Germany’s AFD

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1:02hi and welcome to ones and twos fp's economics podcast every week we take a couple data points use them to try to explain the world i'm cameron abadi fp's deputy editor with you in berlin germany joining us as always is fp's economics columnist and columbia university professor adam twos in new york hi adam hi kem so two segments for you all today in the second half of the show we're going to be talking about the historian Eric Hobsbawm. A new biography about him has just been released, so stick around to hear about his perspective on history and also on economics. But first, another data point.

1:40That is 43.8. That is the share of the vote that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party received this past weekend in the regional elections in the state of Saxony-Anhalt in Germany. Jubilation at the Alternative for Germany party in a tight election that could change the face of German politics. The far-right AFD party has sent shockwaves across Germany and the world by surging to a landslide victory in the state election in Saxony-Anhalt. First time since the end of World War II, a far-right party could be a whisker away from coming to power in a state in Germany. The AFD, or Alternative for Germany in English, has come out the strongest.

2:27Now, Saxony Anheid is one of the smaller German states, only a population of two million people. It's in eastern Germany. But the fact that the AfD won such a large share of the vote, nearly winning a majority in the parliament in that state, has been a veritable earthquake in German politics. It's been a historical event in the basic sense that a far right party has not won a majority in any German state since the Second World War. and yeah in an even deeper sense this is a constitutional challenge to the identity and the politics of the post-war German state and its sense of itself its sense of itself as a liberal constitutional order the AFD does not think of itself as a party devoted to liberal democracy and so yeah one will will soon know whether they will be in charge of the state government but the implications for Germany in either case are profound.

3:34And yeah, Adam, to start off with, just to describe the AFD's program for Saxony Anhalt, you know, the states in Germany do have a lot of power in terms of determining policies across a number of major portfolios from security to education to culture. So yeah, what exactly was the AFD's proposed program for the state? And And what was that platform exactly? Yeah, just to underline my agreement with you that this is something of an earthquake. It is a small state. It is in East Germany. But this is sort of, I don't know, it has the force of, you know, Chronicle of a Death foretold or something.

4:14Like, we've seen this coming, and there has been a sort of sense of disbelief that this could actually happen, and now it has. And that in and of itself, I think, the sort of sobering up from the realization that maybe people would just try not to believe in the possibility of this is significant. It's worth saying that the AFD has many faces. And your question points us to the most respectable face of the AFD. So it's worth underlining also that the AFD has many regional branches. And this one in particular, Saxony Anheilth, has been labeled by the Verfassungsschutz, so the German agency that's responsible for protecting the German constitution.

4:53The Germans have a very militant conception. West Germany developed this conception of the militant defense of the constitution. So they're not afraid to label people as enemies of the constitution. And the AFD in Sachsen-Anhalt has been labeled as Rechtsextreme, so right extremist. And you only have to go on Twitter or YouTube or your favorite social media channel to see videos of AFD in Sachsen-Anhalt, which show it as a party of skinhead thugs, of people blaring out openly racist rap songs, using the N-word. It's a dirty party. Amongst the people elected to parliament include well-known far-right activists, porn producers, people with criminal records.

5:43It's playing in the dirty end of German society. but when if you look online and you look at its party program it's extraordinary i mean the it's really night and day contrast so if you look online and want to take the time reading their program it would be i would describe it as deeply dry conservative in terms of the old distinctions within british politics wets and dries this is a dry conservative version of german history and German politics. It's not populist. It's not plebeian. It's not MAGA. It isn't the crazy stuff that was coming out of Homeland Security in the US with super macho, powered up images of men defending the nation against alien invaders.

6:31The language is there, but the iconography, the style is very, very different. And it's a very, it reminds me of the tone. I can't help thinking of conservative high school teachers that I knew as a kid in West Germany. It's very sort of gymnasial professor, sort of a lecture about restoring the core values of German national culture. So the argument is basically that the establishment parties are selling Germany out through climate policy, through migration policy, through a policy of history, which is rejecting Germany's own history through migration, which is, of course, welcoming above all Muslim men who undermine the basic cultural values of German society.

7:23And so the program is a sort of point-by-point effort. And it says we're not even going to accuse mainstream parties of willfully trying to destroy the German nation. That would be polemics. What we're going to argue is somehow something's culturally wrong with them. They're victims of a declinist, degenerate culture. And so therefore, the project of the AFD starting in this first state, which we hope to govern, will be to restore the foundations of a national culture on the basis of which then you can actually have a reasonable conversation about politics. It's very multi-layered. They've had some intellectuals at work on this program.

7:56If you dig into the AFD podcast YouTube scene, And you'll see there are people talking about Gramsci and hegemony. It's about that. And then they have a 100-day program for their first 100 days in office, which is really pure culture war. It is immediate deportations as soon as we can get them organized. It is cutting funding for public broadcasting because they're systematically biased against us. It is re-evaluating the priorities of Sachs and Anhalt's government. So part of Sachsen-Anhalt's claim to fame is it was home to one part of the Bauhaus modernist movement of Weimar Germany. And they want to replace a state level program, which was called Think Modern, a modern denken by a program called Deutschdenken, Think German, which will involve raising the German flag outside schools and other public buildings, which in the US would be completely normal, in Germany really isn't.

