The polls tell the story. Prime Ministers with a disapproval rating of 70% rarely last long. Nobody defies gravity forever. Margaret Thatcher didn’t; nor did Tony Blair, despite winning three elections. Johnson has won only one. And the next test is not far away. On 5 May voters across the country will go to the polls in the local elections. A terrible set of results, and more letters of no-confidence will surely flood in. For Rishi Sunak, Liz Truss and their rivals, the prize must seem so tantalisingly close…

And yet, and yet. Political history is littered with examples of potential leaders who struck too soon or waited too long, future England captains whose moment never came. Nobody remembers the R. A. Butler governments of the late Fifties and early Sixties, because they never happened. A decade later, Roy Jenkins sharpened the knife, raised it high about his head and prepared to plunge it deep into Harold Wilson’s back… but the blow never fell. And a decade after that, everybody knew Tony Benn was going to become Labour leader one day — but he never did.

The list goes on. Willie Whitelaw delayed and delayed, loyal to the last to the beleaguered Ted Heath, and then found himself overtaken by, of all things, a woman. Michael Heseltine timed his deadly attack on Margaret Thatcher to perfection, only to discover that many of his fellow Conservative MPs would never forgive him for it.

Kenneth Clarke won three separate parliamentary ballots in three different Tory leadership contests, yet never wore the crown. David Davis arrived at the Conservative conference as a runaway favourite with two busty women in T-shirts reading “It’s DD for me”, only to find that the party faithful preferred a smooth-talking shepherd’s-hut enthusiast instead. Even Boris Johnson’s first leadership bid exploded on the launch pad, sabotaged by his chief engineer.

And then there’s the most disastrous campaign of all, the Labour moderates’ risible attempt to unseat Jeremy Corbyn in the summer of 2016. “Angela is a star in the Labour firmament. She will be at my right hand throughout this contest and if I am successful, Angela will be alongside me as my right-hand woman.” The words of the future Labour leader Owen Smith, talking about his erstwhile rival Angela Eagle. That was just five-and-a-half years ago. Dame Angela is still there somewhere, lurking unnoticed on the backbenches. But poor Smith isn’t even an MP.

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How to bring down a Prime Minister

By Dominic Sandbrook

It would be nice to claim there’s a clever formula for success, or to tease out some immutable “lessons from history”, but that would be disingenuous. There’s no formula. Indeed, the joy of political leadership campaigns is that nobody can quite predict the strange chemistry that makes a winner, the peculiar combination of luck and personality, the unforeseeable, unrepeatable point when man (or woman) meets moment.

Take Labour’s Roy Jenkins, the embodiment of metropolitan citizen-of-the-world liberalism, whose admirers often describe him as one of the best Prime Ministers Britain never had. In the spring of 1968, the only question was not if, but when. Following the humiliating devaluation of the pound a few months earlier, the Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, seemed crippled beyond recovery. The public had tired of his endless slipperiness, and as a smart and urbane crisis Chancellor — Rishi Sunak parallel alert! — Jenkins seemed the only plausible successor.

On the Labour benches Jenkins commanded what he called “a dedicated group of commandos, waiting as it were with their faces blackened for the opportunity to launch a Dieppe raid against the forces of opportunism”. Their leaders reported that they had assembled an elaborate system of ‘dissident cells’ comprising more than a hundred supporters, as well as an ‘inner group’ who would co-ordinate the revolt. At a secret meeting on 17 June the chief plotters even produced a definitive list of some 120 potential rebels. All they needed was the signal to strike.

It never came. A couple of weeks later, Jenkins told them to hold off for the time being. The premiership was so close — but he “did not want to be implicated in actually launching an action”. A convicted assassin, he believed, would never wear the crown: “I will never be caught with a dagger in my hand unless it is already smoking with my enemy’s blood”.

So Jenkins waited, and waited… and the moment passed. Wilson stayed on at Number 10 and Labour lost the next election. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, Jenkins lost his sheen. He went from tomorrow’s man to yesterday’s, without ever having been today’s. By the time Wilson retired in the spring of 1976, Jenkins’s chance had vanished. He had fallen out with the party’s Left wing over Europe, but there was a palpable sense, too, that he lacked the killer instinct.

