Hobsbawm and the Bandits

A couple of years ago, in Rio de Janeiro, I was discussing the city’s gangster problem with a Brazilian colleague, João Moreira Salles. In trying to describe the late Marcinho VP, a charismatic, intelligent gang leader he had known well, Salles said, “Marcinho VP was a classic Hobsbawmian guerrilla.” He was referring, of course, to Eric Hobsbawm, the brilliant Marxist British historian, who died Monday at the age of ninety-five. Hobsbawm’s political affinities made him an easy target for criticism, especially after the fall of Communism, but his extraordinary quartet of books covering the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was widely acknowledged as groundbreaking, even by his ideological foes. The conservative Scottish historian Niall Ferguson was among those who praised him yesterday.

Another of Hobsbawm’s legacies was his unprecedented research into, and writings on, bandits and outlaws. In his 1969 book “Bandits,” which showcased such figures as Salvatore Giuliano, Robin Hood, and Pancho Villa, he explored how certain bandits remained criminals while others became revolutionaries.

Salles told me that, in interviews he conducted with Marcinho VP, he found a man who was a criminal but who expressed social views. He seemed to be someone who, given the circumstances, might even evolve into a political figure. He would never know what Marcinho VP might have become, however. Eventually captured and thrown in prison, he was strangled to death in 2003 by his rivals.

While I was in Rio on that trip, I met a gangster who had recently got out of prison, the same one Marcinho had been murdered in. He told me he had joined a reading group in the prison, and that they had read a biography of Che Guevara that I’d written. The gangster asked me many questions about the book, as well as about Che Guevara. I was intrigued by his intellectual curiosity, and asked him how he defined himself. The gang he was a senior member of had been started in the nineteen-seventies by political prisoners, I noted, and its first manifesto had called for various forms of social justice. He smiled and shook his head. He said, “In the old days, some of us had a social conscience. But that was then. Nowadays, we’re just criminals.”

Hobsbawm was very much on my mind after that encounter. A couple of years later, I was able to meet the grand old man myself, at his house in London, for a cup of tea, followed by a glass of whiskey. Hobsbawm was gracious, listening intently as I told my stories of the underworld of Brazil, and of other places. He was interested in Sri Lanka, a country with an old Marxist tradition in which I had recently spent time, and where a war had just ended, and also about Colombia, where a peasant-based rebel insurgency had carried—with both bandit and Marxist characteristics—for over half a century. He was discreet as to his opinions, however, as I outlined how, in most of the cases I had encountered, it was the bandit, rather than the revolutionary, that was proving to be the stronger species.

In the end, Hobsbawm was something of a romantic, and evinced an underlying faith in human nature. Perhaps, indeed, it was what lay at the roots of his Marxism. In a 1999 postscript to “Bandits,” he mentioned with some pride how, in the seventies, members of a radical Mexican peasant group had let him know they approved of his writing on social banditry. He noted, “It does not prove that the analysis put forward in this book is right. But it may give readers of the book some confidence that it is more than an exercise in antiquarianism or in academic speculation. Robin Hood, even in his most traditional forms, still means something in today’s world, to people like these Mexican peasants. There are many of them. And they should know.”

In Mexico today, the psychopathic bandit Chapo Guzmán is on top, while the philosophizing, pipe-smoking revolutionary Subcomandante Marcos has been sidelined, along with his message of social reform. In time, of course, the pendulum may swing back again. Eric Hobsbawm, rest in peace.

Photograph by Peter Marlow/Magnum.