June 1983 Election. Eric Hobsbawm on Labour’s Lost Millions
Eric Hobsbawm wrote a lot of very interesting history and as a member of the Communist Party until it dissolved itself he also opined on politics. The history was mostly much better than the politics (though I should I add I was and am a member of the Communist Party Historians Group, now the Socialist History Society).
One point I completely agreed with Hobsbawm on was that marxist historians (myself included) should be ‘historians of the present too’. That is the history of the twentieth century and indeed of Stalinism (or actually existing socialism if you were that way inclined) had to be grappled with.
Hobsbawm did a lot of this in Marxism Today which started life as the CP’s theoretical journal but by the 1980s was more like (as Hobsbawm later admitted) the house journal of New Labour. Note ‘more like’ not ‘like’.
One example was the analysis he wrote after Labour’s defeat in the October 1983 edition of Marxism Today which was titled Labour’s Lost Millions
It is well a worth a read now because so many of the themes he raises and notes featured in the discussion of Labour’s Election defeat on 12th December 2019 and continue to do so.
Hobsbawm argued that Labour had lost millions of votes of people who were working class but did not vote for the Party. His suggestion was that Labour must become the party of workers by hand and by brain, hence a much broader alliance of people,
Hobsbawm’s analysis was not entirely to the point as he often wasn’t politically.
Labour had not finally lost the votes of millions workers. We need only look at the results of Blair in 1997 or Corbyn in 2017 to see it is much more complex than that.
Historically the point perhaps was that Labour had only been a nearly automatic home for working class votes arguably from 1945 to 1979
Hobsbawn was certainly not right to think that Labour was set for a perpetual decline as a party however. It remains the largest broadly social-democratic party in Europe even after losing several hundred thousand members in the Starmer period.
On the other hand he had a point that in 1983 Labour had to grapple with Thatcherite Toryism as a new variant.
This was the variant that didnt see any point in maintaining UK manufacturing capability when this could be done elsewhere but profits still gathered by the Tories friends from it. 40 years on despite Brexit this still applies.
At least Hobsbawm saw the need to understand and to an extent oppose market capitalism rather than get into political bed with it
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