It’s a long time since a book annoyed me as much as this one. But since I try not to get annoyed about unimportant things, it was obviously because I thought the book said something significant. Indeed ,all the central problems of the British left are debated out here; most of the right questions are posed. Regrettably, and this in itself is a sad comment on the state of the British socialist intelligentsia, few of the right answers are given.

The book’s origins lie in a debate initiated in Marxism Today by Eric Hobsbawm. He argued that the high point of self-organisation and class consciousness of the British working class was reached in the early 1950s, after the first post-war Labour government. Since then there has been a decline of class consciousness, reflected in such things as a decreasing vote for the Labour Party. The struggles of the working class are characterised by increasing sectionalism and fragmentation. The working class itself is increasingly split along lines of occupation, race, sex, age, etc. and this has led to fragmentation rather than unity. His initial article insisted that a new strategy of unification was needed.

In his second essay in the book, replying to the debate, Hobsbawm begins to expand on what that strategy might be. In this essay he starts to pose the problem of assembling a popular majority for socialist change: the key being the expansion of working-class support into middle class layers and attracting those people who might otherwise go over to the SDP. By implication, Hobsbawm argues that Bennism is a left sectarian barrier to this kind of project, and that what we need is something like the Italian Communist Party’s ‘historic compromise’. In other words, to get a popular majority we need to move to the right and present a multi-class programme, not a narrowly ‘sectarian’ working class programme.

Class consciousness is, as they say, a problematic concept and one which cannot be measured by a single yardstick like election results. Since the early 1950s, and in particular in the late 1960s and early 1970s, there has been a massive increase in trade unionisation. and in industrial struggle. In 1968 the number of strikes in Britain trebled and in the following six years there was a higher level of industrial militancy than at any time since the 1920s. Indeed, the industrial strength of the working class has been an increasingly intractable problem for the British ruling class during this period. It is one of the major problems for the ‘forward march of capital’ in Britain that the British working class is perhaps the most extensively unionised in the world.

But does this add up to an increase in class consciousness, and does it create the basis for Labour to move forward? And how does i relate to the decline in the Labour vote? One might argue that the latter problem reflects the experience of successive Labour governments which have implemented right-wing policies. It is necessary also to point out that industrial militancy is not just sectional and economistic: it has also created the basis for solidarity and the unification of working-class struggles-look at the massive support for the five imprisoned dockers in 1972, the miners strikes and the Grunwick workers.

But Hobsbawm has a point, and one very badly answered by the “far left’ contributors in this book, Steve Jeffreys, Hilary Wainwright and Robin Blackburn. Militancy,. whether industrial militancy, tenants’ militancy, trades council militancy, international solidarity militancy or any other kind of militancy, will not in itself provide overall goals, an overall direction for the movement National political solutions, to be implemented by governments are also needed to give the militancy of sections of the working class a coherent project around which to unify. Hilary Wainwright suggests the key role of trades councils, tenants’ groups etc; Steve Jeffreys points to picket lines and rank and file militancy; and Robin Blackburn calls for more socialist education.

Hobsbawm has no difficulty whatever in showing how all these are quite inadequate as strategic answers to the problem of how to take the left forward. In the end, therefore, the book ends up with a classic false dichotomy, and at the risk of unbecoming immodesty, one on can only regret the absence of a contribution from the political current represented by this journal. The question is: how can economic or other forms of partial and sectoral militancy be integrated with a national political thrust to create a new break though, and turn around the political impasse in which the left apparently finds itself? The answer is plain: the fight for the next Labour government and the struggle over what policies it should implement, and the connected fight on the question of the accountability to the working class of that government.

Steve Jeffreys and Hilary Wainwright, in their different ways, confuse their historical judgement of the ability of the Labour Party to carry through the transition to socialism, with the question of whether fighting inside the whole labour movement for a ‘Labour government committed to socialist policies can be an essential component in maturing working class consciousness, unifying the working class, and above all creating a space for socialist politics. Those people who spend their time rushing from industrial dispute to industrial dispute, without at the same time relating to the central political struggle associated with the name of Tony Benn in the Labour Party, and its affiliated organisations (and centrally the industrial unions). make a big error.

There are two implicit responses to Bennism in this book. Hobsbawm’s right Eurocommunist line is that it is left sectarian to non-proletarian social layers. Steve Jeffreys seems to think that it’s a dangerous diversion. Jeffreys- a well known spokesperson of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) – shows clearly the price that organisation pays for its ultra-left syndicalist errors when it comes to understanding the dynamics of Labour politics.

Bennism, like all left social democratic projects, is unfortunately reformist- and thereby potentially dangerous. It has other potential as well. It comprises first and foremost tens of thousands of workers, most of them in industrial unions, who want no more truck with the Callaghans and Wilsons of this world. This is an important step forward and provides an immensely positive opportunity for revolutionaries. The onus is on the whole revolutionary left to make the boldest steps to link up with Bennite workers and to engage them in the sharpest ideological confrontation within the framework of united activity. This means that revolutionary socialists must be active in the Labour Party and the trade unions, changing the dispersed multiple foci of their previous activity, but not for one moment giving up their critique of Benn’s reformism. If revolutionary socialists fail to make this transition, they will lose a historic opportunity to link up with the most important political development for 25 years.

Hobsbawm’s concern to link up with the middle layers in society evokes precisely the worst possible response. The middle class in Britain, currently undergoing a certain politicisation which in different ways is as evident in Bennism and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament as in the Social Democratic Party, will undoubtedly polarise around either bourgeois or socialist solutions to the crisis- or split between them. The working class won’t maximise its alliance with these middle layers by moving to the right, but only by appearing to be the most decisive, the most ideologically advanced, the most unified, indeed the ‘hegemonic’ class.

The forward march of Labour can, if socialists act correctly, be resumed with a vengeance in the next few years.