How to change the world, Tales of Marx and Marxism. Or, a lot of waffle and tired nostalgia . . .

(A review of Eric Hobsbawm’s, How to change the world, Tales of Marx and Marxism)

Never before in field of historical literature has a title of a book been so misleading and unconnected to the body of words on top of which it stands. This is not to say that upon purchasing Eric Hobsbawm’s book, ‘How to change to world’, I was expecting a detailed blue print for doing just that, however I was expecting something a tad bit more dynamic than the regurgitation of the old and well-worn material about Marxism which the book sadly contains. Going by the title one could have reasonably have hoped for at least an engagement with or an analysis of some sort of Marxist thought possibly building on Hobsbawm’s unrivalled experience, at least in duration, of being one of its foremost English scholars. Instead we get a series of essays which provide a disjointed and rather bland chronological narrative of its development, which is acutely uninspiring to any reader already slightly familiar with the subject area at hand.  

The one essay perhaps of any note is the third of the sixteen, ‘Marx Engels and politics’. Here Hobsbawm, much like Terry Eagleton in his recent ‘Why Marx was right’, presents Marxism as something in reality which is distinct from the reputation that it has acquired both through its critics as well as its practitioners. Rather than being a manual from which the iron laws of history can be understood and then identified within the contemporary situation of the reader, thus providing a clear cut illumination of the direct and narrow road to socialism, Marxism is instead presented as a much more loose and non-specific elucidation of economic and historical tendencies. No longer inevitable, but instead increasingly likely, the end of capitalism and its replacement by another economic system, not specified in any detail by either Marx or Hobsbawm, though one that should be recognisable as being somewhat socialist is still forecast.

However this unoriginal apology begs as many questions as it answers. By reducing the explanatory powers of Marxism, by abandoning certain untenable frontiers, characteristic of Bolshevik and other popular hard line ultra-materialist interpretations, an explanatory vacuum is left gaping. What uses are there left for Marxism? Even though triumphantly Hobsbawm reassures us that it still has its uses, subject the modifications that need to be made, which again he doesn’t discuss in any detail, if at all, the critical reader is left wondering and awaiting answers.

An important problem being that most of what is left is not necessarily uniquely or originally Marxist. It is needless to say socialism precedes Marx and that Marx himself had very little to say on the subject. Viewing history as a progressive process towards human self emancipation also has traction elsewhere both pre and post Marx and the same goes for analysing human society through examination of its economic foundations. It is only in this last point concerning the realm of economics that Marx made any original contributions and the relevance of these contributions are not covered at all in Hobsbawm’s work, much like Eagleton’s. The all-important question of the relevance and validity of Marxist economics is that which underlies the ability of Marxism to make any of its pronouncements about capitalism its crises and contradictions and the future spectre of socialism which hangs over it. However by not even attempting to defend or even rejuvenate or modernise Marxist economics, which along with all classical economic theory, was overthrown by the revolution of ‘marginalist’ or subjectivist economics at the end of the 19^th century, Hobsbawm leaves the key stone of Marxism to sink into the abyss of theoretical obsolescent dragging much of the superstructure down with it. How he can do this and then say Marxism is still alive and well is surely the height of intellectual incredulity. Whether Hobsbawm avoids this subject knowingly or not it seems a fit tribute to a theory and an ideology which has always depended much more on its revolutionary and subversive aesthetic appeal than any thorough understanding of Das Kapital.