I read Matt Myers’s The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France and Italy, 1968–1989 just before attending the first Historical Materialism Conference ever organised in Paris, during a sweltering early summer. It was an engaging read – if not exactly beach reading. At a time of collective hopelessness among the French Left (which has persisted since the defeat of the pension reform movement), it was a welcome read.
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. This, of course, is one of the most critical historical issues for any scholar working on European political history in the second half of the twentieth century in general, and the labour movement and the European Left in particular. But it is also, beyond that, one of the most crucial questions that should concern any Marxist and any revolutionary activist or intellectual today.
Indeed, Myers’ historical endeavour is also a quest for new solutions to the current predicaments of the Left in Europe and beyond: the quest of an author who seems to continue to take the Left’s historical tasks seriously, who understands it as a loose but united community beyond its many internal divergences, and who believes that understanding the errors of the past can help open new alternatives for the future. In his view,
The activists under discussion in this book were not ‘ordinary’ people. Those who wanted a radical break with capitalism—believing such a path to be possible and necessary—were extraordinary in the societies in which they lived. They were united as part of a community of fate with a common sense of purpose, political perspective, and theoretical heritage. They thought that discipline, faith, loyalty, and selflessness enabled efficient action and success. Their organisation was a guide for present conduct and the instrument to reach an unbound future.
Based on an ambitious comparison of France, Britain and Italy, which were all undergoing the dislocation of the Fordist industrial model and disruption of class identity, Myers offers a convincing new analysis of the relationship between party and class in the 1970s and 1980s, which sheds new light not only on the history of the European Left and the European labour movement, but also to the history of neoliberalism. The book’s main argument is that socialist, social-democratic, and Communist parties and trade unions’ decisions and strategies – and not the sociological and cultural end of the working class – brought forth the halt of the Left in Europe and hastened the turn to neoliberalism. This is a compelling argument to anyone who, like me, is sceptical of the myth of ‘the end of the working class’. And, yet, as Myers rightly points out, ‘the working class tends to be portrayed as an ageing relic of the past in contemporary history’.
Myers’s book is an impressive work for different reasons. First, it is based on 27 different archives in several languages, from Britain, France and Italy, as well as some oral history interviews. It is also based on an remarkable compilation of primary and secondary literature of contemporary European history. The choice of archival sources denotes the author’s desire to go beyond a political and intellectual history centred on party and trade-union elites and apparatuses. Myers is most interested in ‘the inner life’ of the European Left, not just its ‘public face’; he searches for historical traces of the ‘subjective experiences’ of the voices of the rank-and-file activists as well as those of leaders and public intellectuals. In short, he attempts to combine a bottom-up analysis of changes in class-party relation, with a top-down approach to his subject matter. In so doing, he also endeavours to connect the study of the Left and of the working class, which are too often separated in traditional accounts.
One of the main contributions of the book is that it challenges received wisdom about the halted march of workers’ parties since the late 1950s, and especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Myers argues against the prevailing declinist narrative that sees this period as the inevitable sunset of working-class political relevance. And this, I believe, is particularly important because these narratives still shape understanding and strategic visions of why the Left is weak today and how to rebuild it.
Rather than framing the erosion of the Left as a natural consequence of long-term structural, economic, sociological and cultural changes, Myers’ book centres the subjective failures and strategic contradictions of left parties in managing both internal diversity (such as gender, class, and race transformations) and external pressures (such as global capitalist restructurings) in those years. He does not claim that structural changes in global capitalist production, deindustrialisation, rising unemployment, rising public sector and service industry, fragmentation and shrinking of the working class, the rise of the middle classes, cultural revolution and the identity-based movements, the shift from ‘material’ concerns of wage, conditions and benefits to ‘post-material’ struggles (ecology, cultural difference, gender, race and sexual relations) were irrelevant. But he convincingly argues that ‘the strength of the European working class during the 1970s makes retrospective narratives of its inevitable decline appear implausible’.
The book makes the case that the working class did not disappear in this era but was actively disempowered, often by the very political forces meant to represent it. The different chapters examine the political and strategic choices of the European left, in order to understand this disempowerment. Myers scrutinises, for example, how party and trade-union leaders progressively accepted the support of capitalist restructuring and the introduction of modern technology to increase productivity and profit, in exchange for, in theory, forms of ‘workers’ participation’ and increased workers’ power in economic planning (Chapter 1). But, while the former were effective immediately, the latter, unfortunately, remain unfulfilled to this day.
