Ovi Magazine Issue #26: WWI - 100 years - Published: 2014-07-28

would dominate the politics of the new millennium.” [emphasis mine]. I suppose today
we’d call it “distributive justice,” a theme repeatedly broached by the present Pope and
the more enlightened political leaders of our times.
It is also a central thesis of Hobsbaum’s book that, from the start, State Socialism betrayed
the socialist and internationalist ideals and vision it claimed to uphold. In particular,
State Socialism always dispensed with the democratic element of the socialist vision:
“Lenin... concluded from the start that the liberal horse was not a runner in the Russian
revolutionary race.” To be sure, this anti-liberalism is ingrained in all authoritarian
totalitarian regimes, on the right or on the left. In 1933, with Mussolini in firm control
of Italy, Moscow insisted that the Italian communist leader P. Togliatti withdraw the
suggestion that, perhaps, social-democracy was not the primary danger, at least in Italy.
The case can be made that the failures of communism vis a vis democracy is a systemic
problem of socialism per se, but that such is not the case was argued by Ignazio Silone
in his famous essay “Emergency Exit.”
As for support for international revolutions Hobsbaum writes that “The communist
revolutions actually made (Yugoslavia, Albania, later China) were made against Stalin’s
advice. The Soviet view was that, both internationally and within each country, postwar
politics should continue within the framework of the all-embracing anti-fascist
alliance.... There is no doubt that Stalin meant all this seriously, and tried to prove it
by dissolving the Comintern in 1943, and the Communist Party of the United States
in 1944. The Chinese Communist regime, though it criticized the USSR for betraying
revolutionary movements after the break between the two countries, has no comparable
record of practical support for Third World liberation movements.” So much for love of
democracy. The question arises: how can a revolution be “from the bottom up” unless
it be democratic?
The Maoist doctrine of perpetual revolution is also a canard according to Hobsbaum:
“Mao was fundamentally convinced of the importance of struggle, conflict and high
tension as something that was not only essential to life but prevented the relapse into the
weaknesses of the old Chinese society, whose very insistence on unchanging permanence
and harmony had been its weakness.” Hobsbaum here draws a straight line from this
belief to the disastrous Great Leap Forward to the subsequent Chinese famine of 1959-
1961. I suppose this ability to tell it straight is what makes him such a notable historian.
He is convinced that socialism as such was betrayed because “...hardly anyone believed
in the system or felt any loyalty to it, not even those who governed it.”
To be sure, this thesis of the betrayal of Socialism is also apparent in The God that
Failed, a book of essays by famous dissenters from Communism among which Ignazio
Silone’s above referenced essay which claims that while State Communism has proven
to be a failure, socialism as such, as an aspiration of the human heart for justice and
fairness, can be found in the acts of the Apostles and in Plato’s Republic and in More’s
Utopia, and will long survive the repressive ideological Communism of a Lenin, a
Stalin or a Mao.
Hobsbaum has very mixed feelings about the end of the nineteenth-century imperial