May Day Manifesto 1968

by Raymond Williams (Editor)

Anniversary edition of the classic political manifesto

Urgently relevant to current arguments about the crisis of austerity, the 1968 manifesto set out a new agenda for socialist Britain, after the failure of the postwar consensus. It sought to change the nature of the state, to drive a wedge between finance and empire, to stress the importance of a planned economy for all, and to detach Britain from the imperial goals to which it had long been committed. Today, the spirit of The May Day Manifesto offers a road map to a brighter future.
The original publication brought together the most influential radical voices of the era. Among the seventy signatories were Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson, Stuart Hall, Iris Murdoch, Terry Eagleton, Ralph Miliband, and R. D. Laing. This edition comes with an introduction from Owen Jones, who brings a sense of urgency and hope to the contemporary debate.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, Sociology, Philosophy

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1968

About the author

Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist, and critic. He taught for many years and the Professor of Drama at the University of Cambridge. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach. Among his many books are Culture and Society, Culture and Materialism, Politics and Letters, Problems in Materialism and Culture, and several novels.

Reviews

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's a possible first reading of this book as pretty unremarkable, perhaps as evidence of the New Left's liberalism. There's a careful distancing from actually-existing socialism, and a pretty firm belief in the possibility of appropriating things like parliamentary democracy and British nationhood. There's quite a lot of attention to the technical, which for some people might lead them down the path of incorporation. There's something a little uncomfortable when a solidarity of equivalence verges dangerously close to an opportunism of parallels - i.e. in comparing the British position to that of the Third World. And on a number of issues - the high hopes for the minimum wage, the absence of reparations in the discussion on international development - this manifesto can show its age.

I think that reading would be mistaken. This is a wide-ranging, complex outline of a concrete situation and concrete ways of reacting to it; an appreciation of the need for study, discussion and connections in a particular phase of struggle. Although in a large number of cases we have seen change since 1968 - generally for the worse - it is remarkable how much of this remains pertinent. Warnings about the management politics have mostly come true, and the writers' advice is as relevant as ever - although worth updating to account for the magnitude of our defeats. It is hard to imagine an undertaking on this scale being made today, but it is necessary.

The possibility of two different readings of this manifesto is related to the manner of its composition. Although Raymond Williams undoubtedly played the largest role, he was trying to bring together the ideas of leftists with as much separating them as bringing them together - with different relationships to Labour, the Communist Party and the sects only the tip of the iceberg. This is not the manifesto of a party, but of an intellectual movement - its purpose was to encourage discussion rather than win hearts and minds.

With the utmost respect to Owen Jones, I don't think these points are especially well made in this edition's preface. Owen is a commentator and columnist with quite an important role to play in the Left, but he is not really comparable to Williams or Hall - it might have been more interesting to have had a preface written by a left-wing intellectual who could have engaged with the book's argument and its history more than (and this is a little harsh) simply updating its statistics.

I think the most significant consequence of this is in Owen's assessment of the manifesto's judgements on the Labour Party. I don't think Owen is right to say that Williams et al would be surprised (at least no more than anyone else!) about the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. It hardly invalidates arguments about the Left's incorporation to discover that on occasion the Left has controlled the party. The manifesto is quite clear about the importance of struggling within or around Labour, and the possibility of Labour making a break - but Corbyn's leadership hasn't quite earned that complacency as yet. I think a more historically grounded perspective would have considered more deeply the impact of the 1964 and 1966 Labour governments which deeply mark the text - the incredible amounts of energy poured into the Labour Party by left-wing activists from the end of the 1950s, and the enthusiasm felt towards Harold Wilson as a nominally left-wing leader, to be followed by disappointment after disappointment. Owen is right to suggest that Labour must be pushed to radicalise whilst in power, but he doesn't give enough space to considering what will happen if it isn't - which is surely the prospect which the manifesto's authors would be pointing to.

[Donald · Rating 4 out of 5]

The manifesto spirals out from the fundamental problems of British society to its economic structures to its place in a world order, concluding on the political implications of all this. It is a very sociological document, then, compared to most political programs. It's interesting with hindsight, knowing that the Labour Left has been able to capture the leader's office and that such ideas have pretty strong influence in the American left. The main difference might be the lack of the work in the middle, the historical materialist part, that links "austerity" to a historical phase of capitalism. Instead, contemporary social-democracy focuses on austerity as a series of malevolent policy choices that could be easily reversed with the political will. So I would say that contemporary Labour is more interested in pushing a set of policies rather than a national plan. In contrast, the national plan is central for the British new left and orders its critique of economic development. It also anchors its humanism - the closest Labour coming to this being its plans for a National Education Service. As a starting point it seems like a good one, although it's also disappointing to see how much their problems are still our problems.

[Jazzy Lemon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Shocking how many things are still unchanged after nearly 60 years.

[Don · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 1960s are often represented as the years of revolutionary, violent street protests and the birth of radical feminism and libertarian identity politics. Much of that is absent from this document of the times and in its place we get sober analysis of global capitalism from an economic perspective and a call for action which involves a reinvigoration of the Labour Party.

