The Long Revolution

"It is our basic case, in this manifesto, that the separate campaigns in which we have been active, and the separate issues with which we have all been concerned, run back, in their essence to a single political system and its alternatives. We believe that the system we now oppose can only survive by a willed separation of issues, and the resulting fragmentation of consciousness. Our own first position is that all the issues, industrial and political, international and domestic, economic and cultural, humanitarian and radical, are deeply connected; that what we oppose is a political, economic and social system, that what we work for is a different whole society." -from The May Day Manifesto, 1967

"This is a language of socialist aspiration which is today scarcely uttered. At a time when many are coming to see that the triumph of neoliberalism — an unfettered version of capitalism — has come at enormous economic, social and environmental cost, it seems to me that The May Day Manifesto deserves to be read again as a contribution to the project of inspiring a concerted resistance to the system that now dominates much of the world." -from The May Day Manifesto, 1968 edition

Download: The May Day Manifesto

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Stuart Hall
1932 - 2014

"This is no time for simple retreat. What is required is a renewed sense of being on the side of the future, not stuck in the dugouts of the past. We must admit that the old forms of the welfare state proved insufficient. But we must stubbornly defend the principles on which it was founded – redistribution, egalitarianism, collective provision, democratic accountability and participation, the right to education and healthcare – and find new ways in which they can be institutionalised and expressed... All of us who oppose the current direction, whether from inside or outside party politics or other organisations, must invent. We must set about disrupting the current common sense, challenging the assumptions that organise our 21st-century political discourse."