Sunday, March 16, 2025

Hobsbawm Again

I want to share a fairly long quote, which has some relevance to the present situation (as well as being interesting on its own) from Eric Hobsbawm's 2003 memoir, Interesting Times (pp. 274-277, although I'm going to break this up by paragraphs, so I can add some notes):

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' 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 we were also right.

Hobsbawm, whose father was British and employed in the colonial empire (making him British), was born 1917 in Alexandria, and grew up in Vienna (home to his mother) and Berlin. He joined the Communist Party in Berlin c. 1930, and moved to England in 1933 to live with relatives, and remained a party member until his death in 2012, despite various misgivings, especially after 1956. So he always identified as a member of the left, effectively outside, but not disinterested in, the fray of British electoral politics. The chapter is called "A Watcher in Politics," and the pages leading up to this quote touch on a number of prominent figures in the post-Wilson, pre-Blair Labour Party: names I only vaguely recognize (Tony Benn, Denis Healey, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock, Arthur Scargill), and events (strikes, schisms), I have little knowledge of. But my sense from this is that Labour didn't just duck for cover, as most Democrats did instead of facing up to Reagan, but strong left resistance didn't work any better than the cowardice and/or indifference of the moderates.

More about why anti-Thatcher resistance failed below, although far short of all that can or should be said. One thing to note here is that while the US left was as strongly anti-Reagan, it was much smaller and more marginalized, partly because the Red Scare purges ran much deeper here (especially in the unions, which were further weakened by 30 yers of Taft-Hartley), and the mass energy of the old left had largely been harnessed and diverted by the New Deal, which had replaced socialism as a quasi-utopian ideal. (We don't need to accept the argument that socialism was impossible in the US due to frontier individualism. The drive toward socialism was effectively blunted all over the west through fairly basic reforms, although the word was most strenuously decried in the US.)

On paper it was easy to analyse the situation realistically, dismissing the 'crisis of betrayal against those who insist on looking at the world the way it is'. 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 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 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.

This is basically about the political tactics of people who never had enough power to need tactics. Given that nothing was likely to work, why kick yourself (or others in some sense comrades) for failed choices? Of course, I've seen many debates like this on the American left, where the track record is no better.

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.

While the left suffered political defeats in the 1980s, at least in the US and UK, the notion that it was eclipsed intellectually was never more than a hideous con job, bought mostly by liberals who never made the effort, not least because they never cared. What I will grant is that two fairly big residual notions had to be discarded: one is that the Soviet state had failed, both relative to the west and in its own terms, which led not just to collapse but to a deep well of cynicism; the other, related, was that we lost faith in the regenerative power of revolution, which actually dates back beyond 1917 to 1776 and 1789, and had been replenished as late as Vietnam and Cuba. A third problem should also be mentioned: the increasing immiseration of the masses ebbed and started to retreat after WWII, at least in the "advanced" world, which made it harder to see the proletariat as the political vanguard driving socialism -- an idea which itself was fading into utopian dreams.

Those were scarcely problems for leftists like myself, who always saw the history of the left as subject to the exigencies of its times and the limits of subversive imagination. In my view, Marx was -- as Benjamin said of Baudelaire -- a secret agent: of the bourgeoisie's secret discontent with its own rule. Modernist art and science were just other facets of a single drive that could only achieve equilibrium through equality and universality, yet didn't fully trust either. So socialism was really just a mirage: something the brain concocts to fill in the void of an unseeable, and possibly unattainable, future. It doesn't matter that Marx got side-tracked by Hegelian dialectics, or that Lenin and Mao siezed political opportunities and tried to pass them off as revelations. Sooner or later, the flaws would become clear.

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.

More on the 1992 United Kingdom general election, where John Major's Conservative Party won a landslide over Neil Kinnock's Labour, after extensive polling showed the race close.

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 and responsibility', unlike 'intellectuals who are able to combine critique, vision and practical policy'. In short, academic or not, 'critique was no longer enough'. 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.