Consisting of 50 short essay, the first 24 set out an argument revolving around the emergence of a 'new; capitalism which was in the process of breaking with the post-war Keynesian consensus. The driving force for this development was the American-style business corporation which was now reproducing its model across the world. It worked through a strategy of what the Manifesto describes as 'pre-emption' - using its influence over the state to acquire the best land and minerals, the most capital, the most skilled labour and the most affluent customers. It is interesting at this point that corporations did not cavil against the obligation to pay taxes to national authorities, accepting this as the price to be paid for the state maintaining aggregate demand and maintaining the flow - via the welfare state - of an educated and healthy workforce. The revolt against taxation seems to have been associated with later years, when barriers to the movement of capital were reduced and the corporates considered themselves free to move to jurisdictions where labour was cheaper and taxes on their operation much lower.

But other forces were driving corporations to become transnational in their operations. The Manifesto saw this as consisting mainly in the desire of these businesses to secure the supply of raw materials. The dominant role of the US in this process had contributed to the pressure to break up the old colonial structures of the world economy in favour of open door approaches. But the trading arrangements which replaced them still looked like a scramble for monopoly control over the things that were being dug up out the ground. But nested within this perspective is a hint of things to come, influenced by what is called 'supply management' in which factors like the siting of plant in relation to stages in production processes, the calculation of cost advantages and cheaper labour and energy supplies were also becoming important. The full-blown drive towards off-shoring, outsourcing and the construction of globe-spanning supply chains lay in the future but momentum in that direction was being established in these earlier decades.

The Manifesto considers the emergence of a ‘new’ imperialism, which is careful to distinguish from the colonial structures that had been secured by coercive, militaristic means. The 1960s was the decade when empires were being rolled back and the former colonies were coming into existence as supposedly independent nations. Liberal commentators saw this as the definitive end of any sort of imperialism, but the leftist authors of this treatise insisted that the goals of the imperium were continued to be achieved through the hegemony of commercial trading organisations.

So why isn’t this new version of capitalism going to work? The Manifesto’s argument seems to centre of the expectation of extreme fluctuations in markets for primary commodities. This level of volatility would not be an issue for the elites which stood at the helm of the corporations, but it would constitute jeopardy for the social layers below them who had come to expect, as a consequence of long years of full employment and wage growth, a flattening of inequalities and the strengthening of democratic structures. These citizens had looked to national governments to meet these expectations but the prospect for the state planning of economic development was precisely the thing threatened by the penetration of the American-style corporation.

The merit of the Manifesto is that is did not confine resistance to the erosion of living standards which would result from the ascendency of the new capitalism as a defensive manoeuvre involving the working class of the developed nations seeking to hold on to what they had. Decolonisation had opened up a broad front for the resistance which took in the new grouping of non-aligned nations who were prepared to consider other options for their development which did not limit itself to the western model of free markets. China and Cuba are mentioned positively in this context. Although not non-aligned nations in the strict sense they were generating models of development and growth which could be broken into parts and utilised in plans adapted to the specific needs of the newly independent nations.

The final sections do consider the prospects for resistance to the new capitalism in the context of Britain. The labour movement is considered from a number of angles – the dimension of the forms of social democracy which had provided it with perspectives for political action in the past; the ambiguities of the Labour Party and the trade unions; and the position of other radical groupings such as the Liberal Party and the Scottish and Welsh nationalists. The role of protest movements, with the CND and Committee of a Hundred being the foremost examples is offered as a route out of the Parliamentary fetishism of the labour mainstream and the source of a new energy mobilising a wide stratum of civil society against the strictures of corporatist new capitalism.

It’s a lucid and coherent piece of work and much more impressive than the attempts at making a claim for the state of society from a left perspective that emerged in the following years. Of course it proved inadequate to the task it set its self because it didn’t anticipated the shift of the centre right away from the post war political consensus which had favoured state intervention and a version of economic planning. Most importantly there is not much in its review of the state of political consciousness of the working class and the large part of it which saw in the Thatcherism that came to pass a way to achieve the affirmation of their desire for liberation which did not run through the structures of the trade union movement, local council control of housing allocation, and the bureaucratic management of public services.

Finally, there is no real hint in the Manifesto of the things going on in society that nowadays we consider emblematic of the 60s. Feminism and liberty in sexual orientation are not mentioned. A discussion which was just beginning on the fringes of the radical left about the importance of ecology is not alluded to. Racial justice is however considered in a few paragraphs which set out the treatment of black and Asian migrants No version of a manifesto which aims to reproduce the ambitions of this view of the world in 1968 could miss out on these critical issues in 2023 and beyond.

[maria manu · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is such an eye-opener. Throughout the first chapters of the book, you can visualize how life at that time was, how hard it was to be successful, and to have a stable income. Although the book shows us the hard and suffered life that middle/low classes lived through, it also shows us the reason behind it.