Between relating anecdotes about his luncheons with Nazi turned hedge fund manager George Soros and his business relationship with the United Airlines flight magazine (all in the spirit of socialism!) Hobsbawm gives us this head scratcher when he comments on the “worker’s struggle” in England:

I think the rapidity of deindustrialisation in this country has played hell with not only the size but also, if you like, the consciousness of the working class. And there is no country now in which the pure industrial working class in itself is sufficiently strong.

What is still possible is that the working class forms, as it were, the skeleton of broader movements of social change. A good example of this, on the left, is Brazil, which has a classic case of a late-19th-century Labour party based on an alliance of trade unions, workers, the general poor, intellectuals, ideologists and varying kinds of left [wingers], which has produced a remarkable governing coalition. And you can’t say it’s an unsuccessful one after eight years of government with an outgoing president on 80% approval ratings. Today, ideologically, I feel most at home in Latin America because it remains the one part of the world where people still talk and conduct their politics in the old language, in the 19th- and 20th-century language of socialism, communism and Marxism.

So even though the workers in England have a better quality of life and are better off than they are in Latin American countries, Hobsbawm, who is living very comfortably himself, prefers the crushing poverty and political instability of Latin America. He would prefer, I take it, that the United Kingdom be ruled by a communist dictator who gives himself the power to rule by decree.

But more amusing is his determination that Brazil is a “success” and its socialist government a viable alternative to capitalism. Brazil’s central bank has just raised its interest rates to 11.25 percent and last September had enacted the irresponsible economic policy of selling treasuries to buy U.S. dollars (U.S. dollars that are worth less now than the Treasuries they sold to get them.) All this while the Brazilian military had to help police pacify Rio’s gang-infested slums in a campaign that news organizations likened to D-Day. No intelligent observer would regard Brazil as successful.

Hobsbawm is not just disdainful of the “bourgeoisie,” but of reality. More important is his disdain for his intended audience who he thinks are either too stupid or too enthralled to realize that his entire intellectual life has been dedicated to wishing upon them a system that would kill most off. Sadly, he’s right about that. The young radicals and old Marxists to whom he hawks his wares are acolytes in a cult of death, transfixed by the promise of paradise realized in the aftermath of a revolutionary Armageddon.