Opening the issue was an expansive and historically astute essay by Eric Hobsbawm, in which the historian charts the ascendency of neoliberalism as a governing doctrine in Britain, a doctrine that had taken first Thatcher and then Tony Blair to No. 10. Forged in the crisis-ridden Seventies, neoliberalism served to insulate the workings of the market from political control. It also created new forms of individualism, which undercut the collective solidarity that has formed the basis of the old labor movement.

Yet by 1998, a year into Blair’s first term, things seemed to be changing. The late Nineties saw financial crises in the once-booming economies of East and South East Asia, while in Europe and the US, the market economy was now producing increasingly unequal societies, as manufacturing jobs were offshored and communities decimated.

The special issue’s cover gave some clue as to what the writers of Marxism Today thought of New Labour’s Thatcher tribute act. Splashed in lurid red, and set over an image of a distinctly awkward and toothy looking Blair, was a single word: “Wrong”. For Hobsbawm, seemingly the only person who couldn’t see the way the wind was blowing was the man in No. 10. “If there is any way of losing the next election,” he wrote, “it is by not recognizing that the age of neo-liberalism is over.”

We know how that went. Now, nearly three decades on, we have a prime minister who is finally saying what none have said before: that neoliberal orthodoxy has failed the country. Andy Burnham’s speech at the Labour party conference in Liverpool may have been mawkish and light on detail. But it was remarkably radical in its forthright rejection of Thatcherism, with the Prime Minister proclaiming that “Britain has been on the wrong path for a long time”, before listing a litany of neoliberal ills from privatization to austerity.

Whether Burnham will be successful in stopping the rot remains to be seen; so far, nothing that Labour has announced has signaled the level of ambition needed to fundamentally reshape Britain’s ailing and deindustrialized economy. It will take more than cheap buses and electoral reform to undo the damage of 40 years of Thatcherism. Neoliberalism, it must be remembered, entailed a radical overhaul of the state, the economy and even personal identity. To overturn it will require an equally ambitious project.

As Hobsbawm’s essay implies, neoliberalism easily outlived its obituarists. Just how did it last so long? The easy answer is that Thatcher won. Her electoral success may have been as much the product of events as it was of her skills as a politician — in 1983, for instance, she relied on the warm glow of Mark VIII torpedoes in the South Atlantic, and on a divided opposition split further by the formation of the SDP — but you can’t argue with three electoral triumphs. Besides, success, by its very nature, can force the opposition to fight on terrain of your choosing. So much so, in fact, that by the early 2000s the New Labour stalwart Peter Mandelson was moved to declare that “we are all Thatcherites now”.

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But there was something deeper at work too. As Hobsbawm himself concedes, part of the success of Thatcherism was its strain of autonomy. It answered a previously unfulfilled wish on the part of the electorate, not least a desire to see fundamental changes made to a statist system that appeared both remote and unresponsive to their needs. In this way, Thatcher was able to draw on what a number of historians have called “popular individualism”.

This new individualism emerged during the Seventies in reaction to the hierarchies and inequalities of postwar Britain, and served to challenge them in more or less political terms. That decade saw the rise of new forms of mass politics in the feminist movement; in the growth of new forms of anti-racist organizing; and in radical forms of grassroots action within the previously hierarchical trade unions. Popular individualism also took more conservative guises, not least in the emergence of new modes of consumerism — think Habitat furniture, and the craze for dinner parties and DIY home improvements — as well as in the generalized and much remarked upon decline of social and political deference.

Importantly, these were not the products of Thatcherism; if anything, she was the product of them. Yet Thatcher herself skillfully exploited these forces, promising to give people a stake in the new system she was both formed from and was, in turn, creating. Nowhere is this clearer than housing. Thatcher’s Right to Buy scheme was part of the New Right’s promise to create a “property-owning democracy”, a foil for statist postwar social democracy. In the decade from 1980 alone, some 1.3 million council houses were sold at huge discounts.

In creating a new class of property owners, Thatcher struck a new political bargain with the electorate: give up the state-backed stability of the postwar decades, and in return enjoy home ownership and asset price inflation. All the while, Thatcher told a new story about ordinary life. The council tenant became an owner, even a landlord, while workers became shareholders. Dependence was now shameful; in place of an out-of-touch state, markets, we were told, would respond to what people actually wanted. In doing so, the relationship between citizen and the state was fundamentally refigured, while new voter blocs had a material stake in the order’s success. In this way, Thatcherism created not just a political settlement, but whole new political constituencies too.

Think, here, of “Essex man”. A term coined by Simon Heffer in The Telegraph in 1990, it described a kind of voter who had become increasingly influential over the past decade. As Heffer put it, Essex man was “young, industrious, mildly brutish and culturally barren”, a nouveau riche ex-Cockney working in the get-rich-quick City and now voting Conservative. To really hammer the point home, the image accompanying Heffer’s story showed an Essex Man standing squat and square in front of his shiny motor and his newly purchased ex-council house.

Yet if Hobsbawm was premature in his diagnosis of neoliberalism’s death — its demographic roots were far too deep for any single crisis to upend — Burnham’s seems belated. Since 2008, if not earlier, it has been clear that the old Thatcherite settlement is broken. Nothing has so far replaced it. No one seems to have either the will or the vision to forge a new economic consensus.

