Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [74]
That is how the 1930s ended for me.
9
Being Communist
I
I became a communist in 1932, though I did not actually join the Party until I went up to Cambridge in the autumn of 1936. I remained in it for some fifty years. The question why I stayed so long obviously belongs in an autobiography, but it is not of general historical interest. On the other hand, the question why communism attracted so many of the best men and women of my generation, and what being communists meant to us, has to be a central theme in the history of the twentieth century. For nothing is more characteristic of that century than what my friend Antonio Polito calls ‘one of the great demons of the twentieth century: political passion’. And the quintessential expression of this was communism.
Communism is now dead. The USSR and most of the states and societies built on its model, children of the October Revolution of 1917 which inspired us, have collapsed so completely, leaving behind a landscape of material and moral ruin, that it must now be obvious that failure was built into this enterprise from the start. Yet the achievements of those inspired by this conviction, and the associated belief that ‘there are no fortresses that Bolsheviks cannot conquer’, were indeed quite extraordinary. Within little more than thirty years of Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station, one third of the human race and all governments between the Elbe and the China Seas lived under the rule of Communist Parties. The Soviet Union itself, defeating the most formidable war machine of the twentieth century, which had pulverized Tsarist Russia, emerged from the Second World War as one of the world’s two superpowers. There had been no comparable triumph of an ideology since the (slower and less global) conquests of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries of our era.
This was achieved by small, often by relatively or absolutely tiny, self-selected ‘vanguard parties’ for, unlike the working-class parties which emerged at the end of the nineteenth century, also mostly inspired and encouraged by the ideas of Karl Marx, communism was not designed as a mass movement, and became one only by historical accident, as it were. In this respect it contrasted with, and indeed rejected, the classic approach of Marxist social democracy, which expected everyone who recognized themselves as a ‘worker’ to identify with parties whose essence, often expressed in their very name – Labour Party – was that they were parties of workers. To support the party of labour seemed to them not so much an individual political choice as the discovery of a person’s social existence, which necessarily had certain public implications. Conversely, their least political activities were imbued with the sense of what defined a person’s social existence, so that the clubs which met in the back rooms of pubs in ‘Red Vienna’ – I recall seeing such notices there as late as the 1970s – practised their hobbies not as stamp collectors but as Worker Philatelists, or as Worker Pigeon Fanciers. Such parties were sometimes also to be found in the communist movement, as notably in postwar Italy. There the Party, rooted in family and local community, combined the tradition of the old socialist movement with the organizational efficiency of Leninism and the moral authority of a secular Catholic Church. (As Palmiro Togliatti put it in 1945: ‘in every household a picture of Marx next to the one of Jesus Christ’). It was the kind of Party in which a young woman from Modena could quite naturally ask her Party Federazione to make enquiries to the Padova Federazione, to discover whether the young carabiniere from that city who courted her was ‘serious’ (Alas, he turned out to be already married in Padova.)1 Here public and private, becoming a better person and building a better world, were considered indivisible.
The Communist Parties of the Comintern era were of an entirely different kind, even when they claimed, sometimes correctly, to be rooted in the working class and to express