The long revolution in the global age

Raymond Williams and the long march to freedom

Raymond Williams's central idea of the long revolution is one of the most important ideas produced by the New Left in the 1960s; and it remains as relevant today (albeit in radically changed circumstances) as it was when Williams first wrote of it. Like most good ideas, it is relatively simple in its conception: the basic idea of the long revolution is that since the industrial revolution there has been a gradual extension of popular and democratic control over the whole society, and this process is something that needs to be continued.

This sense of the long revolution as a continuing struggle for freedom is an important myth to keep alive and to pass onto future generations of socialist thinkers - and by 'myth' I mean something that offers a carefully constructed narrative out of the many other possible ways of reading history. My view is that, despite the sometimes overly rationalistic arguments that take place on the left, we should recognise that myths and stories inherited from the past are important and help to shape the meanings of the present. As profoundly cultural beings we require political narratives to give us a sense of how our personal and collective lives can be moved beyond the ordinary; yet far too much of labour politics remains at the level of more utilitarian arguments. Instead, as the long revolution fully recognises, political projects require stories and narratives to help legitimate them within wider communities of interest.

The new edition of The Long Revolution, which has an excellent introduction by Anthony Barnett, deserves to be re-read not only by historians seeking to make sense of the culture and politics of the 1960s, but also by those seeking to reconsider the future of the labour movement in these troubled times.¹ Indeed Williams himself continually sought to refine the idea of the long revolution in the context of the changing fortunes of the British left, not only in response to critics (of which there were many) but also as a way of keeping the flame of his idea alive during periods that were hostile to some of the book's central concerns. When I myself first read this book in 1989 I was offered a clear sense of what Williams was talking about in the popular revolutions that were transforming Eastern European state socialist societies. The idea that popular uprisings could confront and sometimes defeat authoritarian governments and institutions dramatically reinforced many of the arguments made by Williams within his book. Read today in the context of neoliberalism and the emergence of global protest movements, Williams's concerns urge us to address the arguably more progressive possibilities of the present.

The long revolution and class society

Williams was always a complex writer, refusing the economic determinism of the Leninist left, but, equally, he wrote with a sense of passion and commitment in favour of a society that respected the creative potential of ordinary citizens to run their own lives within democratic institutions. His argument took aim at the cultural conservatism that presumed that ordinary people were simply unable or not yet ready to participate in the running of their own communities, wo rkplaces or public spaces.

Williams's previous work as a humanities academic had traced similar ideas back to romantic writers such as William Coleridge and Mathew Arnold.² But, while recognising the conservatism of thinkers like John Ruskin, Williams also identified the importance of their critique of the dominant market-driven society (which he saw as fundamentally antagonistic to the long revolution). For example, it was Ruskin who had asked not only how we might live a life that that was free from domination, but also how we might have regard for the worth of life in ways that were not defined by money. Williams sought an answer to this question in the context of the long revolution.

The liberalism of the nineteenth century, on the other hand, lacked a concern with the relationship to the wider community, and indeed other affective concerns, and had no convincing account of the...