Could it have happened differently? This is a question of counterfactual history. Supposing the political system had broken down with WWI and revolution had occurred in Germany, which is a contingency on which Lenin and the revolution gambled, then it is conceivable that a form of socialism would have triumphed in a large part of Europe and probably with better chances. Since I argue that one of the major difficulties of communism was that it arose in a country in which conditions for the development of socialism or communism was simply not present. Had it merely provided the spark for a wider revolution, it might not have ended in failure. But I believe that it is rather unlikely that the revolution in the west could have succeeded. I think the German Soviet Revolution wasn't likely to take place, and this became clear very soon. So to that extent I think the chances of communism replacing capitalism were quite small. I think they were even smaller after WWII, for reasons of international diplomacy as well as because of the sheer weakness of the Soviet Union. That would be a quick answer to your question.

From this remark some logical questions arise. Let me point to two related questions here: 1)The first is, If the end of the Short Twentieth Century marked the failure of past generations to achieve a much better life, then what makes you think that the efforts of a later generation, in the next millennium, would not follow the same trajectory?

Again, I don't actually argue that life hasn't become better. I mean, it demonstrably has for most people. The paradox of the situation, the reason why it is the age of extremes, is that the improvement, the progress,-- and the case for material progress is far stronger in the twentieth 20th Century, than in the nineteenth --, is combined with extraordinary catastrophes, tragedies, tensions, massacres. But if you actually look at it, we all live better, we are probably better off, we are more skilled, we are more -- in our life times have become better, we have achieved more than our parents and our grandparents, mostly. So, that's what I would say. I don't believe that material progress is likely to change even though I think it may be, in view of the environmental problems with the speed of economic and technological progresses has raised, it may have to be governed down to a more sustainable level, and I believe to the extent this is so, the ideal which most people in the West have assumed may be a constant unburdened improvement in the period standard of living, is not likely to be maintained. Stability and the high standard of living may well be attacked. Nevertheless, I wasn't talking about material terms. In other respects, of course, socially, in terms of values of civilization and culture, the outlook is by no means so good. I wouldn't wish to predict because to some extent, of course, for someone of my age, the outlook looks substantially gloomier simply because we have lived through, my generation has lived its life as one the luckiest generations in the west, in western history. Things have got better for us for 25, 30, 40 years without us having to do much about it, whereas our children have visibly a far more difficult situation to cope with: Insecurity, uncertainty, as in the United States, relative stagnation of even real incomes, all of these matters. So, clearly looking from the older to the younger, it seems to us that the outlook for the next generation is not as good as it was for ours. But that may be merely a biographical view taken.

Again, as far as welfare is concerned, the problem which faces us is that of temporarily at least, a transformation or rather decline of the major mechanism of the distribution, socially redistribution, namely the national state. I don't say that the problem is entirely that, but you cannot simply say under these circumstances that the old acquisitions of both ideas and policies can automatically provide for the transition. One hope so, but the problem is that of discovering ways of organizing, of formulating them in a situation which is to some extent new and for which actually neither an adequate social analysis as yet exists. Nor in fact even a descriptive analysis.

Eric Hobsbawm: That's a big question. What I mean by being a paleo-Marxist is that I'm a Marxist who grew up as Marxist in what you might call the tradition which leads from Kautsky or Engels via Kautsky, to the Soviet Marxism of the 1930s. That is to say, Marxism is essentially, I won't say economic determinism, but it has its elements there, but nevertheless which was firmly anchored to the idea of base and superstructure, an economic and social base. And secondly which was a Marxism which believed, that Marxism could be an interpretation of the entire universe, not simply as a politics or of human society. In a sense I was brought up in this combination of historical and dialectical materialism. Now, this isn't altogether easy to escape from, though clearly I try to adjust to subsequent developments or use subsequent discoveries.

Remember, when I grew up in Marxism, even the early Marx -- the Lukacs, early 1840's Paris Manuscript, Marxism -- was not yet discovered or common. I first really got on to that just in 19 .., I think I discovered one of the books by Henri Lefebvre in England during the War, around 1940 in a second hand bookshop and took to it and was really excited by it. But still in a sense this was an additional layer to a Marxism which had already been formed early on. That's what I mean. So, that's the foundation of my Marxism. Now that doesn't mean that I have been stuck, as it were, in the simple Marxism of whatever it is, of the Engels "Socialism, Utopian and Scientific", although I still have sympathy with this.

