Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life

by Eric J. Hobsbawm

  Yet a few months later it became entirely clear that Benn was totally unsuited for the job. He had put his money entirely on the sectarians. In January 1981 a special conference of the party in effect handed over its fortunes to the left. The details do not matter. It was now evident that only his own political stupidity could stop Benn from becoming the leader of the Labour Party fairly soon. At this point anyone with minimal political sense, knowing how deeply the party was split, would have played the card of generosity, reconciliation and unity. Instead of this Benn issued a triumphant call for the victorious left to take over and to demonstrate its power by electing him against Healey for the deputy leadership. Whether a more conciliatory approach would have prevented the secession of the future Social Democrats, no one can tell. However, Benn’s total identification with the left sectarians made it evident to anyone who did not want the Labour Party to be reduced to a marginalized socialist chapel that its future required him to be defeated. And this was achieved, if only just. Tony Benn himself retreated to an honourable position as a backbench defender of the constitution, democracy and civil liberties and a propagandist for socialism, but his career as a serious politician was at an end.

  II

  Such as they were, my interventions in the political debate were almost entirely through Marxism Today. One would not have expected this modest monthly to become, in the course of the 1980s, and in spite of its association with the CP, essential reading in the media and political world – and not merely among the left. Even some eminent Conservative politicians – Edward Heath, Michael Heseltine, Christopher Patten – wrote for it or allowed themselves to be interviewed for it. A young Labour politician of no left-wing sympathies whatever, elected to Parliament in 1983, claimed he was a regular reader and allowed himself to be interviewed for it: Tony Blair. Most of the already established names who were to become major personalities of the future Labour government had their say in it: Gordon Brown, Robin Cook, David Blunkett, Michael Meacher. The journal was bitterly attacked by the hardliners within the Communist Party, which was about to be destroyed by its own internal battles and the collapse of the communist regimes, but its political leadership, firm supporters of the Prague Spring and the Italian kind of communism, gave it solid political and, of course, financial support as long as it could. (It went out of existence at the end of 1991 with the Party and the USSR.) In an era of crisis for the Labour Party the ideas for its future came from a communist journal. Its success was overwhelmingly due to the combination of political nous and journalistic flair of Martin Jacques, and not least to the decision to open its pages to writers far from the Party line, and the orthodoxies of the old socialists. Nevertheless, we also benefited by the almost total disarray of the traditional politico-intellectual universe in Britain in the Thatcher era. This chiefly affected the sectors left of centre, but even the Conservatives were exploring an unknown new territory. What must or could be done in the new era? How, even where, was it to be discussed? Marxism Today provided a space where these questions could be considered outside the established frameworks, above all because it insisted that with the arrival of Mrs Thatcher, ‘The Great Moving Right Show’ as the cultural theorist Stuart Hall called it in an article in 1979 which coined the term ‘Thatcherism’, all bets were off. The game was new. And Marxism Today said so, before the rest.

  In retrospect nothing is more obvious. The Thatcher era was the nearest thing in the twentieth century to a political, social and cultural revolution – and not one for the better. Armed with the most uncontrolled and centralized power available to government in any electoral democracy, it set out to destroy everything in Britain that stood in the way of an unholy combination of unrestricted profit-maximizing private enterprise and national self-assertion, in other words greed and jingoism. It was moved not only by the justified belief that the British economy needed a kick in the pants but by class feeling, by what I called ‘the anarchism of the lower middle class’. It was directed equally against the traditional ruling classes and their mode of rule, in practice including the monarchy, the country’s established institutions, and the labour movement. In the course of this largely successful endeavour it obliterated most of the traditional British values and made the country unrecognizable. Most of my generation probably feel like an American friend who decided to settle in England in the new century after retiring from an academic career in Massachusetts, and who was asked whether he missed the USA. He answered: ‘Nowhere near as much as I miss the Britain I knew when I first came here.’ This, at bottom, was the reason for the overwhelming dissidence of, even the widespread visceral hatred of Thatcher, felt in intellectual and cultural Britain, and the increasing dissidence of the bulk of the college-educated middle class, symbolized by the spectacular refusal of Oxford University to grant her an honorary degree. Not that this prevented the ideological advance of the Thatcherite belief that the only way to run the public and private affairs of a nation was by businessmen with business expectations using business methods. What made the triumph of Thatcherism so bitter was that, after 1979, it was not based on any massive conversion of opinion in the country, but primarily, though not exclusively, on the deep division of its opponents. There was no wave of Thatcherite voting in the 1980s like that which lifted Ronald Reagan in the USA. It consistently remained a minority of the electorate. My own calls for some electoral arrangement between Labour and the Liberal–Social Democratic Alliance or, at the very least, systematic ‘tactical voting’8 by anti-Conservative electors, were (naturally) dismissed by both, although in the end the voters had more sense than the parties and voted tactically in large numbers and to good effect. What made the situation so frustrating was that neither Labour nor the Liberal–Social Democratic Alliance had an alternative to offer. Thatcherism remained the only strategy in town. In the end all we had to rely on was that it would eventually become so unpopular that it would lose against any opposition, which is indeed what happened – but only after eighteen years. We warned that much of the Thatcherite revolution might prove irreversible. In this also we were right.