8:58And then it also includes things like a truth commission on the COVID era, which panders to another of the slightly more bonkers and unsavory elements of the AFD constituency, which is COVID scepticism. So it's a very weird amalgam of different policies, very little that actually amounts to anything serious on the socioeconomic side. That's interesting. Yeah, because there has been a lot of discussion of the economic grievances that may have led to the rise of the AFD's popularity. Saxony-Anhalt, just as an example, there are other states where the AFD is very popular, but this is one of the poorer parts of Germany.

9:40It is a kind of classic left behind region of former Eastern Germany. So there is a lot of talk of the AFD's material policies to the extent that they exist. I mean, I was reading the program about, you know, again, maybe a marginal policy, but a discussion of cutting fees for daycare centers. Right. I mean, that that would then benefit families or, yeah, some other kinds of like marginal economic benefits along. those lines. But I guess, is it fair to say that this identitarian aspect of the party, this kind of rejection of liberal politics as Germany previously understood it with its kind of strenuous commitment to protecting minorities of all kinds and proceduralism, is it that rejection that is sort of more important for its success?

10:32Yeah, I mean, on the point of family policy one area where they do actually advocate for more government spending is in support of families with kids but anyone who's ever had kids knows that having a kid is not a recipe for improving your family's real income standing right so like and encouraging their average voter base which in fact is um lower income self-identified working class in many case people who identify as having financial problems to encourage particularly that group to have more kids It's like, that's not a strategy for improving people's average welfare, right? So there's a real paradox here, which is that the data are quite unambiguous.

11:13The AFD voting, and this is true of far right parties across Europe in the current moment, AFD voting is associated with self-identified working class status and people who self-identify as having financial difficulties. And it tends to correlate with areas of low income. So within Saxon-Anhalt itself, like the Tony fancy parts of cities like Halle voted solidly for the Green Party, which is the main cultural antagonist of the AFT. Forget the established parties, SPD, CDU. It's the Greens that they're really after, the true kind of upper middle class, educated, ecologically minded party they're fighting against.

11:54And so there is a really strong association between various types of measure of social disadvantage and AFD voting. And when you poll people who voted AFD, whether they have economic worries, they'll tell you they have economic worries. But when you ask them why they voted AFD, not what their general view of problems is in the world, but why they specifically voted the party, they don't mention redistribution as their main reason. They mention dealing with foreigners, dealing with criminality and establishing security, Sicherheit, which in Germany really doesn't have the connotation of social security in the United States.

12:30So they vote for the party because they think it's going to deliver a crackdown on foreigners and going to restore some sort of sense of national pride and is basically going to put two fingers up to the establishment that they identify as having sold them out. And if you look at the AFD's program, no one with two brain cells who had any idea of what was going on at all would vote for the AFD instrumentally so as to obtain from the AFD concrete material benefits because the AFD is more austere, more committed to the debt break, more committed to slashing public spending, more committed to reducing government debt than any party in the political spectrum.

13:12So it's to the right of the Autobahn liberal FDP that caused so much trouble in the previous government in Germany. They're to the right of the CDU. And if you will, wanting to vote for a party that would do redistribution, that would promise you targeted welfare programs or even general welfare programs, of course, there are Die Linke and the SPD who stand for that kind of policy. and voters did to a certain extent support DeLinca but but their social democrat support has crashed so it just doesn't seem to me that you can construct a plausible hypothesis that this vote for the AFD is motivated instrumentally by the expectation that increasing the AFD's power certainly if you think of them being in government is going to deliver is going to deliver outcomes you might say that voters are playing five-dimensional chess in which they vote for the AFD as a protest vote and then expect the conventional parties to respond by playing the welfare social security card.

14:14But I just think that's an implausible construction of what's going on here. So it's a very, it's a truly, you know, complicated, messy kind of conjuncture, which is after all, not entirely unfamiliar from the United States as well. I mean, we see similar patterns in the US. And one way of reading this is perspective. In other words, this isn't just about current misery, it's about anxiety about the future. And those fears about the future are projected onto foreigners. And the AFD's promised deal with that problem, quote unquote, then becomes your kind of substitute for a social policy. But I'm just finding it very difficult to reconcile the data and what we're seeing with any simple interpretation that way.

15:02Also, it's worth conveying to our audience, which maybe hasn't spent a lot of time in East Germany, that though these are left behind regions, they're not left behind like chunks of the outback of Florida or Louisiana or Michigan, where there's no clean water that you can drink. We're not talking about that level of deprivation. These are rough parts of the world, no doubt. They have relatively higher levels of unemployment. But the overall structure of the most dangerous thing going on there are right-wing thugs. The level of deprivation here is relative. It's real. It's experienced as real. And also memories of the GDR are in the past now.

15:51The vast majority of their electorate, which is middle-aged and young, have no real adult memories of the GDR. And if you look at the age profile of the voters, it's actually older people who tend to vote against them. It's very interesting. In Germany, the age profile of voters is quite different from that, say, of the US, where we see a monotonous increase in Republican voting with age. In Germany, the core constituency of the Social Democrats are pensioners. And in East Germany, older people tend to vote against the AFD. Yeah, in terms of its connectedness to the rest of the country, it would be easy enough for anyone in Berlin to get on a regional train, right, that heads directly to the state.

