Reviews

How to Change the World: Reflections on Marx and Marxism by Eric Hobsbawm

elleneam's review

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3.0

A very interesting book made up of a number of essays which is very readable.

jpowerj's review against another edition

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4.0

Loved it. This book is extremely comically "in the weeds" of the history of Marxism, to the point where I can't imagine any audience for it outside of "PhD students doing their dissertations on the history of Marxism", but for such people (*toots horn*) it's seriously a treasure trove

zohal99's review against another edition

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3.0

Some parts of this were interesting and heaps of parts were relevant to my History project, however it was SO dull!!! The guy expects you to know so many big terms and there was so much analysis my brain hurt. The good thing was that it all flowed even though sometimes he went off on a tangent.

gef's review against another edition

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4.0

Marx is back. Even finance capitalists like George Soros are re-reading him with attention, and — more tentatively, after the terrible experience of Stalinism — leftists are rediscovering him. Hobsbawm notes two main reasons: 1st, the collapse of the Soviet Union "liberated Marx from public identification with Leninism in theory and with Leninist regimes in practice," and 2d, "the globalised capitalist world that emerged in the 1990s was in crucial ways uncannily like the world anticipated by Marx in the Communist Manifesto." Hobsbawm himself has been liberated from identification with Leninist regimes (though long active in the British Communist Party, he became increasing critical of Soviet practices beginning in the 1960s).

In this collection of essays, one written as long ago as 1957 and others published here for the first time, he stresses the "enormous force" of Marx's thought "as an economic thinker, as a historical thinker and analyst, and as the recognised founding father (with Durkheim and Max Weber) of modern thinking about society." But he also points out that Marx never completed his magnum opus, Capital — volumes 2 and 3 were put together by Engels from Marx's notes after Marx's death in 1883 — and left many important issues unresolved. No theory of literature or other arts, though he and Engels were obviously interested and commented on these in their correspondence. Engels' anthropological theorizing, based mainly on the flawed research of Lewis Morgan, doesn't hold up today, though we can still learn something from the questions Engels posed if not his answers.

But the lack most seriously felt by later Marxists has been a theory of politics, despite what Hobsbawm calls (correctly, I think) many "brilliant" political insights in Marx's journalistic writings, especially "The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon" and the pieces gathered by Engels under the title "Civil War in France". How exactly were revolutionaries supposed to make the revolution? And how would the new socialist or communist society be organized? Marx and Engels chose not to say. Lenin, a great pragmatist more than a theoretician, made up theoretical positions on the fly as he tried to solve one problem after another. But according to Hobsbawm it was Antonio Gramsci who "pioneered a Marxist theory of politics." Gramsci was not only the founder of the Italian Communist Party but also a rare intellectual who knew both the rural (Sardinia) and urban industrial (Turin) proletariat. Hobsbawm's two essays on Gramsci will not only remind you of his brilliance and originality, they will no doubt make you want to reread the Prison Notebooks.

Now as then (in the 1880s or 1930s or 1960s) if we are looking for answers for our current economic crisis, we're going to have to make them up ourselves — but Marx and Engels, Gramsci and others can help us formulate the questions we should be asking. And this book by Hobsbawm should help us understand those thinkers.

milkbadger's review

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1.0

Insider baseball about who Marx's intellectual heirs were and vice versa, with relatively little exploration of Marx's actual thought. I skimmed the majority of it during a flight and left it behind at the airport terminal.

petrauusimaa's review against another edition

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4.0

I was drawn towards Eric Hobsbawm after hearing his name mentioned in several lectures that touched on nationalism and Marxism. When I saw a brand new translation of this one in library, I decided to pick this up. I was expecting to read something dry and hard to understand but I have to admit that I was completely surprised. Hobsbawm's writing is very easy to understand and he explains some more complex philosophical ideas in simple way that doesn't make you frustrated when you can't understand them. I hardly ever read nonfiction books that I am looking forward to read instead of thinking them as task but this one I wanted to pick up always when I had time to read. That is always a sign of a good nonfiction book. The first part of the book is used to explain Karl Marx's and Friedrich Engel's body of work and the second part delves into Marxism and its' influence in the political world mainly in 20th century. So in short, I was definitely surprised how understandable and easy to approach this book is and I would recommend this to anyone who wants to understand communism and Marxism more.

zoey1999's review against another edition

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3.0

Some parts of this were interesting and heaps of parts were relevant to my History project, however it was SO dull!!! The guy expects you to know so many big terms and there was so much analysis my brain hurt. The good thing was that it all flowed even though sometimes he went off on a tangent.
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