The problem, of course, is that Blair's Labour Party, having won power, no longer needed any kind of critique about what was wrong with capitalism, and opposed any effort to rock their boat. After all, hadn't they just won? But in adopting so much Thatcherism, they too were bound to collapse under the dead weight of bad ideas and corrupt practices, as indeed they eventually did. But even out of power, they still saw no need for critique, as they had simple faith that the Conservative would fail again, letting them back in. (Which is basically all you need to know about Neil Starmer, whose recent win was inevitable and underwhelming.)

In America, Bill Clinton played the same role as Blair, with Obama and Biden stuck in his ruts, free of analysis or principles, and blessed with opponents so odious they can make you think you have no alternative. Still, aside from the rich donors who fund them -- and who often as not work both sides of the party divide -- the neoliberals have no real political base, except in the minds of actual liberals, who are so terrified by the right, and so willing to settle for next-to-nothing, that they're willing to follow the anointed nouveaux riches who spout the right verities while doing nothing to inhibit the slide into oligarchy. Worst still, their pandering to right-wing talking points only encouraged the right to make more extreme demands, secure in their understanding that "centrist" Democrats would at most offer the the sort of lame opposition that could easily be lampooned, and which would offer them to claim the high ground of strong and decisive leadership.

Not that I enjoy flogging a dead horse, but it might be useful to recap Clinton's legacy: his adoption of Greenspan's austerity, anti-government program, which he took so seriously he declared "the era of big government is over," launched a program (led by Al Gore) for "reinventing government," and eventually reached the holy grail of a balanced budget (a feat curtly discarded by Dick "deficits don't matter" Cheney); his campaign for NAFTA and other anti-union trade agreements, which not only wiped out manufacturing jobs but by decimating Mexican agriculture triggered the "illegal" immigration that fueled the rise of Trumpism; his lame surrender to Powell on civil rights for homosexual soldiers, and ultimately on every other "defense" budget demand, as well as his "Defense of Marriage" act; persistent bungling on every foreign policy front, from inept incoherence in Somalia and Haiti to the reduction and rape of Russia and the rearmament of NATO, to the commitment to regime change in Iraq, the sham peace process in Israel, and the first volleys in what Bush later christened as the Global War on Terror (bombing Afghanistan and Sudan to provoke reprisals from Al-Qaeda); the "end of welfare as we know it"; the "Washington Consensus" which pushed the "developing world" ever deeper into debt, triggering financial crises for which the only acceptable solution was imposing greater austerity; his repeal of Carter-Glass and hasty deregulation of financial markets (especially derivatives), which led directly to the crash of 2008; his demolition of the Democratic Party into his own personal political machine, which was largely accomplished by destroying Democratic majorities in Congress and at state and local levels, ensuring that regardless of what he might say to the party base, he would only be able to pass laws permitted by the Republican opposition (which, thanks to Newt Gingrich, preferred to gain credibility by fighting him over cutting deal that would bind them to his disasters); and which over all set standards for cant, mendaciousness, and corruption which cut deep enough into the American psyche that even someone as obviously defective as Trump could campaign against.

The Hobsbawm quote was written in 2003, so it doesn't follow further analogies between US and UK politics, the most interesting of which was the emergence of renewed left leadership with Corbyn in the UK and Sanders in the US, and the nearly fanatic efforts of moneyed elites in the "left-center" parties to quash any signs of principled rebellion, while the right has been left free to stray into increasingly extremist policies (Brexit in UK, Trump in US). But it mostly interests me as an example of how real leftists think and maneuver in a political system which allows them no genuine representation. In a proportional representation system, one could imagine building a small but like-minded party and gaining a toe hold which could grow and maybe even be bartered into a coalition. But the UK's "first-past-the-post" system militates against third parties (although for some reason the Liberal Dems have survived, often with disproportionately low representation, and districts have allowed sectional parties to prosper), and the US system is even harder to break into.

Central to Hobsbawm's analysis is his conclusion that not just revolution but any sort of system-changing socialism hasn't been possible in the the western democracies, at least since the "Golden Age" of 1945-1973, which made up a major section of his The Age of Extremes: 1914-1991. I think he's right, but we needn't go into why right here, let alone the many things this implies, let alone the various permutations among countries where the path to affluence and democracy was more checkered. Although we should note that the orchestration of the Cold War had repercussions in domestic relations, especially in the US and UK, which weakened labor and gave license to finance capital's predatory instincts, ultimately bringing us back to a degree of class polarization we haven't experienced since before WWII.

