This pamphlet is the product of the Socialist History
Society special event held in 2013 to assess the work of Eric Hobsbawm. The
title was a Historian, Teacher and Critic. This review is made up
of four parts. Part one looks at Eric Hobsbawm and Labour History; part two
examines Hobsbawm's Tetralogy and Other Works, the third part Hobsbawm, History
and Politics and finally Hobsbawm's relationship with the Pseudo Left.
The pamphlet Eric Hobsbawm: Socialist Historian aims to
celebrate and assess the life's work of the historian. It does indeed celebrate
his life, but the assessment it makes whitewashes his politics.
The pamphlet correctly portrays Hobsbawm as an exceptionally
gifted historian. He had an excellent aptitude for writing in an accessible
manner while retaining a robust academic rigour. However, If he had
concentrated on writing before the 19th century, then I would
not have much problem in recommending his work. However his work on the 20th century
especially the Russian Revolution was severely hampered by his near Jesuit
defence of both the Stalinist British Communist Party and the Soviet Communist
Party.
Eric Hobsbawm and Labour History
Malcolm Chase's article sets the tone for the rest of the
pamphlet. He begins the whitewash of Hobsbawm's politics, especially his
defence of the Communist Party. His amnesia regarding the many betrayals of the
party is breathtaking and offers only limited criticism at the end of his
essay.
From Chase's essay, you would not have guessed that Hobsbawm
adopted a genre (Labour History) which was a combination of both his party's
support for the Popular Front and more importantly the Annales school of
history. This Annales school combined Front Popular front politics
profoundly influenced Hobsbawm and most of the historians that formed the
Communist Party Historians Group (CPHG).
When Hobsbawm started to tackle Labour history he had
already drawn very pessimistic conclusions from the post-war defeats suffered
by the working class which his party along with the trade union and Labour
Party leadership had organised. It was not wrong for Hobsbawm to examine Labour history, but
his refusal to expose the betrayals of the working class by the leadership of
that class was.
A perfect expression of Hobsbawm's pessimism was his
article The Forward March of Labour Halted. Hobsbawm had no real faith in the
revolutionary capacity of the working class as can be seen in this Marx
Memorial Lecture of1978. According to the Marxist writer, Chris Marsden "Hobsbawm
began by asserting that the crisis of the labour movement could be attributed
to the decline of the working class itself. His evidence for this mainly
consisted of a presentation of the fall in the number of workers employed in
heavy industry and the supposedly concomitant fall in support for the Labour
and Communist parties. He then argued that industrial militancy has failed to
provide an answer to the failures of the Labour government of the time.
Hobsbawm's The lecture was not just unconvincing. It was an attempt to provide
an apologia for the betrayal of the working class by Labour and the TUC".
Hobsbawm played lip service for the need for a revolutionary
Marxist Party that would combat the reformist leadership of the working class.
Hobsbawm, in this quote below, believes that all a party should aim
for is to stop the working from drifting into reformism.
"A higher degree of political consciousness, a special
effort, is needed to prevent the movement from drifting into mere reformism ...
a conscious socialist movement, and notably a communist party, provide such a
special factor. If the working class attached itself to such a movement at the
crucial phase of its development when it forms such attachments, it would have
some built-in guarantee against the drift into reformism. However, if, as in
the British case, it attaches itself to a movement largely formed in the
pre-Marxist mould, it will not. The loyalty and theoretical inertia which it
derives from its spontaneous experience will maintain its traditional
attachments, and – unless quite extraordinary catastrophes
occur, and even then by no means lightly or rapidly – it
will stay with them" [1].
While examining the history of the British Labour movement,
Hobsbawm discounted the possibility of a Marxist Party being established in the
working class. As Norah Carlin suggests "Hobsbawm became so convinced that
the dead weight of tradition on the British labour movement was irremovable?
.In rejecting the 'heroic moral epic' style of labour history and deciding to
concentrate on the long-term social and economic background of the movement,
Hobsbawm ruled all revolutionary and near-revolutionary situations out of
consideration.
