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Matt Myers, "The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968-1989" (Oxford UP, 2025)
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Dr. Matt Myers
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- [02:05]
Dr. Matt Myers
Thank you very much for having me.
- [02:07]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Before we start talking about the book, can you just very briefly introduce yourself, tell us about your expertise and your research background and more importantly, how the idea of this book came to you.
- [02:19]
Dr. Matt Myers
So this book has been long in gestation. It was a product of many years of research, primarily in my doctoral thesis, but also before and after. And I was interested in certain narratives of European and Western history more generally at the end of the 20th century. And I was drawn to perhaps from a historiographical interest, but also a wider interest and experience to the 1970s as a hinged decade. In many of the narratives of the 20th century, I was reading about during my studies, I was not wholly convinced that that decade was conceived in the way that I thought would be justified, given its importance. There were a number of different narratives, but the main two that I sensed might require some more further reflection were the idea that deindustrialization and a cultural revolution of sorts somewhere in the mid 20th century totally overwhelmed certain kinds of political culture, certain kinds of political institutions, certain ways of organizing society and mass subjectivity. And the 1970s seemed to me to be quite an odd decade because many of the forces which had been predicted by those two big processes, on the one hand, the industrialization resulting in the end of the so called classical working class, and the emergence in the 1960s of a kind of post material identitarian politics of the individual, of Gulenti, authoritarian politics which fragmented the culture of an old working class, with the left being certainly in Europe, the victim didn't for me, or it didn't seem to me after I went to the archives in my research, fully encapsulate what was going on in that decade. It seemed that the 1970s was glossed over or was unnecessarily or unnecessarily underestimated as a period with its own and a decade with its own dynamics that needed to be understood. So. So my entry into the history of the left, the history of labor and the history of the 1970s came through the wider narratives that we tell about European history more generally, and particularly the idea that a certain kind of political culture associated with left, associated with industrial politics, was inevitably and inexorably overcome by forces outside of its control. I wanted to bring subjectivity back into that experience because the people I was reading about in the archives I consulted consulted about 27 in three or more countries, spending a lot of time reading resources archives, meeting minutes, police records, many of which had not been previously been consulted or had been overlooked. What I was finding is a very dynamic culture, a very exciting culture, one that's highly contested and the subjectivity is important, and that these objective forces that I've been reading about in the big general histories didn't have automatic effects in the 1970s, but actually have been quite contradictory readings. And what I came to the conclusion during the research was that the 1970s seemed far more open than previously thought by historians like Eric Hobshorn, perhaps, or Tony Jutt, whose chapter on the 70s in his book, whose section is entitled Diminished Expectations. But the people I was looking at, certainly the rank and file members of the trade union movements, even the leadership of the communist parties and Socialist parties in Europe didn't think it in those terms. In fact, they saw it as quite a hope inducing decade. And many of those who were contesting the rise and expansion of the workers movement and the left which was on the advance in that decade, were the ones who were more gloomy in their expectations. So I wanted to understand when that process came to a head, when that process started to turn for me, I was drawn to the late 70s, early 80s.
- [07:17]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And I absolutely found the content quite interesting to myself. And it sort of answered a lot of questions I had because I was also, I guess, under the impression that there were forces of market that kind of caused the weakening of the left. We'll get to talk about some of these in your book. You also make a reference to Eric Hobsbawm's famous theory of the decline of the European Left that he put that idea forward in 1978 in a lecture. I think the title of the lecture was the Forward March of Labor Halted. Can I just very briefly tell us what was his assessment? What did he attribute to the decline of the European Left in that lecture?
