Raymond Williams: A Short Counter Revolution

Towards 2000, Revisited

Jim McGuigan, Jim McGuigan, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781446294727, 9781446294710
• eBook ISBN: 9781473905665
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Raymond Williams: A Short Counter-Revolution amply demonstrates the continuing relevance of Williams's analysis, from the early 1980s, to our current situation. After thirty years of neoliberalism his insights still read as freshly and as incisively as they first did. Jim McGuigan's new chapter explicitly extends the lines of continuity from then to now, in a persuasive and at times appropriately critical way. Williams's concluding chapter, Resources for a Journey of Hope remains as inspiring, and as necessary, as ever.
- Simon Dentith, University of Reading

"It?s great that Towards 2000 is revisited. Jim McGuigan?s preface to this edition and his remarkable up-dating chapter A Short Counter Revolution draw upon a formidable range of references to illustrate why this work is as fresh and insightful today as it was 30 years ago."
- Derek Tatton,  

?Culture,? wrote Raymond Williams, 'is one of the most complicated words in the English language.'  Ironically, the most important British writer on culture in the post-war period is also one of the most poorly digested among today's readers.  

Originally conceived as the sequel to his 1961 The Long Revolution,  Williams? 1983 title Towards 2000 has been unfairly classified as a period piece. With the permission of the Williams Estate, the book has been re-entitled A Short Counter-Revolution – Towards 2000 Revisited, with noted Williams expert Jim McGuigan adding a chapter that updates the original with a survey of developments since its publication, par­ticularly concerning the impact of neoliberalism, a phenomenon sighted early by Raymond Williams and named 'Plan X'.

In this new edition, Jim McGuigan makes a totally convincing case to read the book as a contemporary classic.  It remains an indispensable guide to:

• Power and inequality
• Class politics
• Post-industrial society
• Globalization
• The crisis in democracy

Index

• ‘academic’ learning 111
• advertising, and cultural