The politics of the downturn

A review of The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989 by Matt Myers (Oxford University Press, 2025), £99.

On 17 March 1978, the acclaimed Communist historian Eric Hobsbawm presented the annual Marx Memorial Lecture under the title: “The forward march of labour halted?”1 He argued that the high point of class struggle in Britain had passed “about 25 to 30 years ago”, in the early post-war period. He pointed to the prolonged decline of manual labour, the entry of married women into the workforce in large numbers, the growth of immigration and a rise of “sectionalism”, pitting different groups of workers against one another, as well as a failure of the labour movement to respond to these various changes. The result: a more fragmented and less class-conscious proletariat.2

The book under review, by the left-wing historian Matt Myers, challenges aspects of Hobsbawm’s argument. Based on extensive archival research and interviews, across Britain, France and Italy, it argues that there was far greater vibrancy to the labour movement at the time of Hobsbawm’s speech, centred on emerging struggles by groups such as migrant and women workers. The halting of the march of labour came later and was far from inevitable.

Challenging Hobsbawm is certainly worthwhile. His arguments contributed to a widespread tendency to attribute the defeat of the post-1968 upsurge in struggle to class restructuring, rather than the prevailing politics in the workers’ movement.3 Although work and employment have been substantially reorganised, much of it coming after 1978, this has not fatally undermined the potential for workers to fight. Rather, it disrupted existing bases of collective organisation, posing the challenge of forging new ones. That is why struggles of groups such as workers in Amazon “fulfilment” centres or the migrant workers in Italy who helped drive recent strikes over Gaza are important.4 They speak to the uneven, spasmodic and far from complete process of maturation of new class forces.5 Myers is also right to emphasise the importance of the struggles taking place in the late 1970s or at the start of the 1980s, including those led by migrant workers at the Grunwick plant in Britain, Citroën and Talbot in France, or FIAT in Italy. They show why we should, as Myers puts it, reject the notion of the “working class as a static, blue-collar, job type” or any “flattening of what were in reality complex forms of class re-composition”.6

Yet, for all the strength of the research here, Myers’ account is unsatisfactory in three interlinked ways. First, there is a tendency to identify the state of the working class with that of large labour movement organisations. Second, while Hobsbawm was wrong about the reasons for the decline in struggle, contrary to Myers, in all three countries examined here, a downturn had set in by 1978.7 Third, although Myers is not uncritical of the major labour movement organisations, the underlying reasons for the failure of reformist politics, in both its social democratic and Communist colourations, need to be fully teased out. Addressing these points at some length may be helpful, not as a point-scoring exercise but as a contribution to debates about how we should understand the defeats of the past and what lessons we can take into the struggles of the future.

Workers’ self-activity or labour movement organisations?

Myers’ emphasis on affairs in the workplace in shaping left politics is welcome. Yet, he inherits from Hobsbawm a tendency to measure the state of the class through the strength of the major labour movement organisations.8 It is in this sense that Myers claims “the workers’ movement in Europe was in rude health” in 1978:

By 1974-5, electoral success had brought social democratic parties to power in Britain, Belgium, Holland, Norway, Denmark, West Germany, Austria, Sweden, and Finland. West European Communist Parties were on the threshold of government and shaped the strategy of emboldened labour movements. Never had so many European political parties formally committed to representing the working class been in power simultaneously across the continent.9

The limits inherent in a formal commitment to represent workers in the sphere of politics are considered below. Myers also offers an upbeat reckoning of union strength. Trade union membership reached its “apex in both Europe and Britain only in 1980 at 43.6 million and 11.6 million (56 percent density) respectively, and in Italy between 1975 and 1980 at 7.18 million (50 precent density). French unions won many basic rights only in May 1968 and held their expanded memberships at around 3.3 million (20 percent density) until the late 1970s”.10 The variable union densities here suggest the limits of such metrics. Today, France has a reported union density around 10 percent; Greece, 13 percent. Both have seen far more impressive workers’ struggles in recent years than Sweden (about 66 percent) or Britain (now about 22 percent).11

From a Marxist perspective, workers’ self-activity, their confidence and ability to launch and shape struggles, is the most important yardstick, rather than the extent of the institutionalisation of the workers’ movement through its leading parties and organisations. As I will argue, the scale of union membership or improved votes for left parties do not always correspond with growing militancy. In a telling aside, Myers acknowledges that the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s “did not permanently establish organs of revolutionary power as they did immediately after the First World War” but nonetheless concludes “workers’ relative gains within the system were comparatively greater, particularly over wages and social spending”.12 Perhaps so from a left-reformist perspective. From the standpoint of this journal, the creation of soviets and workers’ councils vying for power with the capitalist state reflects a far higher level of workers’ self-activity.

