[R-P] (De Ed George) Sobre Hobsbawm

[Nestor Gorojovsky]

Ed George, quien lee esta lista desde España, aunque lamentablemente 
no contribuye tanto como uno desearía, acaba de traducir, a mi 
pedido, un reciente intercambio sobre Eric Hobsbawm que tuvo lugar en 
otra lista de discusión.

Lo que sigue son tres correos sucesivos, en orden cronológico 
inverso:

El último es una nota [en inglés] a Eric Hobsbawm, publicada en el 
_New Statesman_, donde se revela el Hobsbawm de carne y hueso, no el 
Hobsbawm etéreo adorado por los Luis Alberto Romero y sus amigos. Se 
nos revela el viejo "antifascista de izquierdas" que siempre fue y el 
acomodaticio profesor universitario que también siempre fue, y en su 
propio relato descubrimos porqué la clerecía intelectual 
universitaria argentina, esa resaca maloliente de la Libertadora, le 
tiene tanta admiración; el penúltimo es un comentario sobre Hobsbawm 
escrito por Mark Aidan Jones, un economista inglés amigo mío, alguien 
que si supiera castellano seguramente estaría contribuyendo a R-P, un 
hombre que conoce la situación interna de Rusia como pocos en 
Occidente, y que se sigue definiendo como "stalinista" pero no por 
las brutalidades de Stalin sino porque cree  -a mi entender, 
correctamente en parte- que frente a la recolonización capitalista la 
URSS debía transformarse, de ser necesario, en un campamento militar 
colectivizado. 

Finalmente, el primer artículo es un comentario de Ed George sobre 
Hobsbawm que espero ilumine, desde el corazón mismo de la vida 
política inglesa sin la cual no se entiende al viejo cazurro de Don 
Eric, cuáles son los motivos por los cuales, más allá de los méritos 
de muchas de sus obras, este sujeto no puede despertar demasiado 
respeto entre los argentinos y en particular entre los 
"reconquistadores populares".

Que lo disfruten.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 

1. De Ed George

Hace mucho que no me gusta Eric Hobsbawm, por razones principalmente
políticas. Para mí, sus defectos como tanto historiador como analista
política se pueden atribuir en buena parte a lo que dijo en sus 
propias palabras en el artículo de la New Statesman (véase abajo): 
‘Políticamente, por haberme afiliado al Partido Comunista en 1936, 
soy de la época de la unidad antifascista y del Frente Popular’ 
[‘Politically, having joined a Communist Party in 1936, I belong to 
the era of anti-fascist unity and the Popular Front’]. Esto explica 
por qué es tan incapaz de explicar bien la aparición del mundo 
moderna, referente a tanto el surgimiento de la burguesía como clase 
como el desarrollo del imperialismo, defectos que hacen mucho daño al 
proyecto de Age of Revolution/Capital/Empire. Además, nunca he 
entendido su reputación como historiador del fenómeno de las naciones 
y el nacionalismo: aunque escribió su _Nations and Nationalism since 
1780_ --un libro espectacularmente sobreestimado-- desde una 
perspectiva abiertamente 'antinacionalista', meramente logró reflejar 
las propias mistificaciones nacionalistas que se pueden ver en el 
peor de la historiografía nacionalista. Un lector inocentemente 
confiando en la palabra de Hobsbawm se encontrará por lo menos tan 
perdido --y probablemente más perdido-- al final del libro que a su 
principio. 

Pero estas críticas son políticas (y me gustaría volver a ellas en el
futuro). Lo que realmente me molestó en al entrevista del Guardian
británico --y ya es algo personal-- fue esto:  ‘El difunto Isaac 
Deutscher, el biógrafo de Trotsky, pero en su corazón un
líder político frustrado, me dijo, cuando nos encontramos por primera 
vez en pleno apogeo de la crisis del comunismo de 1956-57: “Hagas lo 
que hagas, no abandones el Partido Comunista. Les dejé expulsarme en 
1932, y aún sigo arrepintiéndome.” A diferencia de mí, nunca se 
resignó al hecho de que su importancia se basaba en ser escritor. Al 
fin y al cabo, lo de los comunistas es cambiar el mundo, no meramente 
interpretarlo.’ [‘The late Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of 
Trotsky, but in his heart a frustrated political leader, said to me, 
when I first met him at the peak of the communist crisis of 1956-57: 
“Whatever you do, don't leave the Communist Party. I let myself be 
expelled in 1932 and have regretted it ever since.” Unlike me, he 
never reconciled himself to the truth that his political significance 
rested entirely on his being a writer. After all, it was the business 
of communists to change the world, not merely to interpret.']

