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A
conversation between Eric Hobsbawm and Marcello Musto
September, 16 2008 --
Eric Hobsbawm is considered one of the greatest
living historians. He is president of Birkbeck College,
London, and professor emeritus at the New School for
Social Research. Among his many writings are the trilogy
about the "the long 19th century": The Age of
Revolution:
Europe 1789-1848 (1962); The Age of
Capital: 1848-1874 (1975); The Age of Empire:
1875-1914 (1987), and the book The Age of
Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991
(1994). Marcello Musto is editor of
Karl Marx's Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique
of Political Economy, London-New York: Routledge
2008.
M. M. Professor
Hobsbawm, two decades after 1989, when he was too
hastily consigned to oblivion, Karl Marx has returned to
the limelight. Freed from the role of instrumentum regni
to which he was assigned in the Soviet Union, and from
the shackles of ``Marxism-Leninism'', he has in the last
few years not only received intellectual attention
through new publication of his work, but also been the
focus of more widespread interest. Indeed in 2003, the
French magazine Nouvel Observateur dedicated a
special issue to Karl Marx -- le penseur du troisième
millénaire? (Karl Marx -- the thinker of the third
millennium?). A year later, in Germany, in an opinion
poll sponsored by the television company ZDF to
establish who were the most important Germans of all
time, more than 500,000 viewers voted for Marx; he came
third in the general classification and first in the
``current relevance'' category. Then, in 2005, the
weekly Der Spiegel portrayed him on the cover
under the title ``Ein Gespenst kehrt zurück'' (A spectre
is back), while listeners to the BBC Radio 4 program
In Our Time voted for Marx as their ``greatest
philosopher''
In a recent public
conversation with Jacques Attalì, you said that
paradoxically "it is the capitalists more than others
who have been rediscovering Marx", and you talked of
your astonishment when the businessman and liberal
politician George Soros said to you "I've just been
reading Marx and there is an awful lot in what he says."
Although weak and rather vague, what are the reasons for
this revival? Is his work likely to be of interest only
to specialists and intellectuals, being presented in
university courses as a great classic of modern thought
that should never be forgotten? Or could a new "demand
for Marx" come in the future from the political side as
well?
E. H. There is an
undoubted revival of public interest in Marx in the
capitalist world, though probably not as yet in the new
East European members of the European Union. It was
probably accelerated by the fact that the 150th
anniversary of the publication of the Manifesto of
the Communist Party coincided with a particularly
dramatic international economic crisis in the midst of a
period of ultra-rapid free market globalisation.
Marx had predicted the
nature of the early 21st century world economy a hundred
and fifty years earlier, on the basis of his analysis of
"bourgeois society". It is not surprising that
intelligent capitalists, especially in the globalised
financial sector, were impressed by Marx, since they
were necessarily more aware than others of the nature
and instabilities of the capitalist economy in which
they operated. Most of the intellectual left no longer
knew what to do with Marx. It had been demoralised by
the collapse of the social-democratic project in most
North Atlantic states in the 1980s and the
mass conversion of national governments to free market
ideology, as well as by the collapse of the political
and economic systems that claimed to be inspired by Marx
and Lenin. The so-called "new social movements" like
feminism either had no logical connection with
anti-capitalism (though as individuals their members
might be aligned with it) or they challenged the belief
in endless progress in human control over nature, which
both capitalism and traditional socialism had shared. At
the same time the "proletariat", divided and diminished,
ceased to be credible as Marx's historical agent of
social transformation. It is also the case that since
1968 the most prominent radical movements have preferred
direct action not necessarily based on much reading and
theoretical analysis.
Of course this does not
mean that Marx will cease to be regarded as a great and
classical thinker, although for political reasons,
especially in countries like
France and
Italy with once powerful Communist
parties, there has been a passionate intellectual
offensive against Marx and Marxist analyses, which was
probably at its height in the 1980s and 1990s. There are
signs that it has now run its course.
