其他摘要：The mass labour movement is in disarray throughout the advanced capitalist world. Its utopias, generations-old visions of a better social future, have ceased to mobilise. Its organisations-unions and parties-are in retreat. Its social base is more and more fragmented. Its erstwhile allies look in new directions. Its politics range from dogged defensiveness of past victories against powerful new capitalist opponents to 'reformulated' positions which, in fact, promise to do much of what these opponents desire. What has happened? The argument presented in this essay is meant to provide a very general answer to this question based on an analysis of the development of class conflict in recent times. In the period immediately following World War II a new class compromise was reached in capitalist societies, one which reconciled many of the pre-war goals of social democracy, broadly construed, with capital's determined pursuit of a new accumulation strategy. During the extraordinarily long period of post-war economic growth the dynamics of this compromise mutually modified the character and behaviour of capital, labour and the state. Part I shows how class structures and the cutting edge of class conflict were reshaped in important ways. When economic and social crisis finally broke the back of the postwar boom, it did its work not on any situation of class division, but on these specific structures and relations of class conflict. What came apart in crisis for the labour movement were the very things which had been created in the post-war compromise, as Part II discusses. The results of this have been devastating. To the degree to which the post-war boom exhausted social democracy's stock of programmes the present crisis of the post-war compromise has left the mass labour movement bereft of creative perspectives. Part III reviews the political options which exist in this unprecedented situation.
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