When was the downturn?

If we accept that the state of struggle cannot be measured through the scale of labour movement organisations or votes for left parties, should we really see the 1970s—as a whole—as a “golden age” of the working class?13 There were certainly titanic struggles in Britain, where the workers’ movement saw some of its greatest triumphs in the 1972-4 period; in France and Italy, the peaks came earlier, in 1968 and 1969-70 respectively.14 However, in all three cases, by the late 1970s, the movements were on the wane.

Britain

We must recognise the scale of the upturn in struggle in Britain. The number of recorded strike days rose from five million in 1968 to 23.9 million by 1972, a year that saw a wave of factory occupations and the first national miners’ strike since the 1920s. By 1974, union unrest had forced the Conservatives to call an election on the theme, “Who runs the country?”. They lost.15 Yet, the onset of the downturn in the mid-1970s divides the decade into upward and downward arcs of workers’ self-confidence and self-activity. This does not mean every struggle in the earlier period was victorious or that all those in the later period were crushed. Nor does it negate Myers’ points about the broadening of struggle beyond what had been widely seen as the core of the class. In May 1979, Tony Cliff, founder of the International Socialists (IS), which had in 1977 become the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), offered his own summary:

[T]he period 1974-9 should not be seen simply as a time of decline in the class struggle. The picture was far more mosaic. Hundreds upon hundreds of factories entered the struggle, involving workers who never knew strike action. Women and black workers entered the battle. While the traditional key sections of the working class—miners, engineers and dockers—were by and large acquiescent, other sections came to the fore… These were hospital workers, local government workers and white-collar workers. Alas, this section, in terms of even the statistics of strike records, didn’t fill the gap left by the others.16

The final sentence is crucial. It was Cliff who most vociferously defended what would become known as the “downturn thesis”.17 Strikes were continuing, but they were increasingly bitter and lengthy, with employers acting more aggressively, using tactics such as lockouts, and with many ending in defeat. Official data showing a high number of strikes conceals important elements of the story, such as a decline in political strikes or factory occupations; strike were now also more likely to be defensive rather than offensive.18 Unions continued to grow, but at the expense of rank-and-file shop-floor organisation, and often in areas yet to establish traditions of struggle.19

The strike waged by Asian workers at the Grunwick film processing lab from 1976 to 1978 has to be seen in this context.20 Racist notions within the union movement were a factor in this dispute, but in some ways the strike—with its mass pickets of up to 20,000 trade unionists—was far more successful in winning support than previous strikes led by Asian workers.21 Despite this, the sapping of morale among the elements in the working class who had led the struggles of the early 1970s blunted active solidarity in other workplaces, even where there was goodwill towards the strikers.22 The failure of the Trade Union Congress (TUC) to call solidarity action led to the quip from the strike leader Jayaben Desai: “Trade union support is like honey on the elbow. You can smell it, you can feel it, but you cannot taste it”.23 Moreover, officials from the Grunwick workers’ own union, the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff, and those of other unions where support had been won, such as the postal workers’ Union of Post Office Workers, pushed for compromise and negotiation in place of mass self-activity, eventually largely abandoning Desai and her colleagues to their fate.24

Crucial to Cliff’s downturn thesis is a particular Marxist conception of unions. Far from being homogenous workers’ organisations with a single set of interests and modes of operation, unions contain both a rank and file and a bureaucracy, typically centred on paid officials. The latter see their prime focus as negotiation and compromise. They may call official union action, either to preserve their own authority or under pressure from below. Yet, as workers’ self-activity grows, they tend to function as a conservative force. The function of the bureaucracy may be reinforced by full-time officials’ position outside the workforce. This makes their pay and conditions independent of those they represent; they do not suffer the pressures on rank-and-file workers or directly experience their struggles on the shopfloor.25

In the 1960s and early 1970s, successful strike action had often been unofficial, driven by networks of union shop stewards—often with the goal of winning the dispute before news of it even reached the union headquarters.26 By the late 1970s, this shopfloor organisation had been considerably weakened. Pay freezes and incomes policies, along with a turn away from piecework, weakened the role of stewards in bargaining with management at “shop” level. The growth of productivity deals similarly removed “stewards from effective direct influence on take-home pay, thus weakening the support they had from their constituents”.27 Increasingly, pay was determined on a plant-wide or even industry-wide basis. This was reinforced by the transformation of many senior stewards into full-time union officials, although paid by their employer rather than the union itself. This further extended the grip of the union bureaucracy into the workplace, weakening the initiative of rank-and-file workers.28 As Myers notes, for many Communist stewards, this incorporated them into the running of factories, with one employed at British Leyland remarking in 1978: “We’re now concerned with how the place is running. Before it was just a free for all.” Derek Robinson, famed Communist union convenor at Leyland, similarly stressed the need to cooperate in restoring the profitability of the company.29 In some cases, as one Communist Party member, Tony Lane, belatedly recognised, this could even draw full-time convenors or senior stewards into a life of “perks and fiddles”.30

