HOBSBAWM'S MAGIC OR PSEUDOMARXISM IN DEFENSE OF CAPITALISM Nildo Viana / UFG Recently the historian Eric Hobsbawm produced an article in which he addresses what he calls the failure of socialism and the breakdown of capitalism, presenting a possible way out of this situation. This is a short article published in The Guardian, an English newspaper (Hobsbawm, 2009). Below we will develop a controversy around that text, due to its theoretical and methodological basis, the values and conceptions incorporated in the text, its practical and political consequences. In controversial texts, it is common to use certain resources, among them irony, in addition to other resources. A controversial text, too, can distance itself - and it is what happens in the present case - from the academic canons of writing and debate, because in war (controversy is a term derived from polemics, a Greek word that means war) structures can...