Eric Hobsbawm’s great gift was to the written history of the nineteenth century.
Having come to Britain from
Vienna, the young communist from a well-to-do Jewish family signed up for
service in the British Army, echoing Stalin’s claim that Churchill was fighting
for democracy. When the British Empire was restored, communists like Hobsbawm
were stung to find that they were targeted as the red menace. While some worked
at getting a foothold in the trade unions, a small band of university-educated
communists got jobs as teachers, and lecturers if they could.
Among them, an historians’
group started to work, led by AL Morton and Dona Torr, champions of what they
called ‘people’s history’, later called ‘history from below’. Morton and Torr
were solid Communist Party propagandists who burrowed into the papers and
journals of working-class activists to tell a story of the steady progress of
the labour movement - from the Corresponding Societies to the Chartists, craft
unions and then the new model unions of the industrial working class, with the
Communist Party treated as the proper inheritor of that tradition.
Joining these party writers were
the recruits that came from Oxford and Cambridge, notably Christopher Hill, who
made the history of the English Revolution of 1649 come to life; EP Thompson,
who transformed Morton’s ‘people’s history’ into the remarkable The Making of the English Working
Class; and Eric Hobsbawm. Hobsbawm worked first at economic history, in
particular the history of the nineteenth century. His allegiance to the
Communist Party no doubt inspired him to take the investigation of the growth
of capitalism much more seriously than other historians of the period, and it
shone through in a series of striking books, Industry
and Empire, and then in the volumes Age
of Revolution, Age of
Capital and Age of Empire.
Guided by Karl Marx’s broad
framework of capitalist accumulation and the way that industrial growth changes
social relations, Hobsbawm’s books are still excellent guides; but they were
remarkable upon their publication, when historians only told the stories of the
great men of diplomacy and politics. Many since have reflected that it fell to
the Communist Hobsbawm to tell the story of industrial capitalism that
establishment historians seemed to find a little too grubby to sort through.
Though it was not his main
work, Hobsbawm did write some important essays on labour history, which are
collected in Labouring Men,
and number among them sharp accounts of machine-breaking (which he shows was
desperate bargaining rather than a revolt against modernity, as Kirkpatrick
Sale has claimed since) and the ‘labour aristocracy’, those skilled workers,
who, by limiting access to their trades, negotiated a better deal, even rising
to the status of labour agents. (Against those who tried to present the ‘labour
aristocracy’ as a perennial problem, and an explanation for British working-class
conservatism, Hobsbawm explained that these were momentary advantages, swept
aside by industrial change.) The collection that Hobsbawm edited with Terence
Ranger, The Invention of
Tradition, was an important opening up of national histories to a more
sceptical interrogation, which caught a moment in the transition among the
intelligentsia from a nationalist to a cosmopolitan outlook. Less successful
was Hobsbawm’s ownNations and Nationalism, which made heavy weather
sorting ‘good’ from ‘bad’ nationalism.
As good an historian of the
nineteenth century as Hobsbawm was, his later efforts at writing the history of
his own times were at best plodding, and often naked apologies for the
destructive policies he followed - those of the official Communist Parties.
Communism as a movement grew
alongside and out of the class struggle that raged across Europe in the early
decades of the twentieth century, coming to a head with the communist-led
revolution in Russia, which created the first workers’ government which struggled
to survive in the years from 1917 to 1923. As the European revolution failed,
the Russian communists were isolated and under attack from all sides. But the
real assault came from within, as the party retreated from its original goals
under a new leader, Joseph Stalin.
An exhausted European
communist movement, desperate to believe in the socialist future, was too ready
to believe that they had found it in Stalin’s bureaucratic dictatorship. And
Stalin was all too willing to use those radicals and working-class militants
gathered around the world in the official Communist Parties as bargaining chips
in his diplomatic game to defend his regime against colonisation.
The tragic result was that the
most forward-looking and militant people in the 1930s and 1940s were left
championing the cause of the most reactionary and destructive regime. That was
Stalinism, and it poisoned so much, including Eric Hobsbawm’s understanding,
and writing, of the history of the twentieth century, where Marxism had
enlivened his writing on the nineteenth century.
In 1940, when still a student
at Cambridge, Hobsbawm wrote a pamphlet defending the Soviet invasion of
Finland, when Stalin claimed his rights under the pact with Hitler (see
Hobsbawm’s autobiography, Interesting
Times, 2002). When in 1956, others, like EP Thompson and Peter Fryer, left
the Communist Party in disgust at the Soviet invasion of Hungary, Hobsbawm,
with that fear of isolation that he struggled with for much of his life,
stayed. Right through to the depressing end, when even the Communist Party’s
general secretary Martin Jacques was not-so-secretly plotting to wind the party
up, there was Hobsbawm, gamely lecturing at conferences from which all life had
already fled.
