The big questions

ERIC Hobsbawm is possibly the world's most famous living historian. His series on the industrial revolution and its aftermath are widely seen as the definitive texts on the subject and, more recently, his magnum opus of 20th century history Age of Extremes has been widely revered across the political spectrum.

Now aged 92, he is still writing and lecturing, with his latest work Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism analysing the effects and prospects of free market globalisation, while comprehensively demolishing Bush and Blair's wars of aggression.

A committed anti-imperialist, his recent lectures to Western audiences have largely focused on the lunacy and arrogance of supporting mass slaughter in the name of humanitarian intervention.

I caught up with him at the Bath literary festival.

You have said that the capitalist world economy has been in a state of crisis since 1997-8. How do you see the current economic crisis unfolding and what are the likely results of this? Do you see any parallels with earlier economic downturns in, for example, the 1930s or 1970s?

"The capitalists themselves now say that the present economic crisis is the most serious since the war, since the 1930s.

"In one form or another, it will probably affect Britain, since this country has followed the US more closely than any other, adopting the economic policy which has led to the present problems, namely the deregulated globalised free market.

"We have even liquidated our manufacturing industries to a far greater extent than Germany, France or Switzerland. It will be a crisis of Western capitalism, but not a global one.

"Even so, it will not be like the Great Depression of the 1930s, if only because, except in the financial sector, the US-centred world economy is no longer the only capitalist global economy. While the US is in serious recession, south and east Asia are rising, the European Union is holding up well and the producers of primary products and energy, such as Russia and Brazil, are benefiting by prices for their exports which will probably continue to be much higher than in the past.

"This acts as a counterweight to a world crisis. Again, though jobs will go, especially in the bloated financial sectors, in the vulnerable capitalist states such as the US and Britain, deindustrialisation has gone so far that even a slump can no longer produce the sudden mass unemployment of the 1930s.

"The major effect of a slump will probably be felt as mass pressure on a standard of living, which is no longer cushioned by easy credit and the anticipated rise in the value of people's assets - houses for most of us, pension funds and private provisions for old age and sickness. Incomes will fall or be kept down, lagging behind inflation and they will be hit, as they already are, by a vast rise in the costs of credit, of energy, of basic consumer goods and leisure.

"Public cost-cutting will mean that what remains of the welfare state will suffer severely.

"The major parallel I see with the 1930s is that the present crisis also looks like bringing about an end to the belief in the uncontrolled free market. Instead, a turn to a much more regulated capitalism, in which the state and other public entities will play a much greater part than they have since Thatcher, may occur."

Has the US ability to intervene around the world been damaged by the Iraq catastrophe? If so, how has this altered the prospects for social change in places traditionally the victim of US aggression, such as Latin America?

"The military ability of the US to intervene anywhere in the world has not been damaged by the Iraq war. If anything, it is probably getting more formidable as an engine for high-tech destruction than it was.

"This military preponderance is today the main, one might even say the only, asset that it has left as a superpower.

"It was designed to fight a world war against the USSR, but it was useless then, because such a war would have amounted to mutual suicide.

"Iraq and Afghanistan have shown that it is irrelevant to the task that George W Bush has set himself, namely establishing a world of satellite states under the control of US hegemonic power.

"To this extent, US power has been severely damaged. It can still destroy us all, but it cannot make the world go its way any more. This does not mean that the US ceases to be a superpower."

You have said in your latest book that you see no rationale behind Bush's policy and point out that this policy is opposed by the dominant figures behind US cold war realpolitik, such as Kissinger and Brzezinski. Does this suggest that there is now a split in the US ruling class?

If so, how significant do you believe this split to be? Is it one merely over strategy and tactics, or does it represent more fundamental differences between the interests of US capitalism in general, whose interests are best served by global stability and the interests of that fraction of capital dominating the Bush administration - namely the oil and weapons industries - which profits mainly from instability?

"The reason why I say I can see no rationale for the Bush policy since September 11 2001 is that it represents neither the best interests of US capitalism nor of US imperial policy. I am not sure that it even represents the best interests of the US oil industry, which has global interests beyond the Middle East.

"It undoubtedly represents the interests of the military-industrial complex perfectly, but, while that has enormous weight in domestic US politics, through distributing its contracts by political advantage, its actual share of the total US economy is limited.

"As for US global imperial hegemony, it was based on a highly successful pattern and techniques honed during the cold war, which there was no reason to abandon. No doubt a Democratic president will return to them - even Obama.

"Of course, globalisation, the international weakening and relative decline of the US economy, as well as the disasters of the Bush years, will make it impossible to recover the international position of 1990, but the US will remain the major national capitalist economy and one of the giants of the globe by its sheer size and resources.

"This decline and especially deindustrialisation since the 1970s, has indeed created profound divisions in the US, but it is too simple to reduce them to the economic divergences between different groups of the ruling class."

You say in your book that you have learned that there are very few short cuts in history. Have your views on political change and how it comes about altered significantly over the years?

"Revolutions or analogous relatively sudden historical breaks indicate the breakdown of an old political and social system, quite often, but not necessarily, in the context of an international situation such as war.

"In the past five centuries, they have occurred in the history of almost all countries in Europe - I can think of no exception other than Sweden.

"In the 20th century, there are plenty of examples in the other continents and there is no reason to suppose that this pattern of historical change is at an end.

"They open the way for the emergence of new social systems, but they do not themselves create them, unless the conditions for these changes are already present. Where they are not, revolutionaries will fail in their aim, even though their revolutions may have great achievements to their credit.

"This was the problem of the Russian revolution. My own views have altered in as much as I once believed that a real socialist society could be constructed in the Soviet Union, but no longer believe that it could have been.

"I also came to the conclusion that the costs of trying to force historical short cuts - and I don't mean just by revolutions - may be and have often been, enormous, terrible and out of proportion to the hoped-for benefits."

How do you view the prospects for the revival of socialist movements in the 21st century and what do you see as the conditions for such a revival, both in the West and in the Third World?

"I don't see much prospect of a revival of the classical socialist and communist movements of the 20th century.

In the West, their basic constituency, the industrial working class, which they saw as the main agent of social change, could no longer play this role even if labour movements wanted to.

"Their basic form of political action and mobilisation, the mass-membership party of the social-democratic type and the vanguard party of the Leninist type, have not survived the old century.

"What survives of such movements in the West must work as part of new, wider political and social movements and find new forms of action, notably transnational ones.

"Some such movements are coming into being, generally as a succession of ad hoc campaigns, but, as yet, they show no signs of being capable of changing society.

"At the same time, the idea of socialism as a 100 per cent publicly planned collective economy has not survived the end of 'really existing socialism' and will not return.

"Twenty-first-century socialism will be an economy combining the public and private, non-market and market elements, but one whose object is not maximising economic growth and profit but the survival of the planet and the reconstruction of a human society battered and increasingly disintegrating under the impact of the past half-century of capitalist development. How this is to be achieved is the big question for this century's socialists."

Globalisation, Democracy and Terrorism by Eric Hobsbawm is published by Abacus Books, priced £8.99.