- [07:59]
Dr. Matt Myers
It was a very interesting lecture and very influential. Almost immediately after it was published in the Communist Party of Great Britain, which was of course his party, the party he'd been a member of for many years. In their journal Marxism Today, he addresses a group of communists in Marx Memorial Library, or what is now Marx Memorial Library on a topic to mark an anniversary of to Marx's influence are in Britain, who then published under the title the Forward March of Labor Halted question mark by its editor, the editor. And he essentially argues in this that a long period of advance of specifically the British labor movement, that he associates both the political and economic wings of that movement, the trade unions cognitives and the political movement in orbit, the Labour Party had essentially halted its momentum after the 1950s. And that momentum had faltered largely due to structural changes, so deindustrialization being one, but also due to internal revisions that he traced to things like corporatism. Sectionalism was the term that he. And also there's an element in that essay and lecture where he sees divisions as being far more important now than there were the idea of agglomeration, the idea of unity or increasing unity was something that was more fleeting after the mid-1950s. And he uses certain kinds of evidence to make his claim, like the peak in the labor vote in the 1950s and 1940s, early 1950s Working class participation and working from the unity of the trade union movement. And indeed he does link this into a certain degree to new entrants into the working class, indeed the remaking of the balance between manual white collar labor and entering women into the workforce. And he expands on these narratives in his Age of Extremes, his classic magisterial work of basically the 20th century. And he has these two sections of the Social Revolution and the Cultural Revolution. And in both these sections he draws out the implications of this, his argument in the lecture in which women's entry into the workforce or the industrialization leading to the overcoming or disempowerment behind the back of the working class had been a process that emerges somewhere in the mid 20th century, and it inexorably works out its impacts over the subsequent decades. What I felt when I went into the archives was that some of the idea that new forces inside the working class or changes to the working class had undermined its unity or undermined its dynamism, undermined its capacity to agglomerate forces, didn't seem to be to encapsulate the force which new entrance into the working class at its margins had been, had been able to achieve. On the one hand, at the lower margins of the working class, migrants and immigrant workers and women workers in particular, and young workers, also had been giving new dynamism to the working class in the early 1970s. They're the ones who had been joining trade unions and certainly or engaging in major strike ways, often and against, but sometimes and increasingly within the trade union structures. And they'd been calling out silences or issues within the old working class model, raising new demands, challenging old cultures. And this was a contradictory and difficult process, but one that many people saw as quite hopeful or a means to renew or to expand the reach of the workers movement into previously excluded categories outside the usual suspects associated with the classical working class, but then the other side of the movement, the other margin with the white collar workers. They seemed to me that in the debates of the 1960s and 1970s, the increasing numbers of white collar workers in managerial, scientific and public sector service or client orientated jobs had also expanded the reach of socialist politics, of trade unionism and the wider ideas of the left. So at both margins the working class seems to be expanding rather than contracting in the 1970s, as perceived by those deeply involved in, in the movement. And these narratives that become very influential, which Hulsthorn is articulating from the late 70s, in a kind of abrupt break I trace, seemed to be a retrospective or increasingly retrospective analysis of what happened in the 1970s. And the idea that the working class had been constricted in this, in the period up to it was. In fact, it seemed as if the opposite had been occurring. This doesn't mean that this period is also very complex and contradictory and there are multiple different processes going on. But what I wanted to try to get at was that Osborne's lecture was an intervention in a contested terrain in which lots of different people had very different expectations about what was, what was happening around them. And to take that contested terrain seriously allows, I think, a fuller picture of the 1970s and its stakes.
- [14:32]
Moteza Hajizadeh
So in a way, you do not agree that the weakening of the Left was due to factors such as deindustrialization, culture shift, and more importantly, maybe the rise of identity politics, because that's something, I guess, that the left is plagued with even still nowadays. Up when people want to talk about why the left is not as powerful as it used to be, they come up with the idea of identity politics. You're more than aware, I guess, about this whole topic. So these are not really the major, let's say, factors that weaken the left, am I right?
- [15:08]
Dr. Matt Myers
Well, I certainly would say that the idea that deindustrialization, and you could also see other structural factors or developments, international and global economy, global slowdowns, and often mid-1960s. These explanations, I don't think, quite encapsulated the political stakes as perceived by actors. Well into the late 70s, early 1980s, the deindustrialization in Europe had been occurring modern 1950s, certainly in Britain and Belgium, then in France and in Italy. You have it really beginning from the late 1960s, more or less, for many European countries, still increasingly industrial in this period, the political stakes of that decade don't seem to easily match onto processes of structural change or deindustrialization. Similarly, on the question of emergence of new political cultures or cultural revolution, where subjects all different to class or con or alongside or related to class emerged, which contest the old consolidaristic culture. That also for me, didn't seem to be capturing what was going on either. Partly because I was seeing the marginalized sectors of the working class, particularly immigrants and racialized groups, often colonial countries. In the case of Britain and France, they were the ones who were driving forward the working class movements or working class struggles as you could perceive them to be, and were certainly using that language when they were doing so. Some of the key strike cases I looked at in Chapter four, in Britain, the Grunwick strike, in France, the strikes in Citouen and the PSA manufacturing group, and in Italy in fiat, these migrant or immigrant workers in various different cases from various different backgrounds, used class as a unifying category, but didn't deny the diversity of where they'd come from and who they were. The idea that diversification of the working class had led to a fragmentation I didn't take seriously how there was often subjects at the margins who had most to gain from the advance of the trade union and movement on the left more generally. And it seemed to be only after the process of disempowerment had fully worked themselves out, after the late 70s and early 1980s, that you start to get a stress on the particularity of the different cases and the disavowal or the marginalization of class as a category that can unify distinct forces and groups and the strengthening of senses of difference as often a defensive mechanism and one that really has to be situated not only within a structural context, but also within a political history as well, and one that's relational, that then takes seriously institutions and their history. And it's a product of high stakes conflict, which I was trying to outline in the book. So in both cases I felt that the 1970s, a period of crisis, really had turmoil going on that have been previously sold.
