The Contradictions of Eric Hobsbawm (2019) | Hacker News Reader

The Contradictions of Eric Hobsbawm (2019)

newstatesman.com

20 pointsapollinaire10 comments

The key thing to understand about Hobsbawm is not just that he was a Marxist, but what particular version of Marxism he prescribed to.

Marxism was introduced in the middle of the 19th century, but toward the end of that century there were two enormous changes. The first was vanguardism. Marx thought the working class would soon spontaneously rise up and overthrow capitalism. But when that failed to happen, Lenin decided that the working class had been tricked into false consciousness, and instead they needed to be lead by a highly disciplined elite.

Secondly, Marx predicted the overthrow of capitalism and its replacing with socialism would take place in the advanced industrial countries. When that failed to happen, the idea arose that it could instead take place in pre-industrial countries, something the original Marxism considered impossible.

These two ideas were combined in the Russian Revolution and lead, not to the free, anarchistic socialism of Marx, but Stalin's brutal totalitarianism. And the same thing happened in every other pre-industrial country where vanguardist Marxists came to power, and also in the Eastern European industrialized countries where it was imposed from the outside.

Hobsbawn, from what I understand, continued to believe til the end of his life in vanguardist, pre-industrial Marxism.

I read his "Age of Extremes"[1], and thought his point that there was an awful lot of Socialism going on in the U.S. system was a cogent one.

Arguably he averted his gaze from some of the excesses at the other end of the argument.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Age-Extremes-History-World-1914-1991/...

An interesting review / commentary on that book, and his worldview, by someone with a rather different one:

https://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/10/brad-delong-eric-hobs...

"He is writing for readers who take the central theme of twentieth century history to be the tragical-heroic course of World Communism."

Looking at the examples Delong gave 25 years ago, history has been much kinder to Hobsbawm's bleak vision than Delong's.

> What has happened in the past decade that has so darkened his vision of our human future?

> The past decade has seen good news along a number of important dimensions: The environment is in better shape: the clean-up of the first world continues; the clean-up of the ex-Communist world has begun; and the third world is more aware of environmental degradation. Progress has been made in creating the international climate to guard against ozone depletion and global warming.

If all you take is bleakness, then perhaps. But Hobsbawm's bleakness is more specific, it's about the demise of actually existing Communism as a pole of the world order. And I would say that putting that anywhere near the top of your list of world events to feel sad about seems even stranger now than in 1995.

His denials of the evils of eastern block communism are unforgivable imo. He lionized Stalin until the day he died.

That's a very facile take on a complex thinker: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/17/eric-hobsbawm-...

And yet, had he been accused of supporting, say, Mussolini, or had he a lifelong fondness for rightist nationalism, he would have been milkshake-ducked into irrelevance today.

Nuance, per Marcuse, is something we can only afford for the left.

>And yet, had he been accused of supporting, say, Mussolini, or had he a lifelong fondness for rightist nationalism, he would have been milkshake-ducked into irrelevance today.

Heidegger would like a word

I find it hard to take any critique of socialism seriously when it's from The Guardian.

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