By Adrian Chan-Wyles
THE
BRITISH “Marxist” historian, Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) died in his 95th
year in London. This Cambridge-educated former Communist had a thoroughly
bourgeois background, which saw him born to a British father and German-Jewish
mother in Alexandria in the British protectorate of Egypt. He spent much of his youth being educated in Germany, and only left for the UK with the
rise of Adolf Hitler.
His privileged background enabled him to
attend the best schools, and enter Cambridge with little fuss in the mid-1930s. He claims to have been a member of the
Communist Party of Great Britain for around 50 years, from 1936 onwards. In his
2002 autobiography Interesting Times – a
Twentieth-Century Life, Hobsbawm, under the guise of literary honesty,
reveals the true nature of his bourgeois upbringing and conditioning through a
single paragraph, the revisionist content of which, re-appears throughout the 418
pages in ever-expanded form, so that the reader is left with no doubt that
although Hobsbawm made a living out of the intellectual output of Karl Marx, in
the final analysis, Hobsbawm was not a “Marxist”, but instead specialised in
turning Marx into a “fetish”:
‘The months in Berlin made me a lifelong
communist, or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and its
significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a
schoolboy, even though that project has demonstrably failed, and as I now known
was bound to fail. The dream of the
October Revolution is still there somewhere inside me, as deleted texts are
still waiting to be recovered by experts, somewhere on the hard disks of
computers. I have abandoned, nay,
rejected it, but it has not been obliterated.
To this day I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the
USSR with an indulgence and tenderness which I do not feel towards Communist
China, because I belong to the generation for whom the October Revolution
represented the hope of the world, as China never did. The Soviet Union’s hammer and sickle symbolised
it.’ (Eric Hobsbawm: Interesting
Times – A Twentieth Century Life – Pages 55-56)
Eric Hobsbawm, despite claiming to be a Marxist academic,
was very popular, and his work was respected throughout the bourgeois academic
world – his work also appears extensively in Chinese translation in the
People’s Republic of China. Why would an openly Marxist academic be so popular
amongst his ideological enemies? The
answer is that despite Hobsbawm’s cursory nod toward the philosophical work of
Marx, that is the defining and use of the theory of historical materialism, he
was essentially a bourgeois revisionist at heart, which applied a misty-eyed
vision, similar to a religious attitude, when interpreting historical events.
When viewed in this
way, a doubt must be assumed when assessing the Marxist validity of all of his
historical analysis. His “age of”
historical analysis series contain a vital flaw running through its centre –
namely the flaw of bourgeois intellectualism masquerading as “Marxism”. Applying Marx correctly to Hobsbawm, it is
clear that Hobsbawm was popular amongst the bourgeois educational establishment
not because of his supposed and professed adherence to Marxism, but because in
reality he was presenting a distorted Marxism shot-through with bourgeois
sentiment and class bias, for whatever else Hobsbawm may, or may not have been,
he remained a bourgeois throughout his life.
His autobiography is nothing more than an apology to his
bourgeois class, for his indulgence with Marxism. It also serves a far more sinister function
of warning-off any young people interested in pursuing a Marxist path in
contemporary Britain, as a
means to combat the injustices current within UK society. Hobsbawm’s work, although carefully
camouflaged in places, nevertheless, reaches precariously beyond and around the
Marxist narrative, and introduces an idiosyncratic interpretation that says
more about the psychological conditioning of Hobsbawm than it does about the
historical subject he is assessing.
This explains why the distorted work of Hobsbawm – as
bourgeois revisionist and apologist – is dangerous to the progressive communist
cause. If people are taken in with
Hobsbawm’s scattering of sayings of Marx throughout his work, and fail to
understand the great bourgeois project he is undertaking, Hobsbawm will succeed
in stamping-out the revolutionary heart that beats at the centre of correct
Marxist thinking.
Criticism of three of his major works can be easily
summed-up using Marxist analysis:
The
Age of Revolution 1789-1848
Most years between the French Revolution (1789) and the
1848 revolutionary movement across Europe, when taken as a world perspective,
(rather than following Hobsbawm’s scheme of limiting his analysis to western
Europe), had no more, or no fewer “revolutionary” movements than any other
historical period. Hobsbawm’s Age of Revolution is an arbitrary sham,
masquerading as historical and dialectical materialist analysis.
The
Age of Capital (1849-1875
This is perhaps the easiest of Hobsbawm’s work to see
through, as he obviously is using the productive period of Karl Marx –
particularly from his move to London – where Marx wrote many (but not all) of
his most influential works, including Das
Kapital, his superb and often meandering analysis of the capitalist mode
of production; its origin, perpetuation, theory of labour and surplus value
amongst many other important issues.
Three more volumes were published after his death in
1882. This time period, regardless of
any assessment made by Hobsbawm, (which is, in any case, an analysis made after
the event), is only the “age of capital” because the genius of Karl Marx made
it so through his assessment. There is
no originality in Hobsbawm simply taking the subject of Marx’s analysis and
distorting it into an “epoch”.
The
Age of Empire (1875-1914)
Hobsbawm, brought-up as a secular Jew in Germany heading
toward Hitlerism, makes much of his “Britishness” and refuses to accept in his
biography, that his move to Britain was inspired by the excesses of early
Nazism. He would have the reader believe
that his “Jewish” family moved on the cusp of Nazi persecution, not because it
made sense to do so, particularly as he possessed a British passport, but
rather that such a move was purely coincidental and linked entirely to his
uncle’s migrating business interests.
Hobsbawm has written that he, and his family were not
German-Jewish refugees escaping Nazism, but gives the impression of holidaying
bourgeoisie, who casually float from one country to the next. Hobsbawm’s Eurocentricism is palpable. His “age of empire” is actually the age of
the British Empire, the establishment of which he firmly joined in the
1930’s. A “floating” member of the international
bourgeois, who swapped the German Empire for that of the British Empire.
Hobsbawm’s work is popular throughout the bourgeois system
because it undermines the very Marxism it claims to represent, through the
careful and clever presentation of many small, but important misrepresentations
of Marxist philosophy and its application.
The over-all effect of this policy is a movement away from a correct
Marxist analysis and toward a thoroughly (and for Hobsbawm a comfortable)
bourgeois interpretation.
His deliberate and illogical separation of the Russian
Communist Revolution from that of the Chinese Revolution is bizarre in its
certainty, and smirks of Eurocentric bias bordering on the racist. Whatever
Hobsbawm’s motivation for this flawed analysis, it is obvious that he does not
adhere to the Marxist principle of internationalism.
What Hobsbawm fails to acknowledge is that Marx eulogised
the Paris Commune of 1871, and that the hammer and sickle flags flies just as equally
over China, as it does over north Korea and many other former Soviet Republics,
and is not limited in its meaning to the ethnocentric bias Hobsbawm appears to
be exhibiting. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is exactly this Asian Communism that is
giving hope to many who hold leftwing views in the West.
After-all, it is in these countries that a living Communist
government continues to exist. Communists are internationalists and derisive
historians such as Hobsbawm should not be allowed to drive a wedge in the sense
of collective, unfolding history. Marxists must acknowledge this weakness in
Hobsbawm’s work, as well as any strengths, but must not allow correct
historical interpretation to be clouded by the smoke and mirrors used by the
bourgeois establishment to peddle its sub-standard wares.
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