I wanted to say, I think, that for more than a century it was taken for granted by nearly any young leftist that what they were doing, and saying, had a great deal to do with organised labour: and that this was because that was both the basic audience for these ideas and the potential means by which they might be achieved. Mine was possibly the last generation - in the UK, anyway - for which this was the case.
The problem is that ideas of working-class solidarity, which were widespread all through this period, are now basically believed in only by a small and shrinking minority and an ageing one at that. It's striking, for instance, how little younger people think or care about trade unions and how old gatherings of Old Left types like me actually are.
Now we could blame this on New Labour, the far left, anticapitalists or who we want, and find fault with any of them. But I can't be bothered, for any number of reasons, but partly because the left is the left and any attempt to make it into a certain shape, all the undesirable bits cut out, is doomed and stupid. You can't have a broad movement that's narrowly defined and you nor can you have it without mistakes and foolishness of all kinds. If we have to get it just right then it's a waste of time.
We could also blame it on the defeats of the Eighties, and it's a fair point - or on the absence of PR (which militates against leftist parties) or anti-union legislation or whatever. But to be honest, I'm a historian by nature and I look at long-term causes most of all. And it seems to me that once the productivity of labour reaches the point where people can secure themselves a decent living - if no doubt an insecure one - by their own efforts, without the need for the difficult and draining efforts of collective labour, then at least one of them effects, at least for a while, will be an increase in individualism and a decline of interest in organised labour. Nothing to do with this party or that party taking this or that line, nothing to do with there being anything wrong (or right) about parties as such. It's just a historical phase, while society remakes itself, as it always does - and while that doesn't mean everything has changed, we need time itself to show us what happens next and how the old struggle of us and them will also remake itself, as it always does.
