New Left Review I/131, January-February 1982

Ken Coates

The Choices Before Labour

Eric Hobsbawm is a distinguished scholar and an original thinker, a historian of the first rank and a Marxist of great eminence. The collection of essays provoked by the Marx Memorial Lecture he gave in 1978 on the state of the labour movement in Britain contains some interesting and valuable discussion. [*] The Forward March of Labour Halted? Verso, in association with Marxism Today, London 1981. It is a merit of the volume to include active trade-unionists as well as intellectuals, a mixture of generations, and representatives of some of the main sections of the British Left. The balance is not as complete as it should be, as the book lacks a sufficient weight of contributions from the political side of the Labour Party. Some of the materials are also rather dated by now. But this is a secondary drawback. The real weakness of the book lies not even in its depressing and discouraging conclusions, but in the serious imbalance which was present right from the beginning of the debate. In one of the essays in the book Raymond Williams pinpoints a problem which lies in the central metaphor of its keynote contribution: the title The Forward March of Labour Halted? implies a single unilinear progress where in fact there have been a series of movements, some of which we may reasonably judge to have been ‘forward’, and some of which have not, in any sense, shared that direction. If we seek to determine which way ‘forward’ lies, it can presumably be agreed that it is in the development of demands for a fundamental and irreversible shift of the balance of wealth and power in favour of working people and their families. This involves fostering—however tentatively—hegemonic aspirations within the working-class movement. But since every labour movement only generates this kind of thrust on a basis of proven capacity to defend and advance the corporate interests of those it represents, a large part of its activity commonly does not directly lead to the growth of explicitly socialist goals. If there exist clear-headed socialist perspectives, widely shared, then actions which grow out of the narrowest defensive choices may be transformed in their meaning; but, by contrast, where large mass movements erupt without such perspectives, they frequently leave behind little tangible advance towards socialism. If sectionalism in trade unions were in fact as decisive a problem as Hobsbawm’s opening essay alleges, then the scope for ‘marches’ in diverse directions—forwards, backwards or standing still—would be all that much greater. We shall return to this problem, but first it is necessary to look at some of the crucial political issues which Hobsbawm’s original analysis omits.

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