- [18:53]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Let's talk about another part of the book. That part again, I found quite fascinating. That's when you discuss how the Left was also complicit and they also helped manage that whole restructuring of what we know as the Fordist industry. So they were. Were not only the recipient of all this restructuring of industrial relations there, but they actually managed it. They helped that to happen. Can you tell us very briefly how it happened and what were the motivation, why did they do that? What were the motivations behind. Behind that to be complicit with this whole, you know, industrial capitalism.
- [19:38]
Dr. Matt Myers
Yes, it was a fascinating part of the research. And I guess many people would go into such a project and assume that the left would be the vociferous defenders of the working class and defend its interests in various different ways, starting in the factory. But one of the things that I had to confront is during the 1970s and the expansion of the left's power, which had not really been taken as seriously in these big meta narratives we've been talking about, is that it becomes far more responsible of the issues of the day. Before the late 1960s, the Italian Communist Party almost had, well, had very, very little, if any or very marginal influence inside of the major Italian car factories like Mirafiori and Turin. It's really only in the late 60s and early 70s that communist socialists and many trade union actors gain foothold of influence inside of the big broadest manufacturing concerns and indeed society more generally. There's major expansion in the control of communist socialists and social democrats in local government as well. So increasing influence, people getting elected to committees, people getting elected and the trade unions being strengthened in the factories, the left being elected, even a national level and urban level and regional level, puts all these series of choices on the choices to the left. What does it do when it's asked to think seriously how the factory should be structured and how production should be organized? And the British communists, say, in the car industry, people like Derek Robinson, a leading British communist car worker in Birmingham, had to confront the idea that the trade unions should be making positive rather than simply reactive proposals to the structure of, of production, certainly within an industry, in his case in which was struggling with profit margins and the impact of inflation caused by the oil price shock. And so the management and the increasingly powerful unions often collaborated to raising productivity or efficiency in order to defend jobs and to expand workers rights as it was conceived. But in all these cases, where, say, Italian communist leaders met with business leaders throughout the 1970s to try to escape from the crisis that seemed to be engulfing industry, led in many cases to confrontation, but also to a distancing between the parties and their basis. But it was difficult choices that were confronted by the expansion of the left, rather than a death spasm or a swan song, which some readings in the 1970s could allow you to think. In fact, it was the expansion of the left and working class influence that placed the series of choices on the desk of the left. Do you restore the profitability and efficiency and productivity of industry by participating alongside management in the restructuring of businesses, often with the intention or the effect of disempowering some of the most militant and well organized workers? And in the case of the car industry, it's not by chance that some of the first areas to be automated after this major period of of strikes that turned the 1970s were the paint shops, which are the most dangerous and dirtiest and most noxious of the jobs, and also some of the most militant, and will organize them with the most structural power. Or do you defend your old and core working class supporters, your most well organized and confident working class supporter, say in the paint shop, with the effect that you'll be called Luddites or not modern or not responsible, especially after your exclusion from power in many cases during the Cold War. And finally the moment emerges in which you can make claims on the states you are increasingly responsible again after the late 40s. So trying to become a party, a responsible party of government puts it in a very difficult position in caught between these different forces and eventually they do choose the former in most cases, but it really only comes to a head in the late 70s, early 80s. For a while, the left is able to manage this process. They even one that's fractious.
