In March 1978, Eric Hobsbawm delivered a lecture in which he asked whether “the forward march of labour and the labour movement” had been halted. His answer, not surprisingly, was “yes, but we can reverse it.” It surprised few that a great Marxist historian would take on such a topic. In the late 1970s, there was still a deep and abiding association of the Left with the working class — how the class was situated politically was the central question for that generation of socialists. Much of Hobsbawm’s audience was, after all, in or around the trade union movement. In the decades since, the ties between the Left and laboring people have been largely severed, with the Left mainly housed within the professional classes and the working class both atomized and set politically adrift from the socialist tradition.

Yet Hobsbawm was writing at a time when there was an expectation that labor, even though it was weakened, could nevertheless carry the torch for progressive forces. There was still a sense of optimism for class politics, although it was waning. Even more, there was an expectation that, if socialists and labor organizers got their act together, they could revive the political momentum they had lost. But while there remained a basic optimism about class politics, Hobsbawm’s posing of such a question reflected a sense of doubt, even despair, about the socialist project. In the postwar years, many on the New Left were warning that traditional Marxism had been too optimistic about labor’s putative mission — the expectation that the working class was destined to overthrow capitalism. At the time, this worry was mitigated by the very real gains that working-class forces made in constructing welfare states, and sometimes even full-fledged social democracies, though this fell short of abolishing capitalism. The disappointment was not that “we are losing political traction,” but rather, “why are we not achieving more with our resources?”

By 1978, doubt was creeping in about the working class’s political capacity. Its traditional parties still upheld socialism, but this was more rhetorical than real; unions across Western Europe were tightly integrated into the bourgeois state; postwar economic gains were under fire as an economic crisis dragged on; and many of the class’s political leaders seemed out of step with the new social movements. All these developments seemed a vindication of the New Left’s Cassandras, and over the next decade or so, pessimism grew. By the late 1980s, it was near-universal.