Ends in Sight by Elliott Gregory;

Author:Elliott, Gregory;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

NOT DARK YET

By way of response, there are two immediate ironies of history that need to be noted. The first concerns Hobsbawm’s treatment of historical communism, in its temporary alliance, and prolonged contention, with liberal capitalism. In vaunting the coalition of ‘progress’ ‘against the common enemy’ of ‘reaction’ in Part 1, he glides over something he only addresses in Part 2 (in Chapter 8 on ‘The Cold War’) – namely, the Stalinist character of the communist party to the alliance, then at the pitch of its barbarism, as the great terror followed hard on the heels of forced collectivisation. Hobsbawm’s amalgamation of liberal capitalism and communism into a single party of Enlightenment, casting Joe and Sam as avuncular affinities in a posthumous rehabilitation of Browderism, is sealed at the cost of repressing this: the degeneration of communism into a Stalinist barbarism, unredeemed by the thwarting of Barbarossa, which was decisive in tarnishing the image of socialism in the West (not to mention the East).

Second, it is surprising to find the Cold War – era of numerous sanguinary hot wars and other episodes of plentiful bloodletting in the Third World – featuring in Hobsbawm’s ‘Golden Age’, on the basis that it provided a regulatory structure for the international system. With its termination, Hobsbawm writes, ‘[t]he Short Twentieth Century ended in problems, for which nobody had, or even claimed to have, solutions … for the first time in two centuries, the world of the 1990s entirely lacked any international system or structure’.34 Even were we to grant the substance of this claim, the obvious rejoinder is that with the ‘solutions’ on offer during the Cold War, humanity – and especially the ‘damned of the earth’ – had its fair share of problems.

The core issue, however, is Hobsbawm’s treatment of liberal capitalism itself. The acute crisis of regulation and orientation afflicting what has become a global mode of production since the implosion of the Second World both allows him to qualify Western triumphalism post-1991 – Bush Senior’s ‘the Cold War is over and we won’ – and to gesture at the continuing relevance of a social democratic version of socialism, thereby turning the tables on the likes of Fukuyama. In drawing – overdrawing – the contrast between the ‘Golden Age’ and the ‘Landslide’, Hobsbawm deploys a concept of economic crisis which, for better or worse, is not specifically Marxist. As Bromley has noted, it owes more to Polanyi’s The Great Transformation – the depredations of disembedded markets – or Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy – the self-destructive tendencies of untethered capitalism – than to Marx’s Capital.35 For unlike the 1930s depression, the crisis threatening the survival of capitalism and, with it, humanity on the eve of the third millennium is conceived by Hobsbawm in terms not of the internal contradictions of the capitalist mode of production, but of a chronic volatility consequent upon its transgression of its external limits. Consuming everything in its path, capitalism is self-consuming, as it erodes the non-capitalist sources

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