On paper it was easy to analyse the situation realistically, dismissing the ‘cries of betrayal against those who insist on looking at the world the way it is’.4 In practice it was hard, since many of those against whom I wrote were comrades (or at least former comrades) and friends. Apart from myself and Stuart Hall, Marxism Today could not rely on the steady support of any established intellectuals of the old and the original (post-1956) new left. Most of the socialist and Marxist intellectuals outside the Marxism Today milieu were hostile, including such prestigious figures as Raymond Williams, Ralph Miliband and the eminences of the New Left Review. I was denounced at trade union meetings. This is not surprising. For many of them the line of Marxism Today meant the betrayal of the traditional hopes and policies of socialists, not to mention of the proletarian revolution which the Trotskyites still looked forward to. It could even look like disloyalty to the organized working class, battered with the full force of state power by a government waging class war, especially during the great national coalminers’ strike of 1984–5, which mobilized the full force of the left’s (and not only the left’s) emotional sympathy. Mine too, although it was patent that the delusions of an extremist leadership of the union, relying on the rhetoric of militancy and the traditional unionist refusal to break ranks in the middle of battle, were leading the union and the coalfield communities to certain disaster. Even we were not immune to the sheer force of the movement’s rhetorical self-delusion. Marxism Today, surveying the wreckage after the strike with a degree of realism, could not bring itself to admit the scale of the defeat.5
This, indeed, was the general predicament of socialists in Britain from the middle 1970s on. Things fell apart for moderate reformist social democrats as well as for communists and other revolutionaries. For Marxists and non-Marxists, revolutionaries and reformists, we had in the last analysis believed that capitalism could not produce the conditions of a good life for humanity. It was neither just nor in the long run viable. An alternative socialist economic system, or at least its forerunner, a society dedicated to social justice and universal welfare, could take its place, if not now then at some future time; and the movement of history was plainly bringing this nearer through the agency of state or public action in the interest of the mass of the wage-earning classes, implicitly or explicitly anti-capitalist. Probably never did this look more plausible than in the years immediately following the Second World War, when even European conservative parties were careful to declare themselves anti-capitalist and US statesmen praised public planning. None of these assumptions looked convincing in the 1970s. After the 1980s the defeat of the traditional left, both political and intellectual, was undeniable. Its literature was dominated by variations on the theme ‘What’s Left?’ I contributed to it myself. Paradoxically, the problem was far more urgent in the non-communist countries. In almost all the communist regimes the collapse of a widely discredited ‘really existing socialism’, the only socialism officially extant, had eliminated any other kind from the political scene. Moreover, it was reasonable enough for people there to place their hopes, even sometimes their utopian hopes, in an unknown western capitalism, so obviously more prosperous and efficient than their own broken-down systems. It was in the west and south that the case against capitalism remained convincing, especially that against the increasingly dominant ultra-laissez-faire capitalism favoured by transnational corporations, backed by economic theologians and governments.
Marxism Today could see that the simple refusal to acknowledge that things had changed dramatically (‘Let cowards flinch and traitors sneer, we’ll keep the red flag flying here’), however emotionally attractive, was not on the cards. Indeed, that is why the traditional Labour left, always present and significant in the party’s history, though rarely decisive, disappeared from sight after 1983. It no longer exists. On the other hand, we could not accept – until Tony Blair became leader in 1994 we could barely even envisage – the alternative of ‘New Labour’, which accepted the logic as well as the practical results of Thatcherism, and deliberately abandoned everything that might remind the decisive middle-class voters of workers, trade unions, publicly owned industries, social justice, equality, let alone socialism. We wanted a reformed Labour, not Thatcher in trousers. The narrow failure of Labour to win the 1992 election eliminated this prospect. I am not alone in recalling that election night as the saddest and most desperate in my political experience.
The logic of electoral politics as perceived by politicians whose programme consisted of permanent re-election, and after 1997 the logic of government, drove us out of ‘real’ politics. Some of the Young Turks of Marxism Today went where the power was. When, eighteen months after Labour had returned to power, Martin Jacques revived the journal for a single issue to survey the new era of Blair, one of them looked down on us – myself and Stuart Hall specifically – from the heights of 10 Downing Street, as people viewing society from the seminar room, ‘as if from the outside, without any sense of membership or responsibility’, unlike ‘intellectuals who are able to combine critique, vision and practical policy’. In short, academic or not, ‘critique was no longer enough’.6 The time had come for the political realists and the technicians of government. And both must operate in a market economy and fit in with its requirements.
True enough. But our point – certainly mine – was and is that if critique is no longer enough, it is more essential than ever. We criticized New Labour not because it had accepted the realities of living in a capitalist society, but for accepting too much of the ideological assumptions of the prevailing free market economic theology. Not least the assumption which destroys the foundations of all political movements for improving the condition of the people, and with them therefore the justification of Labour governments, namely that the efficient conduct of a society’s affairs can only be by the search for personal advantage, i.e. by behaving like businessmen. Indeed, the critique of neo-liberalism was all the more necessary, since it not only appealed to businessmen and to governments who wanted to remove their traditional suspicion of Labour, and needed a justification for appealing to middle-class ‘swing voters’, but because neo-liberalism claimed the authority of a ‘science’ increasingly identified with the interests of global capitalism, namely economics, as consecrated for almost a quarter of a century by its highest authority, the Nobel Prize for Economics. Not until the very end of the century, when it was finally awarded to Amartya Sen, and then to a vocal critic of ‘the Washington consensus’, Joseph Stiglitz, was it given again to economists known to be outside the prevailing orthodoxy; and not until (so it is understood) the electors for the Nobel prizes in the natural sciences had expressed dissatisfaction at the consistent ideological bias of what was intended to be a scientific distinction. Perhaps the bursting of the great speculative bubbles of the fin-de-siècle, 1997–2001 have finally broken the spell of market fundamentalism. The end of the hegemony of global neo-liberalism has been predicted and indeed announced long enough – I have done so myself more than once. It has already done more than enough harm.