Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [159]
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