Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: il silenzio del comunista

Anche Hobsbawn invecchia. E dire che ci sono cose che potrebbe
riuscire a spiegare, se si lasciasse alla spalle Marx...
http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2011/01/marx-hobsbawm-russia-world
How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism
Eric Hobsbawm
Little, Brown, 480pp, £25
Eric Hobsbawm begins this collection of essays on Marx and Marxism
with a note on how frequently visitors come to Marx's grave. "Walk
into Highgate Cemetery, where a 19th-century Marx and Spencer - Karl
Marx and Herbert Spencer - are buried curiously enough within sight of
each other's grave. Herbert was the acknowledged Aristotle of the age,
Karl a guy who lived on the lower slopes of Hampstead on his friend's
money. Today nobody even knows Spencer is there, while elderly
pilgrims from Japan and India visit Karl Marx's grave and exiled
Iranian and Iraqi communists insist on being buried in his shade."
It is an odd way to start a book whose central thesis is that Marx's
thinking can help solve the problems of the 21st century. The aged
pilgrims described by Hobsbawm are a little like the Russian émigrés
of the 1920s - disoriented refugees from a vanished world. The Soviet
regime, which was the most important embodiment of Marx's
revolutionary project in the 20th century, has collapsed and been
replaced by one that owes more to Russian Orthodoxy than to any
western ideology, while the largest and most important country still
ruled by a communist party has embraced a type of capitalism that
makes mid-19th-century English laissez-faire look tame. There is no
longer any advanced country that has a mass party which can claim to
be inspired by Marx's thinking.
Marx has never been more marginal politically. By contrast, Spencer's
ideas are flourishing. Spencer the man, an eccentric Victorian
thinker, is largely forgotten, and it is a safe bet that none of the
many writers who interpret social and economic life in evolutionary
terms today has read anything much of his writings. But whether or not
they acknowledge it, modern propagandists for the free market are
promoting a version of Spencer's social Darwinism, embellished with
ideas of genes and memes - a toxic mix that is no more genuine science
than was the theory of survival of the fittest that Spencer so
ardently promoted.
Free-market capitalism may be in trouble, but crackpot theories of
social evolution continue to give the failing system a deceptive aura
of intellectual legitimacy. One of Hobsbawm's strengths is that he is
too good a historian to take this nonsense seriously. If The Age of
Capital (1975) and The Age of Empire (1987) are landmark works of
history, one reason for this is the deep understanding they show of
the interactions of ideas with power. Hobsbawm's great weakness is
that he chose not to apply the same historical understanding to the
period between 1914 and 1991 - the era he has called "the short 20th
century", in which communism came to power in many parts of the world
and then disappeared, leaving only a trail of ruins. His writings on
this period are banal in the extreme. They are also highly evasive. A
vast silence surrounds the realities of communism, a refusal to engage
which led the late Tony Judt to conclude that Hobsbawm had
"provincialised himself". It is a damning judgement, but one that the
present volume vindicates.
When he can bring himself to address the subject of the Soviet
experience, Hobsbawm's comments are offhand and conventional. As if
its truth were self-evident, he recites the cliché that Russia was too
backward to produce anything like the socialist society Marx
envisioned. As the Marxist theorist Georgi Plekhanov intimated in a
statement that Hobsbawm cites approvingly, the result of a revolution
in Russia would be "a Chinese empire in red". Seizing on Plekhanov's
observation, generations of western Marxists have argued that the
Soviet experiment was thwarted by Russian traditions of "Asiatic
despotism". It is a dubious claim, empirically unproven and notably
provincial in the contemptuous attitude it expresses towards non-
western traditions. This drearily familiar narrative has one large
advantage, however: it absolves those who hold it from confronting the
historical record of communist regimes throughout the world.
Rehearsing another version of the cliché, Hobsbawm tells us that "a
liberal capitalist Russia wouldn't come about either". The clear
implication is that, by late-tsarist times, Russia was set on a course
that led inexorably to dictatorship of the kind that Lenin and Stalin
practised. One wonders how he can be so sure of this. Aside from
anything else, the view that nothing other than brutal dictatorship
could develop in Russia is hard to reconcile with the eminent
historian's 60-odd years of continuous Communist Party membership.
More to the point, it is impossible to square this conventional
narrative with the dictatorships that have been a feature of every
communist regime - not just in Russia, but across eastern Europe and
in central Asia, China, south-east Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Were the peoples of these lands, with their widely varying histories,
cultures and levels of development, unfailingly backward and semi-
barbaric? Or was Marx's vision of a post-capitalist society flawed
from the start? These are questions Hobsbawm never confronts. If he
did he would be forced to accept that his entire political life was
founded on a gigantic delusion.
When he considers the contemporary crisis of capitalism, Hobsbawm
might be expected to be on safer ground. "The globalised world that
emerged in the 1990s," he writes, "was in crucial ways uncannily like
the world anticipated by Marx in the Communist Manifesto." Well, up to
a point. Certainly Marx did not anticipate the resilience of
nationalism and the resurgence of religion. Nor did he foresee the
possibility that countries which were subjugated by the forces of
imperialism might rebel not only against western power, but also - as
is clearly the case in China, despite its nominal adherence to Marxism
- against western ideas. No less than John Stuart Mill or Spencer,
Marx took it for granted that Europe was the centre of the world.
Where Marx was ahead of his time was in grasping that capitalism was
an inherently revolutionary mode of production that would eventually
consume bourgeois civilisation. Economists and politicians who
celebrated the triumph of capitalism in the 1990s imagined that the
result would be a "property-owning democracy". In fact, the result has
been a type of reproletarianisation - an economic system in which
middle-class life has ceased to be a viable option for most of the
population. Here, if nowhere else, Marx was prophetic, but that does
not mean we can turn to him for an understanding of the current
crisis. Hyman Minsky's post-Keynesian account of the inherent
instability of finance-capitalism is more illuminating and practically
useful than anything produced by Marx or his disciples.
Most of the nearly 500 pages of How to Change the World relate to
19th- and early 20th-century Marxian disputes that have been rightly
forgotten. If Hobsbawm seeks to rescue Marx from history's memory
hole, it is in the same spirit of atavistic piety that superannuated
revolutionaries make the melancholy pilgrimage to the master's grave
at Highgate Cemetery.

 Anche Hobsbawn invecchia.
Libri: Hobsbawm, a 93 anni, in classifica bestseller
In testa alla classifica dei bestseller a 93 anni: l'onore è toccato a
uno dei maggiori storici contemporanei, Eric Hobsbawm, con il suo
nuovo libro: "Come Cambiare il mondo".
La classifica è quella della libreria del "Guardian", un luogo che lo
stesso quotidiano definisce "selettivo" quanto a provenienza degli
acquirenti.
Il volume è una raccolta di saggi sul marxismo. Eric Hobsbawm, nato a
Alessandra d'Egitto nel 1917 in una famiglia ebraica di origini
austriache, è uno storico di formazione marxista che ha dedicato molte
delle proprie ricerche alla classe operaia inglese ed al proletariato
internazionale
il castorino John Gray e comari sioniste dovrebbero imparare a starci.

 stesso quotidiano definisce "selettivo"
un classico esempio di autopompino.
prova a prendere esempio.