A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (80 page)

The new impasse

The wave of radicalisation did not end with 1968. The biggest student protests in the US came in 1970. Colleges throughout the country were occupied in the week after National Guard troops shot dead students at Kent State University in Ohio for protesting against President Nixon’s extension of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. In Greece the student movement erupted in 1973, with the occupation of the polytechnic in the centre of Athens shaking the military junta which had ruled the country for six years, and helped to ensure its collapse seven months later. In West Germany the universities continued to stand out for several years as ghettos of left wing (mainly Maoist) agitation in the midst of a generally apolitical country.

However, there was an important shift in several countries after 1968. The students ceased being the centre of left wing opposition. In Italy the workers’ movement became central after the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969, when metal workers occupied their factories over wage contracts. In Spain, too, the workers’ movement played a central role from late 1970 onwards, so weakening the regime in the last years of Franco’s life that his heirs rushed through ‘democratic’ reforms almost the moment he died in 1975. In Britain activity by trade unionists, much of it in defiance of their union leaders, so damaged the Conservative government of Edward Heath that he called an election on the question of ‘who runs the country?’ early in 1974—and lost.

Students had sometimes been able ignite struggles which involved workers, but how the struggles ended depended on the workers’ organisations. This was shown clearly in France in May 1968, when the unions and the Communist Party succeeded in bringing the general strike to an end against the objections of the best known student leaders. It was shown again in Italy, Britain and Spain during 1975-76. The Christian Democrats in Italy, the Tories in Britain and Franco in Spain were unable to curtail the workers’ struggles by themselves. Governments could only do so by signing agreements with the union leaders and workers’ parties—called the ‘historic compromise’ in Italy, the ‘Social Contract’ in Britain and the ‘Pact of Moncloa’ in Spain.

The effect in each case was to curtail the action of workers just as the long boom was coming to an end—lowering people’s guard just as a knockout punch was about to be directed at them.

There was another area of the world where the student radicalism of the late 1960s led to a wave of workers’ struggles in the 1970s—the southern ‘cone’ of Latin America. The late 1960s saw a near uprising in the Argentinian city of Cordoba,
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and a wave of land occupations which challenged the Christian Democrat president of Chile. In both cases the drive for change from below was channelled in constitutional directions.

In Argentina it became centred around the demand for the return from exile of the post-war dictator, Peron. He had ruled at a time when high world prices for Argentina’s agricultural exports had translated into relatively high wages and welfare provision for its workers. People believed that his return would bring back the good times. It was a message repeated by rival Peron supporters of the left and right—and even by a powerful urban guerrilla organisation, the Montoneros. In fact his eventual return resulted in no gains for workers, but unleashed an onslaught by the right and by the military for which the left was unprepared. After Peron’s death the military felt strong enough to take power directly into its own hands. A whole generation of left wing activists, numbering tens of thousands, were murdered or ‘disappeared’.

In Chile the parliamentary Socialist Party was the beneficiary of the new militancy. One of its leaders, Salvador Allende, was elected president in 1970, and the right wing majority in parliament agreed to him assuming office in return for a constitutional guarantee that he would not disturb the military chain of command. Important US business interests were not happy at this, and two years into Allende’s term of office they were joined by major sections of the Chilean ruling class. There was an attempt to drive him from office in the autumn of 1972 through a ‘bosses’ strike’ spearheaded by lorry owners. It was thwarted by workers seizing their factories and setting up
cordones
—similar to the workers’ councils of 1917 and 1956—to link the factories. An attempted coup in June 1973 failed due to splits in the armed forces and massive street protests. But the Communist Party and main sectors of the Socialist Party told people to wind down the
cordones
and trust in the ‘constitutional’ traditions of the army. Allende brought generals, including Augusto Pinochet, into his government, believing this would placate the right and maintain order. In September Pinochet staged a coup, bombarded Allende in the presidential palace and murdered thousands of worker activists. While the workers’ movement was being lulled to sleep in Europe by its own leaders, it was drowned in blood in southern Latin America.