Incorporation into trying to fix the problems of British industry was reinforced by the election in 1974 of a Labour government committed to the Social Contract, a pact with the union leaders to control inflation, which peaked at 25 percent in 1975. This was to be achieved by restraining wages. It annulled the “Tories out” approach, which had acted as a unifier of struggles under Edward Heath’s Conservative government.31 Under the previous Labour administration of 1964-9, a culture of “do-it-yourself reformism” had allowed militant workers to overcome government attempts to constraint wages amid the unstable “stop-go” economic conditions of the time. Workers generally responded with intensifying struggle.32 The experience under the 1974-9 Labour governments was different, not least because of the deepening economic gloom.33 High levels of unemployment and the grinding crisis after 1973 increased the pressure on Labour to contain struggles and sapped the resolve of those in the workplace. If the late 1960s and early 1970s showed the strength of do-it-yourself reformism, the late 1970s showed its limitations.

Central to the approach of the Communists, an important force within the unions, was the “broad left strategy”, which sought to elect left-wing union officials to replace the right-wing ones.34 By the time of the downturn, key unions were controlled by the left, notably Hugh Scanlon, who won the presidency of the Amalgamated Engineering Union in 1967, and Jack Jones, general secretary of the Transport & General Workers Union from 1968. However, the left union leaders, having been pushed into leadership roles by rank-and-file militancy, did little to counter declining workers’ confidence. On the contrary, left leaders were far better equipped to contain struggle than a bureaucracy dominated by the right. Scanlon and Jones had helped devise the Social Contract before Labour came to office. The approach was made even more explicit by Jones during a run on the pound in the mid-1970s: “something further would have to be done to try to persuade in a voluntary way the trade unions to hold their wage claims within reason”.35 Not only did the left officials help prop up Labour against a rebellion by workers; they also made scabbing respectable.36 The sectionalism that Hobsbawm discussed was very much in evidence, as unions were drawn into a logic of “participation”, accepting that in straightened economic times they had to support “their” union, “their” firm or “their” industry against others. Myers recognises the strategic impasse and confusion among the Communists around the time of Hobsbawm’s intervention, locating it in the context of “a short-term check on rising workers’ power”, but it is important to understand the extent of this “check” and the complicity of the Communist Party.37

Revolutionary socialists lacked the base in industry possessed by the Communists.38 Nonetheless, the IS/SWP sought both to strengthen the rank and file and to offer it the kind of generalised politics largely missing from economic struggles during the long post-war boom. A key initiative was the attempt to create rank-and-file union organisations and weave these into a national movement with a shared strategy. Two rank-and-file delegate conferences were held in 1974, coming just as workers crested the wave of their struggles by toppling Heath’s government. A third and final gathering was called in 1977, drawing together 522 delegates from 251 trade union bodies. The SWP wrongly believed a series of renewed battles early that year might break the Social Contract. Yet, the union leaders and Labour were able to contain this revolt, and the conference proved impotent in driving significant new workplace activity.39 James Callaghan’s Labour government would eventually collapse in the wake of the so-called “Winter of Discontent” in 1978-9, when the policy of wage restraint finally became untenable. Although the bursting of the dam holding back workers resulted in high levels of strike action, this did not “break out of the cycle of sectionalism and scabbing”. The divisions between groups of workers remained largely untouched and employers were able to regain the initiative. The Winter of Discontent was “not part of a rising tide of struggle or class consciousness”. For the bulk of workers, “The element of growing political generalisation had been lost”.40

France

The French May of 1968, then the largest general strike in history, was a far more explosive rupture than 1972-4 in Britain, triggered by the student struggle rather than an intensification of an existing pattern of industrial action.41 Clashes between students and the state helped vivify the accumulated anger of workers, who had for some time suffered the consequences of efforts to modernise French industry in a context of an archaic system of industrial relations. At its peak, the strike wave probably involved at least ten million workers, about half of the labour force and five times those officially enrolled in unions.42 The largest union, the General Confederation of Labour, (Confédération générale du travail, CGT), effectively under the leadership of the French Communist Party (Parti Communiste Français, PCF), was from the outset running to catch up. The PCF had expressed contempt for the student radicals of 1968, and it was only under pressure from below that the CGT, together with the other major federation, the French Democratic Confederation of Labour (Confédération française démocratique du travail, CFDT), gave official backing to the actions of workers.43 The wave of action was primarily driven by worker activists, particularly those from the younger generation and some from a far-left background, who combined strikes with factory occupations.44 In an interview on 19 May, CGT general secretary Georges Séguy responded to a question about why he had not called a general strike: there was no need; workers had already organised one.45