M. M. Throughout his
life Marx was a shrewd and tireless researcher, who
sensed and analysed better than anyone else in his time
the development of capitalism on a world scale. He
understood that the birth of a globalised international
economy was inherent in the capitalist mode of
production and predicted that this process would
generate not only the growth and prosperity flaunted by
liberal theorists and politicians but also violent
conflicts, economic crises and widespread social
injustice. In the last decade we have seen the East
Asian financial crisis, which started in the summer of
1997, the Argentinian economic crisis of 1999-2002 and,
above all, the subprime mortgage crisis, which started
in the
United States
in 2006 and has now become the biggest post-war
financial crisis. Is it right to say, therefore, that
the return of interest in Marx is also based on the
crisis of capitalist society and on his enduring
capacity to explain the profound contradictions of
today's world?
E. H.
Whether the future politics of the left will once again
be inspired by Marx's analysis, as the old socialist and
communist movements were, will depend on what happens to
world capitalism. But this applies not only to Marx but
to the left as a coherent political ideology and
project. Since, as you say correctly, the return of
interest in Marx is largely -- I would say mainly --
based on the current crisis of capitalist society, the
outlook is more promising than it was in the 1990s.
The present world financial
crisis, which may well become a major economic
depression in the USA,
dramatises the failure of the theology of the
uncontrolled global free market, and forces even the US government to consider taking
public actions forgotten since the 1930s. Political
pressures are already weakening the commitment of
economic neoliberal governments to uncontrolled,
unlimited and unregulated globalisation. In some cases (China)
the vast inequalities and injustices caused by a
wholesale transition to a free market economy already
raise major problems for social stability and raise
doubts even at the higher levels of government.
It is clear that any
"return to Marx" will be essentially a return to Marx's
analysis of capitalism and its place in the historical
evolution of humanity -- including, above all, his
analysis of the central instability of capitalist
development, which proceeds through self-generated
periodic economic crises, with political and social
dimensions. No Marxist could believe for a moment that,
as neoliberal ideologists argued in 1989, liberal
capitalism had established itself forever, that history
had come to an end, or indeed that any system of human
relations could ever be final and definitive.
M. M. Do you not
think that if the political and intellectual forces of
the international left, who are questioning themselves
with regard to socialism in the new century, were to
foreswear the ideas of Marx, they would lose a
fundamental guide for the examination and transformation
of today's reality?
E. H. No socialist
can foreswear the ideas of Marx, since his belief that
capitalism must be succeeded by another form of society
is based not on hope or will but on a serious analysis
of historical development, particularly in the
capitalist era. His actual prediction that capitalism
would be replaced by a socially managed or planned
system still seems reasonable, though he certainly
underestimated the market elements which would survive
in any post-capitalist system(s).
Since he deliberately
abstained from speculation about the future, he cannot
be made responsible for the specific ways in which
"socialist" economies were organised under "really
existing socialism". As to the objectives of socialism,
Marx was not the only thinker who wanted a society
without exploitation and alienation, in which all human
beings could fully realise their potentialities, but he
expressed this aspiration more powerfully than anyone
else, and his words retain the power to inspire.
However, Marx will not
return as a political inspiration to the left until it
is understood that his writings should not be treated as
political programs, authoritative or otherwise, nor as
descriptions of the actual situation of world capitalism
today, but rather as guides to his way of understanding
the nature of capitalist development. Nor can or should
we forget that he did not achieve a coherent and fully
thought out presentation of his ideas, in spite of
attempts by Engels and others to construct a volume II
and III of Capital out of Marx's manuscripts. As
the Grundrisse show, even a completed Capital
would have formed only part of Marx's own, perhaps
excessively ambitious, original plan.
On the other hand, Marx
will not return to the left until the current tendency
among radical activists to turn anti-capitalism into
anti-globalism is abandoned. Globalisation exists, and,
short of a collapse of human society, is irreversible.
