[Militant International Review, No 60, February-March 1995, p. 14-18]
Phil Hearse reviews The Age of Extremes – The Short Twentieth Century, by Eric Hobsbawm, published by Michael Joseph, 1994, price £20.
Eric Hobsbawm is Britain’s leading living historian writing from a broadly Marxist perspective. However, as Hobsbawm himself notes, writing about the 20th century is a rather different enterprise than writing about the 18th or 19th centuries, given that every author is implicated in contemporary political judgments. This applies especially to an author like Hobsbawm, a life-long supporter of the official pro-Soviet Communist movement.
When, in October [February] 1956, Nikita Khrushchev’s ’secret speech‘ admitted some of the horrors of Stalin’s rule and in the same month [October-November] Soviet tanks crushed the Hungarian revolution, the British Communist Party exploded. Thousands streamed out of the party, including leading members of the party’s historians group, like EP Thompson and Christopher Hill. Hobsbawm stayed. Neither did the events of 1968 and after, which as Hobsbawm says, brought to the surface dissident socialist traditions like Trotskyism and Maoism, move Hobsbawm either.
For him, the official Communist – Stalinist – movement remained the sole credible force for radical change, and indeed the sole legitimate heir of the October 1917 revolution. Now, with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disintegration of Stalinism, Hobsbawm’s lifelong commitment is thrown into question.
This very long book covers a wide range of social, cultural and scientific developments and much of it very well. But Hobsbawm rightly sees the central fact of the ’short‘ twentieth century (from 1914 to 1991) as being the Russian revolution and its legacy. Overall Hobsbawm sees the whole enterprise as a disaster and probably a folly: rather illogically, given his general approach, he finds what the Communist parties outside Russia actually did specifically to be largely correct and justifiable with certain exceptions and questions discussed below. And given that Hobsbawm thus finds himself facing in two directions at once, his overall argument has an incoherence and illogicality at its core. Briefly summed up, his central arguments are as follows:
1) Twentieth century history has been determined by the Russian revolution and the reaction to it. However the Russian revolution, in a backward semi-feudal country, inevitably gave rise to an authoritarian and backward ’socialism‘.
2) This revolution, carried out by Lenin and the Bolsheviks on the false assumption of the likelihood of European and world revolution, irrevocably and disastrously split the workers movement, driving the formerly ‚oppositional‘ social democrats into the arms of the capitalist state.
3) The official Communist movement was the sole effective socialist movement internationally although by the 1930s Stalin and the Communist International opposed the further extension of the revolution.
4) Thanks to the existence of the Soviet Union and the ’socialist camp‘, and also as a result of the lessons of the 1930s slump, the post-war boom gave rise to not only to growing prosperity but also to Keynesian capitalist planning and the welfare state – and thus a ‚Golden Age‘ in the 1950s and 1960s of relative world peace and well-being for the working class, at least in the imperialist countries.
5) The Golden Age gave rise to the most sustained development of the productive forces in human history; however Keynesianism eventually ran out of steam, leading to a new era of capitalist crisis.
6) The Soviet model collapsed because the bureaucratic command economy could go no further than establishing ‚the world’s largest 19th century economy‘; and its ‚ruling class‘ became increasingly corrupted.
7) The October revolution is dead, Communism is dead, Leninism is dead: „By the 1980s it had as little relevance to international politics as the Crusades“. In retrospect ‚the legacy of 1789‘ (i.e. the French bourgeois revolution) is much more long-lasting and significant than the legacy of 1917. The future for the left is probably some form of ‚market socialism‘ or „a more socially just version of the Golden Age“ – i.e. some modified form of social democratic Keynesianism.
8) „No one (sic), least of all the present author“, claims to have the answers to the present crisis of humanity.
