As a cultural studies scholar, Jeremy Gilbert was sharpening his daggers for Melvyn Bragg well before his BBC programme on ‘culture’ aired. Here is why, and how, it unexpectedly lived up to a momentous task – well, up until the ‘80s.
The politics of the market has given us individual freedoms, but inhibited any potent form of collectivity. We cannot return to the regulated social life that enabled a 'Fordist' democracy to function. So what now? Neoliberals are terrified of the emerging potential for a dynamic pluralist and dem
As formal education in Britain faces commodification, networks of informal participative learning are flourishing. openDemocracy is building ties with these through our relationship to the Raymond Williams Foundation, whose residential last week explored the theme of the Long Revolution.
The Third Revolution by nature of its high mechanisation and non-labour intensity means an ever larger proportion of the general public will be excluded from the production process or remunerated to ever lesser extents.
Talk on the British left of a return to a Keynesian, pre-monetarist system is historically untenable. Aaron Peters argues that the solution to the current crisis resides not in statist capitalism but through a greater correspondence between the mechanisation of labour and a respect for human agenc
To arrest the drift to social engineering, the voice of those subject to the steering should be inside the institutions responsible for social policy. This means more than putting token ‘community leaders’ on boards. It must be a collective democratic voice. At present, we see the opposite.
Encouraged by the Spanish movement for ‘Real Democracy Now!’, the Occupy network and above all the Arab Awakening, Anthony Barnett asks what revolution might actually mean in the developed democracies of the West. This is his foreword to the new edition of Raymond Williams' "The Long Revolution"
