Eric Hobsbawm Works

[Norine Wiltshire]

Almostall Marxists have imagined themselves to be part of a global community. More than perhaps any other modern ideology, Marxism has given its adherents a sense of being connected across regions, countries and continents. The activists, thinkers, politicians, students, workers, guerrilla fighters and party apparatchiks who, throughout the 20th century, claimed Marxist ideals for themselves rarely agreed on what Marxism was or where it was headed. But they knew that they were not alone. At its height, Marxism created a web of interconnected communities at least as powerful as the Muslim ummah, complete with its own heretics, infidels, rogue saviours and clerics.

For committed Marxists, the explanation for the remarkable reach of Marxist ideas is self-evident: since capitalism is a global phenomenon, so a critique of capitalism must highlight the transnational reality of capitalist domination. For the historian of ideas, however, the creation and persistence of a global language of Marxism is anything but self-evident. There is no obvious reason why, in the 1970s, a Uruguayan trade unionist, a French philosopher and an Indian communist activist should have shared a common set of words, images, ideas and metaphors to describe the world. It is not enough to say that this extraordinary convergence is a consequence of the intrinsic rightness of Marxist explanatory frameworks. It also has to do with how certain ideas travelled across continents, carried along by the writing of Marxist intellectuals and Marxist-inspired political leaders.

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