Resources of Hope by Raymond Williams

Author:Raymond Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2016-02-07T16:00:00+00:00

1. This essay was written as a response to the following question: If a Labour government were to be elected, and taking into account all that we know about past performance, what would you want such a government to do? [Ed.]

2. The reference is to the preceding essay in this volume, ‘Ideas and the Labour Movement’, which was originally published in New Socialist 2, November/December 1981. [Ed.]

Problems of the Coming Period

1983

The title I was given for this talk was ‘Problems of the Coming Period’!1 When this was set, some six weeks ago, the coming period that was in mind was the twenty years or so up to and through the millennium; that term which we still have to use, millennium, for the Western Christian date of 2000, but which also has its ironic echoes of the coming good time, the transformation. It happens that the period up to the year 2000 is by any reckoning, whatever numerical system you employ, one of the major periods of crisis in all human history. So the perspective of that period seems an important thing to discuss.

Since then, however, the coming period has been redefined as the next four weeks, until the general election. There’s a sense in which one could be tempted to drop all that long-term thinking about the period up to 2000, and just talk about the next four weeks. That I think would be wrong, if only because some of the things that will be happening in the next four weeks, and certainly the situation that may then emerge, require us to think of a scale of problems and challenges which, for all the efforts of a number of people in this and other countries, the Left has not really met. In other words, while we can recognize, respect, and even where we can’t respect, discount the kind of opportunism and short-term argument that becomes the daily fare of a general election campaign, we have all the time to be looking through and past it at the underlying problems. The most central of these is this: How can it be, and who at any period could have predicted, that the most open right-wing government for half a century in Britain, coming after the supposed liberal and social-democratic consensus of the postwar years; a government, directly responsible for massive de-industrialization of the British economy and for massive unemployment; engaged in an absurd military adventure twelve months ago; virulent in cold war attitudes; rigid and resistant to all initiatives towards disarmament and the problems of nuclear weapons; how can such a government outstrip, as it has done so far, not merely the challenges of the Left (we have been accustomed to being in a minority), but all those apparently solid formations of British society – what we thought we had most to analyse: the liberal, social-democratic and right-wing Labour consensus? How can it outstrip both?

It is so unreasonable that much of the time one thinks, and not just as a pleasant kind of fantasy, that it cannot be objectively true.

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