Thus he has very little to say about the high points of working-class struggle such as Chartism, the peak of the new unions in 1889-93, the waves of militancy of 1910-14 and 1919, or the General Strike of 1926". As was said, previous Hobsbawm had a near Jesuit ability to avoid upsetting both the Labour and Stalinist bureaucracy when writing about the working class. Despite this handicap, it would be wrong to say that all Hobsbawm writing on the Labour movement was worthless. To his credit, Hobsbawm wrote about Labour History with the same academic rigour as any of his other subjects. He believed historians should "consolidate the new territories won by the committed.'
Thus he has very little to say about the high points of working-class struggle such as Chartism, the peak of the new unions in 1889-93, the waves of militancy of 1910-14 and 1919, or the General Strike of 1926". As was said, previous Hobsbawm had a near Jesuit ability to avoid upsetting both the Labour and Stalinist bureaucracy when writing about the working class. Despite this handicap, it would be wrong to say that all Hobsbawm writing on the Labour movement was worthless. To his credit, Hobsbawm wrote about Labour History with the same academic rigour as any of his other subjects. He believed historians should "consolidate the new territories won by the committed.'
In many ways, his new writing was as groundbreaking as was
the former Communist party historian E P Thompson. As Norah Carlin put it "his
studies of early nineteenth-century machine-breaking, Primitive Methodism, and
general unions in Britain, for example, broke new ground and inspired a
generation of Marxist labour historians".
Hobsbawm's Tetralogy and Other Works
Willie Thompson's essay concentrates on Hobsbawm's four core
writings The Age of Capital, 1848–1875 (1975), The Age of Empire, 1875–1914
(1987), and finally The Age of Extremes: the Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991
(1994). He also examines Hobsbawm as both historian and activist.
Hobsbawm understood in embarking on such a wide-ranging
study that he was, in fact, writing three separate books but was, in essence,
writing a history of the 19th century. Hobsbawm's first book of the Tetralogy
The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 while maintaining a very high academic standard
was written for a broad audience. Like in the first essay Thompson largely absolves Hobsbawm
from any blame regarding Stalinism's betrayals. When commenting on the
Khrushchev revelations of Stalin's murderous regime, he manages to lump
together right-wing commentators with those he calls the "anti-communist
left".
In another point, he glosses over the crimes of
Stalin by saying that their exposure proved that the Communist Party could
reform itself from its worst excesses. Which was Hobsbawm's position also?
Hobsbawm subsequent later life as a historian and activist
was shaped by his early political experiences. This worldview was dominated by
the rejection of the working class as a revolutionary force and his
anti-Trotskyism.
Especially crucial in shaping his outlook were the political
events in Germany that he witnessed as a child. Joining the Communist Party as
a direct result of the threat of Fascism, Hobsbawm stood on the right of his
party and drew extremely pessimistic conclusions from the rise of Fascism. He
says "Liberalism was failing. If I had been German and not a Jew, I could
see I might have become a Nazi, a German nationalist. I could see how they
would become passionate about saving the nation. It was a time when you did not
believe there was a future unless the world was fundamentally
transformed".
This is quite a statement. Instead of the nationalism of the
Nazis, Hobsbawm adopted the nationalism of the Stalinists. Hobsbawm joined the
CP in 1931. It was unfortunate that the party he joined had broken decisively
with orthodox Marxism and the German Communist party would later commit a vast
betrayal by allowing Hitler to come to power without a shot being fired. The
refusal of CPSU to acknowledge any fault for this calamitous defeat of the
German working class led later on to the Russian Marxist and opponent of
Stalin, Leon Trotsky forming a new Fourth International.
Hobsbawm parrotted the party line on the victory of Hitler
by saying "In Germany, there was not any alternative left," he said
in an interview with Maya Jaggi published in The Guardian newspaper in 2002.
This was untrue. There was a Left Opposition to the rise of Fascism which
sought to oppose both the increase of the fascists and the betrayal of the
party that Hobsbawm had just joined. From an early part of his life, it
is clear that Hobsbawm rejected the Trotskyist view of events in Germany.
Age of Extremes
The Age of Extremes was dangerous territory for Hobsbawm.