16:34And, you know, the most popular regional train in Berlin has one of its terminal stops in Magdeburg, the capital of this particular state. So it is, in fact, very much connected in terms of its being networked with the rest of the country. I guess in terms of the material policies, I suppose it would only be fair to say that they also do emphasize wanting to cut aid to Ukraine as a material policy and redistributing the aid from Ukraine to German citizens. And, you know, of course, one can't do that from the statehouse of Magdeburg and Saxony-Anhalt. That's a national policy that the state only has very indirect control over.

17:15But it is, I guess, some, you know, again, an indirect material policy. But yeah, certainly their emphasis otherwise is on this kind of emotional politics that is focused on identity. And that gets expressed in terms of, you know, re-migrating immigrants that are in the state, forcing them to return to their original home countries, for example, or emphasizing German identity in schools and refocusing historical education on pre-20th century German identity. This is something that they will have control over in the state and redistributing cultural funds to, you know, sort of properly German national cultural institutions for whatever that could mean.

17:56It's worth underlining, isn't it, this distinctive profile of xenophobia and racism in the AFD, which to an American audience will be different because anti-black racism, for obvious reasons, is not essential. It's there emphatically and in really grotesque forms, but it's not the central motivator. The most manifest version is Islamophobia, and the AFT owes its surge in popularity above all to the refugee crisis in Europe of 2015 and the perceived betrayal of German national interest by then-Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was supposedly of the right and from East Germany, and nevertheless pursued what is called an open-door policy.

18:35And then exactly, as you quite rightly emphasised, there is this, in some ways, surprising degree of resentment against the latest ways of refugees to come to Germany who are as white and blonde as you could possibly ask for. But they're from Ukraine and they are victims, after all, of a war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine. And yet in the AFD's construction of recent political history, that is not seen in the commonsensical way that you might expect of these people just seen as being as victims. but rather Berlin and the rest of the West is accused of essentially a policy of warmongering. This is a very kind of incoherent logic here.

19:14This isn't a coherent leftist critique of NATO or something like that. But there is a strong desire to push back against the standard narrative of the war as one in which Germany should squarely align with Ukraine against Russia. And Ukrainian refugees are seen as representative of this misalignment of German policy. and if you look at the disposable element of german government funding they're not wrong to say that that was a very large element of what and remains a large element of what the german government has to freely spend beyond entitlements but of course as a share of the overall budget it's relatively small but this is this is one of the areas where they would want to where they would want to redistribute yeah yeah and it does seem like the reason all of these ideas you know I almost hesitate to call them coherent policies, but these ideas stir up emotions, as you were pointing out, I think because they are manifestly rejecting the pieties of the system as it existed before.

20:13I mean, they're manifestly not treating everyone equally, manifestly not giving everyone the same legal rights. I should also add one other specific policy is that like new immigrants or refugees would be taught, their children would be taught in separate classrooms. The very sort of basic American definition of, you know, separate but equal isn't equal is something that AFD really wants to pursue in earnest. And for me, I guess this raises a more general question because the emotion is real. It may be at the center of the party's appeal. So what kind of lessons could progressive forces learn from this?

20:51I mean, can the left, does it have the capacity to create emotional, affective politics of this kind without rejecting the system they are a part of? And, you know, if not, does that kind of imply that progressive forces are actually sort of co-opted by the system that they preserve during crises, whether it's the financial crisis, the euro crisis, COVID, all of these crises, progressive forces have, you know, been cooperative and useful in addressing and solving and maintaining the system. But is this ultimately cutting off this ability to create a kind of affective politics that the AFD has pursued?

21:33I mean, this is a really fundamental question to which I don't know a simple answer. And I'm not sure that anyone does, except that this has always been the argument, after all, of anyone from the true left wing, that collaborationist management of the co-management of the system ultimately leaves you unable to address the profound grievances of populations of voters, of classes that feel quite rightly that they are systematically victimized by the existing system. And that's one of the reasons why some people say that the idea of holding the AFD out of power is misguided because the easiest way, if you like, to contaminate them too with the opprobrium of running the system is to give them a chance to try and run it.

22:17But thinking about this logic, I realized something from a different domain, from New York City, that I hadn't really fully understood before, I think, in these terms. But if you think about the way that Mamdani has emerged as this highly charismatic figure representative of a different kind of politics. He does this laser sharp focus on cost of living issues, rental costs, childcare, public transport, but then he combines it with a powerful non-establishment value statement, which is above all anchored in his open speech and frank speech about Gaza. And I hadn't really quite thought through the logic of that in electoral terms, but thinking about what the AFD does, and the way in which they almost welcome their stigmatization by the mainstream, because it helps to establish their plausibility, their credibility.

23:13It's a commitment device. If you're willing to speak in a racist way and get labeled a racist, you have a kind of authenticity. And I think something quite similar is in play right now in the American left around Gaza. If you are willing to take on the Democratic Party establishment on this issue and challenge America's alignment with Israel and especially Israel's current government, and to speak frankly about the violence and the horror being inflicted on the Palestinian population, and you're willing to take the knocks for doing that, it establishes this bona fides that nothing else really can, right?

23:47You can offer cheap childcare as much as you like, but it's the combination of the two things, especially, of course, in demographics and electrics like that of New York, which is massively diverse, where you're actually speaking to populations for whom this really means something, which is true also of the AFD's appeal to, you know, to bio-deutsch white Germans in East Germany. This gives you this, this gives you this element of credibility. And people like Jeremy Corbyn had it in the UK. And I think this move, and it's clearly explosive, it's potentially dangerous, It can backfire. And of course, in the case of the AFD, it's absolutely obnoxious.

