From Folk to Jazz: Eric Hobsbawm, British Communism and Cultural Studies

Abstract

Eric Hobsbawm's book The Jazz Scene (1959) is rarely mentioned by scholars in cultural studies and related disciplines. This article argues that the book has been neglected for too long, not least because it played an important transitional role in the development of British Marxist writing on popular culture. It can essentially be seen as a critical response to the cultural politics of the British Communist Party in the late 1940s and 1950s. In seeking to prove that jazz was a form to which serious people ought to pay attention, Hobsbawm drew freely but largely implicitly on the ideas of the numerous British communists who had (1) provided the so-called Second Folk Revival with its founding principles, and (2) resisted the post-war influence of American popular culture. Hobsbawm's attitude to the work of his communist contemporaries was a strikingly ambiguous one. Aware that the Communist Party's cultural line was at once illiberal and unrealistic, he nevertheless tried to build on some of its main principles while calling others into question. The result was a book that refused to break entirely with communist orthodoxy but which also foreshadowed some of the main theoretical insights developed by later Marxist writers in cultural studies. Section One of the article examines the main ideas about popular culture to which British communists subscribed in the 1940s and 1950s. Section two identifies the theoretical principles on which The Jazz Scene was based. Section Three speculates briefly about Hobsbawm's influence on cultural studies in the 1960s and after.