He successively analyses how the introduction of professionalised political marketing and opinion-polling studies were used by party elites from the late 1970s to justify changes of political direction away from their working-class constituencies (Chapter 3). He also shows, by comparing three significant strikes in France (Citroën and Talbot, 1982–4), Britain (Grunwick Film Processing Laboratories, 1976–8) and Italy (Fiat 1979–80) how governing left parties in all three countries prioritised ‘governability’ economic pragmatism, and social order over solidarity with immigrant and marginalised workers in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Chapter 4).
Another great contribution of the book is that it reappraises the 1970s, not as the beginning of the end following the ‘French May’, the Italian ‘Hot Autumn’ and Britain’s historic peak of militancy in 1972 during the anti-Industrial Relations Act movement and miners’ dispute, but as a pinnacle of European labour: a moment when different roads were still open. In so doing, Myers challenges the teleological, declinist narratives of this decade, which dominate both the historiography and collective memory. Indeed, he argues: ‘If any period deserves to be seen as the “golden age” of the working class, it was the 1970s’. In Myers’s view, dominant narratives underestimate the continuing centrality of class to the European Left during this decade.
Indeed, he rightly recalls, the 1970s were the decade of British Labour’s radical ‘Alternative Economic Strategy’, of the Common Programme of the Left which united Socialists and Communists as well as the Radicals in France, and of sweeping successes of European Communism, especially in Italy and France. Public social spending also peaked in the 1970s in Europe. It was the decade of highest trade-union membership density. The number of shop stewards rose impressively, for instance in Britain and Italy. Actually, the crisis of the 1970s and the end of the postwar economic boom initially reinforced the Left throughout Europe. The decline of industrial capitalism did not lead automatically in the 1970s to weakened left parties and working class.
In Chapter 3, Myers analyses some opinion polls surveyed by the PCF, which show that in 1979, on the eve of the demise of the PCF, 93 per cent of its voters thought that the party would strengthen in the coming years, and only 2 per cent thought it would weaken. Throughout the book, the author shows that ‘the belief that labour’s forward march had halted was not shared by a new and diverse generation of workers’. Indeed, a historic bloc uniting the working class, marginalised workers, women, the youth, and service and public sector workers was possible. If it did not become a reality however, it is because the Left made some strategic choices that ended up stabilising rather than challenging or breaking with capitalism.
This, I believe, should be obvious to any historian who works on the archival material of the Left in those years. When working on the Left and European integration in the ‘long 1970s’ (from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s), I came to very similar conclusions. Looking at the archives of international party and trade-union cooperation at European level (such as the Confederation of Socialist Parties of the European Communities or the European Trade-Union Confederation and at the archives of European institutions, the European Parliament in particular), it is clear that left-wing activists, cadres and elites had a very firm belief that their victory was coming. What is more, in the 1970s, the Left was institutionally majoritarian for the first time at the European and EEC level, it had formulated a ‘social Europe’ project, which failed in large part because of parties’ and trade unions’ own strategic mistakes.[1]
Myers’s book helps revisiting the genealogy of neoliberalism. Especially in Chapter 4, where he scrutinises the defeat of the three historical strikes in Britain, France and Italy, he demonstrates the Left’s active role in dismantling the foundations of the postwar working class. The book insists that neoliberalism’s rise was not imposed exclusively from the top down or from the Right, as has already been well documented by historians. It was also made possible through the Left’s capitulations and even complicity.
A few aspects of the book left this reader hanging. The first one has to do with the methodology. Myers announces in his introduction a comparative and transnational history of the Left. But the book offers very few occurrences of transnational cross-border history. Myers even contends that ‘though interactions, transfers, and cross-border initiatives are demonstrated across the three cases, the findings indicate that commonalities are better explained by similar strategic dilemmas rather than the transnational sharing of ideas and practices’. And, yet, transnational history has proved quite effective in showing how important the circulation of ideas and practices between left-wing organisations across different European and extra-European countries has been in shaping ideological and political change.