His previous three volumes were to a much lesser extent coloured by his
politics. In the fourth volume, they were very much to the fore.
While Hobsbawm did not write extensively on the Russian revolution
in this book, he did in a later book called On history. The Russian revolution
was the dangerous territory of for Hobsbawm. It is well-known that Communist
Party historians avoided like the plague writing on the Russian revolution. For
the simple reason that his party leadership would have frowned upon it. With
the threat of expulsion a real possibility. Hobsbawm knew that when he finally
wrote on the subject, he would have to lie about it. One striking aspect of the
group was that none of them specialised in twentieth-century history. More
specifically, the experiences of the Russian revolution were never to be
explored by the group apart from one book by Christopher Hill, which in reality
was an apology for Stalinism.
According to A Talbot "In more recent areas of history,
as in politics, the control of the Stalinist bureaucracy was too high to allow
the free development of Marxist thought and whether deliberately or not they
all avoided venturing into the modern arena".
Hobsbawm was acutely aware that broaching the subject was
largely taboo according to him "it raised some notoriously tricky problems".
According to one essay on the CPHG a study of the journal Our History between
1956 and 1992 showed there was not a single article dealing with any part of
Soviet history. Having visited the Marx Memorial Library to check this
statement out, I can say there was one article by Monty Johnson on Leon Trotsky
in 1992.
Hobsbawm has gone on the record to say that he "wasn't
a Stalinist. I criticised Stalin and I cannot conceive how what I have written
can be regarded as a defence of Stalin. However, as someone who was a loyal
Party member for two decades before 1956 and therefore silent about some things
about which it is reasonable not to be silent - things I knew or suspected in
the USSR. Why I stayed [in the Communist Party] is not a political question
about communism, it is a one-off biographical question. It was not out of
idealisation of the October Revolution. I am not an idealiser. One should not
delude oneself about the people or things one cares most about in one's life.
Communism is one of these things, and I have done my best not to delude myself
about it even though I was loyal to it and its memory. The phenomenon of
communism and the passion it aroused is particular to the twentieth century. It
was a combination of the high hopes which were brought with progress and the
belief in human improvement during the nineteenth century along with the
discovery that the bourgeois society in which we live (however great and
fruitful) did not work and at certain stages looked as though it was on the
verge of collapse. Moreover, it did collapse and generated awful nightmares "[2].
According to the Marxist writer and expert on Leon Trotsky
David North Hobsbawm's writing on the Russian Revolution mostly portrays the
revolution as being "doomed to failure" and a "fatal enterprise."
This leads to the assumption that the breakdown of the Soviet Union was the "Shipwreck
of Socialism."
North admits Hobsbawm has produced some excellent work but,"
the subject of the Russian Revolution is dangerous territory for Professor
Hobsbawm, for in this field his scholarship is compromised by his politics.
Hobsbawm once confessed that as a member of the CPGB he had avoided writing about
the Russian Revolution and the 20th century, because the political
line of his party would have prevented him from being entirely truthful. Why he
chose to remain a member of a party that would have compelled him to tell lies
is a question to which he has never given a convincing answer. At any rate, it
would have been best for him and no loss to the writing of history, had he
continued to limit himself to events before 1900" [3].
Hobsbawm and the Labour Party.
It does not come as a surprise that Hobsbawm's writing on
Labour history brought him closer to the Labour Party. He was made a Companion
of Honour. A rarity for a historian especially of his political persuasion.
Hobsbawm was lauded from both sides of bourgeois democracy in Britain. Labour
leader Ed Miliband said Prof Hobsbawm was "an extraordinary historian, a
man passionate about his politics and a great friend of his family". His
historical works brought hundreds of years of British history to hundreds of
thousands of people. He brought history out of the ivory tower and into
people's lives. However, he was not simply academic; he cared deeply about the
political direction of the country. Indeed, he was one of the first people to
recognise the challenges to Labour in the late 1970s and 1980s from the
changing nature of our society."
