Labour historians retroactively minimized how close postwar Britain came to revolution

Evidence

Following the war, pockets of workers from across Europe were drawn to modes of organization in which production was intended for use rather than profi t; communal property was favored over private property; freedom was valued above the commodifi cation of labor. Th e strength and revolutionary signifi cance of the Italian and especially British labor movements aft er the war have been downplayed by many labor historians in the decades that followed; G. D. H. Cole, the political theorist and economist who wrote this chapter’s epigraph, wrote in his 1958 A History of Socialist Th ought, Vol. 4, “I have tried to make plain that there was no point at all at which there was any possibility of a British Revolution” (Cole 1958, 449). Th is was a departure from his dispatches from the period itself, including a 1919 testimony that read in part, “[f]or I do sincerely believe that the present economic order is breaking down, and that its defi nite collapse is a matter not of decades, but of years” (Cole 1920a, 24). He observed that what had held capitalism together until that point, that is, “the widespread conviction that capitalism was inevitable” (ibid., 8), was collapsing. — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 339

Categorization

• XREF: Cole’s own reversal (1919 revolutionary expectation versus 1958 denial) parallels the reader’s interest in how historical narratives of ‘inevitability’ are constructed retroactively — same move seen in Milgrom’s law-merchant and Africa’s First Democrats material. — connects to: The British labour movement embedded itself within the state rather than challenging it hegemonically — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1215; British labour lacked a hegemonic challenge to state power; British labour integrated into state structures without a hegemonic challenge (+2 more)
• QUESTION: Why did Cole himself reverse his prognosis in his own later history-writing? Worth tracing what changed in Cole’s politics between 1919 and 1958.

Broader Connections

• The British labour movement embedded itself within the state rather than challenging it hegemonically #contradicts (0.85) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1215
• British labour lacked a hegemonic challenge to state power #contradicts (0.85)
• British labour integrated into state structures without a hegemonic challenge #contradicts (0.85)
• Austerity was designed to reverse workers’ revolutionary wartime and postwar gains #corroborates (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 654
• Reformist Labour Socialism, not Marxism, directed British workers’ politics #corroborates (0.72) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1218