What actually happened during the 1970s?

Working-class politics is back in vogue in the West, but for whom does it speak? An AfD candidate in Germany won over 14% of the vote after claiming the SPD was ‘no longer a workers’ party in the classic sense’ and that his organisation was ‘taking on this role’. The US Vice President, JD Vance, emphasises he is a ‘a working-class boy, born far from the halls of power’ and promises to reshore industrial jobs. Marine Le Pen claims to lead the ‘party of French workers’ and Fratelli d’Italia wins a majority of manual workers after asking if ‘the Left is now no longer in the factories and amongst the workers, where can you find it?’ (its answer: a Pride parade). These political visions define themselves against an identity politics of the urbane, the educated, and the socially liberal. They seek to reverse the impacts of deindustrialisation, globalisation, and social liberalisation which began in the mid twentieth century and rapidly accelerated after the 1970s.

Histories of contemporary Europe tend to argue that the defeat of a certain kind of industrial politics associated with the Left was both inevitable, permanent, and an event long in the making. Viewed from the year 2000, the dividends of adaption to broadened social bases, reformulated programmes, and a post-class image seemed self-evident to many. Twenty-five years later, this consensus has been challenged. The British Labour Party’s chief strategist believes winning back working-class voters is the fundamental test of power. Others stress the polarisation of values between graduates, professionals, and ethnic minorities and pensioners, school leavers, and workers. Though many trace the origins of contemporary uncertainty to the 1970s, fewer have concretely analysed what actually happened in that decade.

West Europeans experienced that decade differently to its retrospective representation. The trade unions and social democratic and Communist parties grew and a diverse new generation entered the labour movement. Marginalised young, female, and immigrant workers led strikes to gain rights. White-collar workers unionised and sections of a previously hostile middle class appeared to be switching allegiances. Immigration, women’s entry into the workforce, widening educational access, increasing service employment, and minority movements were believed to have expanded the reach and magnetism of the Left. Many on the other side of politics thought that this trajectory would continue. Successful strikebreaking movements, new automation technologies, and organisational recasting helped to interrupt this momentum. A generation of workers felt bewildered, unable to understand their predicament, and bereft of the means to resist the shift to a new era. Only under specific circumstances at the end of the 1970s and early 1980s did the old Left’s expanded coalition fracture with enduring and sometimes traumatic results. The reliance on ideas of decline has contributed to the flattening of a complex history.   

Asking different questions of the 1970s may require experimentation with methods, incorporation of neglected forms of evidence, and analysis of various cases within unitary frameworks. Archivally-driven accounts rooted in spaces of common deliberation and action can address the absence of a certain kind of working-class voice in existing narratives. Combining transnational and comparative approaches can provide insights on periods where the forces of change traverse states and delimited frameworks, institutions, and cultures channel their energies, manage their impact, and decide on priorities. Looking beyond that decade, it might be worth developing more granular accounts of the relations between technology and society, following the scholarship of David Edgerton and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, and establishing a deeper understanding of how machines are used at work. The conditions of possibility of a moment when the Right seeks to occupy the space where classical working-class politics once stood merits further study.

_{Feature image by André Cros. CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.}