George Lichtheim:

I am not a liberal and never have been. I find liberalism almost as boring as communism and have no wish to be drawn into an argument over which of these two antiquated creeds is less likely to advance us any further. My review of Professor Marcuse’s book proceeded from agreement with its underlying philosophy. I explained at length why I thought it important. I also dissociated myself from its politics, which seemed (and seem) to me unduly pessimistic and excessively influenced by the erratic opinions of the late C. Wright Mills.

Of course Marcuse is a Marxist. That is why he has written an interesting book. His five constituents, who are so anxious to defend him, seem not to have understood him at all. Politics are a different matter. If the five signatories will come out of their stockade for a while and pay a brief visit to Europe, they will discover why the kind of “negative thinking” they fancy makes little appeal here: we are not as helpless as they are, and consequently less frantic.

Marco D’Eramo, New Left Review:

The media still denounces Putin’s atrocities and makes obligatory comparisons with the Hitlers and Stalins of the past, yet it does so with the enthusiasm of a bored schoolchild, almost as if le coeur n’y était pas. How many times have we woken up to the news that our former allies have suddenly become reprobates and criminals? How can we forget that Saddam Hussein was furnished with chemical weapons to use against Iran before he was designated a war criminal himself? Or that Bashar al-Assad was deemed reliable enough to torture prisoners at the behest of the CIA before he became a so-called international pariah?

It also strains credulity that the US wants to see alleged war criminals tried in an international tribunal which it does not even recognise; that it supports Israel’s illegal occupation and apartheid regime but refuses to tolerate Russia’s presence in Crimea and the Donbas; that it recognises the ethno-territorial grievances of Kosovar minorities in Serbia but not those of the Russophone minority in Ukraine, and so on. How can we take seriously the West’s invectives against authoritarian regimes, and calls to defend democracy, when our democratic leaders lay out the red carpet for a Saudi Prince who butchers critical journalists and an Egyptian General who executes political prisoners by the tens of thousands?

[T]he entire publication of the Grundrisse took place under what may safely be regarded as the least favourable conditions for any original development of Marx studies and Marxist thinking, namely in the USSR and the German Democratic Republic, at the height of the era of Stalin. The publication of texts by Marx and Engels remained a matter subject to the imprimatur of political authority even later, as editors engaged in foreign editions of their works have had reason to discover. It is still not clear how the obstacles to publication were overcome, including the purging of the Marx-Engels Institute and the elimination and eventual murder of its founder and director, or how Paul Weller, who was in charge of work on the manuscript from 1925 to 1939, survived the terror of 1936–8 to do so. It may have helped that the authorities did not quite know what to make of this large and difficult text.

—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 122.

However, what will undoubtedly also strike the contemporary reader is the Manifesto’s remarkable diagnosis of the revolutionary character and impact of ‚bourgeois society‘. The point is not simply that Marx recognised and proclaimed the extraordinary achievements and dynamism of a society he detested, to the surprise of more than one later defender of capitalism against the red menace. It is that the world transformed by capitalism which he described in 1848, in passages of dark, laconic eloquence, is recognisably the world of the early twenty-first century. Curiously, the politically quite unrealistic optimism of two revolutionaries of twenty-eight and thirty years has proved to be the Manifesto’s most lasting strength. For though the ’spectre of communism‘ did indeed haunt politicians, and though Europe was living through a major period of economic and social crisis, and was about to erupt in the greatest continent-wide revolution of its history, there was plainly no adequate ground for the Manifesto’s belief that the moment for the overthrow of capitalism was approaching (‚the bourgeois revolution in Germany can only be the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution‘). On the contrary. As we now know, capitalism was poised for its first era of triumphant global advance.

What gives the Manifesto its force is two things. The first is its vision, even at the outset of the triumphal march of capitalism, that this mode of production was not permanent, stable, ‚the end of history‘, but a temporary phase in the history of humanity, and, like its predecessors, one due to be superseded by another kind of society (unless – the Manifesto’s phrase has not been much noted – it founders ‚in the common ruin of the contending classes‘).

—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 110-111.

The good social scientist, as Engels showed, could only be a person free from the illusions of bourgeois society.

Ω Ω Ω

It must not be forgotten that Engels was (unlike most other foreign visitors) no mere tourist, but a Manchester businessman who knew the businessmen among whom he lived, a communist who knew and worked with the Chartists and early socialists, and not least through his relations with the Irish factory girl Mary Burns and her relatives and friends — a man with considerable firsthand knowledge of working-class life. His book is thus an important primary source for our knowledge of industrial England at this time.

—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 97-98.

I read this last line again and again. It makes perfect sense of course, but what strikes me is how foreign several of the concepts are to the societies I know. „Primary source“? My acquaintances, family, coworkers don’t have a ready understanding of this term. „Our knowledge of industrial England at this time“? What knowledge do acquaintances and coworkers have of their own industrial countries at the current time? Are their countries industrial, or post-industrial? How would they know? What do these phrases even mean?

Contemporary topics of discussion are nearly solely related to consumer goods, especially intangible consumables.

Hobsbawm is evaluating Engels‘ work from the standpoint of a historian looking back from the 1960s, and needs to be read this way, but it occurs to me few of the people I know could correctly place the time Marx and Engels were writing in within half a century. What Engels meant by the bourgeois society of mid-19th Century England is inaccessible, but then so is an understanding, really, of present US society, classes, wealth.

The work begins with a brief sketch of that Industrial Revolution which transformed British society and created, as its chief product, the proletariat (chapters I—II). This is the first of Engels‘ pioneering achievements, for the Condition is probably the earliest large work whose analysis is systematically based on the concept of the Industrial Revolution, which was then novel and tentative, having only been invented in British and French socialist discussions during the 1820s. Engels‘ historical account of this transformation lays no claim to historical originality. Though still useful, it has been superseded by later and fuller works.

Socially Engels sees the transformations brought about by the Industrial Revolution as a gigantic process of concentration and polarisation, whose tendency is to create a growing proletariat, an increasingly small bourgeoisie of increasingly large capitalists, both in an increasingly urbanised society. The rise of capitalist industrialism destroys the petty commodity producers, peasantry, and petty-bourgeoisie, and the decline of these intermediate strata, depriving the worker of the possibility of becoming a small master, confines him to the ranks of the proletariat which thus becomes ‚a definite class in the population, whereas it had only been a transitional stage towards entering into the middle classes‘.

—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 91-92.

As Marx and Engels championed materialism against idealism in philosophy, so also they consistently criticised the view that the state stood above classes, represented the common interest of all society (except negatively, as a safeguard against its collapse), or was neutral between classes. The state was a historical phenomenon of class society, but while it existed as a state it represented class rule — though not necessarily in the agitationally simplified form of an ‚executive committee of the ruling class‘. This imposed limits both on the involvement of proletarian parties in the political life of the bourgeois state and on what it could be expected to concede to them. The proletarian movement thus operated both within the confines of bourgeois politics and outside them. Since power was defined as the main content of the state, it would be easy to assume (though Marx and Engels did not do so) that power was the only significant issue in politics and in the discussion of the state at all times.

—Eric Hobsbawm, How to Change the World, (London: Little, Brown, 2011), 84.