Yet, gradually, the CGT bureaucracy together with the PCF regained control of the movement, negotiating the limited gains of the Grenelle Agreement, and seeking subordinate the movement to strike committees they controlled. An account by Walter Kendall captures the approach well:

The attitude of the PCF and CGT is not difficult to explain. General de Gaulle’s antagonism to NATO, his opposition to US policy in Asia and elsewhere, his flirtations from time to time with Moscow, made his government, in the eyes of the PCF, infinitely preferable to any other that seemed likely to arise out of the crisis. The great proletarian mass movement had begun quite independently of the party and the union of the proletariat. The movement’s development leftward threatened to leave the proletariat’s doctrinally prescribed representatives stranded high and dry. The confused excitement of May–June offered an unprecedented opportunity for revolutionary students to break through the wall which insulated the CGT’s doctrinally insulated base from outside influence. This threatened organisational and political disaster for the PCF in France. Thus, in a potentially revolutionary situation, the PCF, in 1968 as in 1936, acted as a party of order.46

When President Charles de Gaulle proposed calling elections, the PCF fell into line, helping to end many of the strikes and focusing on their bid for office.47 The stalemate of 1968 gave way in the period that followed to intensified firm-level negotiations between unions and employers, who were encouraged that the CGT and CFDT could bring industrial peace. There would still be significant levels of strike action, but nothing like on the scale of May-June 1968.48 After economic crisis hit in 1973, there was, as in Britain, a hardening of employers’ attitudes to strikes.49 While strike action would continue to rise until 1976, it did so amid growing demoralisation of rank-and-file workers. Increasingly, the CGT would rely on repeated one-day demonstrative strikes, while emphasising the need for a left electoral victory to bring about real change.50 The PCF would seek an alliance with the social democrats of the Socialist Party, signing a joint programme that helped create the “Union of the Left” as early as 1972 and, after a brief falling-out in 1977-8, entering the Socialist-led government of François Mitterrand as junior partners in 1981. The PCF lost considerable support as a result.51 Both the Communist-led CGT and social-democratic CFDT would be incorporated into supporting the “left” government.52

Italy

It is always possible to point to signs of life, but by the time of Hobsbawm’s speech, the French working class was, like that in Britain, in a phase of declining militancy and confidence. The same was true in Italy. The struggle to modernise Italian capitalism was even greater than that of France in the early 1960s. Italy saw mass migrations from rural areas of the south to the factories of northern cities such as Turin.53 Abortive attempts to reform industry, combined with an increase in industry-level and in some case plant-level agreements, encouraged a rising level of strike action in the early 1960s.54

An upsurge of student struggle from 1967 helped galvanise what has been called, in contrast to the French general strike, a “creeping May”, one that would continue into the early 1970s. Union-initiated strikes or, from spring 1968, those of skilled northern workers with established traditions, gradually gave way to the “hot autumn” of 1969, centred on young and often unskilled migrants from the south of Italy, who had previously been excluded from official union bodies and their negotiations.55 Official data shows a huge leap in strikes—the figure increases four-fold from 1968 to 1969.56 Women, white-collar workers and southern migrants were already important players in this strike movement, long before the late 1970s, complicating the narrative in Myers’ book. In the course of the action, plant-level organisation, relatively peripheral in Italy up till then, assumed a far greater importance—with an array of tactics such as “go-slows” and “lightning strikes” often taking the place of traditional day-long strikes.57 Occupations and protests within factories, sometimes aimed at scabs or at temporarily kidnapping managers, became commonplace.58 It was this explosion of workers’ self-activity, undoubtedly one of the international high points of the post-1968 wave of struggle, that gave unions an extensive shop-floor presence across much of industry.