The first thing to note is that in the last 80 years there have been many left variants in the US/UK -- from here on we'll simply ignore the rest of the world, and probably blur some of the US/UK differences[*] -- with varying grievances, prospects, and hopes. But what they all have in common is extreme political marginalization, which was the point of the Red Scare. Hobsbawm notes that the anti-left hysteria was much worse in the US than in the UK, but he still has many stories of how his membership in the CP was held against him. I never had any CP interest, partly because: I was born 33 years after him, missing the Great Depression, the Nazi rise to power, WWII, and memory of the Korean War, McCarthy, the death of Stalin, and the tumult of 1956; partly because I was far removed from its milieu, unlike some friends I only met much later; and partly because the CPUSA never seemed to be anything more than a joke.

But while the left has often suffered setbacks, it never really vanished, because it's based on the eternal faith that ethically reasoned solutions are always possible, a belief that resurfaces after every disruption and disaster: during and after WWII; in the 1960s with the new left issues (civil rights, war in Vietnam and elsewhere, women's liberation, ecology and environment, the cultural revolution); and in the as-yet-unnamed now, which has started to look perilous enough to send folks back to their 1930s history books (part of the reason I'm reading Hobsbawm).

I've been a pretty diligent observer of American politics since the mid-1960s, and I became a fairly serious student of the Marxian intellectual tradition at least by 1970, so I've been in a ideal position to note any correspondence between Democratic politics and leftist political thought. So believe me when I tell you that there is none. The Democratic politicians who have been most damned for being too far left -- Adlai Stevenson, George McGovern, Edward Kennedy, Howard Dean, Elizabeth Warren -- were nothing of the sort. The closest you come is with mild-mannered reformers who picked up bits of framing from the older left and can play can play them as rhetoric, like Jesse Jackson and Bernie Sanders. I don't mind -- I'm pretty mild-mannered myself -- but I still think that when you shortchange the critique, you have trouble coming up with the best solutions.

What attracted me to Marxism in the late 1960s was the depth of insight and understanding as well as the idea that proper answers to problems would lead to a more just society. I discovered reason and enlightenment there, and in many ways doing so saved my life, allowing me to dispense with all sorts of kneejerk reactions and prejudices (e.g., grudges I had built up as defensive mechanisms against my schooling). After a few years, I stopped reading Marxism, because I understood the analysis so well that I could read anything and find what I needed. So I no longer counted myself as a Marxist, but I never lost the notion that people who understood Marx were much smarter than those who didn't, or that people who identified with the left, even if their understanding was suspect, were simply better people (not superior, which would be anti-left, but better).

It's quite possible that I had already internalized the insight that revolutionary change in America was impossible and not even desirable. I was, after all, inclined to flip Marx's maxim, to say that the real point wasn't to change the world but to understand it. Hobsbawm's motivation thirty years earlier was the opposite: he joined the KPD for the politics -- not just the goal of changing the world for the better, but the dire immediate need to fight the fascists -- then wound up reading Marx on the side. Later on in the book, he apologizes:

Had it been the life I had in mind when I was young? No. It would be pointless, even stupid, to regret that it has turned out this way, butg somewhere inside me there is a small ghost who whispers: 'One should not be at ease in a world such as ours.' As the man said when I read him in my youth: 'The point is to change it.'

The last 40-45 years has been a disaster for the left, both in the UK and the US, and not because our heads and/or our hearts were in the wrong. The UK history in the Hobsbawm quote is just the start of this ordeal. So whose fault has that been? I don't doubt that we've made mistakes. I could imagine compiling a catalog of fallacies that have popped up here, there, and everywhere. Still, I've never noticed most of what I hear other people complain about, and what I have noticed is often blown way out of proportion. Perhaps more helpfully, I could also imagine writing a guidebook, which starts with principles and develops them through practical exercises. The key definition is that you're on the left if you favor more equality, more freedom, and more mutual support -- which the right opposes, because they seek an order that is hierarchical, privileged, and enforced (preferably by concent, but often resorting to violence and intimidation, enveloped in a web of deceit and pretension). Given this definition, right and left have fundamentally different views of justice.

