THERE
WERE THREE masterful intellects that
drove the Left forward during the 1960s and 1970s, and whose impact on
generations of students is still with us today and has been, in no small way,
responsible for this country’s decline into left wing hegemony, which now grips our cultural and political
establishments.
These three Marxists were E P
Thompson, Ralph Milliband, and Eric Hobsbawm. They were, to all of those who
indulged themselves in revolutionary politics, and believed in the damnation of
capitalism - the master players.
Now, the last remaining member of
this triumphrate has died. That Eric Hobsbawm (95)was a great historian there
is little doubt, and a general consensus among modern historians would support
such view.
As a Marxist myself during the late
1960s to the late 1970s, I read two of the volumes of his great trilogy, The Age of Revolution, and The Age of Empire. Both volumes removed
the fog of dialectical materialism from the eyes of a prole without any
academic understanding of philosophy. The Hobsbawm curse was that he turned
what had been a romantic belief and shallow understanding of Marxism into a comprehensive
one; but it still left me with the naivety associated with class politics, and
the nastiness of the underlying envy that accompanies such naivety.
I cannot judge Hobsbawm as a
historian, only as a Marxist; and one which, when the end came, and the whole
hideous experiment failed, he still remained supportive of the system that the
historical materialism was meant to bring about.
To have admitted failure would have
admitted a failed life. So he at times, truculently, and obdurately tried to
defend the indefensible. He praised, right to the end, Stalin, whose many
murderous impulses equalled or surpassed those of Hitler. To quote from his Daily Telegraph’s obituary: “In a television interview, Hobsbawm was
asked whether, for such an accomplishment to take place[communism in the Soviet
Union], ‘the loss of fifteen, twenty million people might have been justified?’
“ ‘Yes’, replied
Hobsbawm”.
Such a riposte gives the true measure of the man. That he
could see any kind of humanitarian impulse within such a totalitarian regime,
is truly undermined by the above quote. Yet today politicians have paid their
respects to Eric, including Ralph’s son, Ed Milliband, the leader of the Labour
Party.
HOBSBAWN MAY
RIGHTLY, after his death, have his literary output praised. But as an ideologue
favouring the most cruel of dystopian arrangements (even in hindsight of its historical
failure), he can be openly targeted and criticised. If he had had the good grace
to admit that the Marxist gospel that he clung to, out of faith, proved a
failure; then at least he would be remembered for his scholarship.
Under the rule of the communist
tsars, covering 0ver 70 years, Russia became the modern backdrop for Dante’s Divine Comedy, whose rubric fitted
neatly into Soviet society; and Hobsbawm must have known this, but, like many
who have been gripped by such idealism, he thought the pain and suffering was
merited in order to fulfil the final synthesis that was to be the communist
society.
Eric Hobsbawm was an unrepentant
sinner and should be treated as such by those who believe in democracy, which
Hobsbawm obviously treated with contempt, except as a vehicle for his published
works. He was a supporter of Stalin. There are no ifs or buts. You cannot blame
the failure of his ‘utopian’ belief
on his dogmatic attitude toward the disappointment he must have felt when Gorbachev
said enough was enough and lifted the iron curtain and, as a consequence, pulled down the Berlin Wall.
What must have been going through
our historian’s mind when these events unfolded? My guess is defiance: and that
defiance asserted itself in belligerence and boldness toward any suggestion of
the failure of Marxism. The rest is all down to the cruelty of old age and its
ability to prove, through time, how mistaken a life spent believing in a
particular nostrum can only bring bitterness and mulishness.
ALONG WITH HOBSBAWM, the historian E P Thompson’s History of the British Working Class also weaved its magic; as did Ralph Milliband, who wrote copiously for the New Left Review in the 1970s, and lectured at the London School of Economics (LSE) and sent, no doubt, scientology-like, many young students out into the world to spread the Marxist virus throughout our schools and universities, as well as, many of our other cultural establishments.
While the Three Tenors brought nothing more than pure joy to
the opera loving public; the Three Marxists weaved their nostrums into young
minds, along with the ‘tolerant’ nature of ‘progressive’ politics; and, of
course, the removal of the capitalist profit making eyesore from their lives.
So, in whatever profession they take, the LSE, as well as
many red brick[1]
students; from the 1960s and 1970s, will have been sent forth to remerge as left/liberals,
and as such, as open minded left of centre types who have deemed, in class
conscious terms, the Conservatives Party as the enemy of their collectivism.
These students will have fallen fowl of such a liberal culture and welcomed it
because of their parent’s own ‘progressive’ impulses.
On the evening of Hobsbawm’s death, the BBC decided to run a
one hour tribute to the old Stalinist; while the Guardian lead with the story and used copious amounts of text to
pay the same tribute. Page after page of Pravda-like accolades , of the kind
that would appear on the death of a Soviet president, found their way into the
liberal intelligentsia’s favourite tabloid.
Hobsbawm’s death hopefully brings to an end the insane
worship which I and many of my generation once indulged in. The worship of a mechanical
process that was, meant to predict the inevitable overthrow of the free market
system, and bring into being the sunny uplands of communism; where human nature,
as it has been recognised for over 200 millennia, is at last constrained by a
stateless brotherhood working for the greater good of society.
In believing this, those who still do so, deserve the
lifelong disappointment that Eric Hobsbawm so bitterly felt when his Sin City collapsed around him, and the
cruel experiment was finally ended.
[1]
Red brick universities were, in the 1970s, the covens of Marxist rebellion
whose members were from both the middle and working classes.
No comments:
Post a Comment