Eric Hobsbawm wrote a lot of very interesting history and as a member of the Communist Party until it dissolved itself he also opined on politics. The history was mostly much better than the politics (tho I should I add I was and am a member of the Communist Party Historians Group,now the Socialist History Society).
One point I completely agreed with Hobsbawm on was that marxist historians (myself included) should be ‘historians of the present too’. That is the history of the twentieth century and indeed of Stalinism (or actually existing socialism if you were that way inclined) had to be grappled with.
Hobsbawm did a lot of this in Marxism Today which started life as the CP’s theoretical journal but by the 1980s was more like (as Hobsbawm later admitted) the house journal of New Labour. Note ‘more like’ not ‘like’.
One example was the analysis he wrote after Labour’s defeat in the 1983 which was titled Labour’s Lost Millions:
It is well a worth a read now because so many of the themes he raises and notes have featured in the discussion of Labour’s Election defeat on 12th December.
Hobsbawm’s analysis was of course wrong as it usually was.
Labour had not finally lost the votes of millions workers. We need only look at the results of Blair in 1997 or Corbyn in 2017 to see it is much more complex than that.
He was certainly not right to think that Labour was set for a perpetual decline as a party. It is currently the largest social-democratic party in Europe.
On the other hand he had a point that Labour had to grapple with Thatcherite Toryism as a new variant.
This was the variant that didnt see any point in maintaining UK manufacturing capability when this could be done elsewhere but profits still gathered by the Tories friends from it. 40 years on, hello Huawei and 5G.
By contrast in 2020 Johnsonian Toryism is not a new phenomenon. In fact at the moment I’m not sure it can actually decide what kind of Toryism it is or wants to be.
Anyway, its interesting history of the present.
I came across it while pondering something altogether more serious for then and now: new realism. More of that anon
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