Perhaps this is why both the Right and the Left seem so haunted by the past. Burnham’s conference speech was brimming with nostalgic references to the stability of the Fifties and Sixties, when workers could earn a decent wage, and when ordinary people could feel confident that their lives were getting better. That postwar settlement produced the NHS; strong trade unions built on the foundations of solid industrial employment; and steady, even historically unprecedented, levels of economic growth.

For the Right, on the other hand, the golden age came in the Eighties, when Britain got its act together and the country reclaimed its confidence. Forget the miners’ strike and the dole queues: this was the decade when you could make it big, when wealth was made and flaunted, when Britain and its people were liberated from the albatross of national decline. All this happened before the advent of mass immigration. For much of the Right today, it is Blairism that is the wound, with the “Blairite revolution” ushering in a new statism of quangos and red tape while the world’s poor were allowed free entry.

Of course, there is a grain of truth here. Some people really did do well in the Eighties, and Blair really did produce a complex para-state system of regulations and subsidies that the energy historian Arthur Downing has called “Zombie neoliberalism”. But there is much missing, too. If anything, Thatcher was a response to the crises of the late Seventies, which saw the start of what the economic historian Robert Brenner has called the “long downturn”. Increasing international competition had, by then, begun putting a heavy downward pressure on profits, while the financialization of the global economy saw assets sweated even as investments dwindled.

Thatcher’s sell-off of state-owned enterprises, alongside a program of austerity and a steep rise in unemployment, bought some relief from the increasingly grim economic picture. But as Harold Macmillan put it, there’s only so much family silver to be hawked before the cupboards are finally bare. Another dose of Thatcherite medicine, with a bonfire of the quangos and a new free-market push, would therefore only deepen the malaise.

Likewise, the image of the relatively stable and prosperous postwar compact may play well against our increasingly precarious present — but there is no returning to postwar years. As the chancellor John Healey remarked in his own conference speech, “without growth, there is no social democracy”, a comment more apt than perhaps Healey himself knew. The political and economic conditions that confront the Chancellor and his boss are far more constrained than those faced by any of their predecessors. Britain’s economy, as economists like Brett Christophers have shown, is increasingly a rentier economy, with essential infrastructure converted into assets optimized for stable returns with minimal capital expenditure. For their part, climate and energy-induced inflation will only make these problems more acute.

Burnham therefore faces an unenviable task. A decade of austerity has failed to kickstart growth. The country’s privatized infrastructure is decaying, while industrial policy and nationalism are returning on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet if there’s clearly a broad public appetite for the state to do something about energy prices, water, rail and rents, Burnham’s politics must be based on more than fine words alone. The vacuum created by the fracturing of the neoliberal consensus must, instead, be filled by a democratic, ambitious and municipal-minded Left.

In this, there are lessons to be learned from the Thatcherite experience: to truly secure its revolution, a renewed Left must create its own political constituencies. A good start would be to relieve some of the pressure on renters. A wave of council house building — prompting a cultural shift that sees such accommodation as more than a last resort — would not only allow hundreds of thousands of people to live more stable and comfortable lives. It would also create a coalition of voters with a material stake in the system, just as Thatcher’s owner-occupiers once did. The same might be said of quality public transport; stable and clean energy; and indeed Burnham’s much-vaunted national care service.

At any rate, the stakes could not be higher. Failure from the Left now would leave the doors open to a Right intent on dismantling the last vestiges of the state, selling it off to whichever private contractor or crypto billionaire happened to be around at the time. God knows what Marxism Today would have to say about that.

It is difficult today to think of any comparable figure, not least another historian: a scholar who, as well as producing a number of innovative essays, wrote a series of major mass-market history books alongside vast amounts of politically engaged journalism, all while communing with politicians and members of the cultural and intellectual elite. Yet Hobsbawm managed it, along the way offering a vital window onto the momentous, world-changing developments of the past two-and-a-half centuries, structuring how millions see both the past and, often, the future too.

And yet, as I discovered while reading his books again over recent months, set against the standard of contemporary historical writing they are also curious works. The historical blockbuster of the 2020s is likely to be a work of narrative writing, focusing on the texture as well as the structure of life in the past. If not the story of a single individual or of a small group, it will nonetheless be extensively peopled, peppered with quotes from diaries or journals, and all hanging on a dense web of narrative. 

Not so the Ages books. The Age of Revolution, for instance, starts not with people but with an analysis of the “agrarian problem” of the late 18th century. “From the point of view of agrarian property relations,” we read only a few pages in, “we may divide Europe — or rather the economic complex whose center lay in Western Europe — into three large segments.” And on it goes: hardly barnstorming stuff, even if it is written in Hobsbawm’s distinctively crisp and limpid prose and sprinkled throughout with wonderfully telling details (a page later we are quoted a Russian advert selling “three coachmen, well-trained and very presentable, and also two girls, aged 18 and 15, both of good appearance”).

As Emile Chabal writes in his superb new intellectual biography of Hobsbawm, “this was pedagogy of the old-school fashioned lecture hall, in which a man stands on a podium and explains what the audience should think”. Driven not by narrative or chronology, the Ages books are instead works of deep synthetic and analytical scholarship, written from an Olympian height rather than the perspective of the common man or woman. There are, of course, risks in such a style, not least a seeming lack of intellectual or epistemological humility, carrying as it does the distinct whiff of omniscience. But, Chabal notes, in the hands of a master historian like Hobsbawm, it can be intoxicating. The reader, he writes, approaches the books “searching for explanation but left in awe of [Hobsbawm’s] encyclopedic knowledge”.

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If there were a model for this sort of historical writing, it was provided by the Annales school of French historians, particularly its leading figure, Fernand Braudel. Clustered around an eponymous journal, this set of postwar historians pioneered writing over what they called the longue durée, privileging deep structures such as climate or geography, or the broader forces of economic and political change, over what they contemptuously termed “event-based history”. 

In Hobsbawm’s case, of course, there was another influence too: Marxism. A lifelong Marxist, Hobsbawm would tell an interviewer in 1985 that those like him who were influenced by Marx will always be “interested in the large-scale totalizing history”. “The basic Marxist question”, he added, is how “culture, ideology, politics and so on” fit in with the economic development of a society. What is key, in other words, is interconnection, or the question of how each of the constituent parts of history fit together into what Hobsbawm likened to a “web”, as opposed to a single unidirectional “thread”. 

If his Marxism helped give shape to his historical writing, it would also become one of the most contentious aspects of his life and work. Even those with only a passing familiarity with Hobsbawm’s work will know that he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain from his undergraduate days at Cambridge to the party’s dissolution following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Trailed through much of his life by the security services, on his death in 2012, at the age of 95, he attracted the ire of the kind of anti-communist who, like those Japanese soldiers in the jungles of South East Asia, were seemingly unaware that the Cold War was over and that their side had won. As A.N. Wilson (quite wrongly) predicted in the Daily Mail: “Hobsbawm himself will sink without a trace. His books will not be read in the future. They are little better than propaganda”. Wilson even went so far as to accuse Hobsbawm of being a possible “traitor” like his Cambridge near-contemporaries Philby and Blunt. Michael Gove, for his part, went further still. At the 2008 Conservative Party Conference Gove declared: “only when Hobsbawm weeps hot tears for a life spent serving an ideology of wickedness will he ever be worth listening to.”

Even those who came to praise him seemed uncomfortable with Hobsbawm’s politics. Tristram Hunt, while celebrating “the breadth of his work and the reach of his intellect”, could regard him only as a slightly neutered “Enlightenment giant”, while his official biographer, Richard Evans, passed over in a slightly embarrassed manner the extent and nature of Hobsbawm’s radical commitments. This is particularly apparent in Evans’s treatment of 1956, the annus horribilis for communist parties worldwide, when the dual shock of Khrushchev’s “secret speech” and the Hungarian Revolution, brutally suppressed by Soviet troops after 12 days, led to mass resignations and public recriminations. Unlike many of his contemporaries, not least his fellow historian E.P. Thompson, Hobsbawm chose to remain in the CPGB, a decision he would be repeatedly asked to account for later.

Evans, explaining Hobsbawm’s decision, emphasizes that his “loyalty was not so much to the Communist Party as to the cause of socialism in general”, a position driven by his childhood in Thirties Berlin. Which rather seems to leave the question begging. Chabal, on the other hand, tackles it head-on. For Chabal, Hobsbawm was what the French would call an “intellectual engagé”: a committed intellectual. He was, Chabal writes, “a communist, and, from the age of about fourteen, communism acted as the guiding thread for his life and work”. Unless we understand this fundamental aspect of his life, we will not be able to appreciate either Hobsbawm’s work or what endures of his contemporary appeal.

Of course, Evans wasn’t wrong in tracing Hobsbawm’s communism to his upbringing. Born in 1917 in Alexandria, then part of the British protectorate of Egypt, to a father from the East End of London and an Austrian mother, Hobsbawm’s early years were spent as a member of the secular Viennese Jewish middle class, albeit one constantly on the verge of tipping into poverty and destitution. He would later recall his sense of “embarrassment” at being given an old second-hand bike, its frame visibly bent, as a gift by his mother, as well as at his threadbare shoes which barely withstood the harsh Central European winters. Although he makes little of it, it seems clear that this sharp early awareness of material privation was pivotal in the early development of his political commitments.

After his parents died young, the 14-year-old Eric moved to Berlin to live with an aunt and uncle. As he would later stress, there were few better places to be a politicized teenager. “The months in Berlin made me a lifelong communist,” he wrote in his autobiography Interesting Times, “or at least a man whose life would lose its nature and significance without the political project to which he committed himself as a schoolboy.” Published when he was 85, the book is a curiously impersonal document, but the sections on the death throes of the Weimar Republic hum with life. It is there that we hear of his first exposure to mass communist demonstrations in the twilight of German democracy, and how Hobsbawm learned of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor as he walked his sister home from school.

Soon after, Eric was moved again, this time to the apparent calm of North London, before he went up to Cambridge, where he read history. Hobsbawm chose the subject, he says, mainly because he was good at it, though there must have been something of the young communist in the decision too. After all, the materiality of history is both the key to understanding the world — and to changing it.