Out of the myriad possible examples, one can think of just how crucial French-Yugoslav connections among trade unions, parties and intellectuals were in promoting self-management in France from the 1950s to the 1980s, but also in Britain and Italy.[2] This, in turn, and despite the bleak fate of self-management struggles in Western European countries, had, arguably, long-lasting cultural repercussions in delegitimising the state as a manager of the economy, even on the Left, thus favouring the victory of neoliberal ideas from the 1980s onwards. Given the significance of trans-European left party and trade-union relations in those years, not only on bilateral but also multilateral bases (within the Socialist International, the CSPEC, the ETUC, the Trade-Union Advisory Committee of the OECD, etc.), it is hard to imagine that transnational discussions on class-party relations did not have an impact on strategy formation at the national, regional and local levels.
Beyond the transnational question, while I found each of the book’s thematic chapters stimulating and convincing, I was missing a more socio-historical, prosopographical history of the main actors of the Left in those years. This applies to almost all the literature on the history of the European Left. How did the sociological evolution of the activists, cadres and leaders of the party – in terms education, career paths, origins, wealth, political trajectories, and so forth – influence their shift away from class politics? Collecting data and starting to answer this question might help the Left draw some conclusions for present-day politics.
Finally, one last aspect could have deserved a chapter in itself: the impact of the party elite’s patent betrayals of their organisation’s working-class-oriented programmes on this story of désamour. While the 1970s can be presented as the golden age of the European labour movement, it is also important to highlight that it was a decade of significant bottom-up leftward radicalisation of European socialism (in France, the UK, even in Germany, etc.). However, left parties in government did not fulfil the radicalised expectations of their rank and file. In the UK, for instance, despite some cosmetic adjustments, Wilson and Callaghan did not implement the radical part of the Party’s programme based on the Labour Left’s Alternative Economic Strategy.
The late 1970s and early 1980s, then, witnessed the demise of Northern social-democratic parties that had adopted moderate, deflationary responses to the post-1974 recession (in Sweden where the first non-socialist government since 1936 was formed in 1976, in UK with Margaret Thatcher’s electoral victory in 1979, in Germany with Helmut Kohl’s victory in 1982), the more radical southern European Socialists in Greece, France, Spain and Portugal, finally came to power. Later, these more radical Socialist parties would also follow a similar path of betrayal of their programmes and constituencies – the French Socialists’ tournant de la rigueur in 1983 under Mitterrand and Delors’s lead being a case in point. How did these betrayals influence the break with their working-class members and supporters?
At a time of alarming advance of fascism all over Europe and the world, including within working-class constituencies, and when the Left is either electorally weak or rallied to the neoliberal centre in most countries, it goes without saying that repairing the relationship between the working class and left organisations is vital. Therefore, this book’s effort to dig into the European Left’s past (and especially into the 1970s–80s) to understand its mistakes and failures is particularly useful. What can this story teach present left-wing activists, thinkers and leaders about how to reorganise a ‘historic bloc’ to march forward?
The short final section of the conclusion, ‘Re-starting Labour’s Forward March’, creates some expectations for the reader. Myers seems optimistic that the post-2008 crisis era could open a new march forward for European labour, but he remains vague on how it might do so. Historians are not working-class organisers – ‘per fortuna o purtroppo’, one might add – and it is perhaps wise that the author did not take position on the best strategy to adopt for the march ahead. How relevant are left party and trade-union organisations in the present-day, fragmented societies? What institutional forms might best sustain a new ‘historic bloc’ capable of resisting capitalist advance today, in its neoliberal or fascist varieties? How can left parties rebuild trust among working-class constituencies that now associate them with neoliberal governance and cultural elitism? Each reader will be able to find their own answers to these most pressing questions in Myers’ book.
References
Andry, Aurélie 2022, Social Europe, the Road Not Taken. The Left and European Integration in the Long 1970s, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Andry, Aurélie and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica forthcoming 2026, ‘How Yugoslav Self-Management Inspired the Ideas and Activism of the Institute for Workers’ Control in Britain, 1960s-1980s’, in Aurélie Andry, Stefan Berger, Sophia Freidel, Frank Georgi (eds.), A Transnational History of Workplace Democracy. Discourses and Practices About the Democratization of Work in Europe and Beyond, from WWII to the Present, London, Palgrave Macmillan.
Georgi, Frank 2018, L’autogestion en Chantier : Les gauches françaises et le “modèle” yougoslave (1948–1981), Nancy, Arbre bleu éditions.
[1] Andry 2022.
[2] Georgi 2018; Andry and Unkovski-Korica 2026.