In this respect, Milliband says more than he
intended. Hobsbawm was a major theoretical architect of the right-wing shift of
New Labour. During his membership of the "Eurocommunist" wing of the
CPGB and his time with the Marxism Today theoretical journal, he wrote many
articles urging Labour to adopt a more right-wing trajectory. In 1978 he wrote
the essay "The Forward March of Labour Halted". Which in many ways,
laid the basis for Labours future development? "If anything, I was an
extremely right-wing Communist and generally attacked by the leftists,
including the leftists in the Labour Party".
Hobsbawm relationship with the origins of New Labour is
explored in an article by Chris Marsden, which reveals Stalinism's role in
spawning new Labour. Marsden said the Communist Party of Great Britain "Euro-Communist"
tendency acted as the midwife of New Labour."
Marsden continues with the observation that Marxism Today of
which Hobsbawm was a frequent writer for laid the "ideological framework
for what was to become New Labour was first established in the editorial
offices of Marxism Today. Moreover, it was mostly made possible to implement
the project so defined due above all to the liquidation of the Soviet Union" [4].
Historian and activist
To begin this part of Thompson's essay, he uses a quote from
Isaac Deutscher in which he regrets being expelled from the Polish Communist
Party and advises Hobsbawm not to leave the party.
The fact that Deutscher was expelled from the party for
"exaggerating the danger of Nazism and ... spreading panic in the
Communist ranks." Moreover, Deutscher opposed the Stalinist
line that Nazism and Social Democracy were "not antipodes but twins."
largely passes Thompson by. Hobsbawm never undertook any systematic work
opposing the party line. This sleight of hand by Thompson is a hallmark of his
political writing.
When Hobsbawm made issue mild criticism of the party's line
on Hungary, he immediately backed down and accepted his punishment. Never to
combine his history writing with opposition to the party's line.
This went for all the historians who were part of the
Communist Party Historians Group. As Ann Talbot points out "There is
something Jesuitical about the relationship of these historians to Marxism.
They seem to have been capable of partitioning their minds and pursuing a
scientific Marxist approach to history up to the point where the Stalinist
bureaucracy drew the line, like the Jesuit scientists who would pursue their
investigations as far as the Church authorities permitted, but no further. It
was an approach that was further encouraged by the extreme specialisation of
academic life that enabled them to concentrate on very narrow areas of history
that never brought them into direct collision with the bureaucracy on political
questions" [5].
Hobsbawm, History and Politics
David Parker has written extensively on the Communist
movement. His essay Hobsbawm, History and Politics is an expansion of his
concluding remarks from the Socialist History Society special event held in
2013 to assess the work of Eric Hobsbawm. Parker is correct to say that
this pamphlet is only a small start to what must be a massive project. Recently
Oxford University Press[6] released a collection of
essays in an attempt to evaluate Hobsbawm's place in history.
Parker justifies Hobsbawm's decision to stay inside the
Communist Party. The fact that all writers closely associated with SHS have
primarily whitewashed Hobsbawm's Stalinism is staggering.
Another comment equally startling is Parker's opinion that
Hobsbawm was instrumental in developing New Labour. A comment that seemed
genuine as it was stupid. As if this was some great achievement. Hobsbawm was
indeed motivated by the struggle for humanity to better itself, but Parker
continues the SHS's attempt to whitewash history will not bring that about.
Hobsbawm's relationship with the Pseudo Left.
Although not a subject tackled in the SHS pamphlet, Hobsbawm
relationship with the Pseudo left is critical in understanding, his history and
his politics. It should be the starting point for any understanding of Hobsbawm's
place in history.
Firstly a point of clarification. The term Pseudo Left comes
from the Marxist David North who characterises these groups in this way "the
pseudo-left denotes political parties, organisations and
theoretical/ideological tendencies which utilise populist slogans and
democratic phrases to promote the socioeconomic interests of privileged and
affluent strata of the middle class".
He continues. The pseudo-left is anti-Marxist. It rejects
historical materialism, embracing instead various forms of subjective idealism
and philosophical irrationalism associated with existentialism, the Frankfurt
School and contemporary postmodernism.[7]
The second paragraph is crucial to understanding their
relationship with Eric Hobsbawm. None of the writings of these groups came from
the standpoint of classical Marxism when examining Hobsbawm place in history.
