Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [79]
To have a serious relationship with someone who was not in the Party or prepared to join (or rejoin it) was unthinkable. Admittedly, since Party members were also apt to be emancipated in their attitude to sex, it is to be supposed that not all militants eschewed completely apolitical sex, but even for the Comintern agent in Brecht’s wonderful poem An die Nachgeborenen (To Those Born Later), his casual couplings (‘der Liebe pflegte ich achtlos’) were yet another proof that the Party’s work came before everything that was personal. I confess that the moment when I recognized that I could envisage a real relationship with someone who was not a potential recruit to the Party was the moment I recognized that I was no longer a communist in the full sense of my youth.
It is easy in retrospect to describe how we felt and what we did as Party members half a century ago, but much harder to explain it. I cannot recreate the person I was. The landscape of those times lies buried under the debris of world history. Even the image – if there was one – of the wonderful hopes we had for human life has been overlaid by the range of goods, services, prospects and personal options which are today available to the majority of men and women in the incredibly wealthy and technologically advanced countries of the West. Marx and Engels wisely refrained from describing what communist society would be like, but most of what little they said about what individual life would be like under it, now seems to be the result, without communism, of that social production of potentially almost unlimited plenty, and that miraculous technological progress, which they expected in some undetermined future, but which is taken for granted today.
Rather than reconstruct in my eighties what made us communists, let me quote from shortly after the 1956 crisis, when I was closer to the convictions of youth. I wrote that even the most sophisticated revolutionaries share ‘that utopianism or ‘‘impossibilism’’ which makes even very modern ones feel a sense of almost physical pain at the realization that the coming of socialism will not eliminate all grief and sadness, unhappy love-affairs or mourning, and will not solve or make soluble all problems’. I observed that ‘revolutionary movements … appear to prove that almost no change is beyond their reach’.
Liberty, equality and above all fraternity may become real for the moment in those stages of the great social revolutions which revolutionaries who live through them describe in the terms normally reserved for romantic love. Revolutionaries not only set themselves a standard of morality higher than that of any except saints, but at such moments actually carry it into practice …Theirs is at such times a miniature version of the ideal society, in which all men are brothers and sacrifice everything for the common good without abandoning their individuality. If this is possible within the movement, why not everywhere?
By this time I had recognized, with Milovan Djilas, who has written wonderfully well of the psychology of revolutionaries, that ‘these are the morals of a sect’, but that is precisely what gave them such force as engines of political change.4
It was easy enough in Europe during and between the world wars to conclude that only revolution could give the world a future. The old world was in any case doomed. However, three further elements distinguished communist utopianism from other aspirations to a new society. First, Marxism, which demonstrated with the methods of science the certainty of our victory, a prediction tested and verified by the victory of proletarian revolution over one sixth of the earth’s surface and the advances of revolution