¡Pobrísimo Isaac Deutscher! Y esta clase de basura de un hombre que 
se hizo un hueco bien agradable dentro de la academia anglo-europea 
como la cara respetable del comunismo; a quien no le molestaba 
suficientemente quedarse dentro de un partido al que claramente 
despreciaba para abandonarlo tras 1956 (a diferencia de los otros 
marxistas con puestos académicos como Christopher Hill, que dimitió 
del partido en 1957 y que se mantuvo mucho más fiel a sus creencias 
que Hobsbawm a las suyas, y E P Thompson --a pesar de las otras 
críticas que se podrían hacer de él-- que no sólo dimitió del partido 
sino intentó a volver a construir de nuevo alrededor de la política 
marxista); que habla del 'sacrificio' de quedarse en el partido, ya 
que se encontró aislado del circuito académico estadounidense 
lucrativo (un sacrificio -noto- ya bien rectificado)... que este 
podría denigra a Deutscher, un político exiliado, fiel a sus
principios como socialista revolucionario, por los que la academia
británica no le dejaron entrar en sus círculos, que tenía que 
escribir para ganarse la vida, pero que nunca lloraba por sus 
‘sacrificios’... bueno, esto me revolvió el estómago.

Entonces, mientras la familia Hobsbawm --según la entrevista con él 
del Guardian británico (véase abajo)-- ‘reproduce la intelectualidad 
urbana en un yermo galés’ (¡esto una ironía curiosa para uno de los 
expertos de los estudios de la historia del nacionalismo más famosos 
del mundo!) parece que se puede decir que este ‘cordón umbilical a la 
esperanza de revolución mundial casi inquebrantable’ de hecho se 
quebró hace mucho ya. 


*********

2. De Mark Aidan Jones

No digo que Hobsbawm no sea marxista sino que no es buen marxista. 
Creo --y siento parecer un poco arrogante-- que nunca entendió bien 
el marxismo. Y creo que tanto para él como para muchos otros lo que 
le impido entender el marxismo fue el estalinismo. Además --y esto 
puede que importe más-- se traicionó. Ya he explicado porque lo 
pienso: utilizó su marxismo suavizado para construirse un hueco bien 
cómodo en el mundo académico. (Un nombre que ha surgido en este 
debate es el de Kim Philby: para mí, es evidente que éste tenía el 
valor de atenerse a sus principios, y por eso puedo respetarle en una 
manera que no puedo a Hobsbawm.)

Pero creo que calificar a la gente en la manera de este debate --como
estalinista, trotskyista, incluso marxista-- al final resulta inútil
porque estos términos valen sólo para insultar. Intento a tratar de 
gente como Hobsbawm basándome en lo que hace y lo que dice. Por estos 
motivos a mí no me gusta Hobsbawm nada: y si se refiere a él mismo 
como estalinista o marxista o lo que sea para mí sinceramente no esto 
tiene nada que ver. Además, estoy de acuerdo con quienes me digan que 
hay que leer y estudiar a Stalín. Tratando del problema nacional o 
del materialismo dialéctico no se pueden ignorar ideas que han 
ejercito tanta influencia sobre tanta gente. Pero una de las ironías 
en la tradición política mía (la del llamado ‘trotskyismo’) es que 95 
por ciento de quienes se llaman actualmente ‘trotskyistas’ han 
asimilado una buena parte de las ideas y métodos de Stalín y del 
estalinismo. Para mí, esto es un problema bastante grande, algo que 
merece discusiones: pero lo que importa --y lo que yo discutiré-- no 
es la etiqueta sino los contenidos.  


****************

3. Del New Statesman

Date: Wed, 18 Sep 2002 16:39:30 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 en panix.com>
Subject: Why Hobsbawm remained a Communist
New Statesman, September 16, 2002

The day when heaven was falling; Eric Hobsbawm saw the October 
revolution  as the central reference point of the political universe. 
In this exclusive  extract from his memoirs, he explains why, even 
when the crimes of Stalin  were exposed, he could not bring himself 
to break with the Communist Party

Eric Hobsbawm

I am among the relatively few inhabitants of the world outside what 
used to  be the USSR who have actually seen Stalin in the flesh. 
Admittedly, he was  no longer alive but in a glass case in the great 
mausoleum in Moscow's Red  Square: a small man who seemed even 
smaller than he actually was (about 5ft  3ins), by contrast with the 
awe-inspiring aura of autocratic power that  surrounded him even in 
death. Unlike Lenin, who is still on view, Stalin  was displayed only 
from his death in 1953 until 1961. When I saw him in  December 1954, 
he still towered over his country and the world communist  movement. 
As yet he had no effective successor, although Nikita Khrushchev,  
who inaugurated 'destalinisation' not many months later, was already  
occupying the post of general secretary and getting ready to elbow 
his  rivals aside. However, we knew nothing of what was happening 
behind the  scenes in Moscow. 

