The Halted March of the European Left concentrates on roughly the period 1975–85. The central theses of this ambitious book are twofold. On the one hand, the 1970s, a decade often seen as ushering in the terminal decline of the European Left, should instead be regarded as a period of almost unprecedented popularity and influence for the European Left. The second thesis is that the subsequent decline of the Left, seen as beginning at the very end of the 1970s and/or during the first years of the 1980s, was only secondarily the consequence of structural changes in the European economy, and must be attributed to decisions taken by the leadership of the key battalions of the Western European Old Left: the Communist and social-democratic parties.
As anyone familiar with the output of actually existing scholarship on this period will immediately recognise, these two theses frontally contradict received wisdom. Most observers highlight objective alterations of European society – deindustrialisation, growing consumer cultures, individualisation, and so forth – as chiefly responsible for the decline of working-class cultures and the concomitant organisations of the European Left. Given these profound transformations of the underpinnings of social and economic life, any form of collectivism and blue-collar politics and culture had outlived its usefulness and was undergoing a rather rapid disappearance act. It is to the great merit of Matt Myers that such a view of the post-1968 decades is frontally attacked and, better yet, that alternative explanations are given prominent exposure. 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.
Myers, first of all, points out that, precisely during the 1970s, the European Left reached, in some respects, the pinnacle of its historic achievements. Trade union membership ‘reached its apex in both Europe and Britain only in 1980 at 43.6 million and 11.6 million (54 per cent density) respectively’ (p. 16), and similar success stories characterised social-democratic and Communist parties. ‘Never had so many European political parties formally committed to representing the working class been in power simultaneously across the continent’ (p. 2). Meaningful reforms were proposed and often enough passed in this era of great hopes. The French Left felt optimistic in the wake of the programme commun; a breath of fresh air was introduced into conservative West Germany, symbolised by Willy Brandt’s key message: ‘Mehr Demokratie wagen’; and the wave of local and regional election victories by the PCI appeared to harbour seemingly boundless possibilities for Italian progressive politics. ‘Those who lived from selling their labour for a wage enjoyed relative levels of economic security, organisation, and renumeration which had few if any precedents in history’ (p. 14).
Nonetheless, from the late 1970s onwards, these trends went into an all-encompassing reverse. Electoral losses multiplied for the European Left, which now began a process of seemingly never-ending decline. Trade unions began to lose their grip on labour relations, and important class battles were lost in almost all national contexts. Employers and their allies in governments and administrations began a concerted counteroffensive which rapidly emerged victoriously. By the mid-1980s, at the latest, the tide had turned, and the game was over for the European Left. Myers underscores that all this happened before the widespread acceptance of neoliberalism as the new ideological miracle cure, the latter in hindsight often held accountable for the resounding victories of non-emancipatory options in European societies.
What happened first?
The forward march of the European Left throughout much of the 1970s, Myers is quite right to highlight, built on the unexpected and unprecedented wave of worker militancy in the years between 1968–72. Many of the associated processes and actions setting the stage for the conquests of the 1970s were, in fact, Myers rightfully contends, products of rank-and-file militancy rather than consciously willed decisions propelled by established trade-union federations or the large parties of the European Left, although unions and old-left parties were initially often quite adept at accommodating to these changing contours of class relations in the wake of ‘1968’. For the most part, throughout the 1970s, social democrats and western-European Communists continued to adhere to optimistic visions of the centrality and actuality of a socialist perspective for their societies. The concept of the working class as the harbinger of a ‘new society’ was still regularly invoked and, for some time, everything else being equal, the Old Left was still regarded as an ally of the emancipatory impulses prominent in the 1970s.
Myers has no problem in recognising the structural changes affecting European societies, notably the effect of the very real beginnings of deindustrialisation with the concomitant ascent of white-collar employment, often at the expense of their blue-collar cohort. And Myers is acutely aware of the possible impact of this sea change for the ideological outlook of wide swathes of European society. Proponents of the thesis of qualitative structural changes accounting for the decline of the European Left consistently point to the associated value changes amongst the newly expanding white-collar component of society. Greater individualism and an orientation towards consumption as the ultimate meaning of life is often invoked as one effect of the switch from blue-collar to white-collar employment. But, Myers asks, was this really the case?
