This book is not about “the Left”, nor about “the Working Class”, nor about “Europe”. It is mainly about the dilemmas, debates, conflicts, and ultimate failure of the communist parties in Great Britain (CPGB), France (PCF), and Italy (PCI) to cope with the crisis and dismantling of Fordism as a regime of production in the 1980s, and with the demise of the Fordist mass industrial worker, whom they regarded as their main constituency. Despite some digressions into other parties on the left, these are not systematically included, nor are European countries where social-democratic parties prevailed (such as Germany and the Scandinavian countries). By choosing this title, Myers reveals an overstretched ambition that he cannot fulfil in his research.

The title of the book refers to a famous essay by the British communist historian Eric Hobsbawm in the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, Marxism Today, in 1978, titled “The Forward March of Labour Halted?”. It aroused fierce debate in the British Left (both inside and outside the CPGB), especially after the defeat of Labour in the 1979 election (which brought the ultra-conservative Margaret Thatcher to power).Footnote ¹ Rereading Hobsbawm’s essay while preparing this review, I was struck by how he apparently presupposed the existence of such a thing as a continuously progressing “forward march of labour”. As a historian of the labour movement, he should have known better: in the history of labour movements (British, European, or global), there have been waves of advances and retreats, high tides and setbacks. By declaring one of these high tides – the one just after the Second World War – to be the last, as a kind of culmination of a “forward march”, Hobsbawm ignored the social upheaval after May 1968 in France, followed by a huge upsurge of workers’ militancy and trade unionism, the emergence of new social movements, and a political and cultural swing to the left, also in Great Britain. Myers is right to correct Hobsbawm’s pessimistic view of the labour movement in the 1970s: if a “forward march of labour” was halted, it was after that decade.

Hidden (or not so hidden) behind Hobsbawm’s denial of the importance of the movement’s progress in the 1970s was an implicit political agenda of criticizing the core of the Communist Party’s strategy of stimulating workers’ militancy in wage struggles and building a “Broad Alliance” of left forces in the trade union movement from positions acquired in these struggles. Hobsbawm dismissed the wage struggles of the 1970s (many of them led by fellow communists)Footnote ² as “sectional” and “economistic”, enabling him to belittle their importance, and that of rank-and-file activism more generally, in the growth of the movement in this period. It is therefore unsurprising that prominent communist trade union militants objected to his view.

In Myers’s view, Hobsbawm’s essay addressed a crisis “located in four interrelated historical processes: the workers’ struggles of the 1970s, the post-war Keynesian settlement, industrial society and its classic class organisations, and the left’s twentieth century” (p. 109). The debate on these issues in the CPGB continued into the 1980s. The strategy of building party politics “from the workplace”, in other words from the industrial working class, was contested by (often intellectual) dissidents (later called “neo-Gramscians”), who downplayed the importance of trade unionism and advocated broad alliances with other strata and movements. Union militants within the party perceived this as a frontal attack. Myers emphasizes that the divisions were more complex than a simple “conflict between obsolete class determinists and modernising ‘Gramscians’” (p. 66) but nevertheless concludes that the “issue had in effect split British Communism into two antagonistic tendencies” (p. 71).

In his research on these debates, Myers delves deeply into archival and other sources. A similar procedure is applied to debates within the PCF and PCI. His meticulous archival work and his mastery of the literature (in three languages) deserve admiration. Although the histories, contexts, and political positions of these parties were very different from those of the CPGB, the issues at stake were, with due nuance, broadly comparable. Myers argues that “common to all three countries was the tangible sense the left had rather suddenly been forced onto the defensive […]. As the unprecedented strike waves receded, class deformation became the dominant paradigm through which the future of the left was understood” (p. 41). “Class deformation” resulted from various social developments – among them the expansion of white-collar employment and the precarious situation of casualized and marginal workers, such as migrants. More generally, he argues that “the link between the development of capital and the growing coherence and unity of the working class had been broken” (p. 43). In the heyday of Fordism, communist parties expected that workers’ struggles in Fordist industries could advance towards socialism. Myers cites a 1979 PCF resolution stating that technological development in these industries would be “ushering in a new era of productive forces, calling for new social relationships capable of emancipating work, universalising well-being, and changing lives”, thereby increasing the ability of the working class “to master the process of the revolutionary transformation of society” (p. 47).

In the late 1970s the PCI proposed industrial policies to further technological and productive development in Fordist industries, such as Fiat in Turin, alongside a programme of generalized planning to increase the profitability and efficiency of Italian industry (p. 53). The working class, it was argued, should “take the initiative as a dynamic and constructive agent in the restructuring processes and technological transformations taking place in the most dynamic companies” (p. 55). The crisis and restructuring of the Fordist industrial complex in the 1980s put an end to this perspective. The Italian communist trade union leader Bruno Trentin, a perceptive observer, argued (in 1997) that the identity crisis of the left in western Europe was closely linked to the demise of “the Taylorist-Fordist model” of production.Footnote ³

Myers, however, appears to misunderstand the communist position on the development of productive forces in Fordist industries when he suggests that the communist leadership came to regard “the power of the working class […] as an obstacle […] to capitalist development” (p. 58). I, at least, could find no convincing evidence for this assertion in his research. From the late 1970s onwards, the crisis of Fordism led employers to dismantle and restructure large industrial complexes, which communists regarded as central to economic progress. In line with their productivist outlook, they participated in and supported struggles to defend industrial employment and resist de-industrialization.

The many workplace occupations and large strikes against closures and redundancies in the 1970s and 1980s (the steelworkers’ struggle in Lorraine, France, in 1979, and the British miners’ strike of 1984 stand out) are largely ignored by Myers, with the exception of the 1980 Fiat strike against redundancies and layoffs affecting 14,469 workers, described as “the largest, longest, and most politically significant major strike in Italy’s twentieth-century history” (p. 137). Myers analyses the debates surrounding this strike within the PCI and CGIL trade union leadership, revealing significant dilemmas and confusions about how to respond to industrial restructuring. I am not convinced, however, by his rather abrupt conclusion that “the main party of the Italian left […] undermined the capacity for independent class politics, weakened grassroots democratic institutions to resist market-based solutions to the economic crisis, and empowered the state with new powers of repression” (p. 173).

A recurrent theme in the book, as advertised on its back cover, is that “communist, socialist, and social democratic parties helped disempower the new components of the working class […] and successfully disciplined their traditional working-class supporters”. As noted earlier, socialist and social-democratic parties scarcely feature in the book, making the generalization that all left-wing parties acted in the same way insufficiently substantiated. Myers seeks to demonstrate that the crisis and defeat of the left (in practice, the communist parties) in the 1980s were largely self-inflicted, and “not the result of […] the transition to a globalised and post-Fordist world that abolished the working class as a great historical actor”. While this transition may not have “abolished the working class” as such, it fundamentally altered its composition through the destruction of industrial employment in Fordist industries. This transformation was imposed through what has been described as “class struggle from above” and met with fierce resistance. The industrial working class was disempowered not by left-wing parties, but by major defeats in these struggles. These defeats undermined not only the “traditional” social base of the communist parties, but also their belief that social and economic development, and even a transition to socialism, could be grounded in the transformation of Fordist industries.

In conclusion, despite my appreciation of Myers’s thorough research, I do not agree with the central argument of this book. Myers overreaches in his ambitions and ultimately advances conclusions that are insufficiently supported by his evidence. Nevertheless, there is much to be learned from his work, even for readers, like me, who do not share his conclusions.