As for support for international revolution, "The communist revolutions actually made (Yugoslavia, Albania, later China) were made against Stalin's advice. The Soviet view was that, both internationally and within each country, post-war politics should continue within the framework of the all-embracing anti-fascist alliance... There is no doubt that Stalin meant all this seriously, and tried to prove it by dissolving the Comintern in 1943, and the Communist Party of the USA in 1944. (ibid. p.168) "[T]he Chinese Communist regime, though it criticized the USSR for betraying revolutionary movements after the break between the two countries, has no comparable record of practical support for Third World liberation movements." (ibid. p. 72)
On the other hand, he is no friend of the Maoist doctrine of perpetual revolution: "Mao was fundamentally convinced of the importance of struggle, conflict and high tension as something that was not only essential to life but prevented the relapse into the weaknesses of the old Chinese society, whose very insistence on unchanging permanence and harmony had been its weakness." (ibid. p.469) Hobsbawm draws a straight line from this belief to the disastrous Great Leap Forward and the subsequent Chinese famine of 1959-1961.
Communism, Hobsbawm argues, ultimately fell because, eventually, "...hardly anyone believed in the system or felt any loyalty to it, not even those who governed it." (ibid., p.488)