One of the beauties of this volume is his detailed assembly of data which suggests that this view may have been accurate for the subsequent decade, but does not fit the realities of the 1970s. Myers argues, and he is quite right in doing so, that the radical movements persisting throughout much of this turbulent decade, in fact, ‘found their motor force in the most dynamic sectors of Europe’s new working class and were conscious of themselves as such’ (208). For much of the 1970s, ‘the major left parties expanded their male, white, and manual base to new sectors of the working class’. ‘The left’s culture continued to attract non-traditional sectors of the working class’. ‘Class-based discourses were in fact at the height of their prestige during this decade. Only after a series of conflicts did the plausibility of the left’s political culture begin to recede’ (All citations from different sections of Myers’s text on p. 177). It is testimony to the radiance of the militant working-class perspective outside of the traditional blue-collar milieu that many of the flagship strikes of that period were mobilising immigrant workers – in the case of Italy, internal migrants from the Mezzogiorno.
A related argument of the proponents of the structural change thesis accounting for the Left’s terminal decline is the reference to the rising tide of identity politics and new social movements focusing on issues other than social class in the years subsequent to 1968. Race, gender and other non-traditional categories began to increasingly matter in the social and cultural battles of those years, at the expense of traditional working-class concerns. Here, again, the facts, figures, and arguments presented in Myers’s rebuttal are priceless. Two citations from the book may get the point across in an elegant manner: ‘The emergence of environmentalist, feminist and LGBT movements in fact co-existed with strengthened class voting, class-based mobilisation, and rising living standards. Many of those involved considered that individual freedom and collective emancipation were compatible. Class appears to have provided activists during the 1970s with an inclusive concept to imagine collective subjectivity which could amalgamate diverse groups’ (p. 18). In short, the traditional blue-collar working-class base of the European Left expanded to include ‘a diverse new generation of empowered and optimistic workers’ (p. 29). White-collar employees, often academically trained, joined radicalised intellectuals and blue-collar workers in a common front together with ethnic and other minority populations.
In the mid-1970s, for instance, Black intellectuals like the influential Ambalavaner Sivanandan expressed his hope, to cite Myers once again, ‘for an ‘organic fusion of forces’ where black people ‘arrive at consciousness of class’ via ‘consciousness of their color’ and the white working class ‘arrive at a consciousness of racial oppression’ through ‘recovering its class instinct’ (p. 180). A final lengthy quotation on the innovations of the 1970s:
In contrast to narratives arguing for the inevitable decline of class politics at the expense of cultural contestation, the new forms of self-organisation by first and ‘second-generation’ immigrants, young people, and women within and outside the workers’ movement provoked activists and intellectuals to question the left’s [traditional, blue-collar oriented] political culture. Their emergence demonstrates that class politics was undergoing reformulation, rather than disappearance, under the pressure of the windfall of wage-earners born at the height of the postwar boom. Many black, young, and female workers still saw the labour and socialist movement as a means to realise the promise of liberation. (p. 209)
What happened later?
Nonetheless, in the end, after a number of years in which there was a serious attempt to reconfigure the outlook and perspective of the European Left, the winds changed direction. Identity politics became increasingly disconnected from class positions. The initial impetus to construct a ‘rainbow coalition’ under the auspices of the Left began to seriously weaken and, certainly by the 1980s, the Left’s political projects rapidly lost their lustre as diversity turned into disintegration. But Myers’s book likewise opens new perspectives on the reasons and processes behind the end of this cycle of progressive mobilisation which helped shape the 1970s into a decade of unprecedented hope and expectations. Myers argues convincingly that it was not the structural changes repeatedly evoked above, nor the subsequent (not coterminous) instances of hegemony of neoliberalism in academia and society, which turned the tide. There were more ‘subjective’, more ‘human’ factors at play.
As was only to be expected, after being taken by surprise by the upsurge of radical emancipatory working-class movements in the period 1968–72, the traditional holders of economic and political power had begun to regroup. But Myers suggests that their measures were initially quite limited and relatively mild. The author identifies three particular instances – one in each of ‘his’ countries – of specific class struggles, where innovative anti-strike strategies were first tested and then applied on a much larger scale, once their effectiveness had been proven. In all three cases, Grunwick in Britain, Citroën and Talbot in France, and FIAT in Italy’s Motor City, Turin, leading agents representing the side of ‘capital’ invented, sometimes against the grain of other representatives of the employing classes and/or conservative political parties in or out of government, explicitly combative tactics, up to then shunned by moderates.