'We' were four members of the Historians' Group of the British 
Communist  Party invited by the Soviet Academy of Sciences during the 
Christmas vacation of 1954-55: Christopher Hill, already well known 
as a historian of  the English revolution; the Byzantinist Robert 
Browning; myself; and the  freelance scholar Leslie (A L) Morton, 
whose People's History of England  enjoyed the official imprimatur of 
the Soviet authorities. Two of us knew  Russian - Hill, who had spent 
a year in the USSR in the mid-1930s and had  friends there, and the 
apparently almost accentless Browning. Nevertheless,  the USSR was 
not then a place given to informal communication with  foreigners. 
Outside buildings, our feet were barely allowed to touch the  ground.

As intellectual VIPs, we were treated to more culture than most 
visiting  foreigners, as well as to an embarrassing share of products 
and privileges  in a visibly impoverished country. We would, for 
instance, be whisked  straight off the famous Red Arrow Moscow-
Leningrad overnight train, to a  matinee children's performance of 
Swan Lake at the Kirov, where we were  installed in the director's 
box. After the performance, the prima ballerina  - - I think it was 
Alla Shelest - was brought straight from the stage, still  sweating, 
to be presented to us, four foreigners of no particular  importance 
who found themselves momentarily in the location of power.

Almost half a century later, I still feel a sense of curious shame at 
the  memory of her curtsy to us, as the children of Leningrad 
prepared to go  home and the (overwhelmingly Jewish) musicians filed 
out of the orchestra  pit. It was not a good advertisement for 
communism. But of Russia and  Russian life we saw little except the 
middle-aged women, presumably war  widows, hauling stones and 
clearing rubble from the wintry streets. 

What is more, even the intellectual's basic resource, 'looking it 
up', was  not available. There were no telephone directories, no 
maps, no public  timetables, no basic means of everyday reference. 
One was struck by the sheer impracticality of a society in which an 
almost paranoiac fear of espionage turned the information needed for 
everyday life into a state secret. In short, there was not much to be 
learned about Russia by visiting  it in 1954 that could not have been 
learned outside.

Still, there was something. There was the evident arbitrariness and 
unpredictability of its arrangements. There was the astonishing
achievement  of the Moscow metro, built in the iron era of the 1930s 
under one of the  legendary 'hard men' of Stalinism, Lazar 
Kaganovich; a dream of a future  city of palaces for a hungry and 
pauperised present, but a modern  underground which worked - and, I 
am told, still does - like clockwork.  There was the basic difference 
between the Russians who took decisions and  the ones who did not - 
as we joked among ourselves, they could be  recognised by their hair. 
The ones who took action had hair that stood up  on their heads, or 
had fallen out with the effort; the ones who didn't  could be 
recognised by the lankness above their foreheads. There was the  
extraordinary spectacle of an intellectual society barely a 
generation from  the ancient peasantry. I recall the New Year's Eve 
party at the scientists'  club in Moscow. Between the usual toasts to 
peace and friendship, someone  suggested a contest in remembering 
proverbs - not just any old saws, but  proverbs or phrases about 
sharp things, such as 'a stitch in time saves  nine' (needles) or 
'burying the hatchet'. The joint resources of Britain  were soon 
exhausted, but the Russian contestants, all of them established  
research scientists, went on confronting each other with village 
wisdom  about knives, axes, sickles and sharp or cutting implements 
until the  contest had to be stopped. That, after all, was what they 
brought with them  from the illiterate villages in which so many of 
them had been born.