The flame lit in 1968 was to flare up one more time in Europe. Portugal had been a dictatorship with fascist characteristics since the late 1920s. But by the mid-1970s it was losing the war to control its African colonies. In April 1974 a coup overthrew the dictator Caetano, replacing him with a conservative general, Spinola, who was backed by the country’s major monopolies and committed to a negotiated settlement to the wars.

The collapse of the dictatorship unleashed a wave of struggle. The great shipyards of Lisnave and Setnave were occupied. Bakers, postal workers and airport workers struck. Many of the army captains who had taken the risk of organising the coup were much more radical than Spinola and wanted an immediate end to the wars, while Spinola wanted to drag them out until the liberation movements agreed peace terms which would protect Portuguese business interests. The only properly organised underground party was the Communist Party. Its leaders made a deal with Spinola to end the strikes (earning the distrust of some of the most powerful groups of workers in the Lisbon area), joined the government and attempted to infiltrate middle class supporters into positions of influence in the armed forces and the media. Its aim was to lift itself up by balancing between the workers and the generals until it could establish a regime along the lines of those in Eastern Europe after the war.

It was a manoeuvre that could not possibly work. The Communist Party could not stop the militancy of the Lisbon workers and disaffection in the armed forces leading to the growth of forces to its left any more than it could it calm the panic within Western capitalism at the revolutionary events on its doorstep.

Two unsuccessful attempts at right wing coups led to Spinola losing office, and to a further radicalisation among workers and within the ranks of the army. Backed by the CIA and the social democratic governments of Western Europe, the right organised a series of near-risings in rural northern Portugal. The army captains who exercised effective military power swung from one political option to another. Then, in November 1975, a senior officer with social democrat backing succeeded in provoking some of the left wing officers into a half-hearted attempt to take power, and used it as an excuse to march several hundred disciplined troops on Lisbon to disarm the disaffected regiments. The Communist Party, which had appeared so powerful only a few weeks earlier—when an officer close to it held the premiership—made no attempt to organise working class resistance. A revolution which had deeply worried the leaders of capitalism in Europe and America in the summer of 1975 accepted defeat in the autumn with barely a murmur.

A hard rain

The long boom came to an abrupt end in the autumn of 1973, as Western economies went into recession simultaneously for the first time since the 1930s and unemployment doubled. This was enough to produce panic in government and business circles everywhere. Mainstream economists had never been able to explain how the slump of the 1930s had happened, and none of them could be sure they were not facing a similar situation.

In the 1950s and 1960s they had convinced themselves that slumps were no longer possible because they could apply the prescriptions of John Maynard Keynes. Business cycles were a thing of the past, the author of the world’s best-selling economic textbook, Nobel prize-winner Paul Samuelson, had assured them in 1970. But when they tried to apply Keynesian remedies to the recession they did not work. The only effect was to increase inflation while leaving unemployment untouched. By 1976 they had abandoned such methods amid panic about the danger of escalating inflation. Economists and political journalists switched overnight to a belief in the completely ‘free’ market, unconstrained by state intervention—a theory previously preached only by a few isolated prophets such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Such a mass conversion of intellectuals had not been seen since the days when theologians changed their ‘beliefs’ on the say-so of princes.

The popularity of the prophets of the free market could not, however, restore unemployment levels to those of the long boom. Nor could it prevent another recession at the beginning of the 1980s, doubling unemployment again and affecting even wider areas of the world than that of 1974-76.

