G'day Brad,
Quoth you:
>I have to confess that the _Age of Extremes_ *annoyed* me. It annoyed
>me because Hobsbawm broke temporal sequence: he moved the discussion
>of Stalin far away from his narrative of interwar Europe. He did this
>because he did not focus on Stalin until sometime after 1956. Thus in
>terms of Hobsbawm's personal experiential timeline, the nature of
>Stalin's rule falls after successful social-democratic reconstruction
>in post-WWII western Europe.
Well, Hobsbawm is not a great one for singling out individuals in explaining history. That's a Marxian thing, I believe. Sure, his ghastly excesses don't get any bigger a mention than, say, what the US had got up to in the Philippines (at the end of *Age of Empire*), or what the Turks did to the Armenians (at the beginning of this volume), but you can't fit in everything, eh?
Then you say some good stuff about the SU's decisive role in WW2, which I've snipped for bandwidth's sake. And then you say ...
> Only in western Europe did
>the Communist threat cause a few steps to be taken to the left. And
>Hobsbawm doesn't explain--doesn't understand--why the existence of
>really-existing-socialism had such widely divergent consequences in
>western Europe and elsewhere.
What about the contemporary variations in proletarian power, Brad? Reconstruction Europe was not quite Latin America on this criterion. Neither was India ever fascist in the post-war years - it was just violently and cripplingly partitioned in the throes of gaining independence. Ceylon was not fascist, either. Burma was run by an explicitly anti-fascist People's Freedom League. In Indonesia, a Communist insurrection nearly got up in 1948. And in Malaya, it took quarter of a million Poms to beat down the local left (all in the chapter 7). All gained their national independence in these years, and all depended on a core committed to getting value wherever they could to pay off their own suddenly irksome proletariats. And all were poor countries 'essentially dominated by their villages and fields' (p 291).
As for Latin America, all the countries there were industrialising rapidly from an immediate post-war base of majority peasantries. Neither Britain nor the US industrialised without robber barons holding ruthless and brutal sway over the body politic (EP Thompson and Thorstein Veblen, respectively, make that pretty clear), Russia could not have industrialised so quickly in a social democratic environment (indeed Hobsbawm himself allows, on page 498, that 'the tragedy of the October revolution was precisely that it could only produce its kind of ruthless, brutal, command socialism), none of the Tiger economies could do it (references unnecessary), so why should we expect it of post-war South America? Tremendous dislocations and enforced reallocations of social wealth are required at such times - and nowhere have peasants been up to protecting their interests at such times (Marx says some such things in his 18th Brumaire, too). And again, the economies/polities in question were controlled /predated upon by external forces (generally the Yanks, natch).
Maybe it might not be going too far to say that social democratic mixed economies in the 'advanced' world were doing their lefty-largesse thing with value elicited from the periphery? That'd make Euro-American social democracy and the absence of third world social democracy two sides of the same coin, wouldn't it? A sorta contradictory unity, mebbe?
Oh, and on another point, one quote from the 1930s chapter I like is, "The communists, who hitherto had been the most divisive force on the Enlightenment Left, concentrating their fire (as is, alas, characteristic of political radicals) not against the obvious enemy but against the nearest potential competitor, above all the Social Democrats, changed course within eighteen months of Hitler's accession to power and turned themselves into the most systematic and, as usual, the most efficient, champions of anti-fascist unity."
What Hobsbawm is saying, I think, is that popular front politics is what wins, but that communists are too preciously pedantic on arcana (like whether some poor boob from New South Wales is a closet liberal; or whether a historian one has never even read has turned traitor) to allow the left to unite until the very threat their theory insists is immanent in capitalism show their particular face.
Sounds right to me ...
Yours still-indignantly, Rob.