Hobsbawm: um crente entre os crentes (infelizmente nao apenas eles...)

Eric Hobsbawm é obviamente incensado pela esquerda e admirado por legiões de historiadores que não precisam necessariamente ser de esquerda, mas que guardam certas simpatias por causas "igualitárias" e uma correspondente antipatia pela exploração capitalista.
Mesmo para os que não concordam com seu marxismo fossilizado, existem muitos outros que reconhecem que seus manuais de história são livros "úteis" no pobre cenário bibliográfico disponível no Brasil. Ele passa, assim, por um grande historiador, e suas teses são aceitas quase inquestionavelmente em todas as áreas das humanidades e em muitos concursos públicos (mesmo nos que seriam supostamente mais exigentes, como os do Itamaraty).
A resenha abaixo de um de seus livros "memorialísticos" não é propriamente arrasador para a sua reputação porque ele mesmo se encarregou de arrasá-la, defendendo o socialismo contra todas as evidências de crimes e desastres, e acusando o capitalismo de todos os desastres e perversões, mesmo sem provas concretas em seu apoio.
Mas vale ler uma resenha-artigo que desmente cabalmente esse "grande" historiador, e o remete ao lugar que ele ocupa legitimamente: o dos ideólogos e o dos deformadores da História.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida

BOOKSHELF
How a True Believer Keeps the Faith
By MICHAEL MOYNIHAN
The Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2011

How to Change the World
By Eric Hobsbawm
Yale, 470 pages, $35

The British historian Eric Hobsbawm in 1976.

In 2003, the New York Times declared Eric Hobsbawm "one of the great British historians of his age, an unapologetic Communist and a polymath whose erudite, elegantly written histories are still widely read in schools here and abroad." The Spectator, a right-leaning British magazine, gushed that Hobsbawm is "arguably our greatest living historian—not only Britain's, but the world's." The Nation anointed him "one of Aristotle's 'men of virtue.' "

That the 94-year-old Mr. Hobsbawm has long championed dictatorial regimes hasn't diminished his standing among the intelligentsia or within the establishment he so obviously loathes. In 1998, Queen Elizabeth II bestowed upon him a Companion of Honour—"In action faithful and in honour clear." But even many of Mr. Hobsbawm's admirers find his slippery defenses of communism discomfiting.

To his critics, his ideological dogmatism has made him an untrustworthy chronicler of the 20th century. The British historian David Pryce-Jones argues that Mr. Hobsbawm has "corrupted knowledge into propaganda" and is a professional historian who is "neither a historian nor professional." Reading his extravagantly received 1994 book, "The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991," the celebrated Kremlinologist Robert Conquest concluded that Mr. Hobsbawm suffers from a "massive reality denial" regarding the Soviet Union.

In "How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism," Mr. Hobsbawm's latest attempt to grapple with Karl Marx's legacy of ashes, the author remains an accomplished denier of reality. Drawn from essays and speeches spanning the past 50 years, Mr. Hobsbawm's book ruminates on pre-Marxian socialism, the works of the Italian communist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, and a slew of internecine ideological battles that will be of interest mainly to academics and unreconstructed militants.

The more recent material in "How to Change the World," written after the fall of the Soviet Union, claims that regimes self-identified as Marxist shouldn't be allowed to sully the reputation of Marxism—despite all the statues of Marx that once dotted the communist world, the constant invocations of "Das Kapital" and "The Communist Manifesto," and the savage collectivization schemes.

For anyone who has visited an American college campus in the past half-century, Mr. Hobsbawm's core argument will be familiar: The Marxism practiced by Lenin, Stalin and Mao was a clumsy misinterpretation of Marx's theories and, as such, doesn't invalidate the communist project. True, the East Bloc societies practicing what was called "actually existing socialism" (which Mr. Hobsbawm determines, ex post facto, didn't actually exist) ended in economic disaster, but experiments in "market fundamentalism also failed," he says. It is unclear to which "fundamentalist" governments he is referring, but it's important for Mr. Hobsbawm to establish a loose moral equivalence between Thatcherism and the ossified economies controlled or guided by Moscow.

