Re: [A-List] Eric Hobsbawm on the legacy of perestroika

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Douglas writes:

I'm not quite sure, Michael the point being made about Hobsbawm living
in the UK which has sanctioned the first strike of nuclear weapons.
Hobsbawm, like I would imagine all British communists of his generation
would clearly be against the first use of nuclear weapons (or indeed
any use of them)

-----

Precisely my point -- that he should refer to the threat of nuclear
annihilation in the past tense, as if we owe its passing to the collapse of
the USSR. Hobsbawm's very own government is in fact going further than was
ever contemplated during the Cold War. Is Hobsbawm only concerned about a
nuclear threat when it is directed at Cambridge, England? I don't believe
this describes his position, but it sure could be read that way and is just
one of several howling clangers that he drops in that article. As for the
lack of bloodshed, this is a technicality at best. It might be called a
"terror of omission", rather than a terror of commission, if we are to
compare the CIA-backed Suharto coup in Indonesia with the deaths resulting
from the collapse of the USSR. But, based on the WHO's own estimates of what
happened during the 1990s, a terror of omission could be regarded as much
worse given the content and duration of the ordeal experienced by its
victims. Bloodshed would have the benefit of being relatively quick and
painless.

Mark Jones wrote extensively on this subject, having been a witness to the
very worst of the "transition" that took place:

http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w39/msg00001.htm
http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/a-list/2003w38/msg00035.htm

Incidentally, when Mark wrote

In brief, I think that the history of the USSR was an event internal to
the history of world capitalism (surely that's non-controversial) and we
have to explain the dynamics of stalinism in terms of the world-system as a
dynamic totality. That at least gets us off the hook of moralising
judgments, of
the kind people love to make. And it gets us back onto the terrain of
history, and the materialist analysis of history.

...he made a point that applies particularly well to Grok's analysis of
Latin America, but that's for another thread.

Michael