The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
– Karl Marx (Thesis on Feuerbach, 1845)
Has the deepest economic crisis in 80 years prompted a shallow revival of Marxism? Or is the jury still out despite the failure of Lehman Brothers and other leading financial institutions in 2008 and the official acknowledgement of American recession in mainstream journals that have hailed Marx as the neglected seer of capitalist crisis? Have the basic articles of Marxist thought – that capitalism was inherently unstable, political activism or state intervention indispensable and revolution offered the ultimate prize – become irrelevant as many radical thinkers had us believe? Some of us who kept the powder dry just in case the times should turn dialectic again predicted that Marx’s relevance would be discovered soon enough. Leading the critics who stuck their ground was Professor Eric Hobsbawm who has influenced a whole generation of students, especially Indians, and whose selected writings have now been brought together in How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism (Little Brown/ Hachette India, Special Indian Price, Rs 795).
With How to Change the World, Hobsbawm marks 60 years in books since editing Labour’s Turning Point in 1948 and his debut with The Jazz Scene and Primitive Rebels in 1959. Should this book prove to be the last of his 20 or so titles to date, (he is almost 95 now) it would represent a fitting farewell to a career intimately bound up with the name and intellectual and political legacy of Karl Marx. Sub-titled Marx and Marxism, the book does not contain all the author’s writings on the subject which can be found in his earlier collections — Revolutionaries (1973) and On History (1997) plus the long entries in The Dictionary of Marxism and The Dictionary of National Biography.
Still, the book contains the bulk of the relevant material since the watershed years of 1956 ranging from an article on Marx’s Victorian critics in 1957 to Marx Today that was specially written for this volume. Although the book consists of previously published materials, many of the 14 articles have never appeared in English and to that extent constitutes an entirely new book for English readers.
As such, it will appeal to two overlapping levels of readership: specialists in the field and the serious common reader who would look into why a movement that lasted the greater part of the 20th century suddenly collapsed like a house of cards. Hobsbawm doesn’t provide straight answers to this question because his main purpose has been to commend “the history of Marxism for the past 130 years ... as the intellectual history of the modern world, and through its capacity to mobilise social forces, a crucial, at some periods a decisive, presence in the history of the twentieth century”.
Hobsbawm has divided his 16 essays in two parts: “Marx and Engels” that has eight essays and “Marxism”, the remaining eight. The first section that contains diverse studies on aspects of the thought of Marx and Engels opens with a small introduction to Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England and pre-Marxian Socialism and Marx on pre-Capitalist Formations in the unfinished work, known simply as Grundrisse that was written as a preparation for his Critique of Political Economy and Capital.
Part Two contains essays that would interest the common reader. Together, they provide an overview of Marxism in almost 130 years since Marx’s death in 1883. It is these chapters written with simplicity, clarity and a purity of style that exhibit Hobsbawm’s combination of lucid analysis and breathtaking range of scholarship that provide, inter alia, an itemised translations of Das Kapital to conclude: “The only other major linguistic extension of Capital occurred in Independent India, with editions in Marathi, Hindi, and Bengali in the 1950s and 1960s.”
In the past 100 years, Marxist writings have oscillated between two poles. On the one hand, there was the orthodox communist position represented by Party hacks that was “all-but-infallible guide to political action that would inevitably lead to the perfect society that would succeed capitalism”. It was one long political harangue, was written in the most turgid prose that put off the common reader from any form of radical thinking despite the ravages in the world outside. On the other side, there was the western view in which Marx was treated along with Nietzsche and Freud and other western thinkers. Much of this writing degenerated into jargon that few could understand and only resulted in turning readers away from the fundamental tenets of Marxist thought.
Hobsbawm avoids both approaches. In the Preface to Marxism in Marx’s Day, Hobsbawm quotes the Feuerbach thesis, given above, and proceeds to note that:
“Marxism, the most practically influential (and practically rooted) school of theory in the modern world, is both a method of interpreting the world and of changing it, and its history must be written accordingly.”
Hobsbawm lives up to these injunctions to provide the conjunction of both theory and practice that we can all understand.