One wouldn't know it from "How to Change the World," but Mr. Hobsbawm wasn't always convinced that the Soviet Union, along with its puppets and imitators, was misunderstanding the essence of Marxism. He never relinquished his membership in the Communist Party, even after Moscow's invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Indeed, he began his writing career with a co-authored pamphlet defending the indefensible Soviet invasion of Finland in 1939. "To this day," he writes in his memoirs, "I notice myself treating the memory and tradition of the USSR with an indulgence and tenderness." There was some ugliness in the socialist states occupied by Moscow, he admitted in 2002, but "leaving aside the victims of the Berlin Wall," East Germany was a pleasant place to live. Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

In a now infamous 1994 interview with journalist Michael Ignatieff, the historian was asked if the murder of "15, 20 million people might have been justified" in establishing a Marxist paradise. "Yes," Mr. Hobsbawm replied. Asked the same question the following year, he reiterated his support for the "sacrifice of millions of lives" in pursuit of a vague egalitarianism. That such comments caused surprise is itself surprising; Mr. Hobsbawm's lifelong commitment to the Party testified to his approval of the Soviet experience, whatever its crimes. It's not that he didn't know what was going on in the dank basements of the Lubyanka and on the frozen steppes of Siberia. It's that he didn't much care.

Readers of "How to Change the World" will be treated to explications of synarchism, a dozen mentions of the Russian Narodniks, and countless digressions on justly forgotten Marxist thinkers and politicians. But there is remarkably little discussion of the way communist regimes actually governed. There is virtually nothing on the vast Soviet concentration-camp system, unless one counts a complaint that "Marx was typecast as the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists as essentially defenders of, if not participators in, terror and the KGB." Also missing is any mention of the more than 40 million Chinese murdered in Mao's Great Leap Forward or the almost two million Cambodians murdered by Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge.

When the bloody history of 20th-century communism intrudes upon Mr. Hobsbawm's disquisitions, it's quickly dismissed. Of the countries occupied by the Soviet Union after World War II—"the Second World War," he says with characteristic slipperiness, "led communist parties to power" in Eastern and Central Europe—he explains that a "possible critique of the new [postwar] socialist regimes does not concern us here." Why did communist regimes share the characteristics of state terror, oppression and murder? "To answer this question is not part of the present chapter."

Regarding the execrable pact between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, which shocked many former communist sympathizers into lives of anticommunism, Mr. Hobsbawm dismisses the "zig-zags and turns of Comintern and Soviet policy," specifically the "about-turn of 1939-41," which "need not detain us here."

In one sense, Mr. Hobsbawm's admirers are right about his erudition: He possesses an encyclopedic knowledge of Marxist thought, specifically Italian communism and pre-Soviet socialist movements. But that knowledge is wasted when used to write untrustworthy history. Readers interested in a kaleidoscopic history of Marxist thought, its global influence and the reasons why regimes flying the red banner inevitably resorted to slavery and violence would be better served by Leszek Kołakowski's "Main Currents in Marxism." The three-volume classic (published in English in 1978 and in 2005 as a single volume) ably demonstrates that Stalinism is a feature of Marxism, not an aberration.

Mr. Hobsbawm closes "How to Change the World" by making a predictable admonition: With the world economy in turmoil, "once again the time has come to take Marx seriously." How the application of Marxist economics to the deeply indebted U.S. (or Greek) economy would reverse the current crisis is left unsaid. In Europe, where socialist parties and left-wing coalitions win elections, the electoral tide has turned dramatically in the other direction now that social-democratic policy has swamped the Continent in debt, with parties of the right controlling all of the major (and many minor) economies.

"How to Change the World" shows us little more than how an intellectual has committed his life not to exploring and stress-testing an ideology but to stubbornly defending it. The brand of Marxism that Eric Hobsbawm champions is indeed a way to "change the world." It already did. And it was a catastrophe.

—Mr. Moynihan is an editor at Vice magazine.