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The Forward March of Labour Halted?
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182 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1981
About the author
Eric J. Hobsbawm
200 books1,818 followersEric John Ernest Hobsbawm was a British historian of the rise of industrial capitalism, socialism and nationalism. His best-known works include his tetralogy about what he called the "long 19th century" (The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789–1848, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 and The Age of Empire: 1875–1914) and the "short 20th century" (The Age of Extremes), and an edited volume that introduced the influential idea of "invented traditions". A life-long Marxist, his socio-political convictions influenced the character of his work.
Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and spent his childhood mainly in Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family. After serving in the Second World War, he obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. In 1998, he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour. He was president of Birkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until his death. In 2003, he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900, "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent."
Hobsbawm was born in Alexandria, Egypt, and spent his childhood mainly in Vienna and Berlin. Following the death of his parents and the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, Hobsbawm moved to London with his adoptive family. After serving in the Second World War, he obtained his PhD in history at the University of Cambridge. In 1998, he was appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour. He was president of Birkbeck, University of London, from 2002 until his death. In 2003, he received the Balzan Prize for European History since 1900, "for his brilliant analysis of the troubled history of 20th century Europe and for his ability to combine in-depth historical research with great literary talent."
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 1, 2018
I read through this record of a debate that took place among luminaries in the British labour movement back in the years 1977-81 to get a sense of how the left performed at these crossroad points in history, when it seemed 50:50 that we would either march on toward real socialist progress, or collapse into catastrophic defeat.
The discussion was triggered by a lecture given by the eminent social historian, Eric Hobsbawm, as the Marx Memorial Lecture for 1978. Hobsbawm’s key argument was that the progress made for the working class in Britain from around 1880 to 1950 – the later date marking the foundation years of the welfare state – had been achieved because of a level of self-awareness among working families that their interests were served by both the actions of the trade union movement and the reforms promulgated by a Labour government. This unity between the two wings of the labour movement began to erode by the tail end of Clement Attlee’s post-war government at the point when the party’s politicians and intellectuals seemed to have run out of ideas with regard to where they were taking the country under the terms of the social democratic settlement. The consequence was a lost general election in 1951 and thirteen years of Tory government thereafter.
As political labour floundered in the parliamentary mire, trade union labour continued to make progress in the sense of winning new members and extending workplace organisation into white-collar occupations. But it did not advance beyond the structures that it had inherited from its earlier years, when the working class had presented itself with the homogeneity of the manual trades and their largely male operatives. Workplace organisation had emerged as a multiplicity of different unions organising workers in accordance with their labour as ‘general workers’, boilermakers, metal workers, lathe operators, etc. As a consequence, demarcation disputes, concerning who did what particular jobs, were a constant feature of the industrial scene, sustaining sectional interests rather than those of the entire workforce.
After the second world war the previously uniform appearance of the working class began to break down at a rapid rate. The process was already underway with the entry of women into the workforce in large number in the 1930s and during the war years. Immigration from the colonies and Commonwealth brought issues of race and ethnicity into workforces which proved challenging to trade union traditions. Changes in the technologies of production, away from coal and steam power towards electrical generation also made more progressive workplaces cleaner and less dependent on the sheer muscle-power of its workers. White collar occupations expanded, but in doing so transformed those holding these jobs from the status of a professional elite, and integrating their work into Taylorist, production-line exploitation.
Building and maintaining consciousness of class position amongst these disparate groups was an essentially political task hindered at a crucial point by the Labour Party’s languishing in opposition. The trade union leadership itself appears to have had no sense of the potential for crisis arising from the slowness of its adaption to new circumstances and its style of working continued more-or-less unchanged during these critical years.
Things began to change in the 1960s. Leadership of the Labour Party passed to Harold Wilson who began to project an image which associated the political wing of the movement with modernisation and the benefits that would come from the ‘white heat of the technological revolution.’ Trade union leaders tacked in the direction of this new wind, with the general-secretary of the TGWU, Frank Cousins, briefly service as Wilson’s minister for technology after Labour returned to power in 1964. But at the grassroots level of industrial workplaces, change was slow or non-existent. The 1960s, and even more so in the 1970s when a miner’s strike brought down the Tory government of Edward Heath, provided opportunities for trade unions to flex their industrial muscles and take on governments as well as workplace management, but in retrospect it can be seen as having done little to reconstruct the sense of class solidarity that existed at earlier times. This was the ‘halt’ to for forward march that concerned Hobsbawm, and until the challenge of building a united labour movement out of its diverse components was properly addressed, it would not be restarted.
