How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and Marxism, by Eric Hobsbawm, Little, Brown, RRP£25, 480 pages
Born in June 1917, months before the October Revolution, Eric Hobsbawm has outlived both the Soviet Union and the Communist Party of Great Britain, which he joined in 1936. He is still in mourning. “The fall of the USSR and the Soviet model,” he writes in How to Change the World, “was traumatic not only for communists but for socialists everywhere.”
Speak for yourself, comrade. I, like many other socialists, greeted the fall of the Soviet model with unqualified rejoicing; and I don’t doubt that Karl Marx would have been celebrating. His favourite motto, de omnibus disputandum (“everything should be questioned”), was not one that had any currency in the realm of “actually existing socialism” – a hideous hybrid of mendacity, thuggery and incompetence.