As in France, the Communists were the major force in the working class. The Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI) boasted 1.5 million members and won a quarter of the national vote in the 1968 elections. The Italian General Confederation of Labour (Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro, CGIL) it led claimed over three million members, while the Christian-democratic Italian Confederation of Trades Unions (Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori) claimed two million and the social-democratic Italian Labour Union (Unione Italiana del Lavoro UIL) 1.5 million.59 Just as with their French counterparts, they rode the tide of struggle, initially supporting the new tactics adopted by rank-and-file workers, only to quell it:

From the autumn of 1968 to 1970, the unions often had to regain control of spontaneous workers’ mobilisation and therefore made use of these new forms of action to intensify the conflicts to a considerable extent. Serious disagreements spread, especially among the rank-and- file leaders, when the unions, which no longer needed to “ride the tiger”, began to moderate the escalation of conflicts in 1971-2.60

The moderation coincided with a sharp economic slowdown in Italy in 1971, which gave the major unions the opportunity to institutionalise the gains of the strike wave, re-establishing “responsible” trade unionism and drawing rank-and-file activists into the union machine. Factory-level councils, presented as a means of integrating the dynamism of the strike movement into the union, soon became a means of policing the factory through the union machine.61 Protest marches, which had in 1968-9 been an opportunity for radical students and the far-left to influence workers, strengthening their resolve, increasingly became a means for unions to reassert their control over the rank and file.62

As in Britain and France, politics intruded in increasingly negative ways as the 1970s proceeded. The PCI, explicitly so after Enrico Berlinguer became leader in 1971, enforced a formal division of labour between the union bureaucracies, responsible for economic matters in the workplace, and the PCI, which had command over the political sphere.63 When Italy tipped into a particularly brutal recession in 1974-5, generalisation from the economic demands of workers to a set of political demands that could challenge Italian capitalism was precisely what was required. Unfortunately, what the PCI actually offered, from 1973, was the “historic compromise”, in which it promised to police workers’ militancy in exchange for the possibility of entering government.64 Cooperation was required, Berlinguer argued, not just with the social democrats but with the centre-right Christian Democrats who had dominated Italian politics since the war.65

In 1975, the union movement faced major defeats, amid growing demoralisation, an ebbing of rank-and-file control, and, as in France and Britain, fragmentation of struggles, which were increasingly bitter and defensive in nature.66 The rise of the PCI’s vote to a third of the total in elections the following year reflected the societal impact of the heady struggles that had taken place, along with the desire for a political alternative in a moment of economic crisis.67 Yet this was a pinnacle the PCI would never surpass. An extraordinarily vibrant range of revolutionary groupings born of the hot autumn proved unable to develop a successful alternative strategy able to displace the PCI and, by 1976, they themselves faced deep crises.68 When a movement of students, joined by unemployed youth, exploded in 1977, rather than stimulating a new upturn in class struggle, it generated escalating violence in the face of state repression.69 By 1978, the incorporation of union activists into efforts to maximise profitability and efficiency noted in Britain also characterised Italian Communism, driving a union strategy that was increasingly in tension with rank-and-file activists. The PCI already had a significant role presiding over local and regional government. At a national level it would not be long before the PCI would allow an austerity package to pass through parliament with minimal dissent from its representatives.70

The political source of defeat

As Myers affirms, the struggles that erupted from late 1960s initially largely escaped any control from left parties.71 Given what happened once these parties began to regain the initiative, and reap the benefits of the growing radicalism, one cannot escape the conclusion that their previous marginalisation had been a great boon for workers. I have already noted the extent to which Communist union strategy, once it restored its grip in Italy and France, tended to blunt rank-and-file struggle.72 Myers’ own account reinforces this view, but at times, his conclusion seems to be that this was the least-bad option for the left:

It [the left] could either participate in the process of restructuring to restore Fordist industry to more stable profitability and consolidate their image as parties of government, or it could resist the technical, spatial, and financial reorganisation of production at the cost of undermining workers’ control, raising tensions with the trade unions, and encouraging apathy on the factory floor.73

To pose the problem in these terms is to follow the Communists in accepting a fundamentally reformist logic, in which the outer limit of the possible is sharing with management the spoils of increased productivity.

As I have suggested, it is not surprising that a huge upsurge in class struggle would eventually register in the electoral successes of reformist parties, often as a sort of lagging indicator, and push them towards government. Reformism is a persistent element of working-class consciousness, rooted in workers’ experience under capitalism, and hard to displace.74 It is in principle possible, especially in the context of mass workers’ self-activity and with the presence of substantial revolutionary formations, for the political generalisations of workers to extend beyond reformism. However, going into 1968, the base of the revolutionary left was tiny compared to that of the major social-democratic and Communist forces. Moreover, the newly forged far-left groups often lacked political clarity or an experience of relating to large-scale struggles. In the absence of a mass revolutionary alternative, the electoral successes of social-democratic and Communist parties, especially in the context of economic crises, brought into sharp relief the reformist nature of these projects. As Myers writes:

After the mid-1970s something snapped… The French and Italian Communist leaderships which entered government or stood on its threshold believed that they had an opportunity to prove once and for all their democratic credentials and technical capacity… Raising economic productivity and efficiency would be their chance to showcase their commitment to the interests of the nation.75