So, then, now, what about the subsequent developments? I think I have tried, obviously both to integrate some of these and especially the kind of Lukacs, the Hegelian type of Marxism. I tried also of course to develop, I imagine, in my own way irrespective of what is in the text. I think that much of what I have tried to do is remote from the old orthodoxy: may I remind you that my Marxism was so remote from this orthodoxy, that none of my books were ever translated into Russian in the days of the Soviets, so you think this indicates that I am not entirely a paleo-Marxist.

As for the development in the younger New Left, to some extent, I had sympathy, but only limited sympathy. For instance, while I enormously appreciated the kind of culturalist turn which the New Left following as they thought, E.P. Thompson gave to it, I think that they probably exaggerated a bit. I think the insistence on the force of agency and of consciousness is something, at least for me, as a separate factor, seems to be exaggerated. The idea of politics by consciousness raising, I could never actually buy it much. From the late 60s I found a good deal that I welcomed enormously -- the revival and spread of Marxism, but nevertheless what strike me that it was largely an academic Marxism. A sort of bastard Marxism trying to combine Marxism with whatever happened to be the currently fashionable theories -- structuralism, being one them. Not that we can not rephrase Marxism in structuralist terms. That would be easy and true, but whether that is its essence of it, I do not know.

I also found that in some instances these people simply did not belong to the tradition of the old and learned Marxists. Althusser, for instance was a man whom almost all older Marxists, as well as some of the New Left, found unacceptable, even though at certain stages he was enormously influential in the New Marxist Left. Althusser didn't know what Marx was about, in my view. He didn't actually know very much Marx himself. So, in fact, some of the New Left Marxism, I didn't recognize. Still, there isn't such a thing as a single, true form of Marxism, so everybody can take Marx as a starting point and go in whatever direction they wish, even though I think some of these directions are misplaced.

As for the historiography, it's difficult to tell. I mean, clearly some of the historiography has been -- some of the New Left historiography -- has been extremely fine. On the other hand, more recently there has been a lot of it that seems to me to be a relapse into essentially populist historiography seeking not so much of analysis, but empathy and propagandist points. I sympathize with them, but I am afraid that it is not what all Marxist history is made of. L r Grande: Speaking of the currently fashionable, It is presently the trend in academic circles to de-evaluate and discredit meta-narratives. In increasing numbers, prominent academics on both sides of the Atlantic claim that it is foolish, indeed impossible, to write a history that attempts to account for everything. The Age of Extremes, however is unapologetically meta-narrative in its scope. What do you say to your colleagues in defense of your approach?

Still, one has got to try and fit in one's specialization into this global question. And I have done so. I have concentrated, if you like, on the rise, and transformations of capitalism but without ever forgetting the main theme. The other thing which has interested me, in fact is probably the first historical problem that I ever, even when I was at school, before I became an historian, found important- and Marxism is the only way of doing it,- is to see how things hang together. In other words the great advantage of the base and superstructure model is precisely that it explains to you how everything from human social relations, technology, culture, institutions, laws, philosophy, everything in a particular period is in some sense linked. It is linked, which I believe it to be. And consequently, this is what I have been trying to do. And how successful it is, is a different matter. But that is what I have been trying to do, particularly in these four volumes, to try to show how it is possible to do it. For instance, I have tried very hard to put in chapters on culture or science to see how these things could not but take the form they did even though they have their autonomous development, except in terms of the period in which -- the social period, the historical period -- in which they operated. I still believe that this is an essential task of history, though naturally it's not the only task.