  On paper it was easy to analyse the situation realistically, dismissing the ‘cries of betrayal against those who insist on looking at the world the way it is’.4 In practice it was hard, since many of those against whom I wrote were comrades (or at least former comrades) and friends. Apart from myself and Stuart Hall, Marxism Today could not rely on the steady support of any established intellectuals of the old and the original (post-1956) new left. Most of the socialist and Marxist intellectuals outside the Marxism Today milieu were hostile, including such prestigious figures as Raymond Williams, Ralph Miliband and the eminences of the New Left Review. I was denounced at trade union meetings. This is not surprising. For many of them the line of Marxism Today meant the betrayal of the traditional hopes and policies of socialists, not to mention of the proletarian revolution which the Trotskyites still looked forward to. It could even look like disloyalty to the organized working class, battered with the full force of state power by a government waging class war, especially during the great national coalminers’ strike of 1984–5, which mobilized the full force of the left’s (and not only the left’s) emotional sympathy. Mine too, although it was patent that the delusions of an extremist leadership of the union, relying on the rhetoric of militancy and the traditional unionist refusal to break ranks in the middle of battle, were leading the union and the coalfield communities to certain disaster. Even we were not immune to the sheer force of the movement’s rhetorical self-delusion. Marxism Today, surveying the wreckage after the strike with a degree of realism, could not bring itself to admit the scale of the defeat.5

  This, indeed, was the general predicament of socialists in Britain from the middle 1970s on. Things fell apart for moderate reformist social democrats as well as for communists and other revolutionaries. For Marxists and non-Marxists, revolutionaries and reformists, we had in the last analysis believed that capitalism could not produce the conditions of
a good life for humanity. It was neither just nor in the long run viable. An alternative socialist economic system, or at least its forerunner, a society dedicated to social justice and universal welfare, could take its place, if not now then at some future time; and the movement of history was plainly bringing this nearer through the agency of state or public action in the interest of the mass of the wage-earning classes, implicitly or explicitly anti-capitalist. Probably never did this look more plausible than in the years immediately following the Second World War, when even European conservative parties were careful to declare themselves anti-capitalist and US statesmen praised public planning. None of these assumptions looked convincing in the 1970s. After the 1980s the defeat of the traditional left, both political and intellectual, was undeniable. Its literature was dominated by variations on the theme ‘What’s Left?’ I contributed to it myself. Paradoxically, the problem was far more urgent in the non-communist countries. In almost all the communist regimes the collapse of a widely discredited ‘really existing socialism’, the only socialism officially extant, had eliminated any other kind from the political scene. Moreover, it was reasonable enough for people there to place their hopes, even sometimes their utopian hopes, in an unknown western capitalism, so obviously more prosperous and efficient than their own broken-down systems. It was in the west and south that the case against capitalism remained convincing, especially that against the increasingly dominant ultra-laissez-faire capitalism favoured by transnational corporations, backed by economic theologians and governments.

  Marxism Today could see that the simple refusal to acknowledge that things had changed dramatically (‘Let cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the red flag flying here’), however emotionally attractive, was not on the cards. Indeed, that is why the traditional Labour left, always present and significant in the party’s history, though rarely decisive, disappeared from sight after 1983. It no longer exists. On the other hand, we could not accept – until Tony Blair became leader in 1994 we could barely even envisage – the alternative of ‘New Labour’, which accepted the logic as well as the practical results of Thatcherism, and deliberately abandoned everything that might remind the decisive middle-class voters of workers, trade unions, publicly owned industries, social justice, equality, let alone socialism. We wanted a reformed Labour, not Thatcher in trousers. The narrow failure of Labour to win the 1992 election eliminated this prospect. I am not alone in recalling that election night as the saddest and most desperate in my political experience.

  The logic of electoral politics as perceived by politicians whose programme consisted of permanent re-election, and after 1997 the logic of government, drove us out of ‘real’ politics. Some of the Young Turks of Marxism Today went where the power was. When, eighteen months after Labour had returned to power, Martin Jacques revived the journal for a single issue to survey the new era of Blair, one of them looked down on us – myself and Stuart Hall specifically – from the heights of 10 Downing Street, as people viewing society from the seminar room, ‘as if from the outside, without any sense of membership or responsibility’, unlike ‘intellectuals who are able to combine critique, vision and practical policy’. In short, academic or not, ‘critique was no longer enough’.6 The time had come for the political realists and the technicians of government. And both must operate in a market economy and fit in with its requirements.