Later, in his memoirs, Jenkins fell back on the excuse that he had never been ambitious enough, a clever way of complimenting himself for his own failure. But some of his supporters told a different story. “Roy was too ambitious, not insufficiently ambitious,” wrote his friend David Marquand. “He never thought it was the right moment; he always thought it was too risky”. The stakes were too high; he was paralysed by the fear of missing out. I wonder if, one day, Sunak’s friends will tell a similar story?

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Nothing can save the BBC

By Dominic Sandbrook

What of Jenkins’s insistence that the assassin never wins the ultimate prize? Well, there’s always the lesson of Heseltine in 1990. But such a flamboyant showman would have been deeply distrusted by many Tory MPs even if he’d never lifted a finger against Margaret Thatcher. And there are plenty of telling examples of political hitmen who made it all the way. Stanley Baldwin, instrumental in terminating Austen Chamberlain’s leadership in 1922, became Tory leader himself two years later. And Harold Macmillan succeeded Anthony Eden in 1957 precisely because many Tory MPs thought that by knifing Eden in the back, he had showed the cold, single-minded ruthlessness that Rab Butler lacked.

Then there’s the best-known political assassin of all, an object lesson in pitiless opportunism. Margaret Thatcher had spent the first four years of the Seventies nodding and smiling at Ted Heath’s policy U-turns. Not once had she whispered a word of dissent. And when, after the second general election of 1974, she announced that she was challenging him for the leadership, nobody seriously thought she would win.

The story goes that when, as a courtesy, Thatcher visited Heath to warn him of her intentions, he said coldly: “You’ll lose.” The Conservative parliamentary party, agreed his old rival Enoch Powell, “wouldn’t put up with those hats and that accent”. Even Mrs Thatcher’s family thought she was wasting her time. “You must be out of your mind,” remarked her husband Denis, not entirely supportively. “You haven’t got a hope.”

Yet as it turned out, Thatcher beat Heath by 130 votes to 119. (“A black day,” declared another of his old rivals, Reginald Maudling.) And now the strange magic of leadership contests took effect. With Heath gone, four new contenders, notably his lieutenant Willie Whitelaw, threw their hats into the ring. But it was too late; all the momentum lay with Thatcher. As the Telegraph remarked, it looked as if “a whole herd of fainthearts left it to a courageous and able woman to topple a formidable leader” and then “ganged up to deny her her just reward”. When the second ballot was held a week later, she stormed to victory. “My God!” exclaimed one Tory vice-chairman when the news came through. “The bitch has won!”

The other great canard about leadership elections is that you should keep an eye on the dark horse, with John Major’s victory in 1990 as Exhibit A. But was Major such a dark horse? He was, after all, Chancellor of the Exchequer, having just served a short stint as Foreign Secretary. It’s true that if the leadership election had been held a year or two earlier, he wouldn’t have stood a chance. But Major had timed his run to perfection, his victory a perfect example of how, in politics, you make your own luck. It would have been easy for him to waver in 1990: to bide his time and sit this one out. But he calculated, quite rightly, that he would never have a better chance. With cool, understated efficiency, he took it.

In reality, most dark horses never come remotely close to winning, and many soon relapse into utter obscurity. Who now recalls Peter Lilley’s leadership pitch in 1997? How many people look back on Michael Ancram as the great lost leader of 2001? Is there, perhaps, some parallel world in which Stephen Crabb faced Liam Fox in the final round of the Tory contest in 2016? Can there really be a universe where Mark Harper battled Esther McVey for the crown three years later?

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

Yet all of these people, presumably, must have imagined the pieces slotting into place: their colleagues marvelling at their unexpected talents, the other contenders falling away, the momentum sweeping them towards that historic audience at Buckingham Palace. Alas, it almost never works out that way. If you enter the contest as an outsider, you’re probably doomed before you start, because most MPs like backing winners.

A good example is one of the most colourful dark horses in modern political history, the hard-drinking, grammar-school-smiting Labour intellectual Tony Crosland. When Wilson resigned in 1976, Crosland fancied his chances. He looked at his rivals. Jim Callaghan, the favourite: too old. Michael Foot: too Left-wing. Roy Jenkins: too Right-wing. Denis Healey: too arrogant. Tony Benn: too mad. And it all seemed so straightforward. One by one the others would blow up, and Crosland would come through the middle.

