Eric Hobsbawm: Bourgeois Intellectual

Hobsbawm’s work is popular throughout the bourgeois system because it undermines the very Marxism it claims to represent, through the careful and clever presentation of many small, but important misrepresentations of Marxist philosophy and its application. The over-all effect of this policy is a movement away from a correct Marxist analysis and toward a thoroughly (and for Hobsbawm a comfortable) bourgeois interpretation. His deliberate and illogical separation of the Russian Communist Revolution from that of the Chinese Revolution is bizarre in its certainty, and smirks of Eurocentric bias bordering on the racist. Whatever Hobsbawm motivation for this flawed analysis, it is obvious that he does not adhere to the Marxist principle of ‘internationalism’.

The Bourgeois State and Feminism

Bourgeois feminism is very different. This is the feminism of the middle class, and already socially privileged women. These women, as wives of the rich and famous, have had historically a remarkable amount of leisure time and relative freedom compared to their working class counter-parts. This apparent ‘freedom’ exists only within the framework of an unquestionable bourgeois patriarchy. It is freedom at a cost and the cost is humanity living free of oppression. Middle class women have had access to a greater array of educational facilities, be they teachers, books, or academic instruction. Middle class women fought for, and finally secured the vote because their privileged socio-economic conditions allowed them the insight to see partly beyond their own negative conditioning. Bourgeois feminism is nothing more than the exercise of political compromise as whatever concessions are granted to a middle class woman, they can not be allowed to directly challenge or alter the essential framework of the bourgeois exploitative state. Exploitation and class difference must be allowed to continue unopposed, in the old way.

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