Hobsbawm’s lecture having been delivered, a remarkable political debate then ensued which brought in prominent trade union leaders and activists, a sprinkling of Labour MPs, plus a few from the intellectual Marxist left. Yet despite the historian’s underscoring of the issue of the diversification of the working class over the period in question, only one woman appears as a respondent to his lecture, and no one at all from a minority ethnic background. The discussion largely hinges on the significance of rank-and-file trade union militancy, showing up under the leadership of nation-wide networks of workplace shop stewards in alliance with left-wingers occupying senior positions in the bureaucracies. This had been driving forward to smash the income side of prices and incomes policies which had been ordained by both Labour and Conservative governments. For some contributors, notably the AUEW official Ken Gill, this wages militancy was itself political and showed that the forward march was still continuing in full vigour.
Others closer to the moods of the shop floor weren’t so sure. Pete Carter, a West Midlands organiser for the UCATT construction trades union, suggested that fighting on wage issues alone left too many questions unanswered about what the future of industry would be under a socialist government. Mike Le Cornu, a shop steward at Heathrow Airport, laments in the fact that even the best strikes led by wage demands still took place “as an exercise of market forces within the framework of capitalism”.
The middle section of the book features a discussion between Hobsbawm and Labour MP Tony Benn, then in the early period of his agitation for a decisive turn to the left on the party of the labour movement. At this point the discussion addresses issues raised in the original lecture, about the long-term decline in membership of the Labour Party, which was interrupted for a brief period in the mid-sixties during Wilson’s push for modernisation. Benn took from this the view that the party’s relationship with the wider electorate was based on the boldness of its political programme. At a time when Labour was uniting around a set of plans for a clear alternative to what was now the Thatcher government, the people who had left in the late 1960s would be returning big time. Hobsbawm pushes on this point: at that moment it was not only Labour that was advocating radical policies, but also the free market zealots that Thatcher had in her cabinet. On the face of it, ‘rolling back the state’ appeared to be a plausible way of solving the long-term problems of stagnation that had beset the UK economy throughout the 1970s. What was it about the socialist programme that would trump this position’. Benn flounders in his response, pleading that it is not possible at this stage to provide concrete answers to concrete problems, and we would have to await Labour’s return to government before these would be provided.
Hilary Wainwright addresses Hobsbawm’s account of the diversification of the working class, particularly from the perspective of its feminisation. For her, this meant that a whole new set of issues came on the agenda, from equal pay and extending to reproductive rights, which the trade unions needed to address. She lauds the examples from within the trade union movement of efforts to ask questions about what industry is for, and how production can be shifted to the production of socially-useful goods rather that things which are intended to add to the profits of the firm. The task of socialists is to support such initiatives as came from the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards committee around these issues and to extend it into other areas of work. The difficulty with this position, as Hobsbawn suggests in his final rejoiner on the discussion, is that this was an answer to questions which were not really being asked by working class people. For them the problem was a crisis of living standards that had come from stalled economy growth. How this could be got going again was the central issue to resolve, and it was the responsibility of the Labour Party, not shop stewards committees, to win support for that.
In my view Robin Blackburn comes closest to understanding the dilemma caused by halted progress. The disappointments with socialist experiments extended beyond Labour’s record in government and took in the failures of the statist regimes of the east. Throughout the 20th century a tradition of western Marxism had maintained a narrative explaining why these aberrant versions of socialism were failing to meet the hopes inspired by the movement in the 19th century, and this meant there was a need to elaborate ‘with more precision and imagination’ what was possible on the lifting of the impediments which capitalism imposed on society.
This seems to me just about right. It does not preclude active participation in the day-to-day struggles which working people must necessarily fight if they are to survive, but it challenges the idea that these alone will shift the balance of social forces in favour of socialism. This was a point made when it was just about still possible to believe that a working class reaction to Thatcherism was still possible and the country pushed further in the direction of renewed socialism as a consequence. But the horrendous defeat at the general election of 1983, which saw even one-third of trade unionists voting for the right-wing, free market party, put pay to the idea that socialism would spontaneously present itself as the answer to the questions being asked by working class people.
The lessons to learn from this debate for today is that all forms of advance are conditional on favourable conditions, and when these cease to exist, progress itself can be rolled backwards. Nothing can be taken for granted about the conjunctures that periodically produce popular outburst that favour radical change, and every contingency about the prospects for reverse has to be considered by those collaborating in the socialist movement. From today’s perspective, whilst there is much hope to be got from the resurgence of Corbyn-style populist socialism, the real job is to convert sentiment into tough-minded determination to win all the battles and the arguments that are needed to get the forward march moving again.
