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FULL TOPIC LISTIssue: 2323 dated: 6 October 2012Obituaryposted: 6.32pm Tue 2 Oct 2012 | updated: 11.31am Wed 3 Oct 2012

Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012)

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Ian Birchall looks back on the life of Marxist historianEric Hobsbawm, who has died aged 95

Eric Hobsbawm, who died on Monday of this week was one of

the most remarkable historians of the 20th century.

After a childhood in Vienna, he moved with his family toBerlin. Recently he wrote a vivid account of his recollections

of life in Germany before Hitler took over. He was already aCommunist by that point, with a duplicating machine hiddenunder his bed.

The family moved to Britain (his father was British) and hestudied at Cambridge university. But though he remained in
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Britain for the rest of his life, he was marked by his earlyexperiences.

Hobsbawm wrote many years later of his experience as a

refugee. He said this made him still vaguely uneasy if I dontpossess a valid passport and enough cash to transport me tothe nearest suitable country at short notice.

He added that he could understand the situation of KenyanAsian refugees in the 1970s. He felt horrified by Britishimmigration officials in a more profound and visceral way

than those for whom the question is primarily one of equalrights and civil liberty in general.

From 1947 Hobsbawm held a post at Birkbeck College inLondon. In academic terms he was a great success. Heauthored many books and articles with an internationalreputation.

But Hobsbawm was quite different from typical academichistorians. They bury themselves in their specialist periodand remain ignorant of the rest of human history (and even

more ignorant of the world they live in).

The range of Hobsbawms work is extraordinaryfrom 17th

century feudal society to Peruvian land occupations andsecret societies in early 19th century Europe.

His four books Age of Revolution, Age of Capital, Age of

Empire and Age of Extremes cover the history of the worldfrom the storming of the Bastille to the fall of the Berlin Wall.Any reader will be rewarded with a wealth of information.

Scholarly

Yet Hobsbawm never believed that history belonged tohistorians. As well as scholarly books and articles, he wrote

innumerable articles for the Guardian, New Statesman,London Review of Books and other publications.

In contrast to many celebrity historians, Hobsbawm didnt

exploit his academic status to shout his mouth off over things

he knew nothing.


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He believed history could help us to understand the presentand shape the future. So arguments based on history wererelevant to an audience far wider than professional students

of the subject.

Hobsbawm also had a second identity. As jazz critic FrancisNewton he wrote for the New Statesman at a time when US

culture was suspect in Communist circles. Howeveras withmany of his generationrock and roll was a bit too much forhis tastes.

Eric Hobsbawm was a lifelong Communist who joined BritainsCommunist Party in 1936. He remained a member until thepartys collapse in 1991. In recent years this has been used

systematically by right wing critics to discredit his historicalwork.

At the 2008 Tory party conference Michael Govenow

education secretarystated that only when Hobsbawmweeps hot tears for a life spent serving an ideology ofwickedness will he ever be worth listening to. We shall of

course wait far longer than that before Gove says anythingworth listening to.

Childish smears of this sort may be disregarded. But a real

problem remains.

Hobsbawms Communist commitment and his admiration forMarx provided much that was positive in his historical work. It

gave him an understanding of the economic base of societyand a grasp of class relations. But his loyalty to the Stalinistcurrent of Communism also had negative effects.

His early encounter with fascism left Hobsbawm convincedthat the only strategy to fight fascism was the popularfrontan alliance between the workers movement and pro-

capitalist parties.

Wedded

In France and Spain in the 1930s this strategy blockedrevolutionary possibilities and opened the way for the victory


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of fascism. But Hobsbawm remained wedded to the popularfront strategy for the rest of his life.

Sometimes this affected his work. He had a tendency to

underestimate the high points of working class activity. Thushis book Age of Capital dismisses the 1871 Paris Communewhich for Karl Marx was one of the greatest achievements of

the working classin a few short paragraphs.

In 1956 Hobsbawm approved with a heavy heart theRussian suppression of the Hungarian revolution. While many

of the Communist Partys best known historiansEPThompson, Christopher Hillleft the party, Hobsbawmstayed.

As late as 2006 he was still insisting, in an exchange withChris Harman and myself in the London Review of Books, thatthe Hungarian workers councils were not a major factor in

the revolution. That contradicted the reports of manyparticipants and observers.

Briefly in the 1960s he seemed impressed by a new wave of

radicalism. He spoke at the first Vietnam teach-in at Oxford,

organised by the new revolutionary left, including Peter Binnsand Tariq Ali.

In 1968 he wrote for the new revolutionary paper BlackDwarf. He described the French general strike as marvellousand enchanting and accused the French Communist Party of

feet dragging. But soon he swung back to his roots.

His most important political intervention was his 1978 lecture

The Forward March of Labour Halted. He argued thatindustrial militancy was not particularly relevant to thestruggle for socialism.

Straightforward, economist trade union consciousness mayat times actually set workers against each other rather thanestablish wider patterns of solidarity, he wrote.

Challenged

Four years later he openly challenged the Marxist view of thehistorical role of the working class. The manual working


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class, core of traditional socialist labour parties, is todaycontracting and not expanding.

It has been transformed, and to some extent divided, by the

decades when its standard of living reached levels undreamedof even by the well-paid in 1939.

It can no longer be assumed that all workers are on the wayto recognising that their class situation must align thembehind a socialist workers party, though there are still manymillions who believe this.

Hobsbawm seemed to limit the term working class to onespecific phase of history, without recognising the

development of a new type of working class.

His argument helped to foment the dispute between openreformists (known as Eurocommunists) and unrepentant

Stalinists that finally destroyed the Communist Party.

But the impact of his views went far beyond Communistranks. At the 1982 Labour Party conference then leader Neil

Kinnock praised Hobsbawm as the most sagacious living

Marxist. Hobsbawms argument against industrial militancysuited Kinnocks desire to shift the Labour Party to the right.

In later years Hobsbawm became more and more critical ofRussian-style socialism. In Age of Extremes he describedRussia as having had a dead end economy and a political

system for which there was nothing to be said.

But while seeing the evils of capitalism, he seemed to have

little idea of what might replace it. In 2007s Globalisation,Democracy and Terrorism he said we were entering a newphase of history but that we do not know where we aregoing.

Yet Hobsbawm never quite lost the spirit that made him aCommunist in the first place. In 2008, now far too old tobother about academic language, Hobsbawm prophesiedthat

there would be more nationalist stuff in English history.

He added that the whole function of history is precisely to bea pain in the arse for national myths.
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There is much to criticise in Hobsbawms work. But theresalso a great deal that will continue to be a pain in the arsefor the likes of Michael Gove.

Further reading

For more detail on Eric Hobsbawms political positions readNorah Carlin and Ian Birchalls 1983 article Kinnocksfavourite Marxist: Eric Hobsbawm and the working

class

Hobsbawms works are available from Bookmarksphone 0207637 1848 or go to bookmarksbookshop.co.uk

Socialist Worker (unless otherwise stated). You may republish if you include anactive link to the original.
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