In his famous 1978 Marx Memorial lecture ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, Eric Hobsbawm painted a bleak picture of the state of the British labour movement, whose apogee, he claimed, lay thirty years in the past. Increasingly divided along ethnic and occupational lines, and faced with the erosion of working-class collective consciousness and culture, the labour movement for Hobsbawm seemed destined for fragmentation and decline. Matt Myers’s The Halted March of the European Left (2025) seeks to overcome this narrative of the working class’s inevitable retreat by tracing the struggles of the labour movements of Britain, France, and Italy in the 1970s. Against interpretations that see the decline of the European Left as an ineluctable consequence of ‘neoliberal’ economic transformations such as globalisation and deindustrialisation, or cultural changes among European workers, Myers argues that the decline of labour was far from inevitable. In fact, he claims that the 1970s should be seen as a kind of apogee of the Left, with workers’ parties and unions mounting full-scale assaults against capitalist classes and states bent on undermining the postwar achievements of the working class. The decline of the West European Left and the victory of neoliberalism derived from the failure of existing labour institutions to adapt viable strategies adequate to a transformed social and economic context, ultimately steering them toward ‘third way’ social capitalism rather than reconfigured politics of class struggle. Drawing on materials from 27 archives, Myers’s account of the turbulent 1970s offers an important new account of an embattled labour movement whose decline in Western Europe was neither automatic nor uncontested. 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.
Read the texts of the Symposium by clicking on the links
Gerd-Rainer Horn, ‘The Legacy of the 1970s’
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/the-legacy-of-the-1970s/
John Kelly, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/the-forward-march-of-labour-halted/
Aurélie Dianara Andry, ‘“I Must Confess I Still Believe”: On Matt Myers’s The Halted March of the European Left’
Nathan Crompton, ‘Labour and the European Left in the 1970s: Revolutionary Momentum and Halted Prospects – The View from France’
Matt Myers, ‘Rejoinder’
https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/rejoinder/
Contributors:
Gerd-Rainer Horn is Emeritus Professor of Twentieth-Century Political History at Sciences Po, Paris. His research interests include: social movements in Western Europe, transnational history of Western Europe, progressive Catholicism, and the ‘Long Sixties’. Most recent monograph: The Moment of Liberation in Western Europe: Power Struggles and Rebellions, 1943-1948.
John Kelly is an Emeritus Professor of Industrial Relations at Birkbeck College, University of London. His research interests include trade unions, industrial conflict, labour movements, and the political Far Left. His books include: The Twilight of World Trotskyism (2022), Comparative Employment Relations in the Global Economy (2nd ed., 2020, with Carola Frege), Contemporary Trotskyism (2018), Rethinking Industrial Relations: Mobilization, Collectivism and Long Waves (1998) and Trade Unions and Socialist Politics (1988).
Aurélie Dianara Andry is a historian of Modern Europe, a member of the editorial board of Contretemps and a researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History at NOVA University Lisbon. She is the author of Social Europe, the Road not Taken: The Left and European Integration in the Long 1970s (OUP, 2022).
Nathan Crompton (he/him) is a writer and community organiser based in Vancouver, Canada, where he edits the Mainlander and works for Our Homes Can’t Wait (OHCW) and the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU). He recently completed a PhD in French history at Simon Fraser University, with a focus on France in the 1970s and the movement for autogestion (‘self-management’). Nathan will commence a Shadbolt Fellowship at Simon Fraser University in 2027.
Matt Myers teaches modern history at the University of Oxford. He is the author of The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989 (Oxford University Press, 2025).
