Before he died in London in 1883, Karl Marx was despairing about what he had achieved. "What works?" he retorted to a visitor. Many were equally dismissive. A Liberal MP who met him in 1879 remarked that Marx would not be the one to turn the world upside down. Yet one hundred years later, Marx had become one of the greatest intellectual presences in world culture, as well as the ideological lodestar of many states around the world, his glowering visage adorning many a banner and city plinth. A vast publishing industry had grown up around him and his followers. A complete English edition of his writings was under way, in 50 volumes. Marx appeared to be at the zenith of his influence, with many different movements, parties and regimes claiming in some way to be "Marxist" and a great range of academic research across many different disciplines powerfully shaped by his ideas.
Yet as Eric Hobsbawm ruefully notes, the publication of the final volume of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels in 2004 was greeted by silence. Like Ozymandias, "round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away". In the previous 20 years there had been a dramatic collapse in the standing of Marx and of Marxism. The academy had largely turned its back on him and, with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the practical relevance of Marxism appeared much diminished. Few regimes still proclaimed themselves Communist in 2003. Some of those - including China - were spearheading a new wave of capital accumulation.
Hobsbawm was born in 1917, the year of the October Revolution, and joined the Communist Party in the 1930s, eager like many of his generation to fight against fascism. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he never left, although as a Eurocommunist he became increasingly critical of the Soviet Union. He is one of our leading historians, displaying a magisterial grasp of the economic, political and social history of the last 200 in his four-volume history of the modern world, from The Age of Revolution to The Age of Extremes. He is also a noted scholar of Marx and Marxism. His new book brings together a set of essays, many of which have never appeared in English before, and some new ones. It includes various introductions to texts of Marx, including the very influential "Marx on preCapitalist Formations", the first English introduction to parts of the Grundrisse. His book is not a comprehensive history of Marxism, but it provides many of the elements of one.
It also shines new light on Hobsbawm's own personal understanding of Marxism. His interpretation is predominantly historical rather than theoretical. His Marx cannot be categorised in terms of modern disciplinary boundaries, and does not provide a set of definitive texts but a process of developing thought.
Hobsbawm shows how different the context was in which Marx and Engels wrote compared to later generations of Marxists, leading to endless distorted accounts of what Marx really meant, both from followers and critics. Views of Marx have also shifted as more of his works have become available. He published relatively little in his lifetime, and what he did publish was often not disseminated or read widely. The mass of material he left behind only gradually emerged into the light. It includes the later volumes of Capital, early works such as the German Ideology and the 1844 Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, the Letters, and above all the Grundrisse. All of these when they were finally published changed how Marx was understood.
There are two essays on the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci. Hobsbawm played a key role in introducing him to an English-speaking readership in the 1950s and 1960s. He regarded him as Marxism's supreme political thinker, someone who understood the crucial importance of politics, and who focused on how societies were founded and transformed.
Gramsci understood that "the effort to transform the world is not only compatible with original, subtle, open-eyed historical thinking but impossible without it." Hobsbawm had little sympathy with the modish Marxism of the 1970s which at one time proclaimed that the study of history was not only scientifically but politically valueless. For Hobsbawm what is most important about Marx is that he thought historically, teaching us to see capitalism as a historical and temporary mode of human economy. Capitalism is a phase of history, not the end of history, and it has to be studied historically in order to grasp how it has come to dominate human life, and yet is still subject to periodic crises.
Hobsbawm's explanation of why Marxism has declined points to the collapse of the Soviet Union as the decisive event. However flawed the Soviet Union in practice, it had kept alive the possibility that there was an alternative to capitalism. Its demise weakened social democratic parties along with communist parties. But he also detects other long-term trends.
The shrinking of the industrial working class and the weakening of labour movements has removed one of the main pillars of Marxism as a political practice. Nothing has emerged to take its place. At the same time the rise of environmentalism and postmodernism have challenged some of the fundamental assumptions about progress and knowledge on which Marxism was based.
Hobsbawm is generally pessimistic about the future, seeing no new agency of transformation. This has not changed his view of the intellectual greatness of Marx, or of what he can contribute to our understanding of contemporary politics.
The 2008 financial crash was a reminder of how capitalism continues to generate system-threatening crises. Marx's own millenarian hopes about the creation of a classless society beyond conflict may have proved illusory. But Marx as the shrewd analyst of the realities which continue to determine the way economy, politics and society operate under capitalism remains indispensable.
Andrew Gamble is professor of politics at Cambridge University and author of 'The Spectre at the Feast' (Palgrave Macmillan)
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