However, these developments were not an anomaly but rather the realisation of the tendencies embodied in reformism. Of course, in the British case, the Communist Party was nowhere near government, but even here successive versions of the party’s programme, The British Road to Socialism, emphasised the party’s attempts to distance itself from any notion of revolutionary insurrection. Instead, it allied itself to the left wing of Labourism, in the case of the 1977 iteration through a “broad democratic alliance”.76 As the Communist’s influential National Industrial Organiser Bert Ramelson boasted: “The Communist Party can float an idea earlier in the year. It goes to trade union conferences as a resolution, and it can become official Labour Party policy by the autumn”.77

Myers is not uncritical of the major left parties he examines in this period, noting that the “choices taken by the left…helped to halt labour’s forward march”.78 Labour’s James Callaghan was happy to portray the Grunwick dispute as the work of a “rent-a-mob” who had foolishly refused “the overtures of his party and the TUC”, framing the struggle in terms of law and order.79 The PCF had met the 1968 rebellion, not with demands for revolution, but “a popular government of democratic union with Communist participation”.80 By 1982-4, they were in government with François Mitterrand, remaining there during the strikes led by migrant workers at Citroën and Talbot in 1982-4 as Socialist ministers “in effect marginalised the most dynamic sector of the working class in France during the 1980s” before developing a French version of neoliberalism.81 The PCI’s role is particularly dismal. The Eurocommunist right wing of the party actively sought an Italian version of Britain’s Social Contract and a “self-regulation of the right to strike”.82 Its reaction to the 1980 strike by FIAT workers at the Miafiori plant was telling. Just over a month into the strike, middle managers staged a march, estimated at anywhere between 12,000 and 40,000 strong, demanding an end to the action. The PCI, which had for some time been seeking to incorporate middle managers as part of its bid for respectability, urged its members not to hold counter-demonstrations and to seek a compromise to end the dispute.83 The defeat of the strike led to around 23,000 workers, including key militants, being sacked.

One of them, Giovannia Falcone, who had migrated from the south in 1968 to work at FIAT, spoke at a tempestuous gathering of union leaders and rank-and-file workers. The defeat, for him, closed a period that had begun in the heady days of 1969, when, on 22 March, Miafiori workers had refused to obey an order to speed up production, triggering the first strike across FIAT since 1948:

A comrade said to me: “It’s a fact of history: another comrade just like us spoke in ’69—now this time it’s your turn to speak and bring an epoch to a close”… I was an immigrant coming up from the countryside like so many others. I didn’t know how to say a word, I was too shy to make political speeches. In part, I still am, but I’ve overcome a lot since then. Do you think that FIAT can still keep someone like me in the factory?.. [Interruption by the chair…who asks him to finish] Don’t worry, comrade but I think I also have the right—after 12 years and now with them throwing me out—at least to let me talk a little more [applause], because I believe…I’ll never again have the possibility of speaking as a FIAT worker, as a FIAT delegate. At least I’ll have the satisfaction of having finished in style…, content with all the struggles I’ve been part of.84

This speaks both to the growth in confidence workers experienced in the post-1968 period and to the way that their official representatives in the labour movement helped contain their aspirations. Yet, if these political forces were so lousy, in what sense can their growing electoral success straightforwardly equate, as Myers suggests, to the “balance of power in society” moving “in the left’s favour during the 1970s”?85

Perhaps his argument is that Labour and the various Communist parties had once been dynamic and progressive, only becoming a wretched block on the movement later. However, this does not stand up to historical scrutiny. The logic of the reformism of these organisations has repeatedly led them to prevent any serious threat to capitalism from workers’ militancy in moments of deep socio-economic crisis.86

Obviously, Labour never seriously contemplated leading a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. It was formed from the top-down, largely by the trade union bureaucracy, and infused by the ideas of groups such as the Fabians, who saw themselves as the “worst enemies of social revolution”. Even Keir Hardie’s Independent Labour Party (ILP), which helped form Labour, was not the direct expression of mass struggles such as the new unionism of the 1890s, but a reflection of the defeats that pushed them into bureaucratic channels.87 In 1919, the highpoint of the wave of radicalism in Britain as the First World War ended, Labour both disavowed the strike wave and was marginal to events. It was their partners in trade union bureaucracy who played the key role in containing the struggle.

When Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, at a famous meeting with union officials, put it to them that they consider taking on “the functions of the state”, the miners’ leader and ILP member Robert Smillie records: “From that moment on we were beaten and we knew we were.” A strike to enforce the nationalisation of the coalfields, with elements of workers control, was defused with the announcement of a Royal Commission to consider the matter. On the railways, union leader Jimmy Thomas was unable to prevent a national strike, but managed to halt it after nine days, as part of his efforts to prevent what he called “Russian methods”.88 When the 1926 general strike erupted a few years later, union officials, together with figures such as Labour leader Ramsey MacDonald, were central to steering the militancy back into safe channels. The Negotiating Committee and the General Council of the TUC played a crucial role in dragooning union officials, both left and right, into accepting negotiations to contain the strikes.89

The role of Labourism, including the left-wing of the Labour Party, in the late 1970s, along with the trade union officials and TUC, should, therefore, not come as a great surprise.90

At its birth, the Communist tradition in Western Europe was, by contrast with Labourism, a revolutionary one, inspired by 1917. Yet, by the mid-1920s, very little was left in Russia of the mass self-activity of workers or the democratic organs of self-rule it had birthed. The state was firmly in the control of a bureaucracy, albeit one still containing former Bolshevik activists committed in principle to revolutionary transformation in Russia and abroad. By 1928, a counterrevolution had been consummated, through which Stalin led the bureaucracy to impose itself over both workers and the peasantry as a new ruling class, purging its residual revolutionaries.91 These shifts could not but impact upon the fledgling Communist parties in the west. Despite the heroic efforts of many Communists militants in Britain in the 1926 general strike, the party was an early victim of the degeneration of the revolution. Having largely discounted the possibility of international revolution, and in the face of criticism from Leon Trotsky, the Russian bureaucracy sought to forge an alliance with the western trade union movement, of which the British TUC was a major component. The result from 1925 had been the Anglo-Russian (Unity) Committee. Pressure from Moscow to strengthen this alliance dovetailed with a growing tendency in the British party to rely on left officials within the unions, leading the Communists to adopt the slogan: “All power to the General Council” of the TUC. The General Council of the TUC, unsurprisingly, failed to substitute for the 1917 role of the soviets in Russia.92

The disorientation of the British Communists was a hint of what would come with the consolidation of bureaucratic state capitalism in the Soviet Union. The PCF’s response to the struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, for instance, was far from anomalous. In June 1930, Maurice Thorez had been promoted to general secretary of the party at the behest of Moscow.93 By then, the Comintern was in the midst of its 1928-34 “Third Period”, combining an ultraleft rhetoric, which denounced the social democrats as the main enemy, with practical passivity, and, in the case of the PCF, a steady decline in membership.94 Six months before Hitler’s 1933 seizure of power, Thorez could still claim: “in terms of substance and methods, fascism and social fascism [ie social democracy] were at root identical” and “social democracy was just as violent and bloody”.95 The stupidities of the Third Period would be reversed by 1934 both by events within France and a shift in Comintern policy towards what became known as the Popular Front.

In France, a riot by fascist and far-right groups had, in February 1934, toppled the latest of a series of moderate Radical Party-led administrations, leading to a new government of the right. Mass strikes were called in response by socialist and Communist unions—and the result was a magnificent display of unity among French workers, with an estimated 4.5 million striking and a million demonstrating. When socialists and the PCI called separate demonstrations in Paris, they converged amid cries of “Unity! Unity!”.96 Thorez was summoned to Moscow in May, where he received support for at least a limited shift in approach, and, by 1935, Stalin was convinced of the need to court governments in countries such as France that might help secure the Soviet Union against the threat of a German invasion. In May, Pierre Laval, who would become France’s prime minister a month later, would travel to Moscow to sign a mutual assistance pact with Stalin. Thus was the basis laid for what Thorez would call the “Popular Front against Fascism”.97

The Popular Front was counterposed to the classical united front of workers’ organisations participating in common actions against the fascists, instead encompassing all parties supportive of parliamentary democracy.98 This involved an embrace of parties of the centre such as the Radicals. Moreover, it was oriented towards an electoral challenge, aimed at the 1936 election. Indeed, the rise in the PCF vote in local elections in the preceding years, buoyed by the new sense of working-class unity, was decisive in persuading the Radicals to participate.99 Naturally, the breadth and orientation meant the PCF compromising its radicalism to create a programme acceptable to its new allies. Electorally, it was a great success: the Popular Front achieved a majority in parliament. While remaining outside the socialist-Radical government led by the socialist leader Léon Blum, the PCF played the part of its loyal supporters. Yet, the working class took seriously the pretence that the new government would transform their situation, which had deteriorated considerably during the economic downturn of the 1930s. As the new government took office in 1936, workers embarked on a wave of strikes and factory occupations, leading to something approaching a pre-revolutionary situation.100

