Which Side are you on, Boys?

Eric Hobsbawm's passing away the other day - I wrote at obit over at Jacobin magazine - reminds us of another age. There's plenty we'd do well to regret in Hobsbawm's adherence to the Communist cause. His Cold War politics has little relevance now. However, as Corey Robin wrote sometime back in the London Review of Books, there was a price to pay for its passing:

For all its violence and misery, the Cold War had the virtue of imposing on Western intellectuals, Communist and anti-Communist alike, the duty of historical intelligence. ...  But [with] the collapse of Communism and disappearance of Marxism, [and] with the market – and now religion – displacing social democracy as the language of public life, writers are no longer compelled by the requirements of the historical imagination. Facing a new enemy, which does not make the same demands that Communism once did, today’s intellectuals wave away all talk of ‘root causes’: history, it seems, will no longer be summoned to the bar of political analysis – or not for the time being. Mimicking the theological language of their antagonists, contemporary writers prefer catchwords such as ‘evil’ and ‘Islamo-fascism’ to the vocabulary of secular criticism. Their language may be a response to 9/11, but it is a product of the end of the Cold War. When Marxism was banished from the political scene in 1989, it left behind no successor language – save religion itself – to grapple with the twinned fortunes of the individual and the collective, the personal and the political, the present and the past.

That's very well put. I'm not sure that serious work can avoid much of what made Hobsbawm's work so valuable. It's interesting that his putative successor - and I admire his work, particularly this - is Niall Ferguson. Here's what Ferguson has to say on class analysis:

[Hobsbawm] and I shared the belief that it was economic change, above all, that shaped the modern era. The fact that he sided with the workers and peasants, while I side with the bourgeoisie, was no obstacle to friendship.

 Here's Billy Bragg singing Which Side are You On? Also, have a look at this by Bhaskar Sunkara at Jacobin.

(I wrote my own book, so far as I was able, to avoid 'taking sides' as such. It was written in the History mode: " I [have not] written this book as an exercise in polemic or political advocacy. The models I employ I do so because I find them useful and interesting; they do not imply moral judgements one way or another. I am taking an argument and using it to make one kind of sense of a stretch of modern history.")