Indeed, Marx recognised it as a fact and, as an
internationalist, welcomed it, in principle. What he
criticised, and what we must criticise, was the kind of
globalisation produced by capitalism.
M. M. One of Marx's
writings which has provoked the greatest interest
amongst new readers and commentators is the
Grundrisse. Written between 1857 and 1858, the
Grundrisse is the first draft of Marx's critique of
political economy and, thus, also the initial
preparatory work on Capital; it contains numerous
reflections on matters that Marx did not develop
elsewhere in his incomplete oeuvre. Why, in your
opinion, are these manuscripts one of Marx's writings
which continue to provoke more debate than any other, in
spite of the fact that he wrote them only to summarise
the foundations of his critique of political economy?
What is the reason for their persistent appeal?
E. H. In my view the
Grundrisse have made so large an international
impact on the Marxian intellectual scene for two
connected reasons. They were virtually unpublished
before the 1950s, and, as you say, contained a mass of
reflections on matters that Marx did not develop
elsewhere. They were not part of the largely dogmatised
corpus of orthodox Marxism in the world of Soviet
socialism, yet Soviet socialism could not simply dismiss
them. They could therefore be used by Marxists who
wanted to criticise orthodoxy or widen the scope of
Marxist analysis by an appeal to a text which could not
be accused of being heretical or anti-Marxist.
Hence the editions of the
1970s and 1980s (well before the fall of the Berlin
Wall) continued to provoke debate largely because in
these manuscripts Marx raised important problems which
were not considered in Capital, for instance, the
questions raised in my preface to the volume of essays
you collected [Karl
Marx's Grundrisse. Foundations of the Critique of
Political Economy 150 Years Later, edited by M.
Musto, London—New York:
Routledge 2008;
http://www.routledgeeconomics.com/books/Karl-Marxs-Grundrisse-isbn9780415437493].
M. M. In the preface
to this book, written by various international experts
to mark the 150th anniversary of its composition, you
have written: "Perhaps this is the right moment to
return to a study of the Grundrisse less
constricted by the temporary considerations of leftwing
politics between Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of
Stalin and the fall of Mikhail Gorbachev". Moreover, to
underline the enormous value of this text, you stated
that the Grundrisse "contains analyses and
insights, for instance about technology, that take
Marx's treatment of capitalism far beyond the nineteenth
century, into the era of a society where production no
longer requires mass labour, of automation, the
potential of leisure, and the transformations of
alienation in such circumstances. It is the only text
that goes some way beyond Marx's own hints of the
communist future in the German Ideology. In a few
words, it has been rightly described as Marx's thought
at its richest." Therefore, what might be the result of
re-reading the Grundrisse today?
E. H. There are
probably not more than a handful of editors and
translators who have full knowledge of this large and
notoriously difficult mass of texts. But a re-rereading,
or rather reading, of them today could help us to
rethink Marx: to distinguish what is general in Marx's
analysis of capitalism from what was specific to the
situation of mid-nineteenth-century "bourgeois society".
We cannot predict what conclusions from this analysis
are possible and likely, only that they will certainly
not command unanimous agreement.
M. M. To finish, one
final question. Why is it important today to read Marx?
E. H. To anyone
interested in ideas, whether a university student or
not, it is patently clear that Marx is and will remain
one of the great philosophical minds and economic
analysts of the nineteenth century and, at his best, a
master of passionate prose. It is also important to read
Marx because the world in which we live today cannot be
understood without the influence that the writings of
this man had on the twentieth century. And finally, he
should be read because, as he himself wrote, the world
cannot be effectively changed unless it is understood --
and Marx remains a superb guide to understanding the
world and the problems we must confront.
[This article first
appeared at
http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18828.
It has been posted with permission.]
A conversation between
Eric Hobsbawm and Marcello Musto. Posted at
Links
International Journal of Socialist Renewal with
the permission of Marcello Musto.
About the Author
Marcello Musto is a Researcher at the University of
Naples ‘L’Orientale’, in Naples, Italy.
http://links.org.au:80/node/643
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