"I try to show that the Left in Europe, both the radical and the institutional, was caught in a bind by the strategies of employers, conservative political forces, and elements of the state. In both cases they were forced to choose between unappealing options. Perhaps the most pressing was to radicalize or moderate their strategies. They’re of course not the only agents in this story, and the Left is not in total control of the situation. But the ultimate outcome of the decisions taken at this critical moment was the evacuation of the working class from left structures and a weakening of labor more broadly.
There are clashes over what to do about economic restructuring and automation, participation in management structures and government, and media and communication technologies. An older generation of self-educated industrial worker activists rub up against a younger generation of educated, often white-collar members, each with different views on priorities and conduct. I mainly focus on the main electoral parties of the Left because they were the main organizations that workers joined and voted for at the time, and the ones that shaped how millions of people thought about the world. The radical left had sparser influence even if they suffered a broadly similar outcome.
In brief, the West European left went into decline not because of an unstoppable neoliberalism and a weakened manufacturing-based economy, but because it failed to recognize and mobilize new constituencies of workers, including migrants and women, and instead embraced a kind of “third way” social capitalism."
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/european-socialism-left-1970s-defeat
#Europe #Socialism #WorkersMovement #ClassStruggle #ThirdWay
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Regrettable Century Podcast
Miguel Afonso Caetano
Ms. Que Banh