24:26But just analytically speaking, it gives a second dimension or a third dimension to your politics that is quite crucial. And to my mind, I mean, what's then interesting is to see how that particular issue is played out in Germany. And the Linke, the Sarah Wagenknes party have both repositioned themselves on Israel. and it hasn't worked terribly much to their advantage and you wouldn't expect it to in a place like Sachsen-Anhalt. In Berlin, it might have a rather different kind of, well, we know it already is. It's causing huge ruptures in Berlin politics. So I think that's my kind of provisional thinking on this at this point.

25:04Yeah, I mean, all of this kind of reminds me of the thinker Francis Fukuyama and his idea of the end of history and the era of the end of history that we entered. And obviously that's the center of many debates about whether that's an accurate description or not. But it does strike me that how we were earlier just talking about the way that material policies were relatively absent from the campaign that AFD ran. Yeah, that material policies themselves have become more administrative questions, perhaps, that are something that the system has absorbed in that administrative framework. And that has left, I guess, backward looking emotional politics about identity as perhaps a greater source of appeal than future oriented politics, which are maybe essentially more material.

26:00But have we been robbed of that potential, maybe because of this end of history area that we've entered? I mean, in fairness to the AFT, I can't believe I'm saying that, but in fairness to the AFT, they, of course, would say, no, no, no, no, Cam, you've got this completely the wrong way around. We're the people who believe in the future because we're the people who believe in the future of the German nation, the German families. We want more kids. We want more German kids. We want less subversion of German culture and German society by foreigners. We also believe in a dynamic energy policy. We're against all this ridiculous climate politics.

26:34And we're interested in the past because we believe without a past, the country can't have a future. And so, you know, what you're describing is that kind of liberal consensus is, in fact, a doomsday mechanism that will ultimately lead to the destruction of German society. He just doesn't know it. It'll be a quiet, you know, anesthetized kind of euthanasia of the German nation. And so, of course, in the first instance, we can't do material policy because we're not in power yet. And B, deeper down, the reason why the establishment parties have been following these self-destructive policies in the name of the end of history, which is actually genuinely the end of German history, is their culture is wrong.

27:13So we have to fix the culture first. That is how I understand the position of the Saxon-Anhalt program. I mean, that's tortured and it's their particular version of reality. And it's but I think that will be their response. Thinking more generally, I think this is a very interesting question. And it's certainly true. I think that mainstream parties in Germany are having a really hard problem, a hard time with this. Neither the CDU nor the SPD, I think, incredibly can represent. And their electorate base is aging. And so if you think around the world, who else is really playing this big futures game?

27:48Well, the obvious person to look at is, you know, the Elon Musk wing of MAGA, the Millay Musk wing of MAGA, which has a vision of the future, but it's a kind of, you know, ready or not terrifying kind of, you know, break things and innovate quickly kind of a vision. And the other people are, of course, the CPC and China, the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, which resolutely believes in a national future, totally would not accept the end of history framing, even though, of course, it projects its own dominance in China into the endless future. So at that level, the question has been answered. But the challenges facing the Communist Party are endlessly new and endlessly have to be reinvented.

28:35And it doesn't believe that its power is due to the permanence of institutions. Its power is due to its willingness to continuously innovate answers to new problems. So I would think of, I think your question is a really powerful one, how we lost the future is a central issue. It was after all also how, say, the abundance book, the effort to try and reinvent the Democratic Party around an agenda. That's how that book starts. It's how did we lose the future? Its answer, I think, is quite banal. But that is the question it poses. And I would see the AFD as actually, in their own terms, answering this question.

29:12Saying, yes, you don't understand, you liberals, what it's going to take to give us a future. We're the only people who are willing to actually say that out loud. Yeah, I guess that's sort of solving Fukuyama by way of Heidegger. Some move like that. Returning to one's roots as the only possible salvation towards the future, which is a scary idea, I think. I mean, but I guess a coherent one, you're right, fair to say, for all his faults, Heidegger was coherent, I think. But otherwise, yeah, I guess it does strike me in hearing your answer there that there is maybe something arbitrary about the tech overlords being associated with, you know, conservative forces.

29:56You know, I mean, there is some alternative way that this could have developed or maybe still will develop in which the kind of tech forces become somehow associated with progressives. I guess what seems to me certainly the case is that whatever progressive answer gets developed, there's going to have to be someone with kind of like a foot outside the system to motivate some emotions behind these politics. Which is, after all, Elon Musk understands, right? I mean, he backed the AFT, and he backs the AFT, I think, precisely because in his own world, that step outside, what do they call it, blue pill?

30:34I can't even remember the pills. But you have to somehow attain access to a different view of the world to really understand what's going on. Yeah, it's a powerful ploy. Well, I think that was pretty interesting discussion all from the spinning off the little state of Saxony-Anhalt. But yeah, the issues here are profound. We should take a break, though, but we'll be back in a second to talk about Eric Hobsbawm.

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32:36Welcome back. Our next data point is 30. That is the estimated number of books that Eric Hobsbawm, the British historian, published over the course of his very long life. Eric Hobsbawm lived from 1917 to 2012, dying at the age of 95 years old. He was a prolific historian, writing about wide sweeps of history, and was also famous for being an avowed Marxist throughout his life as well. This particular conversation is occasioned by the recent publication of a new biography written by Emil Chabal. The Age of Hobsbawm is the title of that book. But yeah, we thought we would dig into Hobsbawm's life and career.

