The historian Eric Hobsbawm is rightly being mourned as a great intellectual of modern times. Yet he was more than a powerful historian and political thinker; nor should he be remembered in solitary splendour. He was part of a group of British Marxist scholars who profoundly
influenced understanding of what culture is.
More than 50 years ago, a group of dissident Oxbridge-educated academic historians changed the way the British saw culture. They understood, long before anyone else, that culture is what shapes the world. They also saw that culture is totally democratic and comes from the people. While the official guardians of the arts, such as Kenneth Clark, were praising the “civilisation” of the elite on television and in print, Hobsbawm and co were resurrecting the lost cultures of Luddites, the masked poachers and anyonymous letter writers, of William Blake and John Milton. They discovered the value of popular culture — something so integral to our lives today it seems bizarre it was ever denigrated.
Culture, in the tradition of social analysis that took its lead from Karl Marx, was seen as a superficial aspect of human life. The economic base, according to the old Marxists, determines everything else; art and literature merely reflect that economic base.
The English 18th-century portrait, for instance, reflects the rise of bourgeois individualism. The example Marx gave was Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which he saw as a utopian
portrait of the self-helping capitalist.
Hobsbawm was one of a generation of brilliant historians, along with EP Thompson and Christopher Hill, who embraced Marxism but rejected its crude attitude to culture.
Thompson’s classic book The Making of the English Working Class is not so much about factories and working conditions as the rituals and symbols in which resistance is expressed: his working class made itself, through culture. Similarly, Hill draws together Milton and the Ranters in his recreations of the culture of the “English revolution” that overthrew
Charles I, releasing a carnival of radical thought.
But it was Hobsbawm who excelled at revealing the power of myths, the intricacies of popular culture. Cinema pervades his work. He happened to research Sicilian outlaws at the exact moment neorealist cinema was discovering working-class Italy: the film Salvatore Giuliano, about a famous outlaw, came out in 1962, not long after his book Primitive Rebels.
In The Age of Extremes, Hobsbawm argued that everyone who was young and savvy in 1930s Britain was also a fan of avant-garde films such as Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin. His evidence? His own memories: he recalls going to see these films as a young man. His passion for 1930s cinema was one that apparently lasted: I saw him in the audience at the Barbican in London a few years ago, glued to Hitchcock’s
The 39 Steps.
In his four-volume history of the modern world, Hobsbawm departs almost completely from Marxist attitudes to culture. He celebrates cinema and art as powerful cultural forces. The truly revolutionary age of art was before the first world war, he wrote, when Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse remade art completely. By the 1930s, he argued, the avant garde had become a social ritual: everyone going to see all those hip, surrealist movies.
In his view, the avant garde was dead by the 1960s. Famously, Hobsbawm loved jazz, an art form that is impossible to reduce to a simple economic theory.
Most importantly of all, Hobsbawm applied his sense of the power of culture to rethinking socialist politics.
The Labour movement had lost contact with contemporary culture, he argued in the pages of Marxism Today in the 1980s — it was Thatcherism that reflected postmodern ways of life.
An avid reader of this magazine in the 1980s, I learned that masculinity was a cultural construct, and that Madonna was a feminist.
It was a long way from old Marxism, and over it all hovered the crystal-clear mind of Hobsbawm.
Of course, he couldn’t have predicted that it would be Tony Blair who took Labour into a new cultural age.
Why did these Marxists influence our understanding of culture? Because they wrote about it so well. In their books there is a powerful sense of culture as an endlessly creative field of play, where people build and destroy utopias every day.
These men set out the expansive, democratic sense of culture we now take for granted, demonstrating that the rough music of the poor can be more eloquent than the duke’s landscaped
garden. Guardian News