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Moteza Hajizadeh
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- [27:23]
Dr. Matt Myers
Sure. Well, the first point to acknowledge is that automation or the introduction of machinery is not new to the 1970s. It's the long, long, much more long standing process. But there were increasing concerns or specific concerns from the 1960s into the 70s and and 80s about the impact of automation on institutional history, on the political and the cultural history. There seemed to be a runaway technological shift or a step change and that automation had deeply impacted the old manual. For what is massed worker, the kind of worker associated with Charlie Chapton's Modern Times or Elio Petri's film Working Class Goes to Heaven. And automation essentially overwhelms these kind of menial task workers. However, in the 60s and 70s, from the perspective of the left and the trade union movement, certainly that I was reading about, not just intellectuals and there are quite a few, but inside the institutions associated with working class, automation did not seem to have this contrary, gloomy, debilitating effect. In fact, many of the communists and socialists I was reading about in France, Italy and Britain saw automation and technological processes was one of the great strengthening forces of this period that's opening up new vistas for political activity, indeed mainly reducing the necessity for onerous and difficult and dangerous work. All these institutions I was reading about, or most of them, certainly the ones who had great influence, the ones who or the mass forces, and indeed my book is really about the mass institutions, ones who garnered a great deal of influence or indeed the majority of the working class in each of their countries. They thought that this process could be managed, that automation, if directed and managed alongside the increasingly influential workers movement, could be directed to socially useful ends and ends that ultimately could expand rights of working people and reduce the burdens, increase the time more for the development of more holistic individuals and more life affirming pursuits. And they certainly read these processes right into the early 80s. They certainly didn't see technological advance as being a force that the left could deny. They hardly saw themselves as a, as a force of modernization or progress and the progress needed to be embraced in large part because they conceived technological change and automation as being a product of human labor and human ingenuity, which they had connected the manual and the non manual together. And that every major advance in the technological capacity of industry it was something that if given the right management or indeed the right property relation structure could benefit the workers movement. So it was contradictory partly because what I was seeing is the political leadership saying that these automation processes were positive. But then when you're seeing the concrete instances of how they were introduced and the response of different workers to being moved around the plants and having to adapt to the new machinery was far more contradictory. And many workers didn't want to be moved around the plant or have their structural power diminished in various different ways. And this created a kind of clash certainly between rank and file workers in the forward industry and supervisors and foremen. And this clash between authority figures who manage and try to manage the production process directly, who oversee it and have to maintain the continuous flow of production and those work and indeed the implementation of new automation processes and the workers who have to fulfill the various different functions really came to a head in the late 70s and early 80s because they had multiple different reasons for this, this, this conflict. But automation does play in play into the changing balance of power within the major factories. And yeah, I don't think that it's essentially, I don't think it's as simple as automation being this overwhelming process that diminishes the power for working. It's not as simple as cause and effect.
- [32:37]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And to the second part of the question, which is about that new university educated, managerial oriented members of the union, can you talk about that as well, how it kind of shifted the parties, especially the communist parties in Europe, in their strategic choices or decisions they made?
- [33:00]
Dr. Matt Myers
Yeah, it's related I suppose to the first part. An increasing technological complexity of production process and technical complexity does require new forms of knowledge and expertise. And there was a major expansion in the post war period of university educated groups. And they increasingly play a large part in the left and certainly the trade union movement. They're not the harbingers of the decline as we've been talking about, but they do bring with them new expectations, new values and new ways of being which do challenge some of the old assumptions of the trade union industrial, classical working class. And you do see this even within the same family. So often it's the parents are these old industrial working class communists who have been trained up in the party, who even been educated in the party, left school very early and found their community and a common community of fate in that organization and their world. They expanded by that, that process. Ra and their children often were also communists or became communists or socialists, but had also been exposed to this educated and pedagogical experience of the universities and so quite different expectations about things like party discipline or what is expected of a political activist and the kind of rules of engagement both with those outside the party, but also and especially those within. One of the issues though that comes to a head and it's not only an internal question within the left, although I think this has been underestimated in the literature is the idea and we have trade units like Bruno Trent in Italy articulating this and you see this in real time. The expectation from the late 1970s seems to be that the old manual working class is having its positionality as the symbolic subject of the Left's future is starting to be undermined and that it's being replaced by a more technical, scientific, white collar worker who does seem to be increasing in importance inside the fact. Certainly mass production industries in the countries I was studying. This doesn't mean this has not always been a concern. There've been plenty of people who've written about the rise of my idea or scientific and technical workers. But it does seem to be within, but within the Left itself, within the major institutions, the idea that more technical educated workers were going to represent a significant and indeed the leading part of the less constituency does seem to emerge in the late 70s. Indeed, in the Italian case, you do have even the name changes of the trading institutions tinkering to include not just manual workers, but also technical and managerial sectors as well.
- [36:46]
Moteza Hajizadeh
So thank you for explaining. And I think this generational divide has also impacts on how unions are run. Another part of the book that I was really amazed by was when you talk about how these unions started dealing with internal dissent or disagreement. And this new, let's say this new generation, they use like professionalized political marketing, opinion polling in order to deal with these internal dissents. And it's sort of according to marginalized grassroots activists. And it replaced that kind of organic political engagement with a technocrat style of management. How did it play out? Can I talk about this part of the book?