A cursory look at a number of the titles of articles on
Hobsbawm by these radicals shows this. Neil Davidson, who is a member of the
State Capitalist Socialist Workers Party, wrote an article: Hobsbawm As A
Marxist Historian: An Appreciation. He states "Now that his life is
over and his body of work complete, it is only fair to Hobsbawm that his
critical admirers take time to assess his output as a whole, free from the
demands of instant assessment required by obituaries. I am confident, however,
that relatively little of his serious historical output is irredeemably tainted
by the political tradition to which he belonged; most of is a lasting
contribution, not only to the culture of the left but far beyond it.
Moreover, can those critics of the right who endlessly demanded that he recant
the views which informed his entire life and work point to any historians with
their beliefs who entered the public consciousness to anything like the same
degree?" [8].
Davidson follows a well-worn path where Hobsbawm's history
is largely divorced from his Politics. This amounts to a political amnesty from
an organisation that professes itself to be Trotskyist.
Hobsbawm himself did not hide his political orientation
which became more pronounced towards the end of his life. In his Guardian
article in 2005[9]" I have a lasting
admiration for Mikhail Gorbachev. It is an admiration shared by all who know
that, however, for his initiatives, the world might still be living under the
shadow of the catastrophe of a nuclear war - and that the transition from the
communist to the post-communist era in eastern Europe, and in most
non-Caucasian parts of the former USSR, has proceeded without significant
bloodshed" [10]. His place in history is secure.
How does admiration for a man that helped restore capitalism into the former
Soviet Union not colour one's history writing?
As the Marxist writer David North said "Hobsbawm is not
merely blind to all this. His writing suggests that he has failed to subject to
any critical review the political conceptions that allowed him to remain a
member of the British Communist Party for many decades: "The terrible
paradox of the Soviet era," Hobsbawm tells us with a straight face,
"is that the Stalin experienced by the Soviet peoples and the Stalin seen
as a liberating force outside were the same. Moreover, he was the liberator for
the ones at least in part because he was the tyrant for the others."
What Hobsbawm really should have written is that "the
Stalin experienced by the Soviet people and the Stalin as he was deceitfully
portrayed by the British Communist Party were not quite the same thing".
Instead, unfortunately, Hobsbawm compromises himself as a historian by engaging
in shabby pro-Stalinist apologetics, and thereby exposing what has been the
tragic paradox of his own intellectual life" [11].
There is no denying that Hobsbawm was a hugely significant
historian. His work is read all around the world and for anyone wanting to
understand the world we live in they are very useful. However, a proper
assessment of his politics and history is overdue. The starting point of this
assessment must be an examination of the extent his politics clouded his
judgement, especially on such a crucial subject as the Russian
Revolution.
[1] Kinnock's favourite
Marxist-Eric Hobsbawm and the working class-Norah Carlin & Ian
Birchall- http://www.marxists.de/workmvmt/birchcarl/hobsbawm.htm
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/sep/22/history.politicalbooks
[3] Leon Trotsky and the Fate of
Socialism in the 20th Century A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm By David North
3 January 1998.
[4] Martin Jacques: embittered
British Stalinist pronounces on the death of the "left "Part One By
Chris Marsden15 December 2004
[5] "These the times ... this
the man": an appraisal of historian Christopher Hill By Ann Talbot 25
March 2003
[6] History after Hobsbawm-Writing
the Past for the Twenty-First Century-Edited by John H. Arnold, Matthew Hilton,
and Jan Ruger
[7] What is the pseudo-left?-30
July 2015- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2015/07/30/pers-j30.html
[8] Hobsbawm As A Marxist
Historian: An Appreciation
-www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/hobsbawm_as_a_marxist_historian_an_appreciation
[9] The last of the utopian
projects- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/mar/09/russia.comment
[10] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/mar/09/russia.comment
[11] Leon Trotsky and the Fate of
Socialism in the 20th Century -A Reply to Professor Eric Hobsbawm-By David
North -3 January 1998
