What Socialist Outlook Saw

Reading the IMG- & WSL-tradition’s journal from the late 1980s, with a view to the present

The argument I have been making in recent months about authoritarian consolidation in Britain, about the architecture of repression that the Tory governments built and Labour has extended, about right-Bonapartist parliamentary politics rather than classical fascism, is not new. The International Socialist Group, formed by the merger of the currents around International and Socialist Viewpoint, was making versions of these arguments in real time through its journal Socialist Outlook from May 1987 onwards. The paper was co-edited by Phil Hearse, an IMG veteran who had edited International, and John Lister, who came from the WSL mainstream that later produced Socialist Viewpoint. The framework they developed together has been in continuous use within the tradition for nearly forty years. The conditions that gave rise to it have intensified rather than passed. This piece is one attempt to recover what the tradition saw clearly, what it got wrong, and why the recovery matters now. The verification work behind the article has so far covered the early issues of Socialist Outlook through to late 1991. The archive is larger than that, and what has not yet been verified may further extend or correct the reading offered here.

The tradition’s analytical core was a wager about the British state. The wager was that the post-war consensus settlement, in which the working class was conceded space within a framework that protected capitalist property relations, was breaking down. What replaced it would not be classical fascism, because British capitalism did not require the destruction of the working class as an organised force. It required something else: a state apparatus capable of disciplining the working class through legal architectures and selective repression while maintaining the formal institutions of parliamentary democracy. The tradition called this a “strong state” and tracked its development through specific legislative moments and policing operations.

What the tradition saw clearly

Phil Hearse’s “Thatcherism: the coming of the strong state” in Socialist Outlook no. 11, December 1988/January 1989, page 25, is the analytical centre of this work and the article that travels best to 2026. Hearse was arguing that the left had underestimated the transformation of state power under Thatcher and that there was, as he put it, “a drift towards a new form of authoritarianism, with some similarities to what Trotsky called ‘bonapartism’.” The argument was directed against two failure modes that had blinded the left to the actual drift. The first was catastrophism: “In the 1970s, sections of the left,” he wrote, “most notably the Workers Revolutionary Party, argued that Britain already had, or was about to have, a form of dictatorship. These absurd and catastrophist declarations have in my view almost numbed the left to what is, in the third term of Thatcherism, a real drift to the strong state.” The second was complacency: “Many comrades in the socialist movement are blind to the advent of the strong state because they think that provided we don’t have either full military dictatorship or fascism, then we must have an unproblematic ‘bourgeois democracy’. This was not Trotsky’s approach.”

The argument is exactly the one the contemporary left needs in 2026. Authoritarian consolidation does not require the abolition of parliament. It requires the parliamentary form to coexist with a repressive apparatus capable of disciplining dissent, criminalising organising, and proscribing specific organisations when their activities become inconvenient. Hearse was tracking the new restrictions on the right to strike, the conditions on ballots that put “all the cards in the hands of scabs and management,” and what he called the array of violent attacks on democratic rights against the wider pattern of the miners’ strike and the Wapping print dispute. The same architecture has been deployed against Reclaim the Streets, against the anti-globalisation movement, against the student protests of 2010, against Occupy, against Extinction Rebellion, against Just Stop Oil, and now against Palestine Action. The form has been continuous. The targets have rotated. The state has not needed to abolish parliament to maintain the apparatus.

The tradition extended this analysis into the cultural and informational apparatus of the state. John Lister and Ken Loach, writing in Socialist Outlook no. 1, May/June 1987, argued that “broadcasting in particular has to be considered in the same light as the police and the armed forces, in its defence of the state and the economic system the state is there to protect.” The framing was sharp for its moment and has aged into something sharper. The contemporary architectures of state-sponsored information control, from the Palantir contracts to the disinformation regulation regime to the criminalisation of journalism that exposes state violence, are continuous with the broadcasting analysis Lister and Loach were making in 1987. The strong state is not only the police on the picket line and the legislation that proscribes the organisation. It is also the information infrastructure that determines what the proscription means and how it is reported. The tradition was right to refuse the separation between repressive and ideological state apparatus, and the contemporary left would do well to recover that refusal.

