Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [150]
Nevertheless, as soon as the dense clouds of maximalist rhetoric and cosmic expectation turned into the rain of every day, the distinction between ecstasy and politics, real power and flower power, between voice and action, became visible once more. Jericho had not fallen to the sound of Joshua’s collective trumpets. The political young had to consider what action was needed to capture it. Since both the older and the younger generation of revolutionaries spoke the same language, mainly in one or another Marxist dialect, a semblance of communication became possible again, especially since the activist groups broke with the vague belief in spontaneous inspiration and often returned to the tradition of disciplined vanguard organizations. In fact, however, there was still a vast gap between the old and the young left. Revolution was not on the agenda in our countries. For revolutionaries of my generation the central problem remained what Marxist parties should do, indeed what their function could be, in non-revolutionary countries. And elsewhere? Where successful insurrection or guerrilla conquest was realistically on the agenda, we – at least I – were still in favour of it.
The old instinct to be on the side of any insurrectionaries and guerrillas who talked the language of the left, however stupid and pointless, died hard. It was not until the 1980s that, confronted with the phenomenon of the Peruvian ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas – admittedly based on an ideology eccentric even on the lunatic fringes of Marxism– Leninism – I frankly admitted to myself that this was a left-wing revolutionary movement I simply did not want to win. (Fortunately good Vietnamese communists had put a stop to Pol Pot’s killing fields.) Perhaps sympathy for the rebels was no more than the intellectuals’ version of the age-old omertà of the poor, the reflex of not telling on those harried by the state and its men in uniforms. Perhaps this came naturally to the author of Primitive Rebels and Bandits, who still finds it hard to withhold admiration from embattled, even if plainly mistaken, losers. In the USA my own sympathies were with the Black Panthers. I admired their courage and self-respect. I was touched by the simple-minded Leninism of their publications, but it was plain to me that they had not the slightest chance of achieving their objectives.
With most of the organizations of insurrectionists, or rather small armed action-groups which emerged in Europe from the debris of the great rebellion of 1968, I found myself entirely out of sympathy. There was room for reasoned disagreement with their opposite numbers in the very different political situation of Latin America (see chapter 21), but in Europe their activities were either pointless or counterproductive. The only operations of this kind which might claim some political feasibility were those of separatist nationalists, Quebecois, Basque or Irish, to whose political project I was strongly opposed. Marxists are not separatist nationalists.13 In any case, one of the two most lasting separatist movements of the kind born in this period, the Provisional IRA, did not claim to be on the left at all, but, on the contrary, broke away in 1969 from the old-established (‘Official’) IRA which had turned left.
So I found myself both out of sympathy and out of contact, if only by virtue of age, with these new practical revolutionaries. Not that there were all that many. In Britain there were none, except the shortlived, ineffective anarchist