And since both see government as a means for securing justice, they contend over its direction. That's where politics comes into play. In a democratic framework, the left should have a huge advantage, in that many more people stand to benefit from equality, freedom, and mutual support than the right can muster in favor of elite-imposed order. So the right does whatever it can to disparage and discredit the left, ascribing false motives, hidden agendas, any whiff they can come up with of unsavory behavior, and/or simply denying the possibility of left policies ever working. Left thinkers can easily see through these tactics, but left politicians spend most of their time fending off the barrage of attacks and innuendo. That rarely works, but the patrons of the right have one more trick up their sleeves: capture the opposition party, and seed it with ineffectual candidates who, even if they win, can accomplish little if anything. Clinton, Blair, and Obama were all ruling class wannabes. In power, they consistently chose their own gilded futures over the needs of the people who voted for them. No wonder the masses turn cynical and hopeless.

It's quite clear now that Trump is going to self-destruct, most likely fairly quickly, and that some Democrat will return to power with a mandate to undo, or at least patch over, much of the damage. What Democrats need to do right away is to establilsh a loud and vigorous opposition, not just to slow down the destruction, but to make people understand that it's the Republicans who are responsible for the damage, and that what they're doing is intrinsic to their nature -- their commitment to various aspects of the right-wing playbook. You don't have to be a leftist to get screwed over by Trump, so we should be happy to support opponents from every angle. In particular, people in the center should learn to appreciate leftists when they can be effective. Leftists, too, need to defer to others when they're more effective. Evils as bad as Trump need broad coalitions to back them down.

What Democrats need to do for the next election is slightly different: they need to find effective ways to talk about what Republicans are doing, who they are hurting in the process, and why they're hell bent on doing such damaging things. As part of this, they need to listen to what people are saying, figure out what problems concern them, and come back with realistic solutions: there is no single answer, so you have to figure out what makes sense, and what you can do within your own principled framework. I suspect that most of the principles and many of the policies that prove most promising will come from the left. The left exists because problems need solutions, and in most cases real solutions come from the left. But to make any meaningful changes, they need to appeal to a significant majority of voters, not just squeak through into a divided, do-nothing government.

To do that, they need to rebuild the party from the ground up. And to do that, they need to come up with a coherent and realstic plan for addressing real problems: not just the usual laundry list of favors for lobbies. Republicans have huge advantages with their massive propaganda network, the pernicious interests of business lobbies, their gerrymanders and dominance in the courts. On the other hand, their policies are unpopular and/or dysfunctional. And while they are very good at inciting rage against government, that's less useful when they are the government. Their "Trump will fix it" slogan fooled many people, but for how long?

While I appreciate the serious work of practical politicians to oppose and counter Trumpism, as well as the efforts of activists to keep their issues active, I agree with Hobsbawm that "critique is more important than ever."

[*] The most obvious one is that the left/center party in the UK is called the Labour Party, so is conscious of its original ties to working class unions, going back to a time when those unions were self-consciously anti-capitalist. Hence there once was a left tradition there which Hobsbawm argues as lately died off. The Democratic Party in the US fills the same ecological niche, but goes all the way back to the plantation slaveholder class and such later paleo-conservatives as Grover Cleveland. It only became the party of labor in the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt co-opted the unions as part of his plan to rescue and stabilize capitalism by consolidating large organizations limited by countervaling powers. Hence, unions were never dominant in the Democratic Party, but were generally satisfied by New Deal policies and the collective WWII effort, and when they started to lose favor, they found they had no alternatives (the Republicans were even worse, and third party efforts were quixotic, especially with the US deindustrializing and shedding union jobs even faster). Also worth mentioning is the distinct role of racism in the US, the various effects of the closing and reopening of immigration, and massive technological changes -- factors which also affected the UK, although perhaps less radically than the US.

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