In Non-Revolutionary Conditions

 “Revolutionaries” by Eric Hobsbawm, 1973

While dated, this book has something to say about present conditions for revolution, stasis or barbarism. The book is a series of essays written in the 1960s and early ‘70s mostly about European politics which I’m going to sample.  It describes how revolutionaries - specifically western Europeans in the British, French, Italian and German CPs; anarchists and dissident Marxists - dealt with this issue in the Twentieth century: “What happens to a revolutionary party in a non-revolutionary situation?”  This, of course, is a key question for Marxists. Hobsbawn was for many years a historian and member of the British CP even after 1956, yet was not fond of Stalinism.  He became a EuroCommunist – a current that is moribund today.  He opposed the 1956 Soviet intervention in Hungary, supported the Prague Spring and criticized the French CP for its failed support of the May-June 1968 rebellion in France.  This is all reflected in this historical analysis, which poses as an ‘objective’ view avoiding the ‘ultra-left’ and the Stalinist right.

The period Hobsbawm looks at in the 1900s is now long gone, given the collapse or destruction (Yugoslavia!) of most ‘state-socialist’ European states after 1991 and the victory of nearly all anti-colonialist movements. So we know what happened to 'revolutionary parties in non-revolutionary times' even more than he did.  The ending of this period might be news to some Marxists oblivious to change and who can’t give up on nostalgia, but it demands a forward look.  What can Hobsbawm contribute? 

Hobsbawn carefully looks at the membership and movement of workers, intellectuals and various types of socialists and communists in and out of the revolutionary orgs – which he considers mainly to be the CPs.  He comments that turnover was always high.  He notes that few in the KPD were from the original Spartacist organization and didn’t survive Hitler except in the GDR; that the Italian CPI grew from a few thousand to hundreds of thousands in the armed fight against Italian fascism - and kept those members for years; that the PCF was ‘bolshevized’ – i.e. Stalinized – which allowed it to create a hard carapace protecting it from ideological change; that Spain was the one area in Europe where anarchists retained their influence after the 1917 Revolution in Russia; that the British CPGB never really had much influence due to the presence of the Labour Party.  Yet all these parties are either non-existent now or shadows of their former selves.  A new day has arrived.

Do present left groups even track actual members, class origins and present jobs, former memberships, tenure and turnover, skills, education, social ties, age, gender and location, like an historian would do? Or in a database? It is doubtful. Hobsbawn notes that many Russian workers in 1917 outside of a few cities barely knew the difference between a Bolshevik and a Menshevik.

This leads him to one of his methods of dealing with non-revolutionary times, when ‘the barricades’ are not on the agenda – the popular front.  He is incapable of distinguishing it from the united front given his politics, but he thinks it a transitional method without using that fraught term.  An anti-fascist front is another transitional organizing tool, as he noted in Italy.  These fronts allow syndicalists, socialists, social-democrats, communists and even some liberals to work together against reaction, allowing small groups of revolutionaries to break out of isolation. Hobsbawn, also quoting Zinoviev and Lenin, extends this to seeing actual anarcho-syndicalists – not the middle-class ‘anarchist’ - as revolutionaries who can be worked with.  In Spain he accuses the CP of ‘sectarianism’ towards anarchists and perhaps Trotskyists – which might be some kind of understatement.  Nevertheless he thinks the CP had the correct policy if only they had a bigger base.  What that policy was is not exactly clear from him except perhaps better military organization.

Hobsbawn touches on the role the Comintern-Cominform had in dictating politics to the sections of the ‘International,’ to the point where almost no one disagreed, and the parties became arms of the Soviet CP.  Yet the parties that showed some independence – the Finnish and the Austrian – actually grew because they were able to chart a more accurate, nationally-relevant course.  He comments that almost every organization will develop some sort of ‘bureaucracy’ – the question is how powerful it becomes. 

