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영어

Eric J. Hobsbawm, a world-famous leftist historian, did not give up his own Marxist faith until the end of his life. But, he saw the peasant insurgency as a pre-political and backward movement lacking of programme, organization and political aim. For him, the peasant had always to be enlightened outside by the politically modern subjects whom the capitalist modernity gave birth to. Moreover, he praise Industrial Revolution because it made “the take off into self-sustained growth” of humanity possible and he named the period from the end of the Second World War to 1970s “the Golden Age” in that the unexpected and stable growth of capitalist economy was achieved. He blamed ‘68 May’ and ‘new left’ for ignoring the political revolution like Russian Revolution and proliferating selfish individualism. He also criticized Althusser’s Marxism as a kind of structural functionalism in which Marxist theory was lost its practical potential. Hobsbawm’s interpretations of those events and figures, in a sense, were connected with his historicist view of progress in history. He argued that the historical progress evolving on a singular and linear time referred to the growth of human control over nature and of rational exploitation by means of the technology and science, which was a cause and result of the development of productive power. For him, modern capitalist society, though he thought we should go to socialist society by way of it, showed the highest stage of productive power and therefore the advanced capacity of human reason. This means that his Marxism was on a logic of capitalist modernity and, therefore, he was a stubborn modernist and an enlightening elitist, before being a Marxist.