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Notes
The longer version of this observation is worth noting here:
“Or rather, most of the great revolutions which have occurred and succeeded, have begun as 'happenings' rather than as planned productions. Sometimes they have grown rapidly and unexpectedly out of what looked like ordinary mass demonstrations, sometimes out of resistance to the acts of their enemies, sometimes in other ways – but rarely if ever did they take the form expected by organized revolutionary movements, even when these had predicted the imminent occurrence of revolution. That is why the test of greatness in revolutionaries has always been their capacity to discover the new and unexpected characteristics of revolutionary situations and to adapt their tactics to them. Like the surfer, the revolutionary does not create the waves on which he rides, but balances on them. Unlike the surfer – and here serious revolutionary theory diverges from anarchist practice – sooner or later he stops riding on the wave and must control its direction and movement.” Reflections on Anarchism (1969).
This essay is focused on Primitive Rebels and the currents that flowed from that book. It is nevertheless important to note that, besides his well-read quartet The ages of…Revolution, Capital and so on, Hobsbowm concerned himself simultaneously with much discussed topics in the history of working people (Hobsbawm 1984) and a fascination with darkened corners. So, he summarizes a late collection of his work thus: “This book is almost entirely about the sort of people whose names are usually unknown to anyone except their family and neighbours…occasionally they are also known to the police… In some cases their names are entirely unknown and unknowable… They constitute most of the human race.” (Hobsbawm 1998).
Worsley 1957: The trumpet shall sound; Cohn, 1957: The pursuit of the millennium.
It was this ordering of apparently more to less archaic that added to interpretations of the text as teleological.
In a later Preface to the book Hobsbawm responded with some regret to critics who found its European focus a major limitation, so it is interesting to note that his early motivation had been to engage in conversation with forms of protest beyond Europe. Throughout the text he frequently touches on a topic and then notes that his expertise in that area is inadequate and needs further reflection.
The effect of US sanction of the Communist party in 1947 is almost lost to historical memory today and yet it plays a major role in both Togliatti’s PCI reformist agenda and provides the context for the Left’s longstanding success in the Terza Italia of Emilia Romagna and, along an entirely different spectrum the insurgent politics of autunno caldo of 1969–1970 [The Hot Autumn] and the general turbulence of the anni di piombo [Years of lead]throughout the sixties and seventies. (For details see Steve Wright 2002).
A similar argument is made by Wolf (1969). See Smith (2020) for a comparison of the two approaches.
The book is full of these kinds of sentiments. It is worth reflecting that it is not Hobsbawm who is famously associated with such remarks but E. P. Thompson who singles out himself in this regard: “I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger [et al.] …. from the enormous condescension of posterity…their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies; their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy..... but they lived through these times of acute social disturbance and we did not.” (1968: 13).
I discuss these two chapters only briefly. Hobsbawm subsequently substantiated this preliminary study in his Bandits (1972). As he says himself in the 1963 edition of Primitive Rebels even at that time there were much more thorough studies of mafia. Since then there have been many more.
Hobsbawm’s dating is quite specific. In two seminal chapters of Worlds of Labour (1984), he makes clear his departure from the periodization of Thompson’s Making (1968), entitling one chapter “The making of the working class 1870–1914,” and remarking, “Thompson seems to me wrong to suggest… that the labour classes of the period before, or even during, Chartism were the working class as it was developed later.” (1984: 195).
I need to stress that coverage here of anarchism in Andalusia is confined to a critical view of what Hobsbawm says. As Susana Narotzky points out, “The references to Spanish anarchism seem excessively simplified, among other things because the anarchist Confederación Nacional de Trabajadores (CNT) was a pretty “organized” union oriented not only towards radical transformation of relations of production against capitalism but also towards more prosaic everyday struggles in rural and industrial settings. On the other hand, they fought against the National-Catholic rebellion during the civil war and were even integrated in the Republican government albeit briefly” (Personal communication).
Hobsbawm himself was in Puigcerdà when anarchists were being dispatched to the Aragon Front in 1938. (Hobsbawm 1969).
Speaking to an anarchist farm worker in his late twenties five years after Primitive Rebels was published, Martinez-Alier notes that he was able speak at length about the respective merits of the Chinese and Russian views, “I asked him whether the strikes which had taken place during the cotton harvests had ever been organized… He said that they were not. This is significant because he was carried by his enthusiasm into affirming that there was a great deal of union…” Martinez-Alier 1971: 238. For the issue of unity being understood as the practice of reciprocal dialogue, see Smith, 1990; 1997.
I do not mean that we should take ‘religious belief’ out of the equation. To the contrary I think by speaking of the millenarian beliefs of the oppressed we distract ourselves from subdued but essential religious ideas, as Gramsci would be the first to note.
Löwy writes (2000: 4-5), “Thanks to the problematic of millenarianism Eric Hobsbawm’s historiography incorporates all the richness of socio-cultural subjectivity—the depth of beliefs, feelings and emotions—into his analysis of historical events, which, from this viewpoint, are no longer perceived simply as products of the’objective’ interplay of economic or political forces.” But surely we don’t need such a problematic to be attuned to ‘socio-cultural subjectivity’ in its myriad forms, nor do we need it so as to see subjectivity as slavishly tied to ‘objective’ forces.”.
“…three forms of value – the values of capital formation, the use values of people in common, and the more abstract ‘civilizational’ values of societies at large….” (Kalb 2024: 2).
Coulthard 2014: 60) quotes Vine Deloria’s God is Red: “When one group is concerned with the philosophical problem of space and the other with the philosophical problem of time, then the statements of either group do not make much sense when transferred from one context to the other without the proper consideration of what is taking place.” (1972: 63).
Refusal in the sense Hobsbawm speaks of here: “they were clearly revolutionary, their sole purpose was the establishment of fundamental subversion.” (1966: 105).
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Smith, G. Counter-politics as inspiration without organization Re-reading Eric Hobsbawm’s Primitive Rebels (1959) today. Dialect Anthropol (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-024-09721-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-024-09721-3