Bandits
By Eric Hobsbawm
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000
226 pages, $40 (hb)
BY PHIL SHANNON
Thirteenth-century peasants are rarely the objects of Hollywood's attention. The notable exception, of course, is Robin Hood. The celluloid homage paid to Robin is a testament to the age-old popularity of the "noble robber" who robs from the rich to give to the poor.
As Eric Hobsbawm argues in the revised fourth edition of his 1969 classic, Bandits, the Robin Hood "social bandit" reflects the "universal longing for freedom, heroism and the dream of justice" amongst the poor and symbolises their yearning for bold champions of the "weak, oppressed and cheated".
Joining Robin Hood in the popular halls of fame for their attacks on wealth, injustice and authority are bandits and outlaws such as Pancho Villa, Ned Kelly, and Frank and Jesse James. Their reputations may depend on a fair helping of embellished myth and selective idealisation but the actual deeds of such "ideological gunfighters" are less important to their poor admirers than the psychological hit they provide when they tackle the enemies of the poor.
The heyday of social banditry was in pre-capitalist rural societies, in which peasants who resisted obedience to class power and turned to banditry broke from the usual mould of stolid peasant passivity. They became more than just a policing problem for the ruling class if, unlike simple criminals who targeted the poor as much as the rich, their deeds (robbing the rich, righting wrongs, avenging injustice) generated popularity, especially if they began to exercise a class-based counter-power and therefore became potential rebels (like Robin Hood), or even leaders of liberation (like Pancho Villa, the Mexican bandit turned revolutionary general).
Bandit-revolutionaries were only possible, however, in conditions of mass peasant mobilisation. Social bandits were generally symptoms, not leaders, of peasant discontent. Their prominence was the flip-side of the usual political state of peasant powerlessness. Social bandits had no political program, such as agrarian reform. Their modest social objectives aimed at individual alleviation — a farm saved, a local tyrant killed, an imprisoned man set free — not class liberation.
Jesse James is said, improbably, to have loaned $800 to a widow to pay the bank debt on her farm, and afterwards robbed the bank. Billy the Kid was known to give money from his robberies to poor Mexicans. Pancho Villa redistributed wealth though "individual beneficence or indiscriminate largesse". Without a revolutionary shift in class power, however, such redistribution of wealth could only ever be symbolic.
Social bandits' tenuous relationship to the class struggles of the poor was also seen in their erratic class loyalties. Property-owners have always aimed to turn poachers into gamekeepers, and landowners sought, with frequent success, to buy off bandits. The Cossacks ("free peasant raiders") of the lower Volga were given land and privileges by landlords or the Tsar in exchange for providing armed protection. Bandits were always prone to slipping into the criminal underworld, preying on the poor as much as championing them. In some cases, like the Mafiosi in Sicily and the Italian immigrant ghettos of the US, they could become a (shady) part of the bourgeoisie.
Bandits were unreliable class allies of the poor. Despite occasional fruitful alliances, revolutionaries distrusted bandits even though they shared a common enemy. In its early days, the bulk of Mao's Red Army consisted of declassed elements, in his words "soldiers, bandits, robbers, beggars and prostitutes". Bandits could work with the prevailing power as easily as reject it, if the price was right. They were not fitted for the democratic discipline of revolutionary organisations. The contribution of social bandits to modern revolutions has been "ambiguous, doubtful and short".
Revolutionaries could, however, adopt bandit methods when necessary. The Bolsheviks, when outlawed and persecuted, could not openly fund all their political activities through legitimate means. Their famous expropriation squads, which robbed banks to finance Bolshevik newspapers and party work, have provided anti-Bolsheviks of both right and left with a stick to beat Lenin with.
This is unfair, says Hobsbawm. Lenin was careful to fence off with strict rules the party's expropriations from the common criminals' bank robberies. Bolshevik expropriations were not true banditry because of their political framework, although they could attract a certain type of revolutionary, tough with a gun in hand and with a lot of presence of mind, who, like Stalin, found that the easy path of criminality could became a way of political life.
The ambiguous revolutionary credentials of social bandits was also displayed in the role of women and banditry. Reflecting the sexism of peasant society, women are rarely found amongst active bandits. They were more likely to be cast in the role of lover (of a male bandit), not fighter. If part of a bandit gang, they performed the domestic tasks traditionally assigned to women. There have been significant exceptions, most recently (as Hobsbawm rather inexplicably fails to mention) that of India's "Bandit Queen", Phoolan Devi, brutalised and raped as a girl and woman at the bottom of the caste system, who achieved extraordinary popularity as an avenger for India's lowest and poorest, especially women, in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century.
Capitalist modernisation has killed-off traditional peasant banditry. Under exceptional conditions, occasional outlaws with a social conscience can arise, such as Phoolan Devi in rural India, or Pretty Boy Floyd (immortalised in a Woody Guthrie song) in Depression USA.
However authentic, these latter-day social bandits are anachronisms, writes Hobsbawm. Capitalist modernisation largely restricts the active choices for the aggrieved to organised class struggle or straight crime.
By the time ultra-leftist guerilla groups had imitated the social bandit tradition (the US Symbionese Liberation Army, for example, kidnapping the daughter of media magnate William R. Hearst and demanding that he distribute food to the poor), the element of farce had won out, writes Hobsbawm, because of the groups' divorce from any organic link to a class base (such as the traditional social bandits had with the peasantry) and the futility of substituting their small group adventures for class mobilisation as a revolutionary strategy.
Hobsbawm's Bandits is a splendid example of Marxist scholarship at its analytically sophisticated yet stylistically lucid best. It shows that social bandits could glimpse a future of freedom, equality and justice but did not have the political strategies to reach it. What they stood for — the poor fighting back — was always, and still is, most important. The idea of Robin Hood lives on to give heart to the poor and the powerless in their struggle for rights and respect.