Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [76]
This does not mean that communism attracted a particular type or types of personality open to extremism, authoritarianism and other ‘undemocratic’ traits, although in the Cold War era this was argued by authors anxious to demonstrate the similarity of communism and fascism, but politically angled social psychology need not detain us. In any case there is little base for the liberal belief in a fundamental affinity between ‘extremisms’ of right and left, which made it easy to pass from one extreme to the other. Since the British CP was small, communist workers and students, at least in the late 1930s, were exceptional but they were not untypical. I can detect no common personality traits among my Cambridge contemporaries who joined the CP that distinguished them from those who did not join, except perhaps a greater intellectual liveliness. Indeed, in later years, as I met some former comrade again in his post-communist existence as a respectable – though rarely Conservative – middle-class professional, I would sometimes say to myself: ‘To think that I once recruited him and fellows like him into the Party!’ It is less surprising that the workers who joined the Party were, in Britain at least, young, livelier than most, but otherwise typical of their class and trades – mainly engineering, building and in some regions mining. Between the 1930s and 1950s, before A-levels and higher education came within reach of their class, the way in which bright young apprentices or the dynamic young workshop activists would get their political and intellectual education was through the Party. It formed the future national leaders of British trade unionism, and, of course, provided the Party itself with capable working-class cadres, which a consciously ‘proletarian’ party insisted on. Contrary to common opinion, intellectuals as such played no significant part in the Party leadership, until the educational revolution removed the potential exam-passing youth from workshop to college, which therefore became the way into politics or better jobs – and not only in Communist Parties.
Communism was therefore not a way of picking out ‘extremists’ from ‘non-extremist’ personalities, although both poles of the political spectrum may sometimes attract the same clientele, namely persons, usually young, who have a natural taste for adventurous operations or political violence, the sort of people to whom terrorism or direct action appeal. Perhaps Rambo-types have been more attracted to the extreme left since the rise of street confrontation and small-scale armed groups in the aftermath of the student revolt of 1968, with its rhetoric of ‘streetfighting men’. Nevertheless, a life devoted to making revolution is not the same as a life that gets its thrills from irregular warfare or adventure.
Given the tradition and importance of clandestine activities in the Communist Parties, which, with the rarest exceptions (such as Great Britain) were illegal for at least some of their history, there was obviously scope for the life of adventure in the international communist movement of my times, but bolshevism, whose motto was ruthless efficiency rather than romance, did not favour the culture of the bank-robber or commando-raid. It invented the supremacy of the ‘political commissar’ (i.e. the civilian) because it distrusted the impulses of the soldier. It was hostile in theory to individual terrorism. Lenin’s own reaction to such gestures was utterly typical. He could not understand why in 1916 the social democrat Friedrich Adler had publicly shot dead the