Unjustly praised, Hobsbawm’s
fourth volume, The Age of
Extremes, published in 1994, tells the story of the twentieth century in a
hand crabbed by 60 years of Stalinist apologetics. All the clarity of his
earlier writing went misty with a weirdly cautious, euphemistic telling of
events, which disguised the appalling complicity of his communist comrades, and
indeed his own complicity, with Stalinist reaction. So it is that we read that
the Spanish Republicans, struggling against Franco’s fascist rebellion, were
‘politically divided… in spite of the communists’ contribution’. Yet since the
Spanish Communist Party was at the time engaged in a vicious purge of its
rivals, notably the Independent Marxist Workers Party (POUM) and the
anarchists, to the extent that it ran its own prisons and torture chambers,
where POUM leader Andreu Nin was only the most notable victim killed, it would
be truer to say that the Republicans were divided becauseof the communists’
contribution.
So, too, it is hard to read in
Hobsbawm’s account of the 1956 uprising in Hungary that the ‘leadership imposed
by the Soviets after the defeat of the 1956 revolution’ was ‘genuinely
reformist and effective’. Hobsbawm did begrudgingly own up to the depravity of
the regime that Stalin put in place, though he told it in a strangely bloodless
way, as if the ineluctable laws of history compelled each monstrous act. Even
here, though, Hobsbawm insisted that the regime in the USSR should be excused
because it saved the world from fascism, as if Stalin had not sacrificed the
working-class movement of Germany, the people of Poland, and eventually the
people of the USSR itself to the grotesque Hitler-Stalin pact.
Tellingly, Hobsbawm in his
later years, and more so in his death, has been lauded by the establishment,
his youthful radicalism excused and his aged fidelity to the official Communist
movement indulged. The BBC and Channel
4 News both retold the lie
that Hobsbawm opposed the Soviet invasion of Hungary, when in fact he only
called for the withdrawal of Russian troops after they had finished off the
uprising, prefacing his remarks in a letter to the Daily Worker, ‘[A]pproving,
with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary…’ (9 November 1956) –
for more on Hobsbawm’s attitude towards 1956 and Stalinism, see this piece by Norah Carlin and Ian Birchall.
Historians of the left and right have lauded Hobsbawm in obituaries, with one
arch-right winger, Niall Ferguson, claiming Hobsbawm as a friend and a great
historian.
There is no mystery to the
praise heaped on this supposedly Marxist historian. It is not a case of that
praise that revolutionaries are accorded once they are no longer a threat.
Hobsbawm was already a darling of the British establishment – a Companion of Honour,
no less – while he was alive. As the Cold War vilification of the East fell
away after 1989, it was Hobsbawm’s conservatism that shone through. In 1983,
seeking to explain away how labour and Communist leaders had failed to rally
the British trade union movement to defend itself against the Conservative
government’s attacks, Hobsbawm argued that it was not the policy that was
wrong, but rather that the working classes had let the policy down. ‘The
forward march of labour’ was halted because blue-collar workers were being
replaced by more individualistic clerical workers, he said. Not only was this
not true (see Gavin Poynter, Change
in Workplace Relations: The UK in the 1980s), but it also represented a
shifting of the blame from the subjective strategy the labour movement followed
on to a supposedly objective shift that was outside of their power to change.
This was a theory that went on to become part of a self-fulfilling prophecy,
namely the ‘new realism’ strategy of reducing working-class ambitions that the
Labour Party followed under Neil Kinnock (and which laid the basis for his
eventual successor Tony Blair’s apolitical Third Way). Kinnock described
Hobsbawm as his ‘favourite Marxist’, while he was busy witch-hunting the
Trotskyist Militant Tendency from Labour’s ranks.
When, after the collapse of
the regime in Moscow, Hobsbawm finally owned up that Stalin’s rule was vicious,
he turned the argument back on the very idea of revolutionary change, heaping
the blame on to Lenin and the other Bolsheviks. So in the 1997 Deutscher
lecture, he asked: ‘What made the Bolsheviks decide to take power with an
obviously unrealistic programme of socialist revolution?’ Looking back on the
fateful choice he made, influenced by Stalin’s realpolitik, to rally to the Union
Jack in the 1940s, Hobsbawm said he felt affection for ‘the old British Empire,
run by a country whose modest size protected it against megalomania’.
No comments:
Post a Comment