It is a little bright spot at the end of the penultimate, gloomiest chapter of Hobsbawm’s history of Marxism: at least the albatross of “really-existing socialism” might not hang around the neck of the latest generation to turn to Marx. “ . . .  [E]ven today only those in their thirties and above have any memory of the actual years of Cold War.” The idea that Marx was “the inspirer of terror and gulag, and communists . . . essentially defenders of, if not participants in, terror and the KGB” was no more valid than “the thesis that all Christianity must logically and necessarily lead to papal absolutism, or all Darwinism to the glorification of free capitalist competition.” Most “really-existing communists” in the West had been critics of Stalinism since 1956 (yes, says Hobsbawm, who stayed in the British Communist Party into the 1980s, even “by implication” within Moscow-line parties). But the line that socialism meant Stalin and Mao was always an effective rhetorical strategy for anticommunists, always a way to change the subject whenever socialists were in the conversation. As the Soviet Union and the Great Leap Forward recede into history, surely the shadows they cast over the very idea of a post-capitalist society will lighten.

No such luck for Hobsbawm himself. The Guardian sicced Iraq War apologist Nick Cohen onto How to Change the World, and ended up with a quarter of a review and three-quarters reheated lines like: “If Hobsbawm had followed the logic of his convictions and moved from Nazi Germany to seek a home in the Soviet Union rather than Britain, his chances of surviving would have been slim.” In a “review” in Australia’s Monthly, John Keane mentions Hobsbawm’s book three times, two of them to complain about things he did not write about, such as “Karl Marx’s outdated philosophical fixation on the conquest of nature through labour, his failure to grasp the constitutive role of language in human affairs and his bogus claim that historical materialism was a science like Darwin’s,” and “the fact that Joseph Stalin alone killed more communists that all twentieth-century dictators combined, or that whole nations were made miserable by Marxism”.

Such attacks must be exasperating for Hobsbawm. The people who will read a history of Marxism with most interest are surely people with some stake in it, his political compatriots. But, as Perry Anderson noted about Hobsbawm’s autobiography, he has since The Age of Extremes sometimes written as if explaining or apologising for his politics to an audience of establishment liberals. He takes pride in those features that appear in the press every now and again about “the return of Marx,” about how Marx predicted “globalization,” or the GFC, or the fall of communism. Indeed, the first chapter of How to Change the World is based on a speech of his own recorded in the New Statesman in 2006 under the headline “The New Globalisation Guru?” He ends the final essay (originally a 1999 lecture) saying that socialists and neoliberals alike “have an interest in returning to a major thinker whose essence is the critique of both capitalism and the economists who failed to recognise where capitalist globalisation would lead . . . ” But the latter is an ungrateful audience that sees his life’s political hopes as foolish at best, and it is a shame to genuflect to them.