Seeking a Relevant Marx

Eric Hobsbawm, who died this fall at the age of ninety-five, has long been among the most esteemed historians of modern Europe in the English-speaking world—and certainly the most distinguished to have been a Communist Party member. As a historian, he always carried his Marxism lightly, as a canon of interpretation, never as the basis for ideological reductionism. Coming from a Marxist historian of such eminence, the present set of sixteen essays, loosely organized around the question of Marx’s renewed relevance, is inherently of great interest, though it is bound to be controversial at the same time. Still, Hobsbawm’s prescriptive dimension here is reasonably gentle. He admitted that much in Marx is outmoded; and he wrote very much as a historian, stressing that we cannot reassess Marx’s relevance without rethinking Marx in his own time and the subsequent history of Marxism, which led to contingent encrustations that must be chipped away.

As with many such collections of somewhat disparate essays, the title promises more than the aggregate delivers. This book does not tell us “How to Change the World,” a title surely dreamed up by the publisher’s marketing department. Images of the Russian Revolution and Che Guevara dominate the dust jacket, though neither figures prominently in the book itself. But the claim of Marx’s renewed relevance provides a major organizing thread—although, in light of the diversity of these essays, the claim is sometimes more nuanced and circumspect than at other times, and on occasion the thread virtually disappears.

In an opening essay on “Marx Today,” Hobsbawm suggested that Marx returns to currency for essentially two reasons. First, the end of the Soviet Union liberated Marx from identification with Leninist theory and practice. But second and more especially because “the globalized capitalist world that emerged in the 1990s was in crucial ways uncannily like the world anticipated by Marx in the Communist Manifesto” (p. 5). At the same time, Hobsbawm noted that the twenty-first century Marx will almost certainly be very different from the twentieth-century Marx (p. 6). So we need to go back to the original Marx and Engels, then probe how we got the twentieth-century Marx we did, in light of political circumstances that are no longer our own.

Returning to Marx and Engels in the first of the book’s two parts, Hobsbawm often nailed key points nicely, though the discussion is thin in spots. For example, whereas it is excellent on why German philosophy had to be brought down to earth, to the level of new conditions in France and Britain (p. 40), we find little on the substance of what, beyond “negation,” Marx took from Hegel. There is virtually nothing, for example, on alienation and the scope for overcoming it.

Still, Hobsbawm’s aim was not so much to explicate as to contextualize Marx and Engels, which meant, first, heading off anachronism; he warned explicitly that seeking a different Marx, relevant to our problems, does not warrant reading our problems back into Marx’s thinking. So in examining the sources of Marxist thought, Hobsbawm constantly sought to pinpoint what Marx and Engels knew, or could have known, or been concerned about, and to avoid what they were not concerned about. He also sought to pinpoint lacunae and blind spots—some inevitable, some not—while also noting the contingent conflations in their thinking. Above all, Hobsbawm stressed the contingency of the fusion of Marx’s prophetic hope, derived from Hegel, with the privilege he afforded the industrial proletariat, taken as the Hegelian negation that would transform existing society (pp. 14, 42–43, 379). This embrace of proletarian experience led to Marx’s particular way of analyzing the mechanisms of capitalism—and of understanding the process whereby capitalism would be overcome.

At the same time, Hobsbawm’s book accounts for the ambiguity of the Marxian legacy in political thought. For Marx and Engels, political action was essential...