The discussion was triggered by a lecture given by the eminent social historian, Eric Hobsbawm, as the Marx Memorial Lecture for 1978. Hobsbawm’s key argument was that the progress made for the working class in Britain from around 1880 to 1950 – the later date marking the foundation years of the welfare state – had been achieved because of a level of self-awareness among working families that their interests were served by both the actions of the trade union movement and the reforms promulgated by a Labour government. This unity between the two wings of the labour movement began to erode by the tail end of Clement Attlee’s post-war government at the point when the party’s politicians and intellectuals seemed to have run out of ideas with regard to where they were taking the country under the terms of the social democratic settlement. The consequence was a lost general election in 1951 and thirteen years of Tory government thereafter.
As political labour floundered in the parliamentary mire, trade union labour continued to make progress in the sense of winning new members and extending workplace organisation into white-collar occupations. But it did not advance beyond the structures that it had inherited from its earlier years, when the working class had presented itself with the homogeneity of the manual trades and their largely male operatives. Workplace organisation had emerged as a multiplicity of different unions organising workers in accordance with their labour as ‘general workers’, boilermakers, metal workers, lathe operators, etc. As a consequence, demarcation disputes, concerning who did what particular jobs, were a constant feature of the industrial scene, sustaining sectional interests rather than those of the entire workforce.
After the second world war the previously uniform appearance of the working class began to break down at a rapid rate. The process was already underway with the entry of women into the workforce in large number in the 1930s and during the war years. Immigration from the colonies and Commonwealth brought issues of race and ethnicity into workforces which proved challenging to trade union traditions. Changes in the technologies of production, away from coal and steam power towards electrical generation also made more progressive workplaces cleaner and less dependent on the sheer muscle-power of its workers. White collar occupations expanded, but in doing so transformed those holding these jobs from the status of a professional elite, and integrating their work into Taylorist, production-line exploitation.
Building and maintaining consciousness of class position amongst these disparate groups was an essentially political task hindered at a crucial point by the Labour Party’s languishing in opposition. The trade union leadership itself appears to have had no sense of the potential for crisis arising from the slowness of its adaption to new circumstances and its style of working continued more-or-less unchanged during these critical years.
Things began to change in the 1960s. Leadership of the Labour Party passed to Harold Wilson who began to project an image which associated the political wing of the movement with modernisation and the benefits that would come from the ‘white heat of the technological revolution.’ Trade union leaders tacked in the direction of this new wind, with the general-secretary of the TGWU, Frank Cousins, briefly service as Wilson’s minister for technology after Labour returned to power in 1964. But at the grassroots level of industrial workplaces, change was slow or non-existent. The 1960s, and even more so in the 1970s when a miner’s strike brought down the Tory government of Edward Heath, provided opportunities for trade unions to flex their industrial muscles and take on governments as well as workplace management, but in retrospect it can be seen as having done little to reconstruct the sense of class solidarity that existed at earlier times. This was the ‘halt’ to for forward march that concerned Hobsbawm, and until the challenge of building a united labour movement out of its diverse components was properly addressed, it would not be restarted.
Hobsbawm’s lecture having been delivered, a remarkable political debate then ensued which brought in prominent trade union leaders and activists, a sprinkling of Labour MPs, plus a few from the intellectual Marxist left. Yet despite the historian’s underscoring of the issue of the diversification of the working class over the period in question, only one woman appears as a respondent to his lecture, and no one at all from a minority ethnic background. The discussion largely hinges on the significance of rank-and-file trade union militancy, showing up under the leadership of nation-wide networks of workplace shop stewards in alliance with left-wingers occupying senior positions in the bureaucracies. This had been driving forward to smash the income side of prices and incomes policies which had been ordained by both Labour and Conservative governments. For some contributors, notably the AUEW official Ken Gill, this wages militancy was itself political and showed that the forward march was still continuing in full vigour.
Others closer to the moods of the shop floor weren’t so sure. Pete Carter, a West Midlands organiser for the UCATT construction trades union, suggested that fighting on wage issues alone left too many questions unanswered about what the future of industry would be under a socialist government. Mike Le Cornu, a shop steward at Heathrow Airport, laments in the fact that even the best strikes led by wage demands still took place “as an exercise of market forces within the framework of capitalism”.
