True socialism was never tried, only distortions.

You can choose your own distorter: Lenin, Stalin, Pol Pot, as you please. Hobsbawm chose Russian "circumstances" and maintained, in 1994, that "the failure of Soviet socialism does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism." There was nothing in "the socialist idea" to suggest a one-party state or the imposition of an orthodoxy, he says, ignoring the massive evidence that a central plan will always require both. Last year he was still arguing that "communism wasn't Russia. It was a global cause . . . if you think that communism is something greater than the histories of the backward countries in which it happened that communists got to power, then that history is not reason enough to abandon the chosen cause." At this rate, there can never be such a reason, since the "socialist cause" has become a metaphysical entity, forever proof against the mere facts of history. That sneer at "backward countries" suggests that the poor Russian people let communism down, the way Hitler said the German people let him down. History will always let deluded tyrants down--but unfortunately only in the long run, when so many of us are dead. Besides, as Revel asks, if local circumstances or individual villainy is distorting the socialist ideal, how does it happen that the identical formula for "really existing socialism" is transmitted from Stalin to Mao, to Kim Il Sung, to Ho Chi Minh, to Pol Pot, to Ceausescu, to Castro and to Mengistu? Were all these men suffering the betrayal of a pure ideal, or were they not rather all applying the same horrendous methods to reach the same impossible goal, the only methods and the only goal communism ever knew?

Please pity the former communists.

There was a mawkish piece in Les Temps Modernes headed "The end of communism: the winter of our souls." It gave the tone for a requiem Mass in honor, not of the countless victims, but of their executioners' friends, whose generous hopes had been so cruelly disappointed. Hobsbawm too invites us to admire their "loyalty to a great cause and to all those who had sacrificed their lives for it"--that means party activists, not those they deceived and betrayed. He says he stayed on in the cpgb long after his faith was shaken by 1956 (he can never bring himself to say "the crushing of the Hungarian revolt", just "1956", so much more sterile) out of loyalty to the heroes who had stuck to the party line. "I didn't want to end up in the company of all those ex-communists who had become anti-communists", i.e., the men and women who had the decency to admit that their god had failed. There was no need to recant anything, for party activists in, for example, Britain "cannot be held responsible for what happened in other countries and certainly not in Russia." Lying about and apologizing for "what happened in other countries" was blameless because it was inspired by noble ideals. As Hobsbawm put it: "Do I regret it? No, I don't think so. I know very well that the cause I embraced has proved not to work. Perhaps I shouldn't have chosen it. But, on the other hand, if people don't have any ideal of a better world, then they have lost something. . . . I cannot help feeling that humanity couldn't function without great hopes and absolute passions, even when these experience defeat."

We are familiar with this mindless cult of commitment from Heidegger and Sartre, but here it is the merest hypocrisy. Imagine Hobsbawm turning up to a cell meeting in Berlin or Cambridge and saying, "I'm only here for my great hopes and absolute passions; it's their night out." He would have been told, "Either you are a sentimental idiot or you are here, like the rest of us, to promote Soviet interests, to deny the truth about Stalin's tyranny, to collaborate when instructed with Nazis, and to fight social democrats. Otherwise, heraus!" The bit about hope and passion comes later, as a lame excuse.

Communism provided the best resistance to Nazism.

Since 1945, if not 1935, this has always been the strongest appeal of communism in the West, and explains the massive membership of the communist parties in countries like Italy and France, as well as the cohorts of fellow-travelers in the older democracies. For this appeal to have succeeded, however, some strenuous acts of forgetfulness were required. One must overlook the long history of collaboration between Moscow and Berlin, dating from well before the Hitler-Stalin pact, and including such services as facilitating military training and handing over foreign communists to the Gestapo. One must forget the campaign against the "social fascists", i.e., the democratic socialists, who as targets were long preferred to mere Nazis. Then and forever after the communists branded decided opponents "fascist", be they conservative, liberal or just the wrong ethnic type; this conceptual recklessness raises doubts about their true attitude to anti-democratic forces like Nazism. When the Comintern finally joined the anti-fascist coalition of the 1930s it was in order to manipulate it, starting with the decree: "You cannot be both anti-Nazi and anti-communist. You cannot criticize Hitler until you stop criticizing Stalin." Finally, one must pretend to overlook the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the brutal aggressions that it sanctioned, until a heroic people rose to save not communism, but the homeland, in what therefore had to be called, in a confession shameful for Marxists, the Great Patriotic War.