33:29And as we usually do when we discuss thinkers, Adam, I thought we could start by describing Hobsbawm's biography and how that may have affected his thinking on history and economics. Yeah, so he really is a fascinating character in that he comes from a world which to us now seems exotic and remote and then becomes a figure that I knew around the conventional academic scene in London in the 1990s, 2000s. So he's a kind of living link between the world of colonial or imperial era Egypt, where he was born in the summer of 1917, just shortly before the Russian Revolution or the Bolshevik seizure of power in Petrograd.

34:17He comes from a mixed Russo-Polish Jewish family. So his father was Russo-Polish, his mother was Austrian. His family, his parents meet, he's born in Egypt. He does actually have a North African phase briefly in his academic career, which he doesn't really ever pursue. But what really does happen is they move to Vienna, where he spends his early childhood, becomes a fluent German speaker. Then as his core family's material circumstances collapse, his father dies early, his mother dies shortly afterwards. He's taken in by relations who are in Berlin. So he moves from Vienna to Berlin. He's in Berlin in the early 1930s.

35:01And then he moves on to school in London, a high school in London, and from there to King's in Cambridge. And from there into a really quite mainstream English, not British, English academic career that is centred on really Cambridge, London, the Communist Party of Great Britain. Because he's not just a Marxist. It's really important to emphasise that the thing about Hobsbawm is that he's a communist. So he remains in the British Communist Party for as long as there is a British Communist his party. So after the traumas of the 56, notably the suppression of the Hungarian uprising, after the revelations about Stalin.

35:44So he's much more like a French intellectual than he is like his British counterparts. I think that's important to emphasize. But then he becomes, he's blocked from having a career in Oxbridge, the heart of the system, which I think left a quite permanent resentment. He's based at Birkbeck, London, which is the ninth school adult education wing of the London university system, becomes a very high status college within the London university system, spends more or less his entire career there with increasing global celebrity. He's traveling all over the world and he builds relationships above all in France and Italy.

36:17So at the one hand, he comes from this world of Weimar Germany and Vienna. And on the other hand, he becomes somebody I knew from seminars in London. Other people I know are much, much, much closer to him. Mark Mazzara, my colleague at Columbia, was his colleague at Birkbeck, and also culturally, I think, closer to Hobsbawm than I could ever claim to be. So that, and so then you ask about, you know, what is the influence of that on his thinking? Let's focus on economics, first of all, because history, like he was so much that history that's a sort of disentangle, and he writes about this, it's quite complicated.

36:52But what does it do to his thinking about economics. And I think, I mean, he's not an economist. He's really a historian. It's interesting that he chooses history as a subject to study, which after all, in Cambridge in the 30s was incredibly unfashionable. This is not where you would think you would go. Deeply conservative discipline, which he, amongst others, helps to revolutionize. And by the 50s, 60s, 70s, British history has become a zone of radicalism in part because of his influence. But thinking about the economy, I think what's really interesting is that he grows up in a period of extreme crisis.

37:29So he's interested all his life in crises, essentially, seen through a Marxist lens. And at Cambridge, the biggest influences on him are Marxist intellectuals, Communist Party intellectuals, Maurice Dobb in particular, who's the leading figure of Marxist economics in Britain and Europe. One of the leading figures in Europe is at Trinity College. and what I think is really interesting is the way in which this filters into Hobsbawm thinking. I mean he becomes famous for the books he writes about the 19th and the 20th centuries but one of the earliest and most influential articles that he writes or two articles appears in the journal Past and Present which he helps the co-found in the 1950s which are actually on the earlier period of massive crisis in European history which before the 20th century was the early modern period and notably the 17th century.

38:20And if you think of Hobsbawm as somebody who's a student of Dobb, and Dobb is fundamentally concerned with the essential Marxist question of the transition, so from medieval feudal economics to capitalism, which someone like Dobb would locate at the end of the Middle Ages in the 13th, 14th centuries where feudalism is beginning to disintegrate, and something like a capitalist regime is unmistakably beginning to emerge in the 1500s, the 14th and 1500s. Hobsbawm's question is, how did it take so long? Why is it that the Industrial Revolution and fully-fledged capitalism doesn't emerge until the late 18th and 19th centuries, which he'll write about in his world-famous Age of Revolution, Labour of Capital, Age of Empire sequence, which are all about the 19th century.

39:08And the answer he gives in this series of profoundly influential articles from the 1950s, so in the immediate aftermath of World War II, He's thinking about this in the midst of all of the crises within global politics. He says that earlier epoch of crisis, which was the 17th century, with the last plague epidemic, with climate change, with the 30 years war, the wars of religion. This is a gear shift crisis in the development of global capitalism. The relations of production, the societal structures of Europe in that period are fundamentally out of sync with the underlying development of capitalism, which was properly identified as happening at the end of the Middle Ages.

39:51But we have centuries to account for. And so this 17th century crisis, which is his first truly influential historiographical intervention, is an effort to make sense of that shift. And that, to me, is where you see the emergence of Hobsbawm as a truly powerful synthetic historian who is using a Marxist framework to phrase questions, but is doing so also against the backdrop of his own experience of crisis starting in World War I with the Russian Revolution, with the upheavals in Central Europe. And out of that, already in the early 50s, so at a very early stage in his career, is able to say, well, maybe what we're dealing with here is what then becomes known as the general crisis of the 17th century.