The factory owners appealed to Blum, who turned to the unions, which, through their political connections, were tied to the Popular Front programme. The result was the Matignon Agreement, which sought to defuse the struggle by conceding union recognition, wage gains and a 40-hour week. However, more was required to contain the struggle, and here the authority of the PCF, which had grown ten-fold since 1932 through its official support for strikes, was crucial. Thorez told a meeting of PCF activists on 11 June: “It is necessary to know how to end a strike when satisfaction has been obtained…and even accept a compromise when all demands have not yet been met… The working class must ensure its union with the middle class and particularly with the peasantry… All is not possible.” The final clause was a response to Marceau Pivert, a leader of the Revolutionary Left current with France’s socialist party, who, on 27 May, had claimed “Tous est possible!” (all is possible). The phrase, “It is necessary to know how to end a strike,” became a catchphrase of PCF cadres. As the capitalists regained their confidence and Blum began reversing the gains of the Matignon Agreement, both the government and the PCF shifted further to the right. Blum was replaced as prime minister, first by a Radical,
Camille Chautemps, then by a more conservative Radical, Édouard Daladier. The PCF supported both, only changing their position in 1938, following the Munich Agreement, in which Britain and France sacrificed their erstwhile ally, Czechoslovakia, to Hitler, negating the value of the Popular Front for Moscow. As a demoralised working class looked on, with the movement now in full retreat, the French parliament, still with a Popular Front majority, voted to outlaw the PCF.101

How to explain such experiences? The western Communist parties after 1928, whatever their self-description, are best viewed as an amalgam of three things: organisations containing important working-class militants; left-reformist parties able to collaborate with or provide an alternative to traditional social democracy; and instruments of Moscow’s foreign policy. The balance between the three elements was far from constant. For instance, the right-wing Eurocommunist trend in the mid-1970s reflected the diminishing attractions of affiliation with the Soviet Union and the temptation to repurpose Communist parties as a variant of traditional social democracy.102 However, at no period from the late-1920s did they, any more than the social democratic parties, offer a serious revolutionary challenge to capitalism. Why, then, would we expect them to do anything other than contain struggles in the period following 1968?103

Indeed, to return to one of Myers’ themes, the failure to reorientate on migrant, young, female and white-collar workers, moving into struggle in increasing numbers as the downturn in militancy hit, reflected the failure of these reformist politics, whose corollary was both to smother struggle in general and to accommodate to racist, sexist or other reactionary ideas increasingly evident within the working class as the struggle retreated.104 It is in this context that we can make sense of a Communist mayor in the Parisian suburb of Vitry leading 50 Communist Party “members, sympathisers and local government officials, as well as a bulldozer, to evict 318 Malian inhabitants housed in a workers’ hostel in their district” in December 1980.105 So too with the Italian Communist leaders mobilising against and denouncing youth and feminist movements in the late 1970s—although this was hardly new; they had, like their French counterparts, denounced the student movement in 1967-9.106 Myers argues, “By participating in the structural, political, and ideological disempowerment of a diverse new generation of workers, the left succeeded in stabilising capitalism”.107 However, this follows from a more basic premise: the reformist desire to work within and hence to stabilise capitalism. It was this that led to a politics in which the major parties of the left disempowered and clashed with oppressed groups.

Conclusion

The way the period Myers studies is interpreted—through a left-reformist or revolutionary socialist lens—has important implications. Myers downplays the significance of organisations to the left of the big battalions in the working class.108 At one level, that is not surprising. No one doubts that the far left was mostly marginal to the working class, although some groups did significantly impact the struggle at key moments. Yet the failure of the mass labour movement organisations should at least lead us to ask whether the revolutionaries had a credible strategic alternative.

Groups such as the IS in Britain did try to develop a politics that could weave together the combativity of rank-and-file workers with a politics able to transcend the self-imposed limitations of reformism. This was not a sectarian politics isolating revolutionaries from wider layers of workers and their reformist organisations but rather one seeking to draw workers into common struggles, while simultaneously wresting them from reformism and offering political generalisation to accompany economic militancy. Based on such an approach, some far left groups grew significantly after 1968—but did so from a tiny base.109 The challenge remains to ensure that in the future, when we see eruptions of struggle on the scale of the 1960s and 1970s, whatever precise form they take, we have a broader platform from which to build and can do so while drawing the right lessons from the past.

Joseph Choonara is the editor of International Socialism. He is the author of A Reader’s Guide to Marx’s Capital (Bookmarks, 2017) and Unravelling Capitalism: A Guide to Marxist Political Economy (2nd edition: Bookmarks, 2017).

Notes