- [37:32]
Dr. Matt Myers
Sure. And this was also very surprising to me when I was confronted by the scale complexity of the political marketing processes enacted into the strategic vision and techniques used by left parties and trade unions throughout the 70s 1980s. What you see, and it's this goes against the assumptions of the literature, is that mass organizations still existed in the 1970s, mass participation existed in the 1970s in trade unions, and the left wasn't a product. It hadn't been, at least from my reading, gutted or evacuated of self activity. In fact, you do have mass participation Institutions, mass entry into forms of classical class struggle, including the mass meeting being one thing, or local meetings, factory meetings, other people spend a lot of time with other people, often in the same room or the same vicinity, discussing key questions, perhaps because there was a lot to decide. This kind of mass activity you see across the board and expressed in things like major increases in membership of left wing parties or big increases in trade union membership. The Communist Party in Italy peaks in its vote in the mid-1970s to the British trade union movement peaks in numbers not in the 1950s, but in the turn of the 1980s, 1979-80. Indeed, the number of shop stewards in Britain peaks in the early mid-1980s. Similarly, in France you have increases in trade union members, increase in size of the left. Indeed, the Communist Party in France increases in size in the 1970s. So you got all these processes happening at the same time, or at least two processes of activation happening. But then as we talked about different generational shifts, different shifts within the past composition of the working class, gender divisions, new sectors, working class at its margins. Entering this proves quite a difficult manage to process to manage from the perspective of the leadership. Often different contradictions imply different demands, different priorities. Indeed, in a period of crisis and expectation, and indeed hope, it places a great deal of stress on the leadership to make the right decision. And so when things start to seem to not be going in the way expected, there are these challenges that often occur within the party organization and its institutions, its democratic organs, or in the trade unions against leadership to its own institutions and democratic processes. And what you see from the late 70s onwards is a tendency to centralize political authority, as you said, to increase the technocratic capacity of leaderships to manage. But indeed it's not only technocratic and managerial processes, but it's also centralizing communication strategies around particularly charismatic individuals. This is also the emergence of new forms of media television becoming more important, of course. But what you see happening within the parties is opinion polling becoming far more important in managing difference of opinion and differences between the different sectors of the party membership. And it's based more widely. So you have the French Communist Party promoting opinion polls not just done by themselves, they showed, in fact there's. The working class was still a major part of the party that expanded its numbers massively. Indeed, it was more gender neutral, having been a largely masculine party for a number of years. But it's also promoting opinion polls done by institutions outside of self professional institutions that show that the work the communist vote has been changing. They've become but Also their voters and their members generally agreed with the existing strategy of the leadership and expected its growth to continue. These polls in the French case were used to justify the continuation of the leadership's position. There is a certain irony that the years immediately after these polls are promoted that the Communist Party in France enters into the largest decline in its support and legitimacy that it's seen as never really recovered from. Similarly in the Italian case, which shows the largest, the most innovative use of opinion polling, you have the Italian Communists using unprecedented techniques in the Italian case to survey the ideas of the working class, particularly in fiat, but also its own membership. They're an assiduous student of their base, the Italian Communists were. And what they found in this massive study of the fiat workforce is that, lo and behold, the existing strategy of the party leadership, particularly in Turin, have been justified. And his critics on the left, and indeed on the right, were misplaced in their anxieties that they want to. Opinion polling essentially enables the leadership in various different aspects, both trade union and political parties, to speak over and above the organized institutional form of democratic process. And one has to be fair to the activists, the most active members of those organizations that go to the meeting. There are elected officials often that have a direct and responsible role in the middle cages of these organizations, speaking over and above their heads directly to a massified but also individuated support base or activist base in order to justify or to legitimate leadership strategies and certain turns of strategic terms that there are taken. So you do see a new kind of political culture emerging, which has less space for mass organization, less space for mass deliberation, but also, and I think this is really quite important, hadn't really been talked about that much. And histories of the left, which tend to the focus, some are very good, the focus largely on the leadership and the strategic perspectives, and then also introduces forces of change like deindustrialization or cultural change, as if they happen outside of the party or the institutions and they just overwhelm them from without. When in fact what you're seeing is within the organizations themselves, there's a process of disempowerment of. Of the middle cadres or the organizers. And this creates quite a tragic situation for them in many different cases. Often they've been some of the most committed and active in building those parties and unions over the precinction period. And they felt that those organizations, they committed their lives and like we said, experience a carnal community of fate, no longer had as much space for them or for them as active participants. And many of these techniques of course developed outside of the left or they had been used very strongly in the US social sciences in the post war period and indeed in US politics more generally. But it seemed to me to be quite an important innovation in this period in the late 70s, 80s and 1980s. The political parties are taking this, taking this seriously as an alternative political model to the mass working class rooted, rooted model of activist parties.
- [46:16]
Moteza Hajizadeh
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- [46:19]
Dr. Matt Myers
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Moteza Hajizadeh
Like the F150 Explorer and Mustang Mach.
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Dr. Matt Myers
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- [46:55]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Only at McDonald's for a limited time.
- [46:58]
Dr. Matt Myers
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- [46:59]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void? But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them. In fact, you can even target buyers by job title, industry, company seniority, skills and did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads? Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started at LinkedIn.com campaign terms and conditions apply. And so I work in the public sector myself and in my role I do work with some I'm not in a union myself, but I do work with unions and I do see that kind of the structure that you're describing, that technocrat structure in unions. And a lot of them, even in order to address an issue or better understand an issue, sometimes they commission a $300,000 report to be done by one of those big consultancies such as PwC, which I find just waste of money. But I guess they also need to report to their board members. But I sometimes kind of feel sad that that level of, you know, the level of engagement that the union members used to have with their working class people, they have lost that. And I guess it's also reflected in labor parties around the world in Australia that are they were in England, they can see they have lost touch with working class people. In terms of this kind of mechanism that you describe opinion polling, do you see parallels with today's data driven decision making or political strategies that even some unions employ.