So the future Prime Minister summoned his protégé, Roy Hattersley, who would surely play a key role in the victorious campaign. They got straight down to business. The most important thing, Crosland said, was to get a “decent vote” in the first ballot, and build strength from there. “I take it you’ll vote for me.”

Silence. Then, at last, Hattersley confessed. He didn’t want to waste his vote, and had already promised to back Callaghan. Crosland couldn’t believe his ears. It was all falling apart, and the campaign had barely started. “You’ll not vote for me?” he said. “Then fuck off.”

Crosland finished dead last in the 1976 leadership election, with just 19 votes. And the winner? Callaghan, just as everybody had predicted. Dark horses aren’t dark horses by accident. Favourites are favourites for a reason.

So are there no lessons at all for Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss — or for Jeremy Hunt, Penny Mordaunt, Tom Tugendhat and the host of other putative dark horses? Well, here are a few thoughts. Most politicians only get one chance. Miss your moment, and it never comes again. Courage is usually more admirable — and more effective — than caution. If you do stand, don’t say anything stupid. Ideally, don’t say anything at all.

None of this is very helpful, I know — not least because there are so many obvious exceptions. So to finish, here’s one ironclad rule of leadership contests, which may not be what the current hopefuls want to hear.

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Test article

By Aris Roussinos

Really, honestly, it would be better to lose. Losers always have more fun. Just ask yourself: would Roy Jenkins have been able to enjoy quite so many agreeable three-course dinners if he’d been Prime Minister? Or would he rather have been defending the Government’s policy on salmonella? Would Denis Healey have been free to appear on TV with Roger Moore and Dame Edna Everage? Or would he rather have been at a meeting in Frankfurt with Helmut Kohl? Would Ken Clarke have been happier organising a junior ministerial appointment for John Bercow, or smoking his fifth cigar of the night in some West End jazz club?

For this is the great unspoken truth about leadership contests: it’s a competition to see who’s going to be the most despised person in the country in a couple of years’ time. Yes, you get to have your picture on the Downing Street stairs, just along from Gordon Brown and Theresa May. But as they would surely tell you, being Prime Minister is awful. Everything goes wrong, and everybody hates you. So instead of agonising about when to declare and what to say, just don’t do it. You’ll have a much happier life if you stay out, and the country will thank you for it.

Here endeth the lesson. Liz, Rishi: don’t say I didn’t warn you.

“It doesn’t sound too bad at all, does it?” Brian mused “You’d think we would be really comfortable on that.”

But for poor Brian, a pay rise of 6.5% wasn’t good at all. It was disastrous. As his wife told the man from the Daily Express, the housekeeping bill had gone up by a third in just a year, while they were even spending £2 a week extra on their son’s clothes.

“Then the gas bill comes in, followed by the electricity, the rates, the phone bill, and a lot of others,” said Brian disconsolately. “I am just one of thousands, I suppose, but there is no comfort in company. And I’ve given up any notion of doing any better for my family.” Then Mrs B cut in: “We used to think we were really well off. Not any more.”

Such was life in the summer of 1975, the age of Showaddywaddy, 10cc and the Bay City Rollers. Harold Wilson was PM, Tom Baker was in his time-travelling pomp, Britain had just voted to remain in the Common Market and the Space Hopper was the fashion accessory du jour — and all the time, inflation just kept rising. 24%, 25%, 26%…

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Jeremy Corbyn's return to the Seventies

By David Kogan

Today, the prospect of prices soaring at such breakneck speed seems like something from some mad fantasy. Yet inflation is back in the news, and understandably so. The Bank of England’s target is 2%; the most recent figure, for the year to August, shows inflation at 3%, and most analysts expect it to hit 4% before the end of the year.

As always, the causes are very complicated. The explosive recovery of the world economy after Covid, the global supply chain crisis, the huge surge in demand for fossil fuels, the spike in wholesale gas prices (up 250%, incredibly, since the turn of the year), the rise in shipping costs because of container shortages, the worldwide scarcity of semi-conductors, the dearth of lorry drivers, Brexit, Boris — you pays your money and takes your choice, basically.

By the standards of the Seventies, inflation of 4% doesn’t sound like much. In the summer of 1975, Britain’s Chancellor, Denis Healey, would have sobbed with joy if you had offered him an inflation rate of 14%, let alone 4%. But as Healey would also have told you, 4% can become 6% very quickly. Then consumers’ expectations kick in, and 6% becomes 8%. Wages leap to follow prices: 8% becomes 10%. And with interest rates following suit, good luck paying your mortgage.

