Ever since the birth of the Labour movement over two hundred years, two opposing trends – the revolutionary and the conservative – have fought for dominance within its ranks. The strength of either tendency was largely dependent on the prevailing objective situation. For the most part, the conservative element held sway within the hierarchy of the Labour movement, which sought to confine the struggles of the working class within the parameters of capitalism. Their main role was to act simply as a mediator between the classes, hoping to gain some concessions in the process. In the last analysis, the right-wing conservative tendency of the trade union leaders reflected the influence and pressure of the ruling class on the Labour organisations. They held back and paralysed the movement, keeping it within the limits of the capitalist system.
But there have been periods when the working class has moved into struggle, when the domination of the right wing has been challenged. That was the case in Britain in the stormy decade of the 1970s, when the leftward movement in the trade unions was reflected in a sharp move to the left in the Labour Party. The Marxist tendency represented by Militant played a decisive role in this development. However, the movement towards the left was cut across largely by objective developments, and has been reversed for a whole period.
The reasons for the lamentable state of the British Labour movement in the past period have already been explained: the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1985, followed by the defeat of the printers, seafarers and then the dockers, represented a series of grave setbacks for the working class. In the 1970s, in many European countries – Portugal, Spain, France, Italy, Greece – the working class came very close to taking power. These were years of stormy class struggle in which the advanced layers of the working class were beginning to draw revolutionary conclusions. The ruling class was fearful of revolution and beginning to make plans for civil war and even toyed with the idea of military coups (the Gladio conspiracy in Italy and the writings of Brigadier Frank Kitson in Britain).
If the struggle was not carried through to the end it was no fault of the working class, which showed its willingness to struggle many times, but the limitations of the leadership, which in every case stopped short of posing the question of power. Inevitably, when they did not carry out a fundamental change in society, the movement began to ebb and entered into a decline. That is quite logical. It is not possible to maintain the working class in a state of permanent tension. When the movement did not achieve the desired results, the active layers of the class in particular became discouraged and disillusioned, a frame of mind that has characterised many of the activists for the whole of the last period.
The ebb of the workers’ movement gave new hope to the ruling class. The employers passed onto the offensive everywhere. The hardening attitudes of the bosses in turn reflected a major change in the position of world capitalism at the time. Up until the first serious recession of 1973-4, the capitalist system had been in a long period of economic upswing, characterised by continuous growth, full employment and booming profits. This enabled them to make significant concessions to the working class: reforms, the welfare state, cheap housing, free education, etc. But by the second half of the 1970s the situation had begun to change dramatically. The old model of Keynesianism had reached its limits – a fact that was expressed by the huge and rising levels of inflation that were everywhere threatening to reach Latin American dimensions.