The tradition’s analysis of the Labour Party’s trajectory was equally prescient. The argument across the 1987-1991 period was that Kinnock’s right turn was not a tactical retreat but a strategic transformation. Labour was being remade as what Socialist Outlook contributors called a “housebroken managerial party,” capable of administering capitalism without disturbing its operations and useful to the ruling class as an alternative manager when the Tories became electorally exhausted. The expulsions and witch-hunts of the period were not merely about removing Militant. They were about producing a party that could be trusted with state power on terms the bourgeoisie could accept. Pete Firmin’s “The downhill road to Brighton ‘89” in Socialist Outlook no. 18, October 1989, captured the internal logic with characteristic acidity. “The watch-word in the Labour Party during most of the 1980s has been that the left shouldn’t ‘rock the boat’, that we have to maintain Party unity in order to win elections,” he wrote. “The right only accept Party unity on their terms — the ‘unity of the graveyard’ where the membership are expected to be silent and dead.”

The Brighton ‘89 conference Firmin was writing about could be the Liverpool ‘24 conference, or any of the post-2020 Starmer expulsions, with the names changed and the basic dynamic identical. The strategic transformation Kinnock began in the late 1980s was completed by Blair, paused under Corbyn, and resumed under Starmer at higher velocity. The current Labour Party is the party Hearse, Firmin, and their comrades predicted in 1989. The expulsion of Jeremy Corbyn, the proscription of pro-Palestine groups within the party, the readmission of figures like Mandelson to senior diplomatic positions, the disciplining of MPs who voted against the two-child benefit cap: these are the working-out of the strategic transformation the tradition tracked thirty years ago.

The tradition was also right about extra-parliamentary movements. The argument was that the most effective resistance to the consolidating state would emerge outside official channels, often in opposition to the official labour movement’s instincts, and would frequently be denounced by Labour leaderships before being claimed by them after the fact. The Poll Tax campaign was the vindication. Mass non-payment, organised through community resistance committees independently of the Labour Party and against Kinnock’s explicit objections, achieved what no parliamentary strategy could have achieved. It defeated the Poll Tax, brought down Thatcher, and established a model of extra-parliamentary action that has been imitated and adapted in every subsequent decade. Graham Topley’s “How we plan to SCRAP the poll tax” in Socialist Outlook no. 14, June 1989, set out the argument in advance: mass non-payment, community organisation, explicit rejection of “official protest” and reliance on Labour pressure. The strategy worked. The tradition was right.

The connected-fronts argument was the fourth analytical move that has been borne out. Socialist Outlook‘s editorial work in the late 1980s, particularly the November/December 1987 piece “Tory hurricane of change,” argued that the various Tory offensives could not be understood as separate policy choices. Anti-trade-union legislation, the criminalisation of protest under the 1986 Public Order Act, the abolition of the GLC, the attacks on social security, the national curriculum, the policing of Black communities in Tottenham and Handsworth: these were elements of a single project. The tradition insisted on what it called a “single analysis,” refusing the fragmentation of struggle that would let the state defeat each front separately. The argument has held up. The contemporary defensive fronts I described in the convention piece, trans rights and disability rights and migrant rights and the right to protest, are the present-day version of the same connected project, run by the same kind of state, against the same kind of working-class formation.

The connected-fronts argument was not abstract. The archive tracked it through specific sites where the strong state’s apparatus was being tested before being generalised. The interrogation centre at Castlereagh and the architecture of policing in the North of Ireland were theorised as the laboratory in which the state’s repressive techniques were developed before being deployed against the miners and the print workers. The 1988 broadcasting ban on Sinn Féin was identified as the template for wider press censorship. Kinnock’s attacks on Black sections were named as enabling rather than incidental to Labour’s rightward managerial turn. Section 28 and the Embryology Bill were analysed as ideological crackdown enforcing the nuclear family as a prerequisite for welfare retreat. The 1988 Immigration Act, the Broadwater Farm policing operation, and the autonomous organising of Women Against Pit Closures and the Greenham Common peace camp were all integrated into the strong-state framework rather than treated as adjacent themes. Black liberation, women’s struggles, Irish solidarity, and lesbian and gay liberation were constitutive of the analysis rather than illustrative of it. The contemporary defensive fronts argument is the direct inheritor of this work, not an extension of work the tradition did not do. The contemporary left has been reinventing arguments the Socialist Outlook archive had substantially worked out.

Where the tradition was wrong

The honest accounting matters. Socialist Outlook and International got several things wrong, and the failures are themselves analytically useful.

1. The most consistent failure was over-prediction of imminent collapse. The tradition was prone to reading each crisis as the one that would bring the system down, and reading each working-class defeat as the precursor to a regrouping that would reverse it. The 1989-1991 recession was treated as a potentially terminal crisis for Thatcherism. It turned out to be a difficult patch in a longer trajectory of neoliberal consolidation. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Eastern bloc were sometimes read as the end of the post-war international order rather than as the prelude to its reorganisation. The recurring habit of catastrophism, of treating the present as the immediate prelude to revolutionary opportunity, produced both analytical errors and organisational habits that the tradition is still working to unlearn.

2. The second failure was the misreading of Thatcherism itself. Some of the tradition’s writers in the 1980s described Thatcherism as “semi-Bonapartist” or as a move toward fascism. The strong state framework was sound; the specific characterisation was overstated. Critics within the tradition correctly noted that Thatcherism did not need Bonapartist forms because parliamentary democracy proved sufficient as a vehicle for the project. The state did not need to abolish representative institutions. It needed only to ensure those institutions could not be used to obstruct the project’s core moves. That recognition is what Hearse’s 1989 article was arguing for, and the article itself was a correction of earlier work in the tradition. The lesson has been carried forward. The contemporary right-Bonapartist framing I have been using descends from this corrected version, not from the earlier overstatement.

3. The third failure was the misjudgement of Labour’s institutional endurance. Many Socialist Outlook contributors believed across the 1987-1991 period that Labour was in terminal crisis and would soon be replaced by a new socialist formation as its working-class base abandoned it. The prediction was wrong. Labour proved more durable than expected, its base proved more attached to the brand than the analytical models predicted, and the new socialist formation did not arrive. The post-Corbyn moment of 2020-2025, including the YP collapse and the Independent Alliance fragmentation, is in some ways the working-out of a process the tradition expected to happen thirty years earlier. The expectation was right in direction and wrong in timing. The tradition consistently underestimated the inertia of mass political identification, the institutional resources Labour could deploy to manage internal dissent, and the trade union bureaucracy’s commitment to the Labour link even under conditions of repeated betrayal. Those analytical instincts have improved within the tradition over time, but the early Socialist Outlook work was too quick to predict Labour’s replacement.

Where the tradition’s engagement was less frequent, rather than less integrated, was on disability politics. The archive’s work on Black liberation, women’s struggles, Irish solidarity, and lesbian and gay liberation appeared more often across the run than its work on disability. But the disability work that did appear was substantially integrated into the strong-state framework rather than treated as a separate welfare issue. Socialist Outlook critiqued sections of the left that dismissed specific oppressions as “poor relations” and argued that ableism, alongside racism and heterosexism, was constitutive of the capitalist order rather than incidental to it. The analysis of Tory welfare retreat tracked how cuts to social security and services forced the burden of care for disabled, sick, and elderly relatives back onto the nuclear family and specifically onto women, with the family forced to “absorb the impact of Tory policies” within the domestic sphere. The closure of centres for disabled and mentally disabled young people in Manchester was theorised as part of the architecture of class repression rather than as an isolated cuts story. Kirsten Hearn’s work on disabled lesbians and gay men was discussed as a radical challenge to the white, able-bodied male-dominated traditions of the left. The participation of disabled Black women in the Women for Socialism conference generated explicit calls for representational changes in leadership. By 1991, Harry Sloan’s writing was naming the movement of people with disabilities alongside the women’s, Black, and lesbian and gay movements as one of the fundamental liberation movements the revolutionary socialist project must champion, with self-organisation as the necessary component for breaking the logic of the market and the strong state’s repressive consolidation.