The middle section of the book features a discussion between Hobsbawm and Labour MP Tony Benn, then in the early period of his agitation for a decisive turn to the left on the party of the labour movement. At this point the discussion addresses issues raised in the original lecture, about the long-term decline in membership of the Labour Party, which was interrupted for a brief period in the mid-sixties during Wilson’s push for modernisation. Benn took from this the view that the party’s relationship with the wider electorate was based on the boldness of its political programme. At a time when Labour was uniting around a set of plans for a clear alternative to what was now the Thatcher government, the people who had left in the late 1960s would be returning big time. Hobsbawm pushes on this point: at that moment it was not only Labour that was advocating radical policies, but also the free market zealots that Thatcher had in her cabinet. On the face of it, ‘rolling back the state’ appeared to be a plausible way of solving the long-term problems of stagnation that had beset the UK economy throughout the 1970s. What was it about the socialist programme that would trump this position’. Benn flounders in his response, pleading that it is not possible at this stage to provide concrete answers to concrete problems, and we would have to await Labour’s return to government before these would be provided.
Hilary Wainwright addresses Hobsbawm’s account of the diversification of the working class, particularly from the perspective of its feminisation. For her, this meant that a whole new set of issues came on the agenda, from equal pay and extending to reproductive rights, which the trade unions needed to address. She lauds the examples from within the trade union movement of efforts to ask questions about what industry is for, and how production can be shifted to the production of socially-useful goods rather that things which are intended to add to the profits of the firm. The task of socialists is to support such initiatives as came from the Lucas Aerospace shop stewards committee around these issues and to extend it into other areas of work. The difficulty with this position, as Hobsbawn suggests in his final rejoiner on the discussion, is that this was an answer to questions which were not really being asked by working class people. For them the problem was a crisis of living standards that had come from stalled economy growth. How this could be got going again was the central issue to resolve, and it was the responsibility of the Labour Party, not shop stewards committees, to win support for that.
In my view Robin Blackburn comes closest to understanding the dilemma caused by halted progress. The disappointments with socialist experiments extended beyond Labour’s record in government and took in the failures of the statist regimes of the east. Throughout the 20th century a tradition of western Marxism had maintained a narrative explaining why these aberrant versions of socialism were failing to meet the hopes inspired by the movement in the 19th century, and this meant there was a need to elaborate ‘with more precision and imagination’ what was possible on the lifting of the impediments which capitalism imposed on society.
This seems to me just about right. It does not preclude active participation in the day-to-day struggles which working people must necessarily fight if they are to survive, but it challenges the idea that these alone will shift the balance of social forces in favour of socialism. This was a point made when it was just about still possible to believe that a working class reaction to Thatcherism was still possible and the country pushed further in the direction of renewed socialism as a consequence. But the horrendous defeat at the general election of 1983, which saw even one-third of trade unionists voting for the right-wing, free market party, put pay to the idea that socialism would spontaneously present itself as the answer to the questions being asked by working class people.
The lessons to learn from this debate for today is that all forms of advance are conditional on favourable conditions, and when these cease to exist, progress itself can be rolled backwards. Nothing can be taken for granted about the conjunctures that periodically produce popular outburst that favour radical change, and every contingency about the prospects for reverse has to be considered by those collaborating in the socialist movement. From today’s perspective, whilst there is much hope to be got from the resurgence of Corbyn-style populist socialism, the real job is to convert sentiment into tough-minded determination to win all the battles and the arguments that are needed to get the forward march moving again.
March 30, 2024
Quite a depressing read, insofar as it feels the debate and the quality of it has hardly moved far since the time. But a useful insight into the kinds of debate which were being had on the left at the end of the 1970s.
Quite often contributions obsessed on particularly empirical aspects of Hobsbawm's provocation, meaning the actual interesting question 'how has class composition changed in Britain?' was missed to focus on debates about 'sectionalism'.
Some of the contributions from the lads (Wainwright is the only female contribution) are hilarious in retrospect - Robin Blackburn in particular begins bigging up the successes of the left in the early 80s.
Quite often contributions obsessed on particularly empirical aspects of Hobsbawm's provocation, meaning the actual interesting question 'how has class composition changed in Britain?' was missed to focus on debates about 'sectionalism'.
Some of the contributions from the lads (Wainwright is the only female contribution) are hilarious in retrospect - Robin Blackburn in particular begins bigging up the successes of the left in the early 80s.
February 17, 2024
Bit of a mixed bag but interesting on debates surrounding militancy
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews