Socialism Never Dies

...At 78, Eric Hobsbawm is still a prisoner of his reactionary faith...

...The failure of Soviet socialism," Hobsbawm sums up, "does not reflect on the possibility of other kinds of socialism...

...Hugo's famous sentiment captures the arrogant his-toricism of the Left, which is convinced that its agendas are "progressive" and that its progress is the destiny of mankind...

...Not surprisingly, capitalist societies like America function in Hobsbawm's narrative as a diabolus ex machina of its tragic turns...

...envy...

...It is in his critical stance towards the present that Hobsbawm shows his ugliest face...

...But through Hobsbawm's Marxist lens the victory of freedom over communism appears as a general disintegration...

...In the wake of its disasters, the false hope of the socialist future is now only tenuously put forward by sophisticated radicals like Hobsbawm...

...What if such impulses are so strong that large numbers of human beings are destined to believe bad ideas-despite their destructive consequences-to the end of time...

...Gorbachev was able to achieve this near miraculous resolution of a global conflict only because the White House-normally a center of war-mongering paranoia-was occupied by a simpleton who somehow remained immune to these malign influences: "However, let us not underestimate the contribution of President Reagan whose simple-minded idealism broke through the unusually dense screen of ideologists, fanatics, careerists, desperadoes and professional warriors around him to let himself be convinced...

...For the Left, as Irving Howe once put it, "socialism is still the name of our desire...

...If we try to build the third millennium on that basis we shall fail...

...The Age of Extremes is a history of the world from the outbreak of the First World War to the fall of communism, the conclusion to Hobsbawm's accolade-laden tetralogy on Western capitalism, which one American reviewer called a "Summa historiae of the modern age...

...The 20 years from 1973 to 1991 are described in a section called "The Landslide," by which Hobsbawm means global collapse...

...But then why didn't it work in East Germany, the industrial heart of the Reich until Marxists took charge and proceeded to ruin what the Prussians had built...

...The rising unemployment of these decades was not merely cyclical but structural...

...This, the final section of his book, opens with the following judgment: "The history of the twenty years after 1973 is that of a world which lost its bearings and slid into instability and crisis...

...In the vacuum created by the great collapse, the historian sees only "a renaissance of barbarism...

...There is not a single reference to Ed Cray, Bill Gates, or the other Rockefellers of this second industrial revolution, or-except negatively-to its implications...

...During the Cold War that followed (the "Golden Age," in Hobsbawm's periodization), capitalist economies defied Marxist predictions about increasing misery and social crisis for reasons he is unable to explain...

...This was at the heart of the demoralization and collapse of the socialist empire, whose peoples were condemned to abysmal poverty by Marxist ideas: the dazzling prospect of American progress in the era that stretched from Eisenhower to Reagan...

...nor are they reasons to abandon the struggle against capitalism in behalf of a society based on a "social plan...

...To this structural dislocation, Hobsbawm attributes America's growing culture of hate and what he perceives as a general social breakdown (including an alleged epidemic of mass murders...

...The number of workers diminished, relatively, absolutely and, in any case, rapidly...

...For all its attention to industrial and cultural developments, Hobsbawm's treatise is first and last an ideological argument: that the practical disasters of socialist societies do not refute the utopian hopes of the socialist premise...

...Instead, his portrait of America's economy in the prosperous eighties is one of unrelieved gloom...

...It is the very indictment with which Hobsbawm began his Communist career...

...The jobs lost in bad times would not come back when times improved: they would never come back...

...In other words, Marx was right...

...He receives the news of technological advance as a society-threatening crisis: The Crisis Decades [1973 to the present] began to shed labor at a spectacular rate, even in plainly expanding industries...

...If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present...

...And the price of failure, that is to say the alternative to a changed society, is darkness...

...In his Times review, Stanley Hoffmann repeats this error: "Marx was right...

...And not through any synchronicity with historic process but because it speaks directly to human weakness: resentment...

...or merely a wish to believe that ordinary mortals can create heaven on earth...

...Ever protective of his radical constituency, Hobsbawm fails to mention the role that party intellectuals like himself played in fostering this destructive illusion...

...This final volume has been generally treated as a fitting crown and was awarded Canada's most coveted literary prize...

...This thought, too, is an echo of past illusions, in particular of Rosa Luxemburg's famous slogan at the end of World War I that summoned radicals to risk everything in their struggle to overthrow the existing order because the choice was one of "socialism or barbarism...

...This underlies the really destructive intellectual contribution of The Age of Extremes, which is to preserve and extend the socialist indictment of liberal societies...

...Characteristically, it never occurs to Hobsbawm that Marxism itself might be responsible for this failure...

...David Horowitz is president of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, in Los Angeles...

...In fact, the Cold War decades coincided with a period in which capitalist economies revolutionized the lives of ordinary working people to a degree previously unimaginable...

...This was a moment that witnessed the destruction of history's largest and most oppressive empire and the spread of democracy around the globe...

...Socialism could only work in developed countries...

...The triumph of Western freedom thus provides Hobsbawm- who in his own life is one of its privileged beneficiaries-with little comfort...

...If he were not so blinded by his anti-capitalist passion, he might have noticed how the underlying forces of Soviet collapse and Western triumph reflected an economic reality: the capacity of a society based on private property to unleash the powers of new technologies transforming the economic world (and, conversely, the inability of its state-managed rival to do the same...

...Capitalist darkness or socialist light...

...The Age of Extremes can thus be seen as an elaborate defense of the two destructive arguments behind which the Left has caused so much 20th-century misery-the evils of capitalism and the promise of socialism...

...Instead, Hobsbawm attributes the end of the Cold War to the wisdom of the Kremlin's regnant dictator, who "recognized the sinister absurdity of the nuclear arms race" and approached the other side to end it...

...government and others in the West that he meant what he said...

...His memoir, Radical Son, will be published shortly by Free Press...

...The idea that the Soviet system was a competitor to the capitalist West was only plausible, he contends, because of capitalism's weakness during the era of the First World War and the Great Depression, a period he calls the "Age of Catastrophe...

...Hobsbawm treats the Soviet revolution as a forced experiment under unfavorable conditions and, consequently, no test of the socialist ideas that guided it...

...But the two arguments cannot really be separated, since the nihilistic rejection of the present order is predicated on the dream of a social redemption...

...Hobsbawm ignores the Reagan boom, along with the liberating potential of the information age it helped to launch...

...But to deny the connection between the radical idea and its practice, as Hobsbawm and his admirers do, is to court the delusion of every progressive generation since 1789...

...Apocalyptic choices are the crucial term in any revolutionary equation, because they establish that society's flaws cannot be remedied by adjustment or reform...

...During this era, the industrial democracies of the West were able permanently to surpass the weaker Soviet system, which could not overcome its initial handicap of underdevelopment...

...Progressives who take this view of the disasters they create do not understand the way in which the futile quest for an earthly paradise is an integral theme of the human tragedy...

...It was an era that witnessed the greatest social transformation in human history-the first time in 5,000 years that more than a tiny percentage of the population of any society attained some degree of material well-being...

...For most of his adult life, Eric Hobsbawm was a member of the British Communist party, and even though he is no longer the Stalinist he once was, he remains an unrepentant, if inevitably chastened, Marxist-still a passionate reviler of democratic capitalism and still an acolyte of the socialist faith The Age of Extremes, which has been published to such praise, is in fact a 600-page apologia for the discredited Left, a brief in defense of the very ideas that produced the world of misery under review...

...But what about a false idea whose time has come...

...That is why the world owes so enormous a debt to Mikhail Gorbachev," he writes, "who not only took this initiative but succeeded, single-handed, in convincing the U.S...

...In a volume that devotes whole chapters to developments in science and industry, there is only a one-sentence mention of the digital computer...

...The final words of Hobsbawm's treatise are intellectually as extreme as any manifesto by Rosa Luxemburg or Karl Marx: We have reached a point of historic crisis...

...But Marx was not right...

...The Cold War is mercifully over and fatuities like this are no longer consequential...

...Like other radicals, Hobsbawm writes as though the debacles to which socialist ideas have led carry no implications for the Left's critique of capitalism...

...Even so astute a historian as Eugene Genovese was smitten: "We shall soon be flooded with books that seek to explain this blood-drenched century," he wrote in the New Republic, "but I doubt that we shall get a more penetrating and politically valuable one than Eric Hobsbawm's The Age of Extremes...

...A case in point is Eric Hobsbawm's recent book, The Age of Extremes, which indicates just how full of life the bad ideas of the socialist Left remain, even after the close of the Soviet nightmare...

...They attempted to explain away the failure of Marxism in Russia by its introduction into an inhospitable environment...

...A major assessment by Harvard's Stanley Hoffmann in the New York Times Book Review hailed it as magisterial...

...Hobsbawm's defense of "real socialism" against the evidence of the "actually existing" kind is not original, but relies (without acknowledgment) on arguments developed first by Leon Trotsky and Isaac Deutscher...

...Nor is the conclusion of the Cold War-the collapse of the Soviet empire and the withdrawal of the Red Army from its occupation of Eastern Europe-a victory for the West...

...For him, capitalism is a doomed system unable to solve its "crises" except through revolutionary upheaval...

...Just as Hobsbawm the radical returns to the anti-capitalist myths of his youth, so Hobsbawm the historian imagines the capitalist past forever recurring in its present: "In the 1980s and early 1990s the capitalist world found itself once again staggering under the burdens of the inter-war years, which the Golden Age appeared to have removed: mass unemployment, severe cyclical slumps, the evermore spectacular confrontation of homeless beggars and luxurious plenty...

...Nothing is more indicative of the ideological passion that informs The Age of Extremes than Hobsbawm's treatment of its final episode...

...We need not take this crusaders' version of the 1980s seriously," writes Hobsbawm...

...Democratic America rather than its totalitarian adversary was responsible for the Cold War, in his view...