellow-traveller or, to put it another way, from effective membership of the British Communist Party to something like spiritual membership of the Italian CP [Italian Communist Party, or PCI], which fitted my ideas of communism rather better.

Gramsci

In the 1950s, Hobsbawm travelled to Spain and Italy, where he began research on the Spanish anarchists and the Italian Lazzaretti and the Sicilian peasant leagues. These studies would anchor his 1959 Primitive Rebels. During this research, Hobsbawm learned about the Italian Communist intellectual Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) and read his Prison Notebooks (collected and edited by the PCI leader Palmiro Togliatti, who became a close friend of Hobsbawm). In 1957, Hobsbawm pressured Lawrence and Wishart to publish a selection from these Notebooks, under the title The Modern Prince and Other Writings (a much fuller selection was produced by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith for L&W in 1971). In these early years, when Gramsci was little known, Hobsbawm interpreted him not only for the Anglophone audience, but also for the Italian one (a significant essay, which Hobsbawm pointed to on many occasions but which is not in this collection, is his Por lo studio delleclassisubalterne, Societ 16, 1960). How to Change the World contains two brief essays on Gramsci, but these hold all the keys to Hobsbawms assessment of Gramsci and Marxism.

Marxist theory of politics

For Hobsbawm, it is not Lenin but Gramsci whose major contribution to Marxism is to have pioneered a Marxist theory of politics. One might cavil with this statement, and indeed with Hobsbawms lack of interest in Marxs own reflections on the Paris Commune, themselves a theory of politics. Nevertheless, this is a very useful introduction to a communist whose own politics has been taken away from him. Gramscis vocabulary (subaltern and hegemony) is bandied about without a sense of its place in Gramscis political framework. Gramsci had a total view of the worldproduction relations in the factory or in the field could not be understood simply from economic history, but they had to have a full sense of the cultural world and political power. To overthrow the present order, one could not simply seize power or change the property relations. The role of a communist party was to engage in ceaseless struggle to prepare the cultural terrain for a new kind of future order. The basic problem of hegemony, Hobsbawm wrote, is not how revolutionaries come to power, though this question is very important. It is how they come to be accepted, not only as the politically existing or unavoidable rulers, but as guides and leaders.

Lenin was a theorist of the how, of strategy. Gramsci was the theorist of the cultural and political effort to produce a socialist morality in political life. A communist party must be organically linked to mass labour movement to root itself in working class life and must not be, as Gramsci put it, the equivalent of gypsy bands or nomads. Hobsbawm ends his 1982 reflections on Gramsci with a long question:

Quite apart from the other disadvantages of this neglect of politics, how can we expect to transform human life, to create socialist society (as distinct from a socially owned and managed economy), when the mass of the people are excluded from the political process, and may even be allowed to drift into depoliticisation and apathy about public matters?

It was both his historiography and his fealty to Gramsci that kept Hobsbawms Marxism alert to the importance of cultural practicethat it was not sufficient to see culture as somehow anterior to the communist project, supplementary to its theory, Marxism. Culture had to be at the centre of things.

The World

The first volume of Hobsbawms quartet is subtitled Europe, 1789-1848. The next three volumes do not have this narrowness. They try to take in the world. By the third volume, and in his memoir, Hobsbawm approaches world history although he is still restrained by his own cultural formation. Much the same in his tales of Marxism. The long histories of Marxism that close out the book are mostly about the fate of European Marxismits turn to the academy, its certain isolation, its break from movements of the working class, and its consequent retreat into abstract theory. This was not the case for Marxism outside Europe.

There is one fleeting mention of Perus Jos Carlos Maritegui (1894-1930), who pioneered a Marxism that was attentive to indigenism. There is no engagement with the rich tradition of Japanese Marxism (such as Samez Kuruma, 1879-1946 and Kozo Uno, 1897-1977) or Maoism, and nothing on Indian Marxism. When I last saw Hobsbawm it was at a conference in Cambridge (United Kingdom), where I had presented a paper on the Marxism of E.M.S. Namboodripad. At age 93, he was nonetheless curious and wanted to know more. One of the biggest gaps in the literature of Marxism is a consideration of people like Maritegui and Uno alongside Gramsci and Mandel. Another major gap in Hobsbawms book is a lack of engagement with the tradition of Soviet Marxism that was vanquished during the period of Stalins leadership, developed by people such as the legal scholar Evgeny Paskhukanis (1891-1937) and the philosopher and art scholar Lyubov Axelrod (1868-1946). In How to Change the World, there is no Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) and no Ernest Mandel (1923-1995), and only episodic appearances of Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919). This is not from lack of appreciation or understanding. He simply did not know some of these people, or believed that their work was derivative, or else they were, as he said of Trotsky, heretics.

Marxism, Hobsbawm writes, has been a major theme in the intellectual music of the modern world. This relates to the world of ideas, but it also does so to the world of political action, which is why he ended his preface to this volume with the hope that it would help readers to reflect on the question of what its and humanitys future will be in the twenty-first century. Eric Hobsbawm was born in 1917, the year of Marxisms greatest revolution to date, and died in October, the month of that revolution 95 years ago.