- [48:46]
Dr. Matt Myers
I certainly think there's quite a few resonances, but I think today perhaps it's slightly different than in the 70s and 80s. In that back then you already had quite an activated base within these institutions that were trying to hold leaderships of various different degrees to account. The participation is dropping off towards the end of our period, of course, but the polling does seem to be a way to anticipate, but also to free the leadership of the messy and difficult process of passing all the different decisions made through the democratic processes which are often dominated by activists. It senses a freeing process or a liberating process for leaderships who no longer have to take decisions in tortured processes, but are free to strategize. But also they're free in the political arena to construct narratives around clear defined individuals with personal traits and histories. Rather than stressing the importance of organization and a collective sense. There's certainly a more personalized politics emerges at the end of our period. You vote a lot more for the individual who leads rather than the organization. But you're right to highlight that today there is a lack of legitimacy or perceived legitimacy and intermediary layers within institutions to represent the base. And often that's the way to legitimize different strategies from the leadership perspective is to go and open above institutional mechanisms, intermediary groups to speak directly to the people concerned. And that may be a legalistic exercise, as you've been alluding to. And also you could say, well, that's partly because of the absence of those intermediary institutional elements, those activists. But I think it's a self fulfilling prophecy if you rely too much on the plebiscituary model or the model of the opinion polling, that you won't get the kind of connected relationship between institutions and those that they seek to represent and lead if you rely on that too much. Indeed, I think there is a case to be made that the mass institutional element, the rootedness is part of, was a constituent part of the building of of large and large dynamic demand making and influential institutions that can last over longer term. So I think you're right to highlight this is a major issue that is facing trade unions today, which is often explained as trying to rebuild the trade unions.
- [52:04]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Yeah, that's right.
- [52:05]
Dr. Matt Myers
Institutions. How do you do that? I think the 70s highlights that it's a very messy process, but one that requires participation.
- [52:18]
Moteza Hajizadeh
It was a long time ago. I was reading a couple of articles about unions in the United States. Unions back in the 1920s, 30s. And I'm also a huge fan of James Baldwin. I've read some of his writings about that. It also discusses how even the unions were sometimes against him because he was black, because he was homosexual. And it seems that at least in Australia, that I know more or less a little bit about, even the Labour Party has a very dark history, let's say, of racism back it's seven or eight years ago in your book again. Another really interesting part of the book was when you talk about strikes in Europe that were led by immigrants there, but they were conceived to be threatening to the political and economic order of the time. But of course, but the left response, the union's response to these immigrant led strikes wasn't, let's say that laudatory. Can you talk about that aspect of unions as well? How did they conceive immigrants or strikes led by them? And also the second part of the question maybe is that do you see that as contributing to the rise of neoliberalism and weakening of the left?
- [53:42]
Dr. Matt Myers
Yeah, I think this was the culmination of the book and I felt when I was writing it that really all the process that we've been talking about really come to a head in series of, as we said, high stakes conflicts. And there's no more high stakes conflict in the end of the 70s, early 1980s than these epochal strikes that all actors involve. Not just the workers, the strikers, indeed the strikebreakers, indeed the managers, the owners of the companies, but of course also leadership of the left, leadership of employers, organizations more generally and particularly, and I found this very interesting, the key articulators of right wing or left wing was now termed neoliberal politics. They all invested key strikes with a hinge quality between different periods. Both the labor movement associated the Grunwick, the PSA Citoyen strike and the fiat strike with being one in which if they didn't win, it would be a generational defeat of, and certainly the end of a process that had been ongoing. Indeed, the right also invested it with an epochal character that if you don't defeat these strikes, then you're going to have a descent into anarchy or to a transition to socialism or some other pernicious eventuality. So in each case I was looking at, and it's important, I think, to highlight in the book that we do talk about Chaldeanians and the left together after, because they were associated with each other. The left as it was conceived then was still tied very much to the working class, both materially but also symbolically. I mean, today, certainly over the past 30, 40 years, that's not been the case. But as I've been saying with the wider narratives, the idea that this cultural revolution in the 1970s undermines class politics and introduces new kind of concerns which are not currently fast paced, doesn't capture what's going on. So in these strikes you do see the dynamics between trade unions and labor politics clashing to a certain degree. But what happens in each case is that the new sectors of the working class that I've been saying were critical in the left's growth and the trade union's growth over the 60s, 1970s, that migrant workers, women workers and young workers had the lower margins, but also white collar, technical, managerial, even scientific white collar staff at the other end play crucial roles. And indeed it's the margins of the work class where the decisive choices are made. So you have immigrants leading strikes in all three countries either to expand trade union rights to join the trade union movement. In the case of France and Britain, there's Moroccan workers largely, or the