Not only the internal coherence, but many of the specifics of this argument need to be challenged. Before looking at the argument in detail, something else needs to be noted. While Hobsbawm remains resolutely dismissive, even sarcastic, about the Trotskyist tradition, some of his arguments – although obviously not the general conclusions – have been borrowed from that tradition. For example, his account of the emergence of capitalist crisis in the early 1970s (pp 284-5) has been borrowed wholesale from the work of Andrew Glyn1. His chapter on the rise of fascism, which includes a rather precise and detailed typology of radical right-wing movements, is based on the theory of fascism developed by Trotsky (while this and the superiority of Trotsky’s analysis to anything developed in the Stalinist tradition remains unacknowledged). And Hobsbawm is compelled to deploy a series of arguments about the Soviet experience, which although now common currency, were first developed by Trotsky and his successors – although he gives these arguments a very different twist than anyone coming from the Trotskyist tradition would accept.
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In looking at the specifics of the Hobsbawm argument we sail be forced at each stage to question a word which slips easily off the tongue, but which is often used as a substitute for detailed explanation for real events – ‚inevitable‘. In Hobsbawm’s broad historical sweeps, the bureaucratisation of the Russian revolution and the failure to extend the revolution internationally emerge as ‚inevitable‘ and pre-determined processes, excluding any substantial investigation of the real political struggles and decisions which led to these outcomes. Take for example the emergence of a bureaucratic caste in the Soviet Union. The victory of that caste’s political representatives – the Stalin faction – was achieved only after the most bitter factional battle between 1923 and 1928, and one which not only involved the Bolshevik tops, but which was carried through the working class vanguard in the factories involving tens of thousands of workers2. This, a decisive factor in Hobsbawm’s decisive question of the 20th Century, surely should have merited a mention in his account, but symptomatically it does not.
The Russian revolution opened up a new epoch, the epoch of the transition to socialism on a world scale, even if that process is more drawn out and complicated than the Bolsheviks expected.
Leaving aside the general method, this is in any case our first point of specific criticism of Hobsbawm’s argument – the inevitability of the bureaucratisation of the Russian revolution. This is first a matter of the internal struggle inside the Russian working class and its vanguard, weakened though it was by the years of civil war and foreign intervention If socialism was impossible in a single country, let alone a backward country, if bureaucratic deformations were inevitable in a situation of scarcity, then Stalinist totalitarianism was not; at its root was the defeat of the Left Opposition (not just the Trotskyists but also Zinoviev’s Leningrad opposition), followed by the murder of the Bolshevik party in the purges and the Gulag.
The precise fate of the Russian revolution however is overdetermined by Hobsbawm’s more fundamental question – should it ever have been carried out in the first place? To be fair Hobsbawm never explicitly says it was wrong for the Bolsheviks to seize state power, indeed at one point he implies that only the Bolsheviks had the will to form a government in the conditions of collapse in 1917 (see p. 62). However to take the revolution in a socialist direction was certainly wrong. Thus: „Looking back we can see that the original justification for the decision to establish socialist power in Russia disappeared when the ‚proletarian revolution‘ failed to conquer in Germany (p. 379)“. What then should the Bolsheviks have done? Establish a capitalist government? Not take state power in the first place? Faced with these questions, Hobsbawm simply returns to the historical narrative and effectively evades them.
But even this analysis takes as given something which needs to be proven – namely that the international extension of the revolution was a non-starter and that ‚world revolution‘ was a chimera, that Lenin’s calculation was utopian. A detailed analysis of the facts at the time leads to more complex conclusions than Hobsbawm’s „looking back“. However, the negative judgement of the Russian revolution reaches outrageous proportions when Hobsbawm discusses the split between social democracy and Communism in the workers movement, something he evidently thinks historically disastrous:-
„It is often forgotten that until 1917 all labour and socialist parties (outside the somewhat peripheral Australasia) chose to be in opposition until the moment of socialism had come … We tend to forget that the very moderation of such parties was a response to Bolshevism, as was the readiness of the old political system to integrate them (p. 84)“. This statement is an act of spectacular historical amnesia. The decisive date which demonstrated social democracy’s integration into the ‚old political system‘ was not of course October 1917 but August 1914, when the social democrats almost unanimously voted war credits to their own governments to pursue the first imperialist war. This, despite Lenin’s incredulity in his Swiss exile, was not a sudden act of betrayal, but the result of a long process of reformist degeneration of the parties of the Second International and, especially, their associated trade unions, Thus to picture the split in world socialism as a unilateral and brutal coup by the Bolsheviks is false. Did not the largest social democratic party in the world, the German SPD, split six months before the Russian revolution precisely on the issue of the attitude to the imperialist war, leading to the formation of the left-wing USPD, whose majority eventually joined the Communist Party?
