Eric Hobsbawm, enemy of the people

So the unrepentant Communist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, C.H., has died aged 95, loaded with honours by the British state which it was his life's ambition to destroy. The BBC report of his death contented itself with noting that his works were “shaped by his commitment to radical socialism”. The Daily Telegraph was less polite but more informatative. Its characteristically masterful and mordant obituary is here. “Biography adds a new fear to death,” said Oscar Wilde and so does the Telegraph. 

Eric Hobsbawm in 1976 (Photo by Wesley/Keystone/Getty Images)

Silly, silly, silly man and worse than silly British state. In his lifetime the British and Western European working classes benefited from unprecedented prosperity and opportunities, thanks to capitalism not socialism, and yet he persisted in believing that the Communist Manifesto foretold the future. He wrote justifying the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1940 and of Hungary in 1956, worked very hard for Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev and achieved a very great deal of influence for the far left in UK universities. I was shocked when I read history at Cambridge at the respect that he was shown but knew it would be unacceptable to voice my opinion with my peers.  

But the patience of the British has its limits. Had Eric Hobsbawm adopted the theories of Gobineau and H.S. Chamberlain, rather than those of Marx and Engels, he would have been left to theorise in pubs, not given tenure at Birkbeck. Had he thought race not class was the driver in human history the Guardian would probably have refused to publish him. (I presume this because The Guardian sacked a football manager who wrote a column for them, a few years back, for making a racist remark, while continuing to employ several communists.)

Nick Cohen pointed out last year on a piece on Hobsbawm the Stalinist:

When he first visited the Soviet Union in 1954, Eric Hobsbawm discovered that the theory of a workers’ state and the practice of a Moscow still bleeding from Stalin’s last purge did not quite gel. “It was an interesting but also a dispiriting trip for foreign communist intellectuals,” he recalled in his autobiography, “for we met hardly anyone there like ourselves.” 

Hee, hee. Cohen continues: 

If he had gone to Siberia ....Hobsbawm would have found the bodies of communist intellectuals – just like him. If Hobsbawm had followed the logic of his convictions and moved from Nazi Germany to seek a home in the Soviet Union rather than Britain, his chances of surviving would have been slim. Either the party would have shot him in the great purge for being foreigner and a Jew to boot, or he would have been forced to denounce innocent comrades to save his skin. After concluding the Nazi-Soviet pact, Stalin handed German communists over to Hitler as a gesture of goodwill. If the purge of 1936-38 had not killed Hobsbawm, the pact of 1939 probably would have done for him instead.’

In 9 November 1956 Hobsbawm, future Companion of Honour, wrote in The Daily Worker:

"While approving, with a heavy heart, of what is now happening in Hungary, we should therefore also say frankly that we think the USSR should withdraw its troops from the country as soon as this is possible."

He said in one of The Age of Extremes which came out in the late 1990s that

'The Second World War led communist parties to power' in Eastern Europe and he referred in it to the 'revolution' in Eastern Europe after 1945. These are not slips or, if they are, they are Freudian ones. 

Hobsbawm (like Ralph Miliband) did not repay the UK very well for sheltering and naturalising him, it seems to me, although Miliband grew out of his Leninist phase in his teens and was a classical Marxist. There is not as much gratitude in immigrants as you might expect. Other instances of ingratitude are legion but include the Archbishop of York and Miss Yasmin Alibhai-Brown banging on about British racism, despite the fact that Britain gave them refuge from Idi Amin. But I suppose Hobsbawm, a convinced Marxist-Leninist, was obeying his ill-educated conscience, as were the Nazis. 

Still I owe Eric Hobsbawm something. I had my first inkling Christianity might be true reading him saying that the Catholic Church opposed everything the 18th and 19th centuries believed in. That sounded like divine guidance and a Divinity in Whom I could believe. (Writing this, I see that the reactionary Catholicism of Pius IX is the opposite of the Marxist doctrine that the historical process is a sort of secular god. Personally, I prefer the Syllabus of Errors to the Communist Manifesto.)

Michael Moynihan has written:

In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of “15, 20 million people might have been justified” in establishing a Marxist paradise. “Yes,” Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the “sacrifice of millions of lives” in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It’s not that he didn’t know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It’s that he didn't much care.

Readers of How to Change the World will be treated to explications of synarchism, a dozen mentions of the Russian Narodniks, and countless digressions on justly forgotten Marxist thinkers and politicians. But there is remarkably little discussion of the way communist regimes actually governed. There is virtually nothing on the vast Soviet concentration-camp system, unless one counts a complaint that “Marx was typecast as the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists as essentially defenders of, if not participators in, terror and the KGB.” Also missing is any mention of the more than 40 million Chinese murdered in Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the almost two million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

I also recommend this excellent piece by John Phelan.

Political commentary by fine historians of the recent past is, surprisingly enough, almost never of any value or interest - certainly not that of Tony Judt, Norman Davies, Eric Foner, Niall Ferguson, Mark Marzower or A.J.P. Taylor. Even my old friend, Andrew Roberts, did not convince me to admire George W. Bush. Certainly Eric Hobsbawm had nothing interesting to say about current politics.

An example is Hobsbawm asking, in 2009, in The Guardian, last home of Communist intellectuals:

‎"Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?" 

He was completely wrong, as always when he wrote about politics. Capitalism had not failed but socialism had won, though not Leninism. The collapse of the USSR liberated the Left in Britain and around the war from defending the economically indefensible. The new Marxism would not try to take over the economy but society and culture, via the universities and the left of centre media. A rather similar decision that had been taken at about the same time by the Labour modernisers, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. The result is political correctness and the ideology of equal opportunities, which seems reasonable and charitable and concerned only with justice but smuggles left-socialist hidden premises into its arguments. As Frank Johnson said of the Left: 

They have given up trying to nationalise companies and want to nationalise people instead.

In any case, at least seen from the viewpoint of an imaginary time traveller from 1900 or even 1935 the developed world nowadays is socialist. I, like most people, could not accept or have the courage to imagine a return to the small state of 1900 or of 1935 but our very big state, equality considered as a public goal, plus anti-discrimination laws, excessive health and safety laws and innumerable other laws seem to me to be socialism, a.k.a. social democracy, even if it is called Christian democracy or modernisation. What would have been surprising thirty years ago is the concomitant lack of freedom of speech and the left wing consensus in university arts faculties.

I suppose it is about defining terms and I always prefer to look back several generations before defining them. Socialism does not mean Old Labour, much less communism. Herbert Spencer thought free school dinners meant socialism. Edward VII said we are all socialists now. I remember Michael Parkinson asking the left-wing trade unionist Arthur Scargill (in the late 1970s?) where socialism had worked and his replying, 'Cuba.' Socialism has worked, rather well in some ways, up to now, but certainly not in Cuba. It has worked in Sweden, Norway and Denmark and in Western Europe generally, not in the Soviet bloc. In the UK it worked less well than on the Continent, though I am not sure why.

I cannot forbear to add that it was not economic problems or lack of freedom that brought down the USSR but the discovery of nationalism on the part of the communists in charge of the fifteen union republics. Nationalism is not 'false consciousness', however much peace studies lecturers disapprove of it, and may yet pose great questions for the Nordic countries and all the Western European social democracies.