multinational in that case, but a predominant number of Moroccan workers, South Asian women workers in particular in Britain and in Italy, a generation of southern migrants who, first generation southern migrants who'd come from the south, the north in the post war period and certainly in the 50s and 60s. In each case you have major strikes, faced with what is perceived to be a very problematic strike breaking movement, in which forces within the factory system itself, the white collar workers we've been talking about, certainly supervisors and foremen, in many cases in alliance with other more right wing political movements outside, but also with employers, organizations and other civil society institutions to attempt to break the momentum of the strike. And in each case you have a different kind of strike breaking movement that succeed. The left is of course caught in the middle of this period of major strikes, or the strike wave, or this key strike, the counter movement of forces hostile to it. And in each case the left is in power, either deeply influential in unions, governing a local or regional level, in the case of the Italian Communists in Turin, or even of course running the government, having ministers in the government, or having the presidency, as in the French case, those strikes happening as the socialist communist government is in power in France, the Labour Party is of course in power in Britain. So what does the left do in this situation? Well, I tried to show that it participates in legitimizing the narratives set by hostile, more hostile anti striker forces, either that there are terrorists, in the case of Britain and, and France. In the case of France, this Islamic element comes into this. In the British case, the strikers tend not to be the subject of the same moral panic as in France. In fact, it's the miners, the white miners from Yorkshire and elsewhere who are seen as the major issues alongside a more amorphous and culturally a red far left. But really it's seen as the problem of young people. So it's actually not the strikers themselves that are seen as the issue in Britain, whereas they certainly are in France. And immigrant workers are seen as in alliance with the communists or other left wing forces. And in Italy the issue is of course because of this particular case, although I think particularity is perhaps so overstated of political violence and the question of terrorism in Italy. And there certainly had been strikes in the previous year to the famous 1980 dispute in which a number of workers had been sacked on the allegations that they've been associated with these kind of groups. And the issue of hooliganism, or the idea that the factories had become ungovernable and that certainly middle ranking and higher level managers within these plants have been afraid for their lives due to political violence. Both organized and as so called, unorganized or spontaneous, have been one of the key narratives set by the strikebreakers during the dispute, which in the Italian case involved the mass sacking or the proposed mass sacking of thousands of workers, including much of the trade union base. Whereas in the British and French cases about immigrants joining the trade union joining and realizing the rights promised by the left as it comes into power, there's about entering into the social contract rather than simply defending it. But in each case, forces of the right succeed in shifting the narrative, reframing strikers and the workers movement more generally, and certainly those are its margins as enemies within who represent the past and represent a debilitating force. And it's out of these disputes and their defeat that you see the individuals groups who come to dominate European politics after. It's not by chance that Berlusconi, Silvio Berlusconi, commemorated the anniversary of his. Of the launch of his television channel that increased his power and influence in 1980s and ultimately led to his elections with the grainy black and white images of the strike at Fiat and the counter movement, the March of the so called March of the 40,000. And out of it comes the beautiful color images of his television shows in the 1980s and new Italy was born. Similarly, in the British case, the key lieutenants of Margaret Thatcher in her early years were deeply involved in the breaking of the strike and the articulation of the narratives against The Grunwick against the Gunwick strikers as supporters. Similarly, in France it was the Front national and right wing forces who made their major breakthroughs around the moment of the strike and articulate new kinds of racial divisions within the working class. And indeed the politicization of the question of Islam in French politics. And in all these different cases, the idea of immigrant workers, the second part of that phrase, is diminished over time and becomes the problem of immigrants. And the class character is reduced and each of the disputes, you see the attempt to. Attempt to frame this classical working class activity, the strike, as being something that emerges out of a largely cultural rather than class mode. So yeah, in each of these cases they are epochal, partly because you see all of the different processes that we've been talking about and indeed the outcomes highlighted in quite stark terms. What I felt, and I think the strikes and the strike breaking movements, which have really been underestimated, I think in this period show, is that the forces of change that we've been talking about, deindustrialization, the emergence of post material identitarian concerns or post material concerns, didn't automatically result in the outcomes assumed. In fact, when you focus down into particular cases and key cases, you see that there was a lot that was fought over and that many different forces didn't believe that there had been an inevitable processes of change. Indeed, conflict actually is quite important in deciding outcomes. And a lot of people invested a lot of time and a lot of effort into rolling back this process of change and empowerment and renewal that seemed to be. That many people seem to expect to be happening. Not to say that long term process of change and objective forces aren't important, but they have to be read alongside the subjective experiences. Partly because the subjective analysis does inform what people do and some of the decisions they take.