Today, you probably have to be in your mid-sixties to remember what inflation really meant. For everybody else it’s just a word, a vague economic term from a vanished age, like the gold standard or the balance of payments deficit. But if you were of working age in mid-1970s Britain, inflation mattered. It ate into your savings, your living standards, your pension. If you belonged to a powerful trade union, which could fight for an annual pay rise on your behalf, you might be all right. But what if you didn’t?

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Don't blame Brexit for shortages

By PHILIP PILKINGTON

Then as now, the causes were very complicated. Traumatised by memories of the Great Depression, desperate to avoid an economic slowdown that might revive the spectre of high unemployment, Britain’s politicians had tolerated a relatively high inflation rate for years. Slowly, inexorably it began to creep up: 6% in 1970, 9% in 1971, 7% in 1972, 9% again in 1973…

And then on 6 October 1973, the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, Egypt and Syria launched a sensational surprise attack on Israel. The Israelis fought back, boosted by more than 22,000 tons of American tanks, weapons and military supplies. Ten days after the start of the war, the Arab oil exporters unleashed their “oil weapon”, slashing production, raising prices by 17% and announcing an embargo on exports to the United States, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa and Rhodesia. And with that, energy prices went through the roof.

In Britain, where Ted Heath was already struggling to keep inflation down, the political consequences were catastrophic. When the nation’s miners walked out for the second time in two years, Heath instituted a three-day working week and called a snap election. But the result was a hung parliament, and in came Labour’s Harold Wilson to form a minority government and prime the pump for a second election.

Every other Western country tried to deflate its economy to deal with the oil shock, but not Harold Wilson’s Britain. By the spring of 1975, prices were rising five times (yes, five times) faster than in any other major European country. In 12 months, the price of sugar had gone up by 184%, carrots by 137%, electricity by 66%, tinned soup by 54%, orange squash by 51% and coal by 47%.

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Where it all went wrong for Labour

By Dominic Sandbrook

Today some of the details of that summer of 1975 seem almost deranged. To cut down on paper costs, publishers started producing shorter books with smaller typefaces. They gave up printing the prices on the back, using sticky labels instead. Meanwhile the trade union leaders were endlessly trooping into Downing Street, asking for new deals for their members. On 3 April the power workers won 31%; on 14 April the civil servants accepted 32%; on 18 April the doctors won 35%; on 29 April London’s dockers settled for 30%.

The extraordinary thing is that most of the union leaders themselves, who knew more about the world of work than many politicians, told Wilson’s ministers that the whole business was completely bonkers. Yet it was their job to keep asking for more. That was what their members expected. So they did.

Perhaps this makes inflation sound like a joke. It wasn’t. The costs fell most heavily on people who could ill afford it — the poorest, the elderly, those living alone — their incomes stagnant as prices rocketed. As Britain’s GDP fell two years in a row, living standards sank with it. By December 1977, the average couple took home less money, in real terms, than they had four years earlier.

It’s worth repeating that although every major Western country suffered from the ravages of inflation in the mid-Seventies, none suffered as badly as Britain. That was a political choice, not an act of God, and people knew it.

They knew it at home: Wilson’s Foreign Secretary, James Callaghan, told his colleagues he often thought that, if he were a younger man, he would emigrate. And more embarrassingly, they knew it abroad. “Britain is a tragedy,’ the US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, told President Gerald Ford in a conversation captured by White House transcribers. “It has sunk to begging, borrowing, stealing until North Sea oil comes in … That Britain has become such a scrounger is a disgrace.”

So how did they fix it? The short answer is: with great difficulty.

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The man who destroyed Labour

By James Kirkup

One of the poisonous things about inflation is that it corrodes the social fabric, driving a wedge between savers and borrowers, old and young, those represented by trade unions and those dependent on fixed incomes. Labour’s answer was the Social Contract: in very basic terms, a programme of rolling incentives (better pensions, bargaining rights and so on) to persuade the unions to accept progressively smaller pay increases.