Never an organizer, Hobsbawm’s political commitments remained primarily intellectual even after he joined the CPGB, brief forays into the world of political protest notwithstanding. This limitation is something he was long aware of. His teenage diaries are filled with an ecstatic, even quasi-sexual, longing to throw himself into the cause. He wanted, he wrote, to “dive” into Marxism, to “love it, both sensually and yet spiritually, like one loves a woman”, to “melt into it like a snowflake in the snow”. It is tempting to read a lot, perhaps too much, into the overwrought private scribblings of a pubescent boy. But within them is a glimpse into the Janus-faced nature of his political self. Marxism, Hobsbawm was sure, could provide him with the key to unlock the meaning and working of the world, but he was instinctively aware of the limitations of his faith in the cause. As a bookish and awkward young man, he could never live the revolution like the working-class KPD toughs he saw in Berlin.

This, too, may hint at why Hobsbawm was able to weather the turbulence of 1956 more easily than his peers. If his political engagement was lived predominantly via the mind — “we were communists in the way in which, in other places, we should have read each other poetry,” he wrote in an autobiographical story while at Cambridge — that was in marked contrast to someone like Raphael Samuel, another pioneering historian whose apprenticeship was served in the Party. In his memoir-cum-study of the culture of communism, Samuel writes of his family, steeped in the cultures of the Left. Both his mother, the composer Minna Keal, and his uncle, the historian Chimen Abramsky, were party members, as were many other members of his family, and much of his childhood was spent engaging in party activities. Samuel even became, he writes, “a kind of juvenile commissar of the family”. 

For Samuel, in other words, communism was then both a mental and a bodily form of commitment. It was the intellectual sea in which he swam, but also the lifeworld in which he was formed. So when Soviet T-54s rolled into Budapest, and the crisis came, Samuel experienced it as a profound and destabilizing break. He threw himself into the New Left, editing Universities and Left Review and later New Left Review. As the intensity of the New Left dissipated, however, Samuel found it increasingly difficult to continue as he had. Not long after, he would move to Ireland and had a nervous breakdown — the long-delayed after-effects, perhaps, of 1956. 

Yet Hobsbawm, from what we know, suffered nothing so drastic. Could this mix of commitment and detachment have served to keep him in the fold? It certainly helped that he had a hinterland beyond the expectations of the CPGB to fall back on. Cambridge opened Hobsbawm to the taste of real intellectual excitement, but it was also where, as Tony Judt later wrote, he “began his lifelong ascent into the British elite”. Judt’s comment is not without merit, even if it has the distinct tang of vinegar. For it was at Cambridge that Hobsbawm joined the elite debating society, the Apostles, whose other members included Wittgenstein, Forster, Keynes and the Cambridge spies. Later, in the Eighties, Hobsbawm would become a member of the exclusive Athenaeum Club, while in 1998 he was honored with appointment to the Order of the Companions of Honor. If, because of his communism, Hobsbawm was always something of an outsider, then he was very much an insider’s outsider.

Yet Cambridge offered more than simply a passage into the upper echelons of British society. In fact, as Chabal notes, much of the next few decades of Hobsbawm’s life can be read as an attempt to return to the intense intellectual atmosphere of the interwar Cambridge Left. We can see this, for instance, in the way he threw himself into the Communist Party Historians Group in the decade after 1946. This group, which would gather in the inauspicious surroundings of the Garibaldi restaurant in Clerkenwell, or in the Marx House nearby, would come to include some of the most celebrated British historians of the 20th century: Thompson, Samuel, Christopher Hill, and Rodney Hilton, who, alongside Hobsbawm, redefined what was until then a rather stuffy subject dominated by aloof political narratives. That all of these historians were incubated not only in the CPGB, but over meatballs and plonk at Garibaldi’s, is surely testament to the intellectual ferment of postwar British communism.

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The Historians Group would, however, be another victim of the Hungarian Revolution and its aftermath. Over the next six months, many of its most able members left the party. Yet in a strange twist, Chabal suggests that whatever the emotional effects of the dissolution of the Historians Group, in the long run it may actually have helped Hobsbawm’s career. As Chabal explains, Hobsbawm was always a “highly effective networker”; more than that, he was something far more easily recognized today than in mid-century: an “academic entrepreneur”. Possessed of a hard-nosed commercial instinct, throughout his career he had a strong sense of who his intended audience was. Not just other academics, or even communist converts, Hobsbawm wanted to write for a wide general readership. This aim was only heightened by the dissolution of his close party network.

As universities increased their intake through the Sixties and Seventies, and with a burgeoning middle class with new consumer appetites to satisfy, there arose a massively increased audience for serious works of non-fiction. Hobsbawm, with his genius for simplifying complex processes and an encyclopedic knowledge of 19th-century history, as well as his terse English prose and his keen sense of the market, was perfectly positioned. Between 1970 and 1990, Hobsbawm’s books earned around £20,000 a year on average in royalties in today’s terms. On top of that came ever-larger advances for his work and royalties on foreign editions. Not only did these years see Hobsbawm become a very well paid writer, they also allowed him to bring Marxism to the masses like never before.

