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The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968–1989

Online ISBN:
9780198944645
Print ISBN:
9780198944614
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

The Halted March of the European Left: The Working Class in Britain, France, and Italy, 1968–1989

Published online:
6 February 2025
Published in print:
11 March 2025
Online ISBN:
9780198944645
Print ISBN:
9780198944614
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

The European left seemed to be in rude health during the 1970s. Never had so many political parties committed to representing the working class been in power simultaneously across the continent. New forms of mobilisation led by female, immigrant, and young wage-earners seemed to reflect the growing strength of the workers’ movement rather than its pending obsolescence. Parties and trade unions grew rapidly as a diverse new generation entered the ranks. Why did the left’s forward march halt so abruptly? This book shows how the left’s defeats after the mid-1970s were not the inevitable result of deindustrialisation or, more precisely, the transition to a globalised and post-Fordist world that abolished the working class as a great historical actor. Choices that were made during a concentrated but decisive historical moment contributed to the left’s lost battles. The British, French, and Italian left managed the shift to a new era by marginalising those groups of workers who had invested it with hopes of social and political transformation. The left encountered a crisis of purpose and identity, a sense of both defeat and lost opportunities, and the dissolution of the idea of a community of fate amongst workers. This book provides a comparative analysis of the left’s fragmenting relationship with the working class and a “feel” for the culture of three leading industrial countries during a traumatic transition of late twentieth-century history. It concludes that decisions taken by the left during the 1970s contributed to the tragic inversion of the expected outcome of that hopeful decade.

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