Age of Extremes : 1914-1991 (9780349144399) by Hobsbawm Eric

Author:Hobsbawm, Eric
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780349144399
Publisher: Hachette Book Group USA

* About the three-fifths of the land area of the globe, omitting the uninhabited continent of Antarctica.

† The systematic introduction in parts of the Third World of new high-yielding crop varieties grown by methods specifically suited to them. Mainly since the 1960s.

* Such high-rise centres, the natural consequence of high land-prices in such districts, had been extremely unusual before 1950. New York was virtually unique. They became common from the 1960s, even low-slung, decentralized cities like Los Angeles, acquiring such a ‘downtown’.

* Here again, the socialist world was under smaller pressure.

* Among these rare exceptions we note Russia where, unlike all the other communist countries of Eastern Europe and China, students as a group were neither prominent nor influential in the years of the break-up of communism. The democratic movement in Russia has been described as ‘a revolution of the forty-year-olds’ watched by a de-politicized and demoralized youth (Riordan, 1991).

* Belgium, (West) Germany, Britain, France, Sweden, Switzerland.

* The phrase, which emerged from attempts to rethink Left-wing analyses of industrial society, was popularized by Alain Lipietz, who took the term ‘Fordism’ from the Italian Marxist thinker Gramsci.

* He told me so himself.

* Cf also: ‘The predominance of industry, with its abrupt division between workers and management, tends to encourage the different classes to live apart, so that a particular district of a town becomes a reservation or ghetto’ (Allen, 1968, pp. 32–33).

* Thus in the USA ‘craftsmen and foremen’ declined from 16 per cent of the total occupied population to 13 per cent between 1950 and 1990, whereas ‘laborers’ declined from 31 per cent to 18 per cent in the same period.

† ‘The socialism of redistribution, of the Welfare State . . . was dealt a hard blow with the economic crisis of the seventies. Important sectors of the middle class as well as sectors of the better-paid workers, broke their links with the alternatives of democratic socialism and lent their votes to form new majorities for conservative governments’ (Programma 2000, 1990).

* Northern Ireland, where Catholics were systematically pushed out of the skilled industrial occupations which increasingly became Protestant monopolies, is an exception.

* It can hardly be an accident that the rates of divorce and re-marriage in Italy, Ireland, Spain and Portugal were spectacularly lower in the 1980s than in the rest of the West European and North American zone. Divorce rates: 0.58 per 1,000 population, against 2.5 for a mean of nine other countries (Belgium, France, Federal Germany, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, Canada, USA). Remarriages (per cent of all marriages): 2.4 against 18.6 for a mean of nine countries.

* Thus the right to abortion, forbidden by the German Civil Code, was an important issue for agitation by the German Communist Party, which is why the German Democratic Republic was to enjoy a far more liberal abortion law than the (Christian-Democrat-influenced) German Federal Republic, thus complicating the legal problems of German unification in 1990.

† In the KPD, 1929, out of sixty-three members and candidate members of the Central Committee there were six women.

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