Intellectual life

Let us not forget that even those who had not come from Marxism, especially those too young for the 1890s, breathed an air saturated by Marxist argument.

In the West the first generation converted to Marxism, by and large those born round 1860, quite naturally combined Marx with the prevalent intellectual influences of the time. For many of them Marxism, however novel and original as a theory, belonged to the general sphere of progressive thought, albeit politically more radical, and specifically linked to the proletariat.

By contrast, in socially explosive Eastern Europe no other explanations of the nineteenth-century transformation to modernity could compete with Marxism, and its influence became correspondingly profound, even before those countries had developed a working class let alone labour movements, or bourgeois ideologies of any significance other than some local nationalisms. That is why Russia, home of a socially ill-fitting stratum, the critical ‘intelligentsia’, produced passionate readers of Capital before any other country and why, even later, Eastern Europe was to be the essential home of passionate Marxist erudition and analysis. The influence of Marx was pervasive.

Eric Hobsbawm

1917 - 2012