There was, however, a tension between the cosmopolitan writer and the committed intellectual. Then again, his was a life of contradictions: Hobsbawm was the loyal party man who wrote sympathetically of peasant revolutionaries; the aficionado of jazz who castigated the deadening effects of mass culture; the refined intellectual who helped open up the study of working-class organization. His communism, however, was the guiding thread throughout. Yet it also poses problems for us in receiving his work today. What, for one thing, does it mean to be a writer who was publicly committed to a cause that’s now more-or-less extinct? More than that, how should we, in our hyperpolitical age, when political causes are backed and discarded at the click of a button, understand someone who dedicated their life to a political project that ended in failure — or worse?

It certainly helps that he wrote so well. Avoiding the kind of jargon that can easily overwhelm even the most lucid Marxist writing, history under Hobsbawm’s pen begins to take on a new clarity and sense of movement. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Age of Extremes, a book which in many ways was a very personal attempt to account for his faith in the cause of communism as a world-historical force. The book presents a riveting picture of the 20th-century “age of catastrophe”, framed on either side by the Great War and the fall of the Berlin Wall and punctuated in the middle by the horrors of the Forties. What adds power to this framing is the centrality of the communist experiment. The vital fact of the short 20th century was that there existed an organized alternative to capitalism, even if it wasn’t in the end a more appealing one. And the defeat of that grand experiment, in Hobsbawm’s hands, turns the story of the century into a tragedy. There is no liberal triumphalism of the kind that became so dominant in the Nineties here.

Today, as Lea Ypi writes in a searching recent essay, the status of the Soviet Union in public memory is still not settled. For those who remain committed to the political project of socialism, neither of the dominant stories we are told about the history of actually existing communism are particularly satisfying. “On the one hand,” she writes, “we have the liberal account in which communism was a totalitarian disaster from start to finish, and every emancipatory aspiration of the twentieth century was an early sign of the catastrophe to come. On the other hand we have the defensive view that state socialism was a deformation or betrayal of a model that is thought to remain philosophically intact.” We could add to that the Govian mode we saw earlier, which would force anyone who wishes to make the world anew to account for the sins of those who came before. What we need instead, Ypi insists, is a new form of narrative, one which can reopen “the past as morally contested rather than closing it off as nothing more than the slaughter bench of history”. 

One model for this can be provided, I would argue, by the work of Eric Hobsbawm. As he wrote in the famous final lines of Age of Extremes:

“We do not know where we are going. We only know that history has brought us to this point and—if readers share the argument of this book—why. However, one thing is plain. If humanity is to have a recognizable future, it cannot be by prolonging the past or the present. If we try to build the third millennium on that basis, we shall fail. And the price of failure, that is to say, the alternative to a changed society, is darkness.”

The past cannot be a dead weight around our necks. But, just as vital, it cannot be forgotten either. The darkness that Hobsbawm predicted in 1994 seems ever closer.

Yet history, for much of the contemporary Left, is merely one moral disaster after another. This is Ypi’s “slaughter bench of history”. When the Left writes history, it is often done in the denunciatory mode, as a kind of a morality play, where good guys are set against bad guys, and which is hamfistedly shaped by contemporary concerns. Or, on the other hand, it is a simplistic “red thread” kind of history: a tale of Left-wing heroes meant merely to invigorate the faithful. 

Of course, there is much value in this form of history, when it is done well. But, as Hobsbawm and Chabal both know, history can also teach us where we’re going. It can give us the tools to understand the world around us, and perhaps even to begin to change it. The retreat to the small, and the jettisoning of grand metanarratives of the kind that Hobsbawm excelled at, has reduced our understanding of who we are. As Hobsbawm wrote in the late Eighties, in a letter to a doctoral student:

“I am not particularly interested in ‘reconstructing a narrative in which gender, ‘race’, sexuality and subjectivity are central rather than adjuncts to the [grand narrative].’ …Anyway the sort of history you propose is not my kind of history, I don’t think it is Marx’[s] ‘kind’ either… In my view, the project you are engaged in is just another symptom of the retreat of [the] Left.”

We can forgive, perhaps, the cranky tone in which this letter was written, if not his often-curt dismissals of feminist history. But his diagnosis of the retreat to identity as a symptom of a historic defeat feels especially acute today. 

How, then, in the wake of the Left’s historic defeat, can one begin to rebuild a shared collective project of emancipation? History does not offer easy answers. Then again, nor does the fragmentation of the past into a series of seemingly discrete moments, not least when the public status of historical memory is more unsure than ever. As Hobsbawm noted: “the destruction of the past, or rather of the social mechanisms that link one’s contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late 20th century.” And if, as the old cliché goes, those who forget their past are doomed to repeat it, then what amounts to the wholesale destruction of the link between history and the present goes far further still. “Most young men and women at the century’s end,” Hobsbawm continued, “grow up in a sort of permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times they live in”, producing the spread of “an absolute a-social individualism”. Against this, historians must be “chroniclers, remembrancers and compilers”. To do so means being the kind of engaged historians who can make sense of the mess of the historical record. They must, in short, be like Eric Hobsbawm.