40:34And if I was to write an intellectual biography of Hobsbawm, I think I would start there, because that's where it all really comes together. And we see his effort to think crisis as this recurring, disastrous element of modern history, out of which, however, also positive developments can come. So wrestling with the question of the dialectic, really. Yeah, I mean, Hobbesbaum goes on to write a hugely popular series on the history of the modern world. You know, the first three volumes cover 1789 to 1914. Those three books are the age of revolution, the age of capital, the age of empire. so what exactly in that series in what sense is hobsbawm a specifically marxist historian again i mean i know what it means to be a marxist in political terms but if one were to look at that series and and the way he covered that period of time i mean how does that express his marxist historical commitments so i mean i think it's it's quite manifest and if you're willing to sort of just, you know, read what he says, it becomes, I think, starkly clear.

41:55First of all, throughout his life, he's interested in what Marxist theoreticians will call the relationship between base and superstructure. So by base, we mean the forces of production. And by superstructure, we mean the relations or culture and political institutions piled on top of that. And Hobsbawm, like so many other intellectuals of the 1930s, you know, I've been a bit obsessed with Thomas Mann, and Lukács, people like that, is first and foremost not a labor historian or economic historian. He's a cultural historian. He's actually interested in English literature. So he's fundamentally concerned, however, with this dialectic, this relationship between the development of culture and the development of broader material forces in society.

42:37And there's a double distinctively beyond that general framing, which is a Marxist framing. there are two further pointed moves which is his willingness to really exclude nothing from the superstructure so it is a move to the totality if you read hobsbawm's books part of their charm is you never know where he's going to go next it could be popular culture one of his big breakout books was jazz he wasn't to my mind a great critic of jazz he was deeply conservative in his taste but nevertheless he was concerned with popular culture and its commercial aspects so this claim to the totality, Lukács will say that the genuine core of the Marxist method is that it's a method that describes totality.

43:19Jameson and famous literary critics in the Marxist mode will recuperate this claim and expand it in the later 20th century. And those people are more associated with outlets like the New Left Review, which Hobsbawm was at a distance from their founding, because he was closer to the Communist Party than was comfortable for those people. So that's one element. So it's the claim to understand the totality through a relationship between base and superstructure, between economy, society and culture. And the third element, which marks in very general terms his approach as Marxist, is the way he understands the base, so the economy, which is that he was a man that focused on production and labor.

44:01So again, the distinctive Marxist approach to the economy is not to look at commerce or finance as the principal drivers. This is where, for instance, Hobsbawm differs from another famous contemporary, the French historian Braudel, who has an understanding of development of capitalism that's much more centred on markets. Adam Smith would go in a similar direction. But coming out of the factory capitalism of the 19th century, Marx is focused above all on the mystery of what happens within the site of production and the labour process which generates the surplus value. And Hobsbawm is completely true to this tradition in that a lot of his social historical work was about the labor process, was about working men, laboring men.

44:43And again and again in your work, in his work, you see him moving to the site of production. This is the general frame of what makes him a Marxist. If you look at the books and the narrative they tell, what's really striking is, in fact, how closely he cleaves, not just to a Marxist construction of history, but to a Leninist construction of history. So he distinguishes between the failed revolutionary epoch of the middle century, the instauration of capital's dominance in the kind of middle third, and then the age of imperialism, an empire that comes at the end. And this is, of course, where Lenin is essentially saying that there need to be fundamental innovations in Marxist thinking about the world, because otherwise you can't account for the new age in which states, in which governments are really central and which will lead to the catastrophe of World War I.

45:35And, you know, in his work, say, on the British working class, like Hobsbawm is, for some people, this is embarrassing. I mean, he's a straight down the line defender of Lenin's theory of the labor aristocracy. Hobsbawm insists he doesn't have quite the same political implications that Lenin believes in, but if you read the stuff at face value, what Hobsbawm is is a loyal foot soldier of the CPGB in affirming that there is a labor aristocracy. In other words, a slice of the British working class that has been bought off by the prophets of imperialism. And what's really fascinating is to see what then happens in the final work of this sequence.

46:15There's a trilogy about the 19th century, and then there's this other book, The Age of Extremes, which many listeners may know about the 20th century. And what always struck me about that is that here his Marxist framework or his Marxian framework really just breaks down. and it isn't because the economy doesn't matter but that the ordering of the logic the causal logic is just so deeply problematic in the 20th century so the book is driven not by productive forces but by the means of violence it's driven by the book starts with an extraordinary powerful kind of enumeration of the violence of the 20th century and then things follow from that which is of course not the marxian story it again is much closer to a leninist story actually it's exactly the kind of story that Lenin and Bukharin began to put together in World War I, because what they're pointing to is the catastrophic de-erailment of 19th century historical prophecy by violence.

47:12And Hobsbawm in some sense reflects that. But unlike more serious theoreticians in the Western Marxist tradition of the 20th century, he never really tangles with the deep implications for understanding the dialectic, the philosophy of history that might follow from that. He's no Adorno, he's no Frankfurt school guy. He avoids the real abyss that people like Walter Benjamin will see deriving from that insight about the role of violence and the state. The possibility of barbarism ultimately as the trajectory of global development, that I think is quite alien to Hobson. He doesn't have much connection with that Western Marxist scene.