One popular explanation for the crises of 1974-76 and 1980-82 blamed the sudden increases in the price of oil after the Arab-Israeli war of October 1973 and the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq war of 1980. But a fresh crisis broke at the beginning of the 1990s, at a time of falling oil prices. Another explanation claimed that the crisis of 1974-76 resulted from the impact of rising wages on profits. But this could not explain the later crises, since wages in the world’s single most important economy, the US, fell steadily after the mid-1970s.
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Something more fundamental in the system had changed, turning the ‘golden age’ into a ‘leaden age’. The US had been able to afford massive arms spending at the time of the Korean War, absorbing perhaps 20 percent of its total output and equal to half the surplus available for investment. This had provided markets for its own industries and for exports from states such as Japan, which spent very little on arms. But by the time of the Vietnam War competition from such countries meant the US could not afford its old level of military output. It still produced massive quantities of weaponry, but the proportion of output this absorbed was probably about a third of that at the time of the Korean War. This was simply not enough to ward off recurrent and deepening world recessions, even if they were not yet on the scale of the 1930s slump.
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This did not bring all economic growth to an end in the advanced countries. But growth was much slower and more uneven than previously, and the cycle of boom and slump had returned with a vengeance. Average output per head in the 1980s grew at less than half the rate of the early 1960s. Unemployment reached levels virtually unimaginable in the long boom, commonly staying above 10 percent for years at a time, and rising close to 20 percent in places such as Ireland and Spain. Lower rates in the US in the late 1980s and late 1990s were driven by welfare cuts which forced people to take jobs at poverty wages—the poorest 10 percent earning 25 percent less than the equivalent group in Britain.
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Generalised job insecurity became a feature everywhere. By the 1990s mainstream politicians were deriding the idea that people could have ‘jobs for life’. Yet that phrase had summed up what most people took for granted through the long boom. Of course, people changed jobs as some industries grew and others contracted. But except in a few ‘declining industries’, workers usually did so voluntarily, responding to the pull of better prospects, not the push of redundancy. Now the push became the norm, and opinion polls suggested fear of it weighed on the minds of about half the working population.

Capitalism is a more dynamic form of class society than any before in history. Its dynamism, its ever-changing character, is as typical of a slump as of a boom. Some firms go out of business while others prosper at their expense. Some industries contract while others expand. Even in the worst slump there would be growth sectors—such as pawn-brokers buying up the goods of the most desperate and security services protecting the wealth of the rich.

The dynamism remained in the ‘leaden age’, but instead of offering the mass of people improved lives, as in the long boom, it threatened to snatch what they had achieved in the past. Whole industries disappeared, and towns were reduced to wastelands. Welfare benefits were cut to the levels of 50 years earlier—or even abolished in some US states. Meanwhile, a new brand of hard right politicians known as ‘Thatcherites’ or ‘neo-liberals’ toasted the unleashing of ‘enterprise’, and found an echo among a layer of social democratic politicians who treated a return to the orthodoxies of 19th century politics as evidence of ‘modernity’.

The shift to the right had its impact on sections of the radical left, demoralised by the defeats of the mid-1970s—and in some cases by learning the truth about China and the bloody regime established by the pro-Chinese Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Some drew the conclusion that the whole revolutionary enterprise had been misconceived. Some believed they had been too severe in their criticism of parliamentary reformism. Some simply concluded that the class struggle was a thing of the past.

In fact there were some very big and sometimes violent class confrontations in the 1980s, as workers tried to prevent the decimation of jobs in old established industries—the struggles by steel workers in France and Belgium, the year long strike of over 150,000 miners in Britain and a strike of similar length by 5,000 British print workers, a five day general strike in Denmark, public sector strikes in Holland and British Columbia, and a one day general strike in Spain.

But, by and large, these struggles were defeated, and one legacy of defeat was a growing belief that ‘old fashioned’ methods of class struggle could not win. This led a layer of working class activists to place their hopes once more in the promises of parliamentary politicians. It also encouraged left wing intellectuals to question further the very notions of class and class struggle. They embraced an intellectual fashion called ‘postmodernism’, which claimed any interpretation of reality was as valid as any other, that there was no objective basis for notions such as class, and that any attempt to change the way society operates would be ‘totalitarian’, since it involved trying to impose a total conception of the world on others. Postmodernists rejected notions of struggling to change society just as the dangerous instability of society became ever more pronounced.