The history of society seen in the broadest sense, is history which includes the intellectual, ideological, political, as well as the social and economic -- this is what we are at. There are however, it seems to me, a number of modifications. Firstly, it seems clear to me that the traditional Marxist view of base and superstructure needs substantial modification. Partly, I mean in the light of the terms of anthropology which clearly demonstrates that the same societies with substantially the same economic-technological base can be organized in very different ways. I take this point both from anthropologists and in fact there are also Marxists who have taken it for instance Eric Wolf in his completely brilliant book Europe And Peoples Without History. So I think in a sense I would rephrase it to say that the economic-technological base provides to some extent the framework, the limitations, within which culturally a variety of different forms of organization can develop. Nevertheless, it provides limitations, there are some things it can't do. That is one thing. The second major modification is one to which I have come to most recently, again in the light of the work of people of who I think see themselves as people of the left, of the Marxist movement, namely paleontologists, and evolutionary scientists like Stephen Jay Gould, and also new theorists of chaos theory which demonstrates that purely determinist causal explanation is not only possible, but to some extent necessary, but only, as it were a posteriori. You can show why a certain thing as it were developed to this point, by necessary steps, but this does not necessarily allow you to predict the way in which, in the old fashioned 19th century way, we thought we could prolong the process of causal connections from past to present to future. It is still possible to do so to some extent, but to a lesser extent, and to this extent the scope of contingency is larger. One of my characteristics as a paleo-Marxist is that I still don't like this. I would prefer to see a situation in analyzing in which you can eliminate as much as possible of these unpredictable contingencies. And I believe it is possible to say that these can to some extent be: Nevertheless in principle I think that one has to abandon the old fashioned belief that history can as it were be extrapolated into the future in the way in which most of us believed.

So, whether the absence of democracy has much to do with it is ... I'm not happy with the discussions of democracy. We know in a sense that as Marxist people on the left, we are for governments, as it were, of the people, for the people, by the people, but what exactly democracy means under these circumstances is not so clear. It is perfectly clear that under certain circumstances there is no democracy at all such as for instance under Stalinism. I don't necessarily believe that democracy is a condition of economic development. Either for capitalism or for socialism. It would be desirable to combine the two, but whether it can be so combined is a concrete question. Certainly in some instances it hasn't been so combined. I don't think it is really relevant to the question of why socialism failed in some of these third world countries. I think here are cultural differences, there are historical differences and above all they are countries which are backward. In fact, it is not simply due to the exploitation of the Third World by the First World that it is harder to establish a modern economy in Chad than it is in Hong Kong. There are historic factors which simply have to be taken account of, which must not be confused with any so to speak racialist or other judgments. The fact is that there are differences. Incidentally as I pointed out in my book, Lenin himself did not hesitate to say that some countries were backward and including his own. '

As for my political work, I mean, I haven't really had much political work, directly political work, for a very long time. I used to be many years ago, until the collapse of so to speak the true faith of communism in 1956-- I used to be a loyal, totally devoted communist party member, doing all the things that communists did devoting their life essentially to this cause. After that I clearly didn't do more than the minimum amount of everybody on the left and I suppose that at certain later stages I got involved at least in my own country in political work, for instance I was involved in the debates about the future of the labor party in the early 1980's, but essentially, I didn't do very much direct political activities. Indeed I never did very much. I was a student activist and small young professor activist, it doesn't give you much chance. Indeed I would have thought that my major political activity as it has turns out, has been my writing books and articles and teaching. So to that extent there isn't a contradiction. If the people who read these books come to different conclusion, as long as they are on the left I welcome them. Some of them do. some of them don't some of them change their minds. But that is essentially, I suppose, politically speaking, has been my major impact.

As for Perry Anderson, I have an enormous respect for Perry Anderson. I believe he is the ablest of the generation of Anglo-Saxon Marxists after my own. You know the first of the New Left. He is a very able person. I am inclined to think, that there is a difference between my own kind of old fashioned Marxism and his continental Marxism, even though curiously enough, he himself has come to conclude that what he calls Western Marxism, which is very largely intellectual Marxism of the post-Stalinist period is not sufficient. I disagree with him on a number things. I disagree with him certainly on Gramsci. I disagree with him on his interpretation of English history and the development of working class society where I believe that Edward Thompson got the best in the debate with Tom Nairn and Anderson. I believe the idea that somehow or other that the development British bourgeois society was cut short by some kind of compromise with feudalism is misconceived. I don't think I want to say more. But once again I think that his major work that he tells me he is still continuing with The Lineages of the Absolutist State, I look forward with great excitement to see the third volume when it comes. I also enormously appreciate his critique, that is what he is been doing lately as it were, of ideologist and thinkers, not necessarily of the left but of all kinds of current ones.