47:59Yeah, I guess it's important to emphasize that that last volume, Age of Extremes, was published after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And Hobsbawm, nevertheless, maintained his connection to communism and maintained that kind of general framework in addressing the 20th century. Even to the point, I think, interestingly, of like, as you're suggesting, not focusing on the Holocaust as a sort of central fact of World War II. And it seems inevitable to, I guess, ask about Hobsbawm's allegiance to communism and the way he maintained it throughout his life. And I guess the question that comes to mind is what function did this communist ideal play for him politically?

48:46I mean, what accounts for him maintaining that allegiance in an intellectual sense? And did this reveal a kind of moral blind spot in his work? Yeah, I mean, for those people who are interested, there's an extraordinary BBC interview with the Canadian liberal historian of political thought, Michael Ignatio, predecessor of Mark Carney, actually, in the Canadian political scene, less politically successful than Carney, who puts Hotsporn on the spot and challenges him about his adherence to the CPGB. And a lot of people are kind of outraged by Hobsbawm's response, because he refuses to flinch from the conclusion that at the time, he was willing to contemplate huge sacrifices, the killing of millions of people for the purpose of making a better world, and refuses to sort of simply distance himself from this politics.

49:47So the very least you can say is that there's an honesty there and there's a kind of bravery, a kind of courage in the face of conventional moral opinion, which of course would condemn this. I think it's important to understand what the logic is here. And I think there's an element where Ignatiev just doesn't get what Hobsbawm is saying. And it goes back to this question of the future. And it originates in the problem of World War I and the disaster of the 20th century that originates in the violence of World War I. because what Hobsbawm starts by saying in response to Ignatiev is, why was I committed to the Communist Party?

50:22He says, you didn't have the option. You see either there was going to be a future or there wasn't going to be a future. And this, the Communist Party, was the only thing that offered an acceptable future. And that is a statement which only makes sense if you put yourself in the position of someone thinking the way that Lenin and Bukharin and other people on left thought about the world and the way it was developing in the wake of World War I, in that the trajectory was not just holocaustal, as it were, towards the destruction of European Jewry, but more comprehensively apocalyptic, right? That the entire trajectory, the entire positive trajectory of history that the 19th century had promised was going to be derailed.

51:07And the only force that understood this and was going to yank the world willy-nilly back in a more constructive direction was the global communist movement. And that's the scale on which this claim is being made. Now, as Hosbaum insists, this is a true statement about his contemporary view, and it's a historian's statement about why people would hold that kind of view. And is it moral or immoral to hold that kind of view? I think this is a moment where one might ask whether good historians are good moralists. Generally speaking, good historians don't distinguish themselves by being good moralists because there's something inherently relativistic about the business of being a historian, which involves you in trying to get inside the heads of other people and genuinely get inside the heads of other people.

51:54And that makes moral certainties quite difficult to maintain. I think it's quite difficult to be a good historian if you have deep moral certainties. I think you have to be willing to contemplate that shift. Hobsbawm adds then, I think, a much less satisfactory rationalization, which is to say, oh, well, yes, of course, the Stalinist regime was violent, but then everyone was being violent at the time. That doesn't work as an argument, because, in fact, hands down, by a huge margin, the Soviet regime in the 30s was the most violent. The Nazi regime doesn't even get going until the 1940s in terms of really grand murder.

52:26So that's, I think, a bad claim. It makes sense only if you start from this Leninist perspective, which is that the catastrophe of World War One threatening the derailment of all positive progress legitimizes radical action. And then you have to ask, of course, OK, if there are all these excuses that can be made for Hobsbawm at the time, like why does he remain faithful to the party in the 1950s when the repression? Well, A, the horrors of the Stalinist period are revealed in the Khrushchev speech, and then the Soviet Union represses the uprising in Hungary. And I think what then comes to the fore, Chepal's biography is convincing, I think, very convincing on this point, is that for Hobsbawm, the Communist Party was a profound source of personal identity.

53:12It was what anchored him as a migrant, as a multiply displaced refugee across the terrains that he had moved across. And it's what anchored him in Britain, but outside Britain at the same time. And so to leave the party for him would not just have been a choice of political position and moral positioning. It was to lose his world because his world was never just British academia. yet, at least in his own mind, his world was always the global movement. And that global movement has a value in its own right. And again, you could claim, and I think following on the original logic of his positioning, given the trajectory of global capitalism, the only thing that can answer it with any hope of success is a global movement.

54:04And this is the pessimism of the end of the age of extremes. If capitalism is faced only by nation states doing social democracy, they don't have a chance. But a global movement anchored in a powerhouse like the Soviet Union, whatever the toxicity of the Soviet Union's politics, creates a counterweight to which there is no alternative. It's like a Christian opting for the Catholic Church because it's the one that actually takes this project of global religiosity seriously. And I think for him, And that is what the Communist Party did. And it did in a very real sense. In other words, he was never just a British academic with a leftist disposition.