Yet, those of us who would wish to write the kind of wide-angled history that can once again ask the big questions of our past and our future cannot simply replicate the work of writers like Hobsbawm. The historical moment for that has passed. We need new histories. But the questions he asked must once more take center stage: what forces have shaped the present moment, bringing us to where we are today? And what tools can we find in them to remake the world in a fairer and just manner? In this, there is still much to learn.

To be considered national treasures, and indeed to truly capture the national imagination, children’s authors paradoxically need a loyal adult readership to supplement their youthful one. But Deary has never enjoyed the crossover audience of a Pullman or a Rowling. Nor has he advertised his politics the way his antipode, Roald Dahl, once did (“Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on [the Jews] for no reason”). Scarcely a jot is known about the anchoritic Deary. Only kids read — more accurately, worship — him. The adults they grow up to be might hazily remember the guts and gore, piss and shit — but not his worldview, internalised at an undiscerningly early age.

The Marxism of Horrible Histories, then, has flown under the radar. Deary himself is aware of this. Likening himself to a “sneaky propagandist”, lacing his tales with subversive ideas, he takes pleasure in his camouflaged transgressions: “I’m poisoning the minds of children.” His invitation is always the same: come for the ribaldry, stay for the radicalism. Beneath the comical carnage (“history with the nasty bits left in”) and Mailesque addiction to alliteration (Rotten Romans, Vile Victorians, Groovy Greeks, Vicious Vikings) are hymns to the pluckiness of the common man.

When asked by The Times to name his favourite historical figure, Deary replied “Mr and Mrs Peasant” — better than some “bloke stuck on a column in Trafalgar Square”. Accordingly, he’s rather sympathetic to the peasants who beheaded the archbishop of Canterbury in 1381: the clergy had it coming, extracting free labour and tithes from serfs. “Just to rub in the fact the Church was making a fortune, the bishops stored their ill-gotten goodies in huge tithe barns,” he writes in The Peasants’ Revolting Lives (2020). “Imagine if you were a hungry peasant walking on your way to your frozen field and having to walk past that barn stuffed with the bishop’s food,” he asks his reader. “These tithes and their monstrous barns may explain why peasants targeted the clergy when they rose.”

Deary, of course, is a republican. “Slimy Charlie thought he could rule without” Parliament, he says in The Slimy Stuarts (1996), explaining why Charles I “got the chop” in 1649. When the late “Lizzie the Last” (“because the monarchy will never survive Charles”) visited Durham, Deary turned down a meeting: “Sod the Queen.” Years later, he had this to say to the Guardian: “My top character is Margaret Wilson, a Covenanter from Scotland, who preferred to drown rather than say God save the King.” The honours system elicits a similar reaction: “Knighting people who’ve done bugger all, while carers [and] nurses get no recognition at all. It breaks my heart.” Class conflict, for Deary, was key.

Imperialism, it seems, is just as awful as the monarchy. “Brutal Britannia” was, along with Belgium, “one of the most evil empires in the world”. Barmy Britain (2008), his most impassioned book, chronicles the “dreadful deeds down under”, the decimation of the entire population of Tasmania — some 20,000 aborigines — by British guns and germs in the nineteenth century. This at a time when more Brits than not were “proud” of empire. In Deary’s account, empire was not about saving souls or preaching progress but rather “money, money, money”. The Royal Navy’s victory in the Opium Wars made “Brit drug dealers very rich … and the Chinese very dead”.

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Crucially, Deary’s history isn’t just a dreary tale of oppression. He emphasises native agency. We get a life story of, for instance, the freed slave Olaudah Equiano, whose gut-wrenching memoir — liberally quoted in Barmy Britain — went a long way in securing abolition. Kids, by contrast, are taught an altogether different story in school, one that the economic historian Eric Williams encapsulated when he wryly remarked that it is “almost as if Britain introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it”. Deary takes a dig at “batty Boswell”, who defended slavery on the ground that slaves were a “cheerful” lot that liked their station: “Of course, Mr Boswell wasn’t a slave, was he?”

Deary’s distaste for the establishment derives from his own personal history. Born in post-war Sunderland — father a butcher in a slum, mother a shop manager — Deary is from “a terribly poor background”. He recalls an unhappy childhood, being “beaten, bullied, and abused at school by the teachers, not the pupils”. His hostility to authority and formal schooling was carried into adulthood. Indeed, it can be felt throughout Horrible Histories. The series’ conceit — always — is: here’s the “real history” your teachers have kept away from you.

Deary has elaborated on the theme in interviews, describing schooling as “an ancient Greek idea that the Victorians borrowed to get kids off the street. It’s fundamentally wrong.” These days, “a bunch of clueless muppets in Whitehall are determining what children learn”. To what end? To “pass your exams so you can get a job and make money and be happy. What a lot of codswallop.” He would rather not be read than wind up on a reading list: “I shudder when I hear my books are used in those pits of misery and ignorance.”

Deary’s ideal reader, then, is a child rather like him: a sceptic tired of being hoodwinked, and talked down to, by the establishment. Both the style and substance of Horrible Histories reflect his penchant to stick it to condescending elites. “I’m not a historian…I want to change the world,” he says, echoing Marx. “Attack the elite. Overturn the hierarchy. Look at my stories and you’ll notice that the villains are always, always, those in power. The heroes are the little people. I hate the establishment. Always have, always will.”

