Ross McKibbin

The local government elections have come and gone (more or less) as expected. Labour did not do as spectacularly well as some predicted, and in the event the caution of the Labour leadership was justified. The Conservatives did better than they feared they might. But they would be unwise to find too much consolation: Labour gains were not as spectacular partly because Labour was defending such a large proportion of the seats anyway, and partly because the increase in the Labour vote was not matched by a proportionate gain in seats. It is possible that the Government’s strategy of blaming high poll taxes on Labour councils had some effect in areas (like London) where memories of ‘loony’ left-wing councils are strong, while in Westminster and Wandsworth the electorate clearly behaved in a cheerfully Thatcherite manner. On the other hand, the Tories did badly in a number of areas where their own councils set low poll taxes. There is, in fact, not much evidence that the electorate has changed its mind about the poll tax and the result of the Mid-Staffordshire by-election would still seem to represent accurately the public view. The best the Government can hope for is that the electorate will become habituated to it; and we can be certain that nothing – including money – will be spared to ensure that it does.’

It is hard to believe that we do not live in ‘new times’. For a generation raised after 1945 on what purported to be Keynesian certainties, and in an international system dominated all too obviously by the two major victors, the transformations of the last twenty years are difficult to assimilate. The speed of these transformations has now accelerated crazily: anything one writes about Eastern Europe, for example, is likely to be half-an-hour and, therefore, hopelessly out of date. We contemplate the present with the same astonishment that people observed 1848 or 1917-19. For those who work within a Marxist tradition such changes do not appear simply as accidental whirlings of the historical kaleidoscope, but as the result of one historical system giving way to another. These transformations, furthermore, are expressed in ideological and rhetorical terms: the contending parties manifest their material interests as ideas. One ideology struggles to supersede another. The transformational dynamic, nonetheless, is physical, grounded in the productive and thus social relationships of our daily lives.

Although Mrs Thatcher and Mr Lawson are closely associated in the public mind, their aspirations are very different. Mrs Thatcher, for her part, is not really interested in the economy at all. She has little idea how it works, no notion of its complicated and delicate relationships, and only the most elementary conception of how it might work better. Sceptical would-be supporters of the Government used plaintively to enquire why the Prime Minister allowed herself to be ‘sidetracked’ by marginal matters – why someone so anxious to promote the free market should be so obsessed with secrecy, censorship or the Poll Tax. That is not the right question. The question is: why should someone so obsessed with secrecy and censorship have any interest in the free market? In fact, insofar as her Thatcherism has a clear focus, it is the establishment of a reactionary moral and political order in which the free market performs a disciplinary and not an allocationary function. The free market, as political economists know, is a harsh disciplinarian, the more effective because its tenets are expressed in apparently impartial terms. But free-market ideologies are purely instrumental to Thatcherism: she uses them when they promote her political order and she abandons them when they obstruct it. Indeed, in several important ways Thatcherism is antithetical to the free market. Her principal preoccupations are the restoration of authority and hierarchy, and it is this she means when she speaks of the ‘defeat of socialism’. Her ambition has always been so to entrench the Conservative Party that people will vote for it as of second nature – and not just any old Conservative Party but a particular version of it. The overriding object of her government, to which the free market has always been subordinate, has been political mobilisation, and she has pursued it with determination. It is precisely because their goals are so different that deregulating Antipodean Labour prime ministers get cross when their policies are described as Thatcherite.’

It was difficult over the last fortnight of July not to think about the Thatcher Miracle and what had become of it. The EEC reported that in the next two years Britain would have the lowest growth rate, highest inflation and biggest payments deficit of any of its member nations. The National Union of Railwaymen struck for the fourth week running; there was a national dock strike; the Local Government Officers (NALGO) struck for three days; the lightning strikes at the BBC continued. The (then) Education Secretary persistently refused to guarantee that every child in a state school would actually be taught next year; the (then) Environment Secretary could not explain even the most elementary details of one of the most important pieces of legislation of this Parliament, and wondered aloud, why, if his backbenchers so disliked it, they ever voted for it in the first place. Then, with a characteristic touch, Mrs Thatcher announced that as a result of the new health legislation the NHS would be so good that no one would ever wish to go private again. Finally, there was the utter fiasco of the reshuffle.

Eric Hobsbawm is one of Britain’s most creative Marxist historians. Anyone who teaches at a school or university is aware of the effect of his writing, even on those who do not know from which stable he comes. He has this effect because he can discover in history a dynamic yet comprehensible movement. Furthermore, he can write two kinds of history with equal facility: there are books with great sweep like Industry and Empire and there are others, like Primitive Rebels or Labouring Men, which are more intimate and local in their focus. One of the reasons why he can do this is that he is primarily a Central European Marxist. His cultural lineage is the Continental Marxist tradition and it is this which shapes his writing in a particular way. He is thus more familiar with both the substance of Continental Marxism and its mode of argument than is (or was) usual in British Marxism. This is immediately obvious in (say) Revolutionaries – in my view, one of his most remarkable books – as it is in Politics for a Rational Left. This tradition has also shaped the literally global range of his interests: European cities, Italian Communism, Australian general unions, Latin American revolutions, English football, all beat together in a great historical engine which might lurch and shudder but whose parts cannot operate independently. Marxism has moreover placed him in time. He believes that there was before 1914 both a ‘classical’ Marxism and a ‘classical’ high capitalism, a capitalism which produced a ‘classical’ proletariat and a ‘classical’ bourgeoisie. In approaching this latest volume of his essays the reader should remember, therefore, that Hobsbawm’s writing is grounded in this classical Marxism and his politics in the mass working-class parties which high capitalism created.’