54:44He wasn't a Christopher Hill. He wasn't an E.P. Thompson, both of whom had deep strands of notably Thompson, a kind of little local patriotism. He was a Marxist intellectual on the scale, at least of Europe. And then in his later career, he was a huge celebrity of Latin America, notably in Brazil, all over the world. And I think that that's key to understanding what for him the stakes were of Communist Party membership. Yeah, I did watch that interview with Michael Ignatieff that you mentioned. And it is a profound response that Hobsbawm gives about the absence of any future as informing his commitment to communism, you know, in his youth.

55:24I think he was also describing it. But that did also make me think about what we discussed about Fukuyama in the first segment here in the sense that the absence of a future could also be defined in terms of, yeah, an end of history in the sense of, you know, the future becoming simply subject to kind of administrative or bureaucratic logic as being its own absence of a future orientation that, yeah, may have also been terrifying in its own way, even if that's not what Habsburg meant. obviously in that sort of early 20th century apocalyptic sense. But there is another way in which the absence of a future can be defined.

56:03But yeah, that also, I guess, reminds me that Hobbes-Bohm also wrote a lot about nationalism and to some extent was a theorist about nationalism and talked about how nationalism is an invented tradition. And I'm curious whether that analysis reveals its own kind of blind spot. Obviously, now we are in a moment where many nationalist parties are on the rise, where the AfD, among others, are beginning to take power in places where they were not previously in power. So did Hobsbawm not take nationalism seriously enough as a social and political force, ultimately? I don't, I find that a puzzling claim.

56:42I mean, I think he understood it as something, I mean, given his background, this is hardly unsurprising, as a force whose emergence has to be explained, right? That can't just be taken for granted. That doesn't believe that nations are nations because nations are nations and always have been nations, right? That needs them therefore to be historicized and explained. And it's the third or the fourth, you know, genuinely creative phase, fifth, sixth phase of Hobson's career. And it had a huge impact well beyond the left Marxist historiographical ghetto or the best-selling global survey-type writing in deeply academic ivory tower history, this question of the construction of the nation, the invention of tradition, the generation of historical narrative in history as itself, therefore, a product of change.

57:39So a really paradoxical position where supposedly timeless things are manufactured in real time. This was a profoundly important idea and was one of Hobsbawm's contributions also to making sense of contemporary realities in Britain, because one of the common diagnoses of Margaret Thatcher, after all, was that in the 80s and 90s she was taking Britain back to Victorian values, and Britain was reconfiguring itself as a site of heritage and the heritage industry, and history was becoming a business, effectively, one from which Hobsbawm, after all, also profited handsomely. And what he was doing was trying to understand the political logic of that.

58:17I mean, both he and I have a deep attachment to King's College in Cambridge. And, you know, one of the most iconic images of King's College is the chapel and the choir service, the carol service at Christmas. And now it's easy to imagine that as being a timeless tradition that goes back to the late Middle Ages. And what he pointed out was that entire logic of the self-presentation of this medieval version of England was the product of BBC Radio in the early 20th century, which created this tradition of the ritual reconnection to the deep historical past. And so I think of this as a, this is not a dismissal of that culture.

58:57It's not, this is that, that's precisely the kind of, you know, base at the cost of the superstructure, the reduction of the superstructure to base that Hobsbawm consistently resisted throughout his entire career. But it's an insistence that one can't take nationalism at face value. We have to understand what pressures, what modern pressures generate these desperate, clingy kind of recursions to the past. And the central idea was that the more history speeds up, the more we should expect this kind of move. And so coming out of that generation that was deeply influenced by that phase of Hobsbawm, but also Benedict Anderson, Perry Anderson's brother, who wrote this extraordinary book called Imagined Communities.

59:39that's my way of understanding Xi Jinping as well. Like Xi Jinping is self-evidently, this is the most obviously Hobsbawmian thing you could possibly do. You have the largest, most dramatic transformation of a human society in history. And what do you do? You reinvent tradition. You reinvent, you know, legacies of continuity. You rebuild continuity. So it seems to me a way precisely of actually understanding, well, I don't know whether to take seriously or not, but of understanding logics of renationalization and the reassertion of imagined histories in moments of tumultuous change. Yeah, point taken and fair enough.

1:00:18I guess the question that I was wrestling with was whether he also then theorized a way of overcoming that nationalism, which would seem to me, I guess, in a Marxist sense, one would have to overcome these nationalist commitments at some point. And whether I guess he completely synthesized all of these thoughts into a single framework. Obviously, maybe that's more than can be asked of any one writer. But clearly, he captivated readers across the world with his many books. I can recommend the biography that just came out, Age of Hobsbawm. But otherwise, we will be back in a week with other data points.

1:01:00Ones and Twos is written and edited by Adam and me and produced by Claudia Tatey. The show is made possible through the support of foreign policy readers and Ones and Twos listeners. As always, we love getting listener feedback. You can leave voice messages on the Ones and Twos homepage on foreignpolicy.com or email us, that's podcasts at foreignpolicy.com, or you can tweet us, that's at onesandtwospod. I'm Cameron Abadi. Thank you very much for listening, and we'll be back in your feed next week.

1:01:45The world at this moment is more fractured than it's been in decades. More wars. Iran will not have a nuclear weapon. More extremism. Germany could soon have a far-right political party running one of its regional... And deeper disagreements on a range of issues. On Season 3 of Counterpoint, we get to the heart of those disagreements with a series of debates. On each episode, two of the smartest people in their field face off over one question. Counterpoint is a production of Foreign Policy Magazine in partnership with the Doha Forum.