  True enough. But our point – certainly mine – was and is that if critique is no longer enough, it is more essential than ever. We criticized New Labour not because it had accepted the realities of living in a capitalist society, but for accepting too much of the ideological assumptions of the prevailing free market economic theology. Not least the assumption which destroys the foundations of all political movements for improving the condition of the people, and with them therefore the justification of Labour governments, namely that the efficient conduct of a society’s affairs can only be by the search for personal advantage, i.e. by behaving like businessmen. Indeed, the critique of neo-liberalism was all the more necessary, since it not only appealed to businessmen and to governments who wanted to remove their traditional suspicion of Labour, and needed a justification for appealing to middle-class ‘swing voters’, but because neo-liberalism claimed the authority of a ‘science’ increasingly identified with the interests of global capitalism, namely economics, as consecrated for almost a quarter of a century by its highest authority, the Nobel Prize for Economics. Not until the very end of the century, when it was finally awarded to Amartya Sen, and then to a vocal critic of ‘the Washington consensus’, Joseph Stiglitz, was it given again to economists known to be outside the prevailing orthodoxy; and not until (so it is understood) the electors for the Nobel prizes in the natural sciences had expressed dissatisfaction at the consistent ideological bias of what was intended to be a scientific distinction. Perhaps the bursting of the great speculative bubbles of the fin-de-siècle, 1997–2001 have finally broken the spell of market fundamentalism. The end of the hegemony of global neo-liberalism has been predicted and indeed announced long enough – I have done so myself more than once. It has already done more than enough harm.

  III

  In the meantime Soviet socialism was dying.

  Unlike the end of the Cold War and the implosion of the Soviet Empire, the end of the USSR took place in comparative slow motion, between the time Gorbachev came to power in 1985 and its formal death in late 1991. It had its moments of headline drama – Yeltsin on the tank in Moscow resisting the attempted coup of August 1991 – but its basic action took place in the darkness of the Soviet corridors of power, such as the unpublicized but fundamental decision in 1989 to abandon the last of the Five-Year Plans (1986–92) in mid-course. As it happens, I was working on the Soviet economy at the UN university’s World Institute of Development and Economic Research (WIDER) and watched the process in the agreeable and acutely Russia-watching city of Helsinki, a few hours by land, a few minutes by air from the Soviets, where I spent some summers during those final years. If it did nothing else, it gave me an insight into the disastrous blindness of the western economists who passed through there, moving comfortably between airport, transnational hotel chain and limo, preparing to put the Russian economy to rights by the untrammelled operations of the free market, as certain of the possession of eternal truth as any Islamic theologian.

  By the 1980s the idea that the socialism of the USSR or its followers was what those of us inspired by the October Revolution had in mind was dead. A case could still be made for it as the necessary counterweight to the other superpower, and with greater moral conviction as the supporter of the liberation of oppressed peoples, notably in South Africa. The Moscow regime supported the ANC struggle, financed and armed it for decades when there was no foreseeable prospect of its success or of Soviet benefit. A devotion to colonial liberation was probably the last relic of the spirit of world revolution. Indeed, what had kept me immune to the appeal of Maoism was that, in spite of its internationalist rhetoric in the days of the Sino-Soviet split, Chinese Communism and Maoist ideology seemed to me essentially national if not nationalist, an impression not weakened by a few weeks’ visit to that impressive country in 1985. Unlike the USSR, which would never have backed a movement as remote from social revolution as the thuggish UNITA in Angola, Maoist China, which advertised its vocation as the centre of global armed struggle, actually supported guerrilla movements very selectively, and almost entirely on anti-Soviet and anti-Vietnamese grounds.

  We, or at least I, no longer had many hopes. My friend Georg Eisler recalls how, returning from Cuba in the 1960s, I wondered how long it would take before Havana became assimilated to Sofia. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which I remember as vividly as others do the death of Kennedy, made it unthinkable even to visit Prague again, but would one want to retire from the West even to a relatively liberal country like Hungary? The answer was no, even though, for an old central European, it was intellectually and culturally far mo
re lively and less provincial than its radiantly prosperous neighbour, Austria.

  What did old communists and the general left expect from the USSR in the 1980s except that it should be a counterweight to the USA and by its very existence frighten the rich and the rulers of the world into taking some notice of the needs of the poor? Nothing, any longer. And yet we felt a strange sense of relief, even a glimmer of hope, when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985. In spite of everything he seemed to represent our kind of socialism – indeed, to judge by early statements, the sort of communism represented by the Italians or the ‘socialism with a human face’ of the Prague Spring – which we had thought almost extinct there. Curiously, our admiration was not to be significantly diminished by the tragedy of his dramatic failure inside the Soviet Union, which was almost total. More than any other single man, he became responsible for destroying it. But he had also been, one might say, almost singlehandedly responsible for ending half a century’s nightmare of nuclear world war and, in Eastern Europe, for the decision to let go of the USSR’s satellite states. It was he who, in effect, tore down the Berlin Wall. Like so many in the West I shall go on thinking of him with unalloyed gratitude and moral approval. If there is one image from the 1980s that has stayed with me, it is the multiple face of Mikhail Gorbachev on the display screens in a TV shop which suddenly stopped me in my tracks somewhere on West 57th Street in New York. I listened to him addressing the United Nations with a sense of wonder and relief.