Yet we met hardly anyone there like ourselves. Unlike the 'people's 
democracies' and 'really existing socialisms' of the rest of Europe, 
where  communists came from persecution to power at the end of the 
war, in the  USSR we found ourselves in a country long governed by 
the Communist Party, in which having a career implied being a member 
of that Party, or at least  conforming to its requirements and 
official statements. Probably some we  met were convinced as well as 
loyal communists, but theirs was an  inward-looking Soviet conviction 
rather than an ecumenical one. We would probably have had more in 
common with some we asked to meet but who were 'unfortunately 
prevented from coming to Moscow by problems of health', 'temporarily 
absent in Gorki' or not yet returned from the camps. But among  those 
we did meet, it was much easier to sense what the 'great patriotic  
war' meant to them, privately and emotionally, than what communism 
meant.  At all events I am certain that, standing by the Finland 
Station in the  marvellous winter light of that miraculous city I 
shall never get used to  calling St Petersburg, what we thought about 
the October revolution was not  the same as what our guides from the 
Leningrad branch of the Academy of  Sciences thought.

I returned from Moscow politically unchanged if depressed, and 
without any  desire to go there again. I did return but only 
fleetingly, in 1970 for a world historical congress, and in the last 
years of the USSR for brief tourist excursions from Helsinki, where I 
spent several summers at a UN research institute.

The trip to the USSR in 1953-54 was my first contact with the 
countries of what was later called 'really existing socialism': my 
visit to the 1947 World Youth Festival in Prague occurred before the 
Party had taken full power in the new 'people's democracies'. Indeed, 
in Czechoslovakia it had just emerged, with 40 per cent, as by far 
the largest party in a genuine multiparty general election. I made 
direct contact with the other socialist  countries only after the 
20th congress of the Soviet CP which inaugurated  the global crisis 
of the communist movement.

There are two 'ten days that shook the world' in the history of the 
revolutionary movement of the 20th century: the days of the October 
revolution, described in John Reed's book of that title, and the 20th 
congress (14-25 February 1956). I cannot think of any comparable 
events in  the history of any major ideological or political 
movement. To put it in the simplest terms, the October revolution 
created a world communist movement: the 20th congress destroyed it.

The world communist movement had been constructed, on Leninist lines, 
as a single disciplined army dedicated to the transformation of the 
world under  a centralised command situated in the only state where 
'the proletariat'  had taken power. It became a movement of global 
significance only because  it was linked to the USSR, which became 
the country that tore the guts out  of Nazi Germany and emerged from 
the war as a superpower. The victory of  the cause in other 
countries, and the liberation of the colonial and  semi-colonial 
world, depended on the USSR's support and on its sometimes  
reluctant, but real, protection. Whatever its weaknesses, its very  
existence proved that socialism was more than a dream. And the 
passionate  anti-communism of the cold war crusaders, who saw 
communists exclusively as  agents of Moscow, welded those communists 
more firmly to the USSR.

Throughout the world, communist parties absorbed or eliminated other
brands  of social revolutionaries. Though the Communist Universal 
Church gave rise  to one set after another of schismatics and 
heretics, none of the rebel  groups it shed, expelled or killed had 
ever succeeded in establishing  itself more than locally as a rival, 
until Tito did so in 1948 - but then,  unlike any of the others, he 
was already head of a revolutionary state. The  joint strength of the 
three rival Trotskyite groups in Britain, it has been  estimated, was 
fewer than 100 persons as 1956 began. Since 1933, the CP had  
virtually cornered Marxist theory, largely through the Soviets' zeal 
for  the distribution of the works of the 'classics'. It had become 
increasingly  clear that, for Marxists, 'the Party' - wherever they 
lived, and with all  their possible reservations - was the only game 
in town. The great French  classicist J P Vernant, a communist before 
the war, broke with the Party  when he defied its line by immediately 
joining the Gaullist resistance. But  he rejoined the Party after the 
war, because he remained a revolutionary.  Where else could he
go?

The late Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of Trotsky, but in his heart 
a  frustrated political leader, said to me, when I first met him at 
the peak  of the communist crisis of 1956-57: 'Whatever you do, don't 
leave the  Communist Party. I let myself be expelled in 1932 and have 
regretted it ever since.' Unlike me, he never reconciled himself to 
the truth that his political significance rested entirely on his 
being a writer. After all, it  was the business of communists to 
change the world, not merely to interpret.

Why did Khrushchev's uncompromising denunciation of Stalin destroy 
the global solidarity of communists with Moscow? After all, 
destalinisation had  been advancing steadily for more than two years, 
even though other Communist Parties resented the Soviet habit of 
suddenly, and without previous information, confronting them with the 
need to justify some unexpected reversal of policy. (In 1955, 
Khrushchev's reconciliation with Tito particularly exasperated 
comrades who, seven years earlier, had been forced to hail his 
excommunication from the True Church.) Indeed, until Khrushchev's 
speech was leaked to a wider public, the 20th congress looked
 simply like another, admittedly rather larger, step away from the 
Stalin era.

