The key thing to understand about Hobsbawm is not just that he was a Marxist, but what particular version of Marxism he prescribed to. Marxism was introduced i

The key thing to understand about Hobsbawm is not just that he was a Marxist, but what particular version of Marxism he prescribed to. Marxism was introduced in the middle of the 19th century, but toward the end of that century there were two enormous changes. The first was vanguardism. Marx thought the working class would soon spontaneously rise up and overthrow capitalism. But when that failed to happen, Lenin decided that the working class had been tricked into false consciousness, and instead they needed to be lead by a highly disciplined elite. Secondly, Marx predicted the overthrow of capitalism and its replacing with socialism would take place in the advanced industrial countries. When that failed to happen, the idea arose that it could instead take place in pre-industrial countries, something the original Marxism considered impossible. These two ideas were combined in the Russian Revolution and lead, not to the free, anarchistic socialism of Marx, but Stalin's brutal totalitarianism. And the same thing happened in every other pre-industrial country where vanguardist Marxists came to power, and also in the Eastern European industrialized countries where it was imposed from the outside. Hobsbawn, from what I understand, continued to believe til the end of his life in vanguardist, pre-industrial Marxism.