Such unseen tactics eventually, after protracted struggles, proved victorious and helped to convince hitherto moderate mainstream majority opinion in government and employers’ associations to go for blood. ‘Charismatic small-time entrepreneurs, white-collar managers, and former army officers became leaders of effective anti-strike movements by appealing to anti-collectivism’ (p. 143). And they helped propel to fame spokespersons for a decidedly more militant course of confrontation in upcoming years. The Grunwick strike ‘allowed Thatcher and her supporters to test their project for the first time against a social democratic government’ (p. 129), which was then still hesitant to embrace tactics openly hostile to the striking workers. The key protagonists of an anti-union course of action in the 1980 FIAT strike, ‘FIAT’s middle class became the ideal subject for berlusconismo. Silvio Berlusconi’s Canale 5 had been launched during the strike’ (p. 142).
Yet, as much as anti-union mobilisations with few holds barred were necessary elements to stave off further victories of the spirit of rebellion in the rapidly expanding zone of influence of Europe’s revitalised Left, more was needed to make such initiatives sufficient to snuff out grassroots revolts. This is where the ultimate trump card of Myers’ revision of the history of the period 1975–85 emerges in full bloom. For, when push came to shove, European social democracy and Communist parties, for practical purposes, opted to support the side of moderation in the crucial contestations of those years, asking their working-class constituency ‘to sacrifice their immediate material interests, exercise responsibility, and limit expectations of further expansions in their rights and powers’ (p. 54–5). As if coordinated from above, ‘Communist, socialist, and social democratic parties helped disempower the new components of the working class at the point of production, in society, and in party structures, and successfully disciplined their traditional working-class supporters’ (p. 3). And this flagrant ‘active participation of the major parties of the left in undermining the preconditions sustaining their growth sapped their credibility as alternatives to a nascent neoliberalism’ (p. 22).
Hannah Arendt once drew attention to the dialectics of popular participation and the level of responsiveness to such acts of grassroots democracy by political elites. She drew attention to the ‘enormous appetite for debate, for instruction, for mutual enlightenment and exchange of opinion’ on the part of the revolutionary societies and clubs in the French Revolution as long as they were being listened to by the Jacobin government; but ‘when, by fiat from above, the people in the sections were made only to listen to party speeches and to obey, they simply ceased to show up’.[1] Similarly, when, by the early 1980s, Communist and socialist parties told their supporters to shut up and tighten their belt, a constantly growing number of voters no longer felt compelled to cast their ballot for the purveyors of austerity politics, even if cast in leftist garb.
Smoking guns
Myers draws attention to a seemingly limitless number of inflammatory statements by leading social-democratic and Communist politicians and power holders, who minced few words, even and especially in public statements, in their appeal to return to the status quo ante 1968. Senior management officials in the Greater Paris automotive factories, in this case in Aulnay, loudly complained about an unholy alliance by the CGT and maghrébin workers, who ‘systematically contest the decisions of the management. No Moroccan obeys an order unless he is given it by a shop steward’ (p. 134). The French Socialist Party’s Jean Auroux, Minister of Labour in François Mitterrand’s Union of the Left government chimed the same tune and openly played the race and anti-Muslim card in February 1983, during yet another instance of radical working-class revolts, the latter once again largely animated by immigrant workers: ‘Immigrants are the guests of France and as such have a double duty: playing the game of the company and that of the nation’ (p. 157).
Leading Western-European Communists did not hold back either, with – for instance – a posse of ‘fifty PCF members, sympathizers, and local government officials’ with the aid of a bulldozer forcibly evicting 318 Malian residents of a workers’ hostel in Vitry on the outskirts of Paris in December 1980. (p. 182) On the sunny side of the Alps, it was Giorgio Amendola, the éminence grise of the Italian Communist Party, who repeatedly expressed his disdain for rank-and-file radicalism on Italy’s factory floors, as in this missive in the PCI’s flagship magazine, Rinascita: ‘Who can deny that there is a direct relationship between factory violence and terrorism?’ (p. 166). Amendola, already in 1977, in the middle of the most significant youth revolt since 1968, at the occasion of a debate in the PCI’s Central Committee, repeatedly and explicitly drew a parallel between the actions of Italy’s autonomists and the Far Left, on the one hand, and the militant activists of Italy’s hardline fascist Republic of Salò, on the other, reminiscing, in all seriousness, about the mid-1940s that ‘we respected them for their courage, but we still had to shoot them’ (p. 192).