We must distinguish here between its impact on the leadership of 
Communist Parties, especially those who already governed states, and 
on the communist  rank and file. Both had accepted the mandatory 
obligations of 'democratic  centralism', which had quietly dropped 
what measure of democracy it might  originally have contained. And 
all of them, except perhaps the Chinese CP,  accepted Moscow as the 
commander of the disciplined army of world communism  in the global 
cold war. Both shared the extraordinary, genuine and unforced  
admiration for Stalin as the leader and embodiment of the cause; both 
 unquestionably felt grief and personal loss at his death in 1953.

While this was natural enough for the rank and file, for whom he was 
a  remote image of poor people's triumph and liberation - 'the fellow 
with the  big moustache' who might still come one day to get rid of 
the rich once and  for all - it was undoubtedly shared by hard-bitten 
leaders such as Palmiro  Togliatti, who knew the terrible dictator at 
close quarters, and even by  his victims. Molotov remained loyal to 
him for 33 years after his death,  though in his last paranoiac years 
Stalin had forced him to divorce his  wife, had her arrested, 
interrogated and exiled, and was plainly preparing  Molotov himself 
for a show trial. Ana Pauker, of the Comintern and Romania,  wept 
when she heard of Stalin's death, even though she had not liked him,  
had indeed been afraid of him, and was at the time being prepared to 
be  thrown to the wolves as an alleged bourgeois nationalist, an 
agent of  President Truman and Zionism. ('Don't cry,' said her 
interrogator. 'If  Stalin were still alive you'd be dead.') No wonder
that Khrushchev's  impassioned attack on his record, and on the 'cult 
of personality', sent  shock waves through the international 
communist movement.

On the other hand, much as their leaders admired Stalin and accepted 
the 'guiding role' of the Soviet Party, Communist Parties, in or out 
of power,  were neither 'monolithic', in the Stalinist phrase, nor 
simple executive  agents of Soviet policy. And since at least 1947 
they had been told by  Moscow to do things, often politically 
prejudicial, which they would never have done themselves. While 
Stalin lived, and the Moscow leadership and power remained 
'monolithic', that was the end of it. Destalinisation reopened closed 
options, especially as the men in the Kremlin patently lacked the old 
authority, and still faced strong opposition from the old Stalinists. 
Moscow was (briefly) no longer under monolithic rule. The cracks in 
the region under Soviet control could now open. Within a few months 
of the 20th congress they did so, visibly, in Poland and Hungary. 
And this in turn aggravated the crises within the non-governmental 
Communist Parties.

What disturbed the mass of their members was that the ruthless
denunciation  of Stalin's misdeeds came not from 'the bourgeois 
press', whose stories, if  read at all, could be rejected a priori as 
slanders and lies, but from  Moscow itself. It was impossible not to 
take notice of it, but also  impossible to know what loyal believers 
should make of it. Even those who  had strong suspicions, amounting 
to moral certainty, for years before  Khrushchev spoke, were shocked 
at the extent of Stalin's murders of  communists. (The Khrushchev 
report said nothing about the others.)

Nevertheless, at the start of 1956 no leadership of any non-state
Communist  Party seriously thought that destalinisation implied a
fundamental revision  of its role, objectives and history. Nor did 
the leaders expect major  troubles from their members, who had 
resisted the propaganda of the cold  warriors for ten years. Yet 
probably because of their very confidence, this  time they failed to 
carry a substantial part of the membership with them.

Why? Because we had not been told the truth about something that had 
to  affect the very nature of a communist's belief. Moreover, we 
could see that  the leaders would have preferred us not to know the 
truth - they concealed  it until Khrushchev's off-the-record speech 
had been leaked to the  non-communist press - and they manifestly 
wanted to bring any discussion  about it to a close as soon as 
possible. When the crisis broke out in  Poland and Hungary the 
leaders went on concealing what our own journalists  reported. One 
could understand why as Party organisers they might find this  
convenient, but it was neither Marxism nor genuine politics. When the 
 familiar call to unswerving loyalty failed, their immediate instinct 
was to  blame the unfortunate vacillations of those well-known 
elements of  instability and weakness, petty-bourgeois intellectuals.

