With most of the organizations of insurrectionists, or rather small armed action-groups which emerged in Europe from the debris of the great rebellion of 1968, I found myself entirely out of sympathy. There was room for reasoned disagreement with their opposite numbers in the very different political situation of Latin America (see chapter 21), but in Europe their activities were either pointless or counterproductive. The only operations of this kind which might claim some political feasibility were those of separatist nationalists, Quebecois, Basque or Irish, to whose political project I was strongly opposed. Marxists are not separatist nationalists.13 In any case, one of the two most lasting separatist movements of the kind born in this period, the Provisional IRA, did not claim to be on the left at all, but, on the contrary, broke away in 1969 from the old-established (‘Official’) IRA which had turned left.
So I found myself both out of sympathy and out of contact, if only by virtue of age, with these new practical revolutionaries. Not that there were all that many. In Britain there were none, except the shortlived, ineffective anarchist Angry Brigade. In West Germany the armed action people amounted to a few dozen at most, probably relying for support on 1,500 or so sympathizers, plus perhaps another handful who moved from action in their own country to international action in anti-imperialist solidarity with some body of Third World rebels, usually the Palestinians. It was a world I did not know, unless one or other of the often very radical young West German historians of those years had some connections with them. I had no contact with the Red Brigades and their like in Italy, much the most formidable of the armed action-groups in Europe other than the Basque ETA. I doubt whether the active members of these groups numbered more than a hundred or two. For reasons I have never understood, no significant armed revolutionary groups of the left seem to have emerged from the ruins of 1968 in France, although a small but quite effective terrorist group operated for a number of years in Belgium. On the other hand, had I been in touch with such groups, I would not have asked them what they did, and they would not have told me, even if they thought I was politically with them.
And where did it all lead to? In politics, nowhere much. Since a revolution was not on the cards, the European revolutionaries of 1968 had to join the political mainstream of the left, unless, being very bright young intellectuals, as so many of them were, they escaped from real politics into the academy, where revolutionary ideas could survive without much political practice. Politically the 1968 generation has done well enough, especially if one includes those recruited into civil services and think-tanks and the burgeoning numbers of advisers in politicians’ private offices. As I write the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, is an ex-Trotskyist, the German Foreign Secretary, Joshka Fischer, is an ex-street-fighting man, and even the ‘New Labour’ government of Tony Blair contains, among its lesser members, more than one firebrand of those days. Only in Italy, where the extreme left retained a strong independent presence, has the mainstream left not been rejuvenated by the young 68 radicals. Is this any more or any less than the inevitable seepage of former revolutionaries from radicalism to moderation in every intellectual generation since 1848?
What has really transformed the western world is the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The year 1968 may prove to be less of a turning-point in twentieth-century history than 1965, which has no political significance whatever, but was the year in which the French clothing industry for the first time produced more women’s trousers than skirts, and when numbers training for the Roman Catholic priesthood began visibly to collapse. I always taught the students in my labour history courses that the great dockers’ strike of 1889, which is prominent in every textbook, may be less significant than the silent adoption by masses of Britain’s industrial workers, some time between 1880 and 1905, of a form of headgear recognizable as a badge of belonging to their class, the familiar peaked cap. It may be argued that the really significant index of the history of the second half of the twentieth century is not ideology or student occupations, but the forward march of blue jeans.
But, alas, I am not part of that history. For Levis triumphed, like rock music, as the badge of youth. By then I was no longer young. I had no great sympathy for the contemporary equivalent of Peter Pan, the adult who wants to stay an adolescent for ever, nor could I see myself as credibly performing the role of oldest teenager on the scene. I therefore decided, almost as a matter of principle, never to wear this gear, and I have never done so. This handicaps me as a historian of the 1960s: I stood outside them. What I have written about the 1960s is what an autobiographer can write who never wore jeans.
16
A Watcher in Politics
I
Looking back, I am surprised how little direct political activity there was in my life after 1956, considering my reputation as a committed Marxist. I did not become a figure in the nuclear disarmament movement, addressing vast crowds in Hyde Park like Edward Thompson. I did not march at the head of public demonstrations like Pierre Bourdieu in Paris. I did not save from jail a Turkish editor who had published one of my articles by offering to stand trial myself by his side, as Noam Chomsky did in 2002. True, I cannot compare with the eminence or the star quality of these friends, but even at the level of lesser celebrity, there was plenty to be done. I did not even take any active part after 1968 in the bitter political struggle within the small Communist Party between the Soviet hardliners and the Eurocommunists, which finally killed the Party in 1991, though (obviously) indicating where I stood. Essentially, apart from a lecture here and there, my political activity consisted of writing books and articles, notably for that most original of editors, Paul Barker, in his days at New Society, as a historian or a historically minded journalist, a Marxist one, which obviously gave my writings a political dimension, as did my special field of labour history. Even my most political writings of the 1960s and 1970s were only obliquely tied to current matters.
So I was not really prepared for the moment when, for the first and only time in my life, I found myself with a brief cameo part on the national scene of British politics. For about ten years from the late seventies I was deeply involved in the public debates about the future of the Labour Party and, after the beginning of what turned out to be eighteen unbroken years of Conservative government, the nature of the new ‘Thatcherism’. Most of my contributions were republished in two volumes of political writing.
It grew from a seed unintentionally planted in September 1978 in the pages of the Communist Party’s ‘theoretical and discussion journal’, Marxism Today, which was to play an unexpectedly important part in political debate in the 1980s under the recently appointed editor, a brilliant, bald, jogging, motor-race watcher, politico-intellectual entrepreneur and former university lecturer, my friend Martin Jacques. It published a lecture I had given in the annual series of Marx Memorial Lectures under the title ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’ It was not intended as a political intervention, but as a Marxist historian’s survey of what had happened to the British working class over the past century. I argued that the apparently irresistible though not continuous rise of the British labour movement in the first half of the century seemed to have come to a halt. It could not now necessarily be expected to realize the historic destiny once predicted for it, if only because the modern economy had changed, relatively diminished and divided the industrial proletariat. If my lecture had a political edge, it was turned against the Labour Party leadership under Harold Wilson, Prime Minister from 1964 to 1970 and again in 1974–6, who presided over a brief moment of labour revival in 1966, and did not recognize it. Nevertheless, ‘The Forward March Halted?’ amounted to a public warning that in the late 1970s the movement was heading for serious trouble.