The contemporary attack on disabled people through PIP cuts, work capability assessments, the Cass Review legacy, and the wider dismantling of collective provision is the present-day version of the offensive the tradition was tracking in 1987-1991. The analytical resources for theorising it are available in the archive, integrated into the strong-state framework, and waiting to be drawn on. The frequency of the engagement was lower than for some other liberation struggles. The depth of the analytical integration was not.

What the recovery is for

My argument is not that everything the tradition wrote in 1987-1991 should be read as if it were written yesterday. The argument is that a left that has lost its analytical inheritance is a left that must reinvent its analytical tools each time conditions change, and that this constant reinvention is one reason the British left has been outpaced by the right’s organisational and ideological development over the same period.

The right has had its analytical continuity. The think-tanks, the policy networks, the publishing operations, the cadre formation that runs from Mont Pelerin through the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Adam Smith Institute through the Centre for Policy Studies through Policy Exchange through Reform UK’s current strategic apparatus, has been continuous. Each generation has built on the last. Each crisis has been an opportunity to refine and extend the framework. The left’s equivalent infrastructure has been weaker and more discontinuous. The IMG tradition, the Socialist Outlook and International archives, the Mandel and Bensaïd and Achcar bodies of work, the FI’s institutional memory: this is the analytical inheritance available to the contemporary British left, and it is mostly not being drawn on by the activists who most need it.

One small example of the continuity makes the point. Phil Hearse’s Creeping Fascism (2017, with Neil Faulkner, Samir Dathi, and Seema Syeda) is in direct lineage with the strong-state analysis Hearse was developing in Socialist Outlook no. 11 in December 1988. By the November 1991 issue of the same paper, John Lister was already extending the analysis into Europe, identifying the new far right of Le Pen’s Front National, the Vlaamsblok, the German Republikaner and the German Peoples Union, the Freedom Party in Austria, and the far-right leagues in Italy as politically distinct from pre-war fascism: not linked to pre-capitalist classes, not carrying the same anti-capitalist ideology, but with “strong affinities” to 1980s Thatcherism (Socialist Outlook no. 12, 23 November 1991, page 9). Creeping Fascism is what that line of analysis became when it was developed at book length after another quarter-century of evidence. The contemporary left has been engaging with the book without knowing that it descends from analytical work the tradition was already doing thirty years earlier. The recovery makes the lineage visible. The Irony: Creeping Fascism has been out of print for years, despite being less than a decade old. All these experiences will be lost, like tears in rain.

The Socialist Federation convention in September will gather comrades who came to politics through Palestine, through the strike wave, through the climate movement, through housing organising, through the post-Corbyn Labour expulsions. Most of them have not read Socialist Outlook. Many of them do not know there was an International. The framework I have been using in recent writing is not mine. It is the tradition’s, refined over forty years, and it is more usable than any analysis that has to be invented from the present moment alone.

The recovery is for that audience. It is for the comrades who are doing the work and need analytical resources sharper than what the contemporary left has been producing. The Socialist Outlook archive contains a substantial part of those resources. It is mostly out of print and mostly inaccessible. Bringing it back into circulation, with honest accounting of what it got right and what it got wrong, is one of the things a serious British FI tradition could do for the next phase of the work. The Socialist Federation convention is one place that conversation could begin. This piece is one small contribution to it. The rest is for the tradition’s surviving practitioners to take up, if they choose, in whatever forms they can sustain.

Phil Hearse is still writing. Pete Firmin is still organising, and plays an active role in the Socoailist Federation. The IMG tradition’s institutional descendants in ACR and Ecosocialist Scotland, in Resistance Books, in International Viewpoint, in the IIRE, are still functioning. The archive can be recovered. The framework can be extended. The wager the tradition made in 1989 about where Britain was going has been substantially borne out. The wager about what to do about it is now ours to make, drawing on what has been built and adding what the present period requires.