Such words of wisdom did not go unopposed within the ranks of the PCI. During the Central Committee discussion, notably the ex-partisan and an opponent of the imminent course towards moderation, Giancarlo Pajetta, repeatedly interrupted Amendola and shouted incredulously at Amendola’s comparison between hardline fascists and the Far left: ‘What comparisons are you making?’ The PCI’s frontal rejection of the Movement of 1977 became the moment when the PCI definitely separated its fate and fortune from the contentious and raucous evolution of social movements in the Italian peninsula. The 1980 defeat of working-class emancipatory desires at Turin’s flagship FIAT automotive complex then signed and sealed the PCI’s ‘Adieu au prolétariat!’. Although the PCI had guardedly (and sometimes openly) supported this most significant strike during the period 1975–85, which determined Italian class relations for years to come, the PCI all too often, notably in the aftermath of this defeat, showcased its penchant for compromise.
On 15 October 1980, Italy’s main trade-union leaders met with FIAT’s works council for a discussion of the disastrous deal. One shop-floor delegate, Giovanni Falcone, perhaps put it best. Matt Myers reproduces part of his speech, sometimes paraphrasing him:
The ‘surgical operation’ Fiat had conducted had removed him, along with all those it ‘couldn’t dominate and exploit one hundred percent’. Gone were ‘the disabled, who for physical reasons can’t keep the pace that the company will set tomorrow’‘, and ‘the women in the factory, with their lives that do not fit the timetables of intensive production’. Gone were those like himself; ‘the minority that can always be counted on … the workers who led the struggles, the delegate on the factory council who never accepted the productivist logic of the padrone’. ‘Think about it. I was an immigrant coming up from the countryside like so many others. I did not 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?’ When the chairman of the meeting asked Falcone to finish, Falcone responded: ‘Don’t worry, comrade, but I think I also have the right – after twelve years and now with them throwing me out – at least to let me talk just a little more [applause] because I believe [applause] that 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 have been part of, even if the padrone doesn’t take me back. (p. 170–1)
Conclusion
For a pathbreaking study opening new terrain, this book is brilliant, especially if one realises that this is the author’s very first academic book. Inevitably, there are some weak spots, which I wish to just briefly address. Myers is excellent at pointing out that, as long as the dynamic went in the direction of at least the potential for radical change, the new sections of this ‘new’ working class flocked to strengthen the ranks of combative trade unions and political parties. But, when addressing the prominent role of academically trained white-collar workers and intellectuals, who, in the 1980s, did often become spokespersons for more moderate positions, notably within leadership positions of Communist or socialist parties, Myers’ argument does come across at times as a bit too schematic. This reader is not convinced that a greater proportion of bona fide blue-collar workers in the upper levels of party leadership structures would have made a significant difference.
More importantly, the author focuses for good reasons almost exclusively on political parties of the Old Left. Trade unions, especially their leaderships, are rarely given prominent exposure. But trade-union leaders, though usually less hostile to rank-and-file initiatives on the factory floor, were at least somewhat co-responsible for the evolution of the outlook of the European left in this red decade of 1975–85. Another major player in this conjuncture within European history, especially within the frequent radical social struggles and movements at that time, the Far Left, likewise makes little more than a cameo appearance in the pages of this book. But some of the more dynamic sections of the European Far Left played rather important roles in the contestations during this period. The author, having covered already a very wide terrain, could not have extended his range of vision to these other political forces to the same extent as he does with the Old Left. But at least a solid set of paragraphs or a subchapter on the role of these groupings could and should have been included somewhere in his text.
Last but not least, a comment on the lack of serious analysis of the precise ‘socialist perspective’ of the Old Left in the glory days of the 1970s. The relative sudden turnabout towards moderation from the late 1970s onwards does come as a bit of a surprise if one takes the ‘socialist perspective’ vaunted by the Old Left up to then, and their supposed commitment to the ‘working class’ as their core constituency, at face value. Perhaps a short section on the actual meanings of such ideological foundation blocks in the decades prior to the period covered in this volume would have helped to prepare the reader for the ease with which such fundamentals were jettisoned when the going got tough.
References
Arendt, Hannah 1963, On Revolution, London: Penguin
[1] Arendt 1963, p. 246.