- [65:27]
Moteza Hajizadeh
One of the. Another part of the book that I was or was fascinated by was when you talk about how the feminist movements and the youth, young people, migrants, they all tried to challenge those traditional structures of the left, but the left also responded by co optation or sometimes repression. Can I talk about this dynamic between the two?
- [65:52]
Dr. Matt Myers
Sure. In each case, these three different social forces, as they were often termed, were challenging some of the traditional or existing assumptions of the left. When you organize a meeting and where do you organize the meeting? Many immigrant workers in Britain who suggested that maybe the left shouldn't and the trade union shouldn't meet in pubs, for example, particularly for those who don't drink, or that the timing in the meeting should reflect women workers schedules to increase participation, or that certain questions should be prioritized over others, or it certainly should be integrated into the kind of demands made. So not just wages and conditions, but also about changes to political culture or specific demands for specific groups of workers, such as women workers or young workers or migrant workers. But there was. There is indeed a growing sense of specificity of different workers experiences. But those questions are being articulated, and I think this is one of the key findings of the book. Within the Left as much as outside of it, there's an assumption that the social movements and the traditional organizations of the left, both the political and the trade union movement, exist in parallel tracks. Whereas in fact many of these different forces, workers who have been involved in the feminist movement, or young workers who've been involved in the youth countercultures, and migrants who had been involved in anti racist, anti colonial movements, they're converging often within the organizations of the left and they're raising these issues within the trade union branches and organizations and within the left. So rather than seeing these two things as counterposal or working in parallel, the clash is often between different conceptions of what working class politics should be and how you manage diversity. It didn't seem to me that what was happening was a clash that you can characterize as simply one of class and identity, but between different kinds of workers claim different kinds of prioritization. What happens in many cases, however, is that there is a process of co optation and repression, but also of. I think this is perhaps more important, this wider disempowerment. As we talked about with the strikes, it's really after these major strikes are defeated that you have the sense of difference being stressed by the different strikers and by wider groups. The language of rights and human rights become more important, say after the Grunwick dispute. And certainly sense of difference. The problem of integrating new categories of workers into the traditional, such as the left was what was, was one which the left ultimately couldn't manage to hold together. All the diversity of the new categories proved too much for them and exploded a certain period of time.
- [69:13]
Moteza Hajizadeh
And one final question. I don't know if I can say the left is making a comeback or not. There has still a lot of challenges, identity politics that we mentioned, those who care about it, those who don't. They're called class reductionists. But it seems that there's a growing disenchantment, there's a growing dissent among ordinary workers, ordinary people, working class people. Well, I mean, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. How do you think the unions are responding to these changes. Are you optimistic about the way they're moving forward? Do you think they're going back to the good old ways? Maybe back like in 1960s or 70s where they were reorganizing or re engaging with the community. How do you see the future?
- [70:07]
Dr. Matt Myers
I think the picture is mixed. I think there are certain signs that you could characterize as hopeful or renewed class politics as you can say. Perhaps this is in a different register to what's happened in the past. Doesn't seem to be as clearly framed in class terms as before. But there does seem to be political and economic movements that are seeking empowerment of working class people. This is obviously not a monopoly of the left and certainly not those who associate themselves with the more classical left wing politics. Indeed, it's the right who've often forced the running on this question and certainly been very influential in reframing their conception of class as one of the ones to take seriously. I think that there has been a series of mass movements since the 2008 World Financial Crisis which have been driven by class forces, although they haven't always articulated themselves in that way. And certainly they've been driven by the generational renewal of societies, new generations entering into political process and to social protagonism. And they bring with them different ideas. The climate question being important, labor being important, different degrees, questions of taxes, the gilets Jaunes for example, in France. But also of course the question of Palestine as well. More recently that there has been mass movements since 2008 which have registered in society, but they haven't always articulated themselves as class movements and certainly not built the kind of institutions that we've been talking about in the same way. But that doesn't mean that there hasn't been a process of political radicalization to certain degrees. And always certainly the idea that I think over time after these movements have declined and registered their influence people's consciousness that there is an increasing sense that political organization matters, that one needs institutions to realize and to lead and to educate and to realize the hopes of such movements and to pass on the experiences and the memory and the lessons.
- [72:55]
Moteza Hajizadeh
Dr. Matt Myers, thank you very much for your time to speak with us about your book on New Book Network. The book we just discussed was the Halted March of the European Left, the Working Class in Britain, France and Italy, 1968-1989, published by Oxford University Press. Thank you very much for your time.
- [73:14]
Dr. Matt Myers
Thank you very much.