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In any case, was the Russian revolution justified? To read back from the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990 to the decisions of April-October 1917 is determinist teleology. Historically the Russian revolution was justified both on the basis of its ‚world revolution‘ assumptions and the concrete historical results. The Russian revolution opened up a new epoch, the epoch of the transition to socialism on a world scale, even if that process is more drawn out and complicated than the Bolsheviks expected. Moreover, given Hobsbawm’s life-long political affiliations, he is sometimes curiously reticent on the concrete economic results in Russia, despite Stalinist totalitarianism. Capitalist ideologues have made much of the fact that according to the laws of the world market, Soviet industry and that in eastern Europe was ‚bankrupt‘. These pro-capitalist theoreticians don’t realise the implicit compliment involved here. Bankrupt or not (according to the irrational laws of the world market) without the Russian revolution these industries would not have been built. And those industries, and the immense social progress they brought – progress now being destroyed by capitalist restoration – survived precisely because they were protected from the vagaries of the untrammelled workings of the law of value and the world market. It was only on the basis of nationalisation, state planning and the state monopoly of foreign trade that all these gains were possible.
It was only on the basis of nationalisation, state planning and the state monopoly of foreign trade that all theses gains were possible.
Was the international extension of the revolution possible? Historically, of course, the revolution was extended; capitalist social relations were overturned in eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba etc. The very existence of the Soviet Union was a key factor in these social overturns. But could it have been extended to the core imperialist countries? Hobsbawm deals in far too summary fashion with crucial events here – the Spanish revolution of 1936, the crisis in Germany in 1930-33 and the years of the Liberation from the Nazis. For example on the Spanish revolution and civil war he is fundamentally evasive; noting that the revolution of 1936 went way beyond what the Popular Front government and the local Communist party wanted towards establishing workers‘ power (pp. 156-161), he then goes into a long tirade against the anti-clerical ‚excesses‘ of the revolution and the murder of priests, omitting all discussion of the violent and brutal crushing of the revolution by the forces of the Communist Party and the GPU.
Again, noting that the north of Italy by 1944 had been liberated by the Communist-led resistance, he is content to remark that these forces did not attempt to seize political power „for reasons which are still debated by what remains of the revolutionary left“. In other words, while he is happy to admit the non-revolutionary role of the world Communist movement and its transformation into an instrument of the will of the Kremlin and the diplomatic needs of the Soviet Union (at one point he even dates this to 1923), he does not draw out the logic of this argument. Since the official Communist movement was the main force coming out of the Russian revolution, didn’t its non-revolutionary role have some impact on the course of the struggles in which it played a decisive role? Or are we left with an immutable and immovable non-revolutionary role of the working class?
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Hobsbawm’s history is thus written ‚backwards‘. For him, everything which happened, happened inevitably once the disastrous Russian revolution had been made. The Russian revolution and the movements inspired by it were a false attempt to force the pace of history in the light of the impossibility of revolutionary advance in the main capitalist countries. Thus, conveniently, the vital role of the subjective factor, human consciousness, action and leadership, is minimised. From Barcelona in 1936, to Prague in 1968, no outcome was realistic or imaginable than the defeats which occurred.
This brings us to the ‚Golden Age‘ of the Cold War and the long capitalist boom. Much of Hobsbawm’s analysis of this is informative and unexceptional, as is his account of the collapse of this period towards a new long phase of capitalist crisis. There is an evident nostalgia for this period, with its combination of growing prosperity and an apparently powerful Soviet Union – a nostalgia obvious in the very term ‚Golden Age‘. However, there is one aspect of the origins of the long boom, roughly 1950-73, which escapes attention. Keynesianism and the welfare state were not just the product of the ‚lessons‘ of the 1930s, and the desire to avoid both recessions and working class discontent. They were the product also of the relationship of world forces, both positively and negatively, which came out of the second world war. For contrary to the impression that Hobsbawm largely gives (pp 109-141), the 1930s were not just a period of capitalist crisis and reaction, but also of stormy working class struggles and (mainly betrayed and defeated) revolutions. Thus the post-war boom was only possible on the basis of the defeat of these working class struggles, and the dispersal of the mass socialist vanguard which existed in the inter-war years. It took fascism, Stalinism and a world war with 50 million dead to smash that vanguard. And of course, on the basis of such events, a new long capitalist boom can be prepared as it could again on the basis of similar defeats, incidentally. The post-war Keynesian, welfare-state, settlement was also of course a product of the fact that, although the inter-war revolutions had been defeated and the socialist vanguard largely dispersed, the very existence of the Soviet bloc and the social strengthening of the working class in the war did provide a counter-example to capitalism and potential threat – necessitating elements of a social compromise for the capitalists.