When the leadership re-established itself in 1957, after fending off 
an  outburst of open opposition without precedent, the British 
Communist Party  had lost a quarter of its members, a third of the 
staff of its newspaper,  the Daily Worker, and probably the bulk of 
what remained of the generation  of communist intellectuals of the 
1930s and 1940s. It also lost several of  its leading trade 
unionists, though it rapidly regained its industrial  influence, 
which reached its peak in the 1970s and early 1980s.

It is difficult to reconstruct not only the mood but the memory of 
that  traumatic year, rising, through a succession of lesser crises, 
to the  Soviet army's reconquest of Hungary, and then stumbling and 
wrestling to an  exhausted defeat through months of doomed and 
feverish argument. Arnold  Wesker's play Chicken Soup with Barley, 
about a Jewish working-class family  struggling with its communist 
faith, gives a good idea of what has been  called 'the pain of losing 
it and the pain of clinging to it'. Even after  practically half a 
century, my throat contracts as I recall the almost  intolerable 
tensions under which we lived month after month, the unending  
moments of decision about what to say and do on which our future 
lives  seemed to depend, the friends now clinging together or facing 
one another  bitterly as adversaries, the sense of lurching, 
unwillingly but  irreversibly, down the scree towards the fatal rock 
face. And this while  all of us, except a handful of full-time Party 
workers, had to go on, as  though nothing much had happened, with 
lives and jobs outside which  temporarily seemed unwanted
distractions from the enormous thing that  dominated our days and 
nights.

1956 was a dramatic year in British politics, but in the memory of 
those  who were then communists, everything else has faded. We 
mobilised against the Eden government over the Suez crisis, but Suez 
did not keep us from sleeping. For more than a year, British 
communists lived on the edge of the  political equivalent of a 
collective nervous breakdown.

Unlike most of my friends in the Historians' Group, I remained in the 
CP. Yet my situation as a man cut loose from his political moorings 
was not substantially different from theirs, and I maintained my 
relations with them, though the Party asked me not to. The Party 
chose not to expel me, but that was its choice, not mine. Party 
membership no longer meant to me what it had since 1933. In practice, 
I recycled myself from militant to sympathiser to fellow-traveller 
or, to put it another way, from effective membership of the British 
CP to spiritual membership of the Italian CP, which fitted my ideas 
of communism rather better.

In any case, our individual political activities no longer mattered 
much. We had influence as teachers, as scholars, as political writers 
or, at best, 'public intellectuals', and for this - at least in 
Britain - our membership of party or organisation was irrelevant. If 
we had influence among the left-wing young, it was because our left-
wing past and our present Marxism or commitment to radical 
scholarship gave us what is today called 'street cred', because we 
wrote about important matters and because  they liked what we wrote.

So why did I remain in the Party, albeit as a dissident? I think two
things  explain it. First, I came into communism as a central 
European in the  collapsing Weimar Republic. And I came into it when 
being a communist meant  not simply fighting fascism but the world 
revolution. I belong to the  tail-end of the first generation of 
communists, for whom the October  revolution was the central point of 
reference in the political universe. No  intellectual brought up in 
Britain could become a communist with the same  sense as a central 
European 'in the day when heaven was falling/The hour  when earth's 
foundations fled' because, with all its problems, this was  
simply not the situation in the Britain of the 1930s. Politically, 
having joined 
a Communist Party in 1936, I belong to the era of anti-fascist unity 
and the 
Popular Front. It continues to determine my strategic thinking in 
politics to 
this day. But emotionally, as one converted as a teenager in the 
Berlin of 
1932, I belonged to a generation 
tied by an almost unbreakable umbilical cord to hope of the world 
revolution , and of its original home, the October revolution, 
however 
sceptical or critical of the USSR. For someone who joined the 
movement 
where I came from and when I did, it was quite simply more difficult 
to 
break with the Party than for those who came later and from 
elsewhere.

But the second reason was pride. Losing the handicap of Party 
membership 
would improve my career prospects, not least in the USA. It would 
have 
been  easy to slip out quietly. But I could prove myself to myself by 
succeeding  as a known communist - whatever 'success' meant - in 
spite of 
that  handicap, and in the middle of the cold war. I do not defend 
this form 
of  egoism, but neither can I deny its force. So I stayed. 

Louis Proyect www.marxmail.org


***********

Véanse también:

<http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,791516,00.html>

<http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,796531,00.html>




Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro en fibertel.com.ar

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 
"Aquel que no está orgulloso de su origen no valdrá nunca 
nada porque empieza por depreciarse a sí mismo".
Pedro Albizu Campos, compatriota puertorriqueño de todos 
los latinoamericanos.
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