[From Gregory Elliot's review, in the latest NLR, of Hobsbawm's new book, _How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism_.]
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In the mainstream Marxist tradition, faithfully relayed by Hobsbawm here, the theory intent on interpreting the world aright aspired to maximum unity with mass practice geared to changing it. According to the theory, capitalism vouchsafed the preconditions for its own communist supersession. Above all, it generated a collective social agent—the industrial proletariat, of necessity a ‘truly revolutionary class’—with an interest in, and capacity for, acquitting its task of ‘gravedigger’. Hobsbawm’s eventual rejection of this cornerstone of Marxian–Marxist socialism is the key to his deepening scepticism, from the late 1970s, about prospects for a transition beyond capitalism in the North. In the chapter on post-war Marxism, the development of global capitalism—and of national labour movements within it—is said to have rendered the proletariat’s performance of the role traditionally assigned it ‘increasingly doubtful’. A quarter-century later, introducing the Communist Manifesto on its 150th anniversary, Hobsbawm followed Kołakowski in identifying it as ‘a philosophical deduction rather than a product of observation’. By the time he came to draft his concluding chapter on the history of the workers’ movement in the twentieth century, the verdict was definitive: ‘it is now evident that [it] was baseless’.
As the 1983 centenary of Marx’s death approached, Hobsbawm felt compelled to register the re-emergence of the theme of a crisis of Marxism. All the ‘old certainties’ about capitalism and socialism had not just been ‘thrown into doubt’; they ‘no longer existed’. Paradoxically, however, the interrogation and revision of Marxism in the 1960s and 70s recorded by him were accompanied by a signal expansion in its intellectual influence throughout the First and Third Worlds, creating a pluralist, cosmopolitan culture of undeniably high quality, in sharp contrast to the authorized version and ‘national segregation’ of the 1930s and 40s. Thus it was, as Hobsbawm concedes in the new conclusion to his chapter on 1945–83, replacing the cautiously hopeful remarks of the original Italian, that he had not anticipated ‘the speed and scale of the reversal’: ‘The [ensuing] twenty-five years’ were to be ‘the darkest years in the history of [Marx’s] heritage.’
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Marxism today: account closed? Hobsbawm’s answer is no, though for reasons that will strike some readers as affording cold comfort. Greeting the revival of anti-capitalism in the new millennium, and the ‘implosion’ of neo-liberalism in 2008, Hobsbawm doubts that what he solecistically dubs ‘a systematic alternative system’ has reappeared on the horizon. The disillusion of a socialist future has not been dispelled. Consequently, the ‘somewhat unexpected return of Marx’ in the twenty-first century is staged by him not in the guise of prophet of international communism, which failed conclusively in the twentieth, but as critic of the globalizing capitalism that has just posted its own memento mori. With the dishonours of communism and market fundamentalism rendered approximately even, Marx has been liberated from the incubus of ‘Marxism-Leninism’. The questions he posed, rather than the answers his successors gave, are back on humanity’s agenda. Indeed, in view of the suicidal proclivity of what Schumpeter (in the wake of Marx) characterized as capitalism’s waves of ‘creative destruction’, Hobsbawm goes so far as to maintain that ‘both sides’—liberals and socialists alike—‘have an interest in returning to a major thinker’ who analysed capitalism ‘historically . . . and realistically’: a minimalist definition of historical materialism for post-lapsarian times.
Given Hobsbawm’s earlier observation of an intensification in anti-Marxism and anti-communism after the Cold War had ended in the conclusive victory of capitalism, one side can safely be forecast to have other ideas (for other interests) and to resist Browderite solicitations. In any event, ‘the Marx of the twenty-first century will almost certainly be very different from the Marx of the twentieth.’ Most obviously, we might add, because on Hobsbawm’s vindication of his contemporaneity, while he will be a major resource for interpreting and criticizing the world (in the company of Schumpeter and Polanyi), he will provide little or no guidance on changing it. Denuded of a moiety of the programme inscribed in his 1845 injunction, the revenant thus construed risks yielding diminishing returns. In this sense, the title of Hobsbawm’s book is a misnomer: it is not about how to change the world today; and insofar as it attends to yesterday’s endeavours to do so, some will reckon that a ‘Not’ has been mislaid along the way.