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Symposium on Matt Myers, ‘The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968–1989’

Historical Materialism has organised a symposium featuring four reviews of Myers’s new book by historians of 1970s labour: Gerd-Rainer Horn, Aurélie Andry, John Kelly, and Nathan Crompton.

Rejoinder

Matt Myers

I want to warmly thank the four participants in this roundtable for taking the time to respond to my book and to Teddy Paikin for helping to bring the contributions together. It has been a great privilege to read such engaged replies. Each one drew my attention to crucial issues. While it has not been possible here to respond directly to each point raised, here are some initial reflections as part of what I hope will be a continuing conversation. My key focus has been on whether the 1970s in Britain, France, and Italy opened realistic alternative strategies for workers than the one their mainstream movements took. This question is important insofar as a rejection of determinist explanations of their late twentieth-century decline seems to have implicit within it the idea of missed opportunities.

Labour and the European Left in the 1970s: Revolutionary Momentum and Halted Prospects – The View from France

Nathan Crompton
Myers shows that, in fact, the 1970s were a genuinely open decade, radically contingent in the dialectical tensions between classes, masses, and the parties that represented them.

The Forward March of Labour Halted?

John Kelly
Matt Myers is surely right to emphasise the role of political debates and strategic choices in the evolution of European labour movements through the 1970s and 1980s as a corrective to accounts that have strongly emphasised structural forces and determinants. What remains less clear is the nature of the more radical options, if any, that were actually available in the economic and political conjunctures of that period and the constraints on their pursuit. 

The Legacy of the 1970s

Gerd-Rainer Horn
Without denying the structural changes which Western Europe underwent in those years, Myers proposes a reading of the facts and figures of the three countries under review (Britain, Italy and France) which, for the first time in a book-length study, suggests that other options were, at least for a while, clearly alive and well, and that the ultimate decline of the European Left was by no means a foregone conclusion.

‘I Must Confess I Still Believe’: On Matt Myers’s ‘The Halted March of the European Left’

Aurélie Andry
The book is a powerful reappraisal of the fate of the European workers’ movement and the European Left in the second half of the twentieth century. Its main purpose is to interpret the historical halt of the European labour movement after the 1970s, and the Left’s fragmenting relationship with the working class.

Long Waves in Economics: Bob van Gelderen’s Extraordinary Contribution in 1913

Herman Pieterson

Spring Tide. Considerations on Industrial Development and Price Movement, originally published in Dutch in 1913 in the Social-Democratic monthly De Nieuwe Tijd and translated by Herman Pieterson is a pioneering work by the first systematic researcher of long waves in economics, Jacob (Bob) van Gelderen, writing as J. Fedder.

What is Fascisation? Some Theoretical and Historical Considerations

Patrick Eiden-Offe
Fascisation as a concept concept is threatening to become so broad that it will hardly still be able to describe anything with precision. Time and again, the connections must be conceptually unfolded, theoretically plausibilised and historically-empirically substantiated.

‘Like a Face Drawn in the Sand at the Edge of the Sea’ – On the Antihumanist Trajectory of Posthumanism

Jan Rehmann
Confronted with this corporate death drive, in a constellation where significant factions of the ruling class are burning up the planet, an effective antifascism needs to take up again the humanist thrust of the refrain of the Internationale: ‘L’Internationale sera le genre humain’.

Mélenchon and Technofeudalism: What Strategy for the French Left?

Louis Delamangue
We are sharing a translation of an article by Louis Delamangue from the new French theoretical journal Armes de la critique, associated with the far-left political party Révolution Permanente (formerly part of the NPA). Delamangue criticises the common assumptions and political orientation informing the ‘citizens’ revolution’ advanced by Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France insoumise (LFI), as well as Cédric Durand’s theory of technofeudalism.

The billionaire who did away with money

Riccardo Bellofiore and Giovanna Vertova
Musk’s future is full of things. Things produced, things launched, things switched on, things automated, things intelligent, things orbiting, things in abundance. But a liberated society is not a society full of things. It is a society in which human beings need not be things amongst things.

Why trans liberation is class struggle

Fraser Amos
The policing of trans life is central to the oppression of the bodies, expression and relationships of the class as a whole