This, needless to say, is particularly refreshing in a land whose popular historians are overwhelmingly of aristocratic stock, excepting the odd Home County and North London subaltern — public schoolboys to a man. Think Hugh Thomas, David Gilmour, and John Julius Norwich. Deary, meanwhile, was apprenticing as a butcher from the age of three, and spent his mid-twenties touring rural Wales with a theatre troupe. Acting, however, was not his calling. He settled in Suffolk, teaching drama and moonlighting as a writer. Fifty titles appeared in half as many years. Success came late.

It was only in his late-forties, in 1993, that the first Horrible Histories were published: Terrible Tudors and Awesome Egyptians. Fame and fortune followed two years later, with Blitzed Brits, timed for the 50th anniversary of VE Day. The story of blunders from on high with devastating consequences for ordinary people, children agreed, was bracing when contrasted with the blimpish jingoism of conventional histories. Its pendant, The Woeful Second World War (1999), tackled the Holocaust, substituting instruction for humour — never a key ingredient in Deary, for whom politics comes first. Indeed, quips and gags are secondary in Horrible Histories.

Beyond the pale in Thatcher’s time — a time of riots in Brixton, Section 28, and imperial adventurism in the Malvinas — Deary’s politics are not unusual, and in fact fairly palatable, nowadays. For the last 30 years have witnessed an astonishing liberalisation of social attitudes. Racism, homophobia, xenophobia, religious belief, support for the monarchy — all are on the decline. The years bookended by the publication of the first and most recent Horrible Histories have been marked by nothing less than the collapse of social conservatism. There’s a correlation here; of course, a causation mustn’t be assumed. It is, all the same, fair to suggest that, on account of his impressively robust sales and impressionably young audience, Deary has played a greater part in shaping public opinion than most public intellectuals have. Indeed, he belongs in the company of Christopher Hitchens and Anthony Giddens.

For some hundred years now, Marxist historians have preoccupied themselves with, in E.P. Thompson’s celebrated phrase, rescuing the lower orders from “the enormous condescension of posterity”. A few of them have done so with remarkable success. Eric Hobsbawm’s histories of brigands and peasants, for instance, are read in garrets and grandes maisons from São Paulo to Shanghai. Yet a truly mass following has been wanting: not a million readers scattered across capitals but tens of millions in a single country. It is the latter that counts for impact.

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Ruled for all but 31 of the last 100 years by the Tories, Britain is unquestionably a conservative country. This is reflected in historical tastes: the lower sort of biography turning on the lives and wives of great men; sporting and starlet hagiographies; an instinctive suspicion of social history. For the Left and its historians, breaking into bestseller lists has always been a Sisyphean task.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci used to carp about the “cultural hegemony” of the ruling elite, which gave it an edge in class conflict, shepherding mass aspirations through the tamer channels of politically disengaged entertainment. In his homeland, this became dispiritingly true in the age of Berlusconi, by which time the Left was vanquished and a television audience hooked on watching seemingly demure housewives take their clothes off on his networks.

Britain has been somewhat luckier. No, the Left has never enjoyed cultural hegemony in this sceptred isle, but it has one rather formidable champion of mad, bad, and dangerous Brits in Terry Deary, a Marxist culture warrior avant la lettre. Who knows, perhaps someday the English Civil Wars will more widely be known as the English Revolution.

The romantic penumbra that surrounds the dictatorship in Cuba to this day is a good example of the moral leeway still granted to projects that are nominally socialist, or which seek to transform humanity in some way. As Leszek Kołakowski put it, progressive hearts which are “bleeding to death when they hear about any, big or minor (and rightly condemnable) injustice in the US… suddenly become wise historiosophists or cool rationalists when told about worse horrors of the new alternative society”.

But the Soviet Union has been gone for almost 30 years, and today’s Cuba is mainly of kitsch value, its youthful revolutionary heroes preserved as a piece of sixties nostalgie; its diminishing achievements — education (Fidelista indoctrination) and internationalist healthcare (Cuban doctors sent overseas have been likened to indentured labour) — implausibly trotted out to justify over half a century of dictatorship.

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And so a new generation of political “seekers” have turned to China for their ideological sustenance.

Beyond the mere worship of money and power, there is not much to like about the government in Beijing. The programme of socialist modernisation launched four decades ago by Deng Xiaoping has produced an authoritarian state capitalism overseen by a dictatorship which censors the internet, bans independent trade unions and pursues an aggressively imperialist policy in the South China Sea.

What the Chinese regime shares with the Stalinist USSR is contempt for ethnic minorities and civil society. Over recent years China has arrested a million Uyghurs and Kazakhs and placed them in forced labour camps. As Nick Cohen writes for The Observer, evidence of their criminality includes “wearing a veil or headscarf” and the “avoidance of alcohol”.

