Of all the charges brought against the British left, one of the most powerful and insistent has been the claim that it wants to “take us back to the 1970s.” Indeed, in the campaign for December’s general election, stoked-up fears of a return to this past cohered the complex political imaginary being mobilized against Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.

A veteran of five decades of activism in the labor and peace movements, Corbyn was constantly portrayed as the archetype “1970s-style leftist,” allegedly wishing to “turn the clock back to the 1970s,” and restore “1970s-style trade union powers.” When deployed by the Right against the Left “the 1970s” is a malleable field to which all the worst elements of the nation’s past are consigned. It appears as a Hobbesian world: a time of the war of all against all, rampant social disorder, economic catastrophe, and national decline. It is a warning to anyone seeking a modicum of change to the neoliberal consensus that followed in the 1980s.

This decade provided neoliberalism’s founding myth — and continues to place a fundamental obstacle in the way of socialist advance in Britain. For forty years of Thatcherism has reconstituted the British working class as a subject broken from its own past, riven by new generational and regional divides. Economics were the method, Margaret Thatcher argued in 1981, but the object was “to change the heart and soul” — to create neoliberal subjects, without class belonging. In its electoral catastrophe in December 2019, Labour reaped what the 1970s had sowed.