Hobsbawm’s rightward shift is noticeable in his discussion of the relationship between democracy and capitalist prosperity. His whole discussion on the strengths and pitfalls of ‚democracy‘ (pp. 110-115) takes as read that it has no other form than parliamentary, i.e. liberal-democratic, constitutionalism. Socialist democracy, in general and as a concrete alternative for the Soviet Union and other post capitalist states, is not deemed worthy of discussion.
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The golden age disguised what was in store, the denouement towards a new long capitalist crisis and the fall of Stalinism. We are left, says Hobsbawm, not with a ’new world order‘ but no order, unbridled and disastrous free market capitalism, ethnic conflicts, racism, ecological and demographic crisis – in short a dark and threatening world. What answer can there be to this gathering catastrophe?
Eric Hobsbawm admits to having no answers, only questions. He notes that the failure of the Stalinist bureaucratic command economy does not logically invalidate any form of socialism (despite his chapter on the fall of Stalinism being entitled ‚The End of Socialism‘), While the fall of Stalinism does not logically invalidate all socialism, whether socialism is any kind of answer is unanswered. Thus, „To demonstrate the feasibility of such a socialist economy is not, of course, to demonstrate its superiority, to say, some socially juster version of the Golden Age mixed economy, still less that people would prefer it“. All we know, is that, unless we get our act together, humanity’s future is „dark-ness“.
After six decades defending socialism, albeit in its Stalinist form, this is a pretty limp conclusion. However the general trend of the argument is clear; a mixed economy, capitalist democracy, a reunited (i.e. social democratic) labour movement3. The circle of Hobsbawm’s argument is thus closed. Repudiation of the Bolsheviks, of revolution, of Leninism, concludes with a scepticism about the viability of any form of socialism.
Historically, of course, the revolution was extended in eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Cuba. The existence of the Soviet Union was a key factor in these social overturns.
All we have left is to try to recapture the Golden Age, and since this turns out to be improbable, to invent some new version of it. Here Eric Hobsbawm has forgotten his own arguments.
The Golden Age gave way inexorably to a new phase of capitalist crisis and our current dilemmas. Those who would put an end to the unending cycle of crises, need not just defend the Enlightenment rationality of 1789, they need to put an end to the capitalist system.
And this will lead them once more back to revolution, to the tradition of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, and to those who defended that tradition implacably and at terrible personal cost in the darkest days of the 20th century.
One final point of Hobsbawm’s analysis which he does not substantially reflect on. He notes that we are moving to an era dominated by the cities and by the urban poor, as the weight of the peasantry declines in secular fashion. By the year 2000 the majority of the world’s population will live in the towns and cities, and the majority of them in dire social y and economic conditions.
Strange then that so many radicals have such difficulty identifying a credible ‚revolutionary subject‘. The stormy revolutionary upsurges being prepared among these masses will answer the despairing scepticism of those who saw their dreams die in Moscow in 1990.
1 See A. Glyn, J. Harrison, I. Armstrong Capitalism since 1945.
2 See for example the accounts in Isaac Deutscher’s The Prophet Outcast and Pierre Broué’s Trotsky (Fayard, 1988).
3 Like EP Thompson, Hobsbawm exhibits an enormous nostalgia for the 1930s and second world war Popular Front. This disables him from making any critical balance sheet of the performance of the Communist parties, for example in the Spanish civil war and the years of the anti-Nazi Liberation.
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