On paper it was a pretty good idea. Slowly but surely, they would wring inflation out of the system, without the shock of harsher medicine. The only problem was that it didn’t work. By the end of 1978, Wilson’s replacement, Callaghan, had got inflation down to just under 10%. Now he demanded one more heave, a 5% pay limit that would push inflation down even further in time for the next election. But it was too much.

Instead of dampening wage pressures, the Social Contract had simply stoked the flames. Workers — especially the lowest-paid — were sick of stagnant living standards, and now their impatience boiled over. That winter, defying the government’s entreaties, millions walked out, unleashing the most devastating industrial unrest since the General Strike of 1926. Bin bags in the streets, the dead going unburied: you know the rest.

A few months later, Britain voted for Margaret Thatcher, and her answer was rather different. Gone was Mr Nice Guy, in came Nurse Ratched, determined to squeeze inflation out of the system by any means necessary. Interest rates went up, and up, and up, peaking at a truly excruciating 17% at the end of 1979.

The irony is that Mrs Thatcher loathed high interest rates, which penalised her beloved middle-class homeowners. But that’s the cruel thing about inflation: to tolerate it is bad enough, but to bring it down can feel even worse. To put it another way, lower prices — or at least, prices that are rising more slowly — come at a cost, and in the mid-Eighties the bill came to some 4 million jobs.

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The Tory conference that caused Brexit

By Alwyn Turner

Was there an alternative? Well, even many of Mrs Thatcher’s own confidants thought they should have squeezed more slowly. But would it have been pain-free? No. With inflation, there’s always pain. So what are the lessons? The obvious one is boringly simple: for God’s sake, don’t let inflation creep into your system. But as Boris Johnson’s government may well find, that’s easier said than done.

The global supply chain crisis, the growing pressure on limited energy resources, the extraordinary circumstances of post-pandemic recovery and even the unanticipated consequences of Brexit are probably beyond the direct control of any national government, even the most competent. And as Ted Heath learned in 1973, a globalised economy makes you vulnerable. A butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, and a woman in Wolverhampton sees another chunk disappear from her savings.

So if inflation does set in, then what? Again, I suspect the answer’s boringly simple. You can try to live with it — indeed, some economists argue that a period of high inflation might be a good way of driving down our post-pandemic debt — but the risk is that 5% becomes 10%, 10% becomes 20%, and then it’s 1975 all over again and the International Monetary Fund would like a word.

Or you can try to manage it with incomes policies. But does anybody think British workers in the 2020s will readily accept government-mandated pay curbs? I don’t much fancy seeing the pavement turned into a Winter of Discontent theme park, sorry.

So that just leaves the only likely solution: ever higher interest rates, a wave of house repossessions and a government-induced recession to deflate the economy. Harsh medicine from a determined doctor, basically. Years of pain.

And can you see Boris Johnson doing that? Me neither.

That was how, at the age of 13, I became aware that the placid politics of the 1960s would be replaced by class warfare. And that behind the facade of Seventies respectability, the establishment lived secret lives according to different rules.

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The fall of the Wall powered up my politics

By Ruth Davidson

Soon, my dad’s prediction came true. The miners’ strike forced power cuts and the three-day week. I remember my schoolfriends, sent home early, pilfering from market stalls in the pitch dark.

But I don’t think the outbreak of class struggle would have had the same radicalising effect on me had it not coincided with my discovery that Catholicism was a sham.

At my school, the priests who taught us railed every day against the twin evils of masturbation and homosexuality. But on arrival we were told by older boys to avoid entering a room alone with some of them, in case we got “touched up”. And in the name of gentle Jesus meek and mild, some were in the habit of inflicting random, psychopathic violence.

This atmosphere of political crisis, combined with the daily experience of hypocrisy and menace at school made me search for answers. And by coincidence, answers were already lodged into my brain — because at the age of 10 I’d played one of the newsboys in Noël Coward’s play This Happy Breed.

Coward’s portrait of a working class family during the General Strike, the Depression and the Munich crisis includes a character called Sam Leadbitter, a caricature communist from central casting. Sitting in the wings at night after night, I found his lines the most vivid. My 10-year-old brain did not see Leadbitter as a caricature at all, but rather the only honest character among a bunch of “apathetic, unthinking, docile supporters of a capitalistic system which is a disgrace to civilisation”, as Sam himself puts it.

These lines stuck with me. Unwittingly, and from beyond the grave, it was Noël Coward who steered me from hormonal teenage revolt to a real and lifelong engagement with the world’s most coherent liberation theology: Marxism.