The esteemed British historian Eric Hobsbawm was asked in an interview for Desert Island Discs in 1995 if communist utopia would have been worth the sacrifice of millions of lives. Yes, the historian replied. The most charitable interpretation of Hobsbawm’s remarks was that it was at least plausible in the 1930s to believe that Stalin’s USSR was the only alternative to a western capitalism which looked increasingly like the handmaiden of fascism. Of course even that is a stretch: there were plenty of individuals at the time who eschewed fascism without embracing Stalinist mass murder.

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But does anyone truly believe that contemporary China is forging an egalitarian new civilisation? Income inequality in China exceeds that of the United States. Moreover, when it is not herding Uighurs into the Gulag, the Chinese Communist Party is busy suppressing young Chinese Marxists who have noticed the gap between official rhetoric and the corrupt and unequal reality.

Yet much like during the Cold War, a roll-call of useful idiots have faithfully stepped forward from deep within the cosseted bosom of western liberal democracy to defend China from criticism. Some, undoubtedly chasing clout on social media, have decided that “Muslims are treated better in Russia/China than in the United States”. This is concerning — the “journalist” in question has sixty six thousand followers — but easy to dismiss as inane online prattle. Still, behind the hot air merchants stand “progressive” organisations that have taken the decision to align themselves with the Chinese state while one of the biggest crimes of the 21st century unfolds.

The Morning Star, long an uncritical mouthpiece for authoritarian communism, describes evidence of Chinese persecution of the Uighurs as “laughably weak”, despite mountains of material from independent human rights organisations demonstrating the veracity of the claims. (The paper has history here: The Morning Star’s predecessor The Daily Worker faithfully toed the Soviet line, defending the pact with Hitler and the murderous show trials in Eastern Europe, while of course never mentioning the millions of people being worked to death in the Gulag). It is shameful that the British Left treat The Morning Star with reverence as an alternative to the capitalist press.

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But The Morning Star is not the only culprit; new organisations are springing up to do Beijing’s dirty work. Today we have the “Progressive International”, launched in 2020 by prominent leftist luminaries including the former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, as well as Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein (among others). The Progressive International says it wants to “defeat a rising authoritarian nationalism”, yet it has aligned itself uncritically with the Qiao Collective, a vehicle for the promotion of Chinese imperialism combined with the sort of authoritarian nationalist groups that the Progressive International were ostensibly founded to oppose. The Qiao Collective brooks no criticism of the CCP and either denies the persecution of Uighur Muslims, or portrays their oppression as a function of legitimate “anti-terrorism” policy by Beijing.

Together with denial and obfuscation when it comes to the projection of Chinese power, the Qiao Collective pushes Chinese state media which depicts western nations as in the grip of strife and malfeasance. The Russian television station RT has long deployed a similar tactic. Western audiences are urged to scrutinise their own governments and to “Question More” — until RT turns its attention to Russia, when this critical approach is replaced by the party line from the Kremlin.

This glaring double standard is evident to anyone who isn’t trying to make a name for themselves as an anti-American talking head. Just as the Soviet Union accused the West of “warmongering” (sometimes justifiably, as in Vietnam) while it sent armies to Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa to prop up bloody dictators, the Chinese State and its obsequious mouthpieces extol the virtues of racial justice in the US, while incarcerating a million Muslims in concentration camps.

It is perhaps understandable, although no less egregious for it, that the Chinese state should seek to downplay its misdeeds and calumnies. Stranger is the spectacle of progressive-minded commentators credulously lining up to offer the Chinese state their support.

Depressingly, a permanent feature of politics seems to be a stubborn rump of ideologues whose criticism of their own government co-exists with a need to develop a corresponding loyalty to another unit. Orwell called this phenomenon “transferred nationalism”. For Orwell, transference has an important political function: “It makes it possible for [the transferer] to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.”

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Authoritarian, rapaciously capitalist China is merely the latest “camp” that stands ready to be embraced by those who are temperamentally inclined to transference. “We examined the source data on the claims of millions of Uyghurs in so-called concentration camps,” said Max Blumenthal, the American left-winger and son of a former aide to Bill Clinton, on RT earlier this year. “We haven’t seen the evidence for these massive claims,” he added.

Blumenthal is the founder and editor of the far-Left news site The Grayzone. In the past, The Grayzone has supported grisly dictatorships in Syria and Venezuela for no reason other than the latter’s opposition to western liberal democracy. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespeople Hua Chunying and Lijian Zhao have both approvingly tweeted a Grayzone article which sought to rubbish claims that China is persecuting its Uighur population.

The Max Blumenthals of the world may be base and cynical (Blumenthal’s politics took a 180 turn following a 2015 trip to the Kremlin), but in this postmodern age, it’s apparent that people still yearn to be part of something bigger than the self. Materialism and solipsistic self-betterment are not enough though. They have limited appeal next to the desire — felt in the days when Wells visited the USSR, and even more strongly felt today — to be part of a world historical struggle between good and evil. Whether or not this quasi-religious impulse is transposed onto an atheistic communist tyranny is largely beside the point. The search for a tyrannical fatherland, a steady ideological pole to cling onto in tumultuous times, continues unabated.

With the emergence of the contemporary pro-China useful idiot in mind, it is worth paraphrasing the dissident Russian revolutionary Victor Serge, himself a believer at one time in the big idea of communism, who noticed: “when there are no more worthwhile banners, people start to march behind worthless ones”.