Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion and Jazz
By Eric Hobsbawm
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998
360 pp., $49.95 (hb)
Review by Phil Shannon
http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/16301
"Common" people, "ordinary" people, the "average" man and woman — these labels are not just neutral shorthand to describe the vast majority of the human race. They also carry within them the condescension of the elites of business, government and official culture, born of minority ruling-class power over the mass of humanity.
The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has spent his life refuting this belittlement of "common" people, rescuing them from historical oblivion and regenerating them as "major historical actors".
The latest collection of his essays brings together some of his best previously published work and continues his fine tradition of the Marxist historical essay.
Shoemakers are one of the "invisible" peoples of the late 18th and early 19th centuries revitalised by Hobsbawm.
These poor "worker-intellectuals", with their poor clientele, would often turn from "village philosopher" to "village politician". They were disproportionately represented amongst the rebels who formed the Paris Commune, who stormed the Bastille and who marched and petitioned with the Chartists.
"Cobbler, stick to your last" was then, and still is, a sneering injunction from ruler to ruled: you mere manual workers should stick to your place in society and not bother your heads with politics. As Hobsbawm shows, the very uncommon shoemakers ignored this advice, to the historical benefit of the "common" people.
Luddites have also suffered the haughty epigrams of the ruling class. The 19th century machine-breakers, like their contemporaries concerned about human well-being or the environment, are told not to ram their heads against economic inevitability, and not to oppose the march of technological progress.
As Hobsbawm shows, however, the Luddites were concerned, "not with technological progress in the abstract", but with the unemployment the new cotton-spinning machines brought with them, and their power lay in machine-wrecking.
The Luddites' resistance was rational and targeted, not pointless and blind. In many cases, they achieved the maintenance of wage rates and employment for many years — until the deployment of 12,000 troops lent a hand to "historical inevitability" for the new factory masters.
A stimulating essay on the female half of the "common" people, doubly invisible to conventional history as workers in both production and reproduction, looks at how the left sought to make women visible through artistic representation in labour movement iconography.
Hobsbawm discusses the images of women in the days of Delacroix's famous painting of "Liberty on the barricades" during the 1830 French Revolution: "Independent and sexually emancipated", active and leading the struggle, the bare-breasted fighter was "the very opposite of the public image of women in bourgeois society". She reflected the militant role that women played in revolts of that era by "the little people ... united by poverty rather than class".
With the advent of the trade union and socialist movements from the end of the 19th century, however, the iconography becomes more masculinist with its hammer-wielding proletarian titans. Women's roles diminish to those of suffering and endurance (the evils of capitalism), or fertility (the hope of socialism).
With women being less than 10% of trade unionists, and with men making up most of the artists, this development was not surprising, despite the best efforts of socialists to promote sex equality.
Hobsbawm's portraits of figures rising to prominence from the anonymity of "common" people are superb examples of Marxist biography, giving flexible and sensitive treatment to the interaction of individual and class.
The corset-maker, Tom Paine, became a revolutionary democrat and hero of the American Revolution. Nevertheless, his entrepreneurial free enterprise spirit cut short his denunciations of monarchical and aristocratic privilege at the boundaries of the rising capitalist class.
Harold Laski, a prominent English Labour Party figure in the 1930s and '40s, was a sincere radical and outspoken publicist who nevertheless "delighted in playing the political insider, influencing a marginal change here and an incremental policy development there". After Labour's election victory in 1945, Professor Laski had no more to say because his vision had reached its reformist limits.
On the ambivalent margins of the left lie the "social bandits" — the Robin Hoods and Ned Kellies and, in Sicily from 1943 to 1950, the bandit Giuliano.
A local killer with a fantasy of being the poor Sicilians' liberator, Giuliano stumbled on influence in the political vacuum after the victorious Allied armies had swept through Italy in 1943. With the return to power of capital and landowners, Giuliano had to demonstrate his usefulness to those in power, which, from 1947, meant anticommunism and attacks on Communist Party members. The mafia took him out as a loose cannon in 1950.
Ignorant of collectivist ideology and organisation, Giuliano was a lesson in how "people's bandits" can become "pawns and victims of the ruling class".
Most of Hobsbawm's essays engage the reader with fluent logic, sound research and Marxist commitment, although his more pessimistic conclusions about sex and the left (he claims there is "a persistent affinity between revolution and puritanism"), and an over-generous evaluation of the role of the French Communist Party in May 1968 (the only civilian organisation which "kept its head" during the strikes and occupations, he says) show that Hobsbawm's judgment is less assured the more contemporary the event.
On our socialist beginnings and traditions, however, there are few better historians and writers than Eric Hobsbawm.