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Who will speak for today's working class?

By Paul Embery

I read The Communist Manifesto in the school library, together with an introduction by A. J. P. Taylor designed to convince us that it was bullshit. One priest noticed what I was doing and tried to engage me in a discussion about Catholic social teaching. I curtailed the discussion by telling him that Catholic social teaching was bullshit, and that belief in God was irrational. But my Marxism remained, at this stage, book-learned and pretty basic.

Then, aged 15, I went to a youth club disco. At the edge of the dancefloor were some very tough looking kids — Irish, black, Italian — who I’d lost touch with after primary school. A record came on that cleared all the Slade fans off the dancefloor: crackly silence; a black man’s voice wailing. Then a crunchy R&B tune kicked in, and all the rough lads threw themselves into a dance that was a mixture of kung fu, shuffling and acrobatics. They did the splits; they spun like ballerinas. This was the Northern Soul culture in its heyday and within a couple of minutes, I was part of it.

I now discovered that it was not just the establishment and the Catholic clergy that could live a double life, but everybody. There was a mass criminal underworld selling drugs all over the North of England, organising thefts from pharmacists or shipping “backstreet” drugs from Amsterdam. To get to the Northern Soul all-nighters you had to catch the last bus and stay out all night, and hunch in doorways at first light until the bus and train services restarted.

Suddenly I was part of a vast working-class Bohemia, operating with absolute solidarity in the face of police raids and searches. We idolised the black kids on our scene, and we venerated black performers like Major Lance and Jackie Wilson. We were white working-class kids curating the R&B music of Detroit and Memphis, and the rest of the world could go to hell.

So when the National Front started holding their racist “anti-mugging marches”, we knew what we had to do. I remember waking hand in hand with my girlfriend as a military-scale convoy of police riot vans sped past us, on the way to confront an Anti-Nazi League protest. I told her: “Next time, I’m joining in”.

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Sex, sin and the Catholics

By Christopher Rhodes

That was how I ended up on my first political demonstration: a 25,000 strong Anti-Nazi League demo in Manchester, in July 1978. My mum told me not to get into trouble. I went alone, spoke to no-one apart from to say “no thanks” to a Left-wing newspaper seller. I marched, I chanted, and then I got hit in the face with a heavy banner pole after the wind snapped it. It took a lot to convince Mum that I had not become some kind of anti-fascist rioter.

That is how — via atheism, soul music and strife — I became politicised.

Looking back, across 40 years of political engagement with the Left, some of the ideas that crystallised in my head at the age of 15 have remained pretty constant: a total lack of deference to authority figures; the default assumption that politicians and religious leaders are corrupt liars; a general preference for spontaneous action; a lifelong revulsion against racism.

Another legacy is that I always understood the importance of counterculture in working class life. Northern Soul, punk and later hip-hop and garage for me had a political meaning, embodied in the taking and holding of physical space at night, for the breaking of rules and the mixing of ethnicities and sexualities.

There are people on the Left who fetishise the old working class culture I come from, and who construct a nostalgia project around it. But for me, alongside the official signifiers of beer drinking, football and respectability, real working class culture has always included a counterculture — of drugs, music, iconoclasm and evading arrest.

I think that’s what inoculated me from the nostalgiafest, and allowed my political commitment to adapt in an age where political opposition movements are full of diverse, networked, educated people.

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Is there a future for English nationalism?

By Paul Mason

With hindsight, it also looks like the work of that progressive priest was not in vain. To defeat the Catholic humanism of Rerum Novarum, I had to build, out of the texts available to me at sixteen, a Marxist humanism, with ethical and moral implications. This has strengthened throughout my life.

Today we are faced with anti-humanism on all sides: from the far-Right, with its race science and violent misogyny, to Silicon Valley, where humans are seen as “already algorithms”, lacking agency and free will. At its most extreme, the post-humanism movement seeks to replace homo sapiens with hybrids of machines and flesh.

My opposition to this is based largely on the conclusions I reached in the school library in the Seventies: human beings have evolved as imagineers, teamworkers and linguists. On that basis it is possible to propose they will free themselves through technological change and self-liberation. If you strip out all the specifics about class, economic crisis and poltical tactics, that’s the basic proposition of Marxism.