In any event, all this was so long ago, before 1945. What could resistance to Nazism have to do with the ravages of Stalin for the next eight years or the misrule of communist parties for a half century more? And yet, last year Hobsbawm was still milking this bull: "If you look at the great causes in which people of my age have been involved, such as the war against Nazism, it is impossible to say that the price paid was higher than the results obtained. . . . Even with hindsight, it is impossible not to recognise that we [communists] did a great deal of bad, but also a great deal of good."

Communism was brutally effective.

Communism never lacked tough-minded admirers who agreed that its methods were deplorable, but insisted that they worked. The USSR and the regimes it imposed elsewhere paid a high price for their industrialization but they got there, whereas Third World countries failed. This callous realism became less convincing when the Eastern bloc economies began slipping further behind the West; and it became quite implausible when the dilapidation of Soviet industry was laid bare.

Meanwhile, capitalism in newly industrialized Asia was demonstrating that impressive achievements were possible without resort to brutality. But it is an argument some mourners are unwilling to surrender. Hobsbawm, for example, always accompanies his denunciations of Stalin with a counterpoint of exculpation: "tough, but it worked." He says Stalin's reliance on terror was "rationally instrumental", i.e., it worked. Incidentally, it was a pure, high-minded terror, since Stalin was "quite indifferent to the material rewards that someone in his position could command." His role as "a secular Tsar" was based upon "a sound sense of public relations", i.e., it worked. His Short History of the Party was full of "lies and intellectual limitations" but it was "pedagogically a masterly text", i.e., it worked, as propaganda.

If the "tough, but it works" line is no longer applicable to Russian industry, one can always transfer the argument to China. Sure enough, Hobsbawm offers a tentative apology for the massacre in Tiananmen Square: The communist leadership was trying to manage a difficult transition and, courageously, "it did not abdicate its responsibilities." The result: ten years later China was prosperous, whereas weakly ruled Russia was in a mess. In other words, it worked.

Capitalism has failed as much as communism.

This is a major gesture of the parry. In France it has produced a series of near-hysterical texts about l'horreur économique, the failure of liberalism and the crisis of capitalism. It is the main theme of all of Hobsbawm's recent work; he calls this the Age of Crisis, in which the "theology of the free market" has failed as miserably as communism. Capitalism (only the Pope has the courage to call it evil, says this non-believer) is lurching from one crisis to another, and its days are numbered. With it will collapse parliamentary democracy, whose elections are "contests in fiscal perjury" and whose cultural foundations have been mined by the new barbarism. He is relying on the sort of unease Schumpeter felt, that the affluence produced by successful capitalism undermines its own ethical foundations, plus a natural concern about the sort of moral decline that Francis Fukuyama has examined in The Great Disruption, and that James Kurth expressed in these pages in a previous essay on Hobsbawm. But whereas Fukuyama set these cultural facts in a historical context, and even claimed to see signs of recovery, Hobsbawm puts on his "The End is Nigh" sandwich board. The way he seizes eagerly on every foreign exchange panic, every stock market slump, every riot about globalization as proof that the Big One has arrived reminds us that Marx and Engels went on this way for decades, always sure capitalism was about to fall over. These people are reluctant to admit what economic agents soon learn: that a free-market economy leads an adventurous life of frequent alarms and excursions; that (for reasons Keynes explained) it is not always self-correcting and needs clever managing; and, finally, that some of its excesses cannot be corrected by even the cleverest interventions but have to be worked through painfully. None of which has anything to do with the Last Trump. A line drawn through these ups and downs can be resolutely inclined upward, as it has been for the ten years since communism really did fall over.

Essay Types: Essay