1968 French General Strike - "Workers Students United We Will Win" 

Hobsbawn, as far as general guidelines, declares that ‘confrontation’ is not a policy, implying this is all ultra-lefts have in their playbook. He opposes both passive ‘waiting’ for a revolutionary situation and ‘forcing’ the issue, so timing becomes everything. This is part of a discussion about Marx in England, who opposed Fenian terrorism yet marked police violence as an ‘educational’ tool for proletarians.  Marx wanted to ally with all non-reformist English workers according to Hobsbawn, especially from Chartism.  After a while Marx considered the Irish question to be of most importance, as British rule in Ireland was a vicious, colonial version of capitalist rule in England itself.  Marx saw fighting the occupation of Ireland as making English workers more class conscious – a transitional method indeed.  Not to mention the high proportion of especially oppressed Irish workers in the U.K. itself. 

On theory, Hobsbawn like most CP intellectuals in his use of language, favor’s Marxism as a ‘scientific’ method.  This might mean that it is as precise as a ‘hard’ science … or, more likely from this book, that Marxists reinvigorate theory with modern facts instead of dogma, servility and repetition.

In a chapter on coup d’etats, Hobsbawn makes the point that there are two kinds of civilian resistance – the pro-forma kind limited to talk, voting and institutional bargaining – and mass labor action, like united fronts, sit-downs, occupations, political strikes and anti-fascist mobilizations.  He has a 1968 chapter on the insurrectionary value and problems of urban cities across the world, lastly focusing on Paris.  This precedes a chapter on the most surprising event of all, the French uprising in May-June 1968 that came within a hairbreadth of overthrowing the Gaullist political regime.  This, again, in a country that was in an ‘objectively non-revolutionary’ situation. 

Hobsbawn sees the first stage of the 1968 rebellion, started by the students of Paris in early May, leading to the largest general strike in French history later that month, the second phase.  Hobsbawn comments that the Government's refusal to shoot the students and retreat as spurring French labor into action.  Of course shooting them might have also done the same thing - and sharpened the stakes even more.  It should be remembered that most French labor unions were led by Communists or Socialists, unlike in the servile and anti-communist U.S. where unions don’t exist in many mass workplaces.

Hobsbawn points to the failure of the ossified PCF to push for a new ‘popular front’ government out of this crisis.   DeGaulle claimed a ‘Communist revolution’ was on the horizon instead and eventually regained the initiative.  As Hobsbawn says, the test of a Party is not its eagerness to throw up barricades but in its ability to see that bourgeois rule is vulnerable and cannot go on in the same way – and to act on that.  The PCF tailed the masses and failed even as a reformist political force to focus on the key target.  The moment – perhaps lasting only a week– was lost.  Hobsbawn, via Touraine, notes that a technocratic, 'white collar' strata entered Left politics during May-June, not simply the blue-collar working-class. This strata, based on new technologies and skills was becoming increasingly important in 1968.  We now have a similar situation in the U.S., as a white-collar and tech workforce grows using new technology, yet in the face of inequality.  

Lastly Hobsbawn has a section on ‘intellectuals’ in the class struggle– an archaic word and concept nowadays given the spread of higher education and self-education.  He might compare them to the middle-class professional strata or white-collar workers, but he claims their education is not ‘vocational.’  So a generic liberal arts degree?  At any rate he insists that most small revolutionary parties in ‘the West,’ along with Peruvian guerillas or Indian Naxalites, are full of intellectuals.  To Hobsbawn, given most ‘intellectuals’ are not primarily driven by material needs, they are instead driven by feelings about how life is blocked without revolution; about how society is fundamentally flawed.   He then tells his own story of being a middle European Jew whose family left Germany in time, in the formative interwar years and addresses the 1960s radicalization as ‘perhaps’ temporary.    

All in all an interesting selection of essays dealing with how to think about revolution in mostly non-revolutionary conditions.  But certainly a modern take is necessary, since this was written 52 years ago.

Prior blogspot reviews on this issue, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 19 year archive, using these terms:  “Hobsbawn,” “Marx,” “Ireland,” “May-June 1968” "Paris" or PCI, PCF, CPGB or KDP.

And I bought it at May Day Book’s excellent used and cutout section!

Red Frog / February 12, 2025  This will be the last year of the blog.  It has been going for 19 years.