I think it's quite clear that Lenin developed his theory because he was largely thinking of the Poles and Finns. At that time that to overthrow Czarism you had to link up with other anti-Czarist forces, of which the national forces in one or two places were the obvious ones. It is possible that the contribution of this to the establishing of firm Soviet Union was important,-significant, I don't know enough about it to be able to judge. I mean I am struck by the fact that in a lot of the Asian parts of the Soviet Union in some ways the formula on which Soviet power was established was not so much to fit in with local national movements but to fit in with the local traditional social structures. This is, I think, one reason why in the first place, the Central Asian Republics remained-- there was no sign of break away movements from the Soviet Union--and also why to some extent they were, shall we say, they had their own problems and for instance people would tie up, to the Soviet power would tie up with prominent clans or prominent things as against others. So in a sense it was a more complicated business than simply saying that Soviet nationality policy was correct and therefore they were able to do this. But I really would not want to make a judgment about it because I'm not expert in this field and could not be an expert in the field. What I do believe however is that the policy of the self-determination of nations as formulated by Wilson and indeed Lenin, in the rest of Europe was a disastrous policy and I think longer on became a disastrous policy even in the Soviet Union. The idea of giving the Soviet republics the right to secession--this is exactly what for instance the USA refused to do--the USA fought the Civil War precisely to avoid the right of self- determination of the American states. So, I don't think we could automatically assume as so many people on the liberal, socialist and even communist left have done that the right of self- determination is for ethnically or linguistically defined territories is something that under all circumstances must be accepted. The results in Central and Eastern Europe have not been good.

I certainly believe that what characterizes the USA is an extraordinary individualism, the basic competitive individualism ..., I mean this is the only country which is based on essentially an ideology of capitalism without any pre-capitalist--or very little in the way of pre-capitalist assumptions. And the idea for instance that it is the ideology is essentially one of bourgeois anarchism--you can see this present in the Republicans who merely extend or extrapolate from a very common American assumption namely that all government is bad. Now if you wish to compare--this is a thing that neither Marxists or non-Marxists have done systematically--the development of Canada and the development of the USA, Canada is much easier to understand for Europeans because the state is important. The opening of Canada, Canadian West, is the establishment of state power and law over a large area. The relationship between the Canadian government and the Indians is different from the relationship of the American government and Indians. So, if one has to choose between the two, America is more exciting and obviously has gotten much further but nevertheless in a sense those of us who come from a European background find ourselves in more emotional intuitive sympathy with the Canadian side. So this may show in the book but I mean I'm not defending it. But I'm making some concession.

As for fascism in the United States, for the reasons which I try and explain in the book, I believe that reactionary movements, movements of equivalent and racist movement, all they are very strong but they don't, I think, or didn't, belong to the fascist tradition as in Europe. Paradoxically it seems to me, posthumously, there's more sign of it. The fact that the ultra- right today or an important section of the ultra-right harks back to the symbols and even the ideological inspiration of European fascism, particularly Nazism, seems to me to be interesting. I mean the people who put explosives under the railway lines and declare themselves to be sons of the Gestapo, I don't think it means they have the slightest understanding of fascism but that they choose this particular part of the past as the one to which they appeal is not insignificant.

So, to this extent I would have thought in my particular generation, somebody like myself probably had a better chance. And you can't say that life hasn't been interesting especially for those of us like myself who have had a relatively quiet life in a stormy century. Obviously the people who have actually passed through the storms may judge it differently. But some of us have managed to live through this without actually having the enormous sufferings or passing through these tremendous personal sufferings and social catastrophes that so many people in this century have passed through.

I can't help feeling that there may be some ideas of what is an acceptable or good or just life or perhaps putting it the other way around what is an unjust and an unacceptable life and I would like if I still have the time to carry on and working and discovering as you would, for instance, by the study of things like customary laws, customary you know village--there is a lot of medieval stuff about what are the ways in which common people thought of the ways in which social relations and human relations should be--could be--organized. That's I think what if I have a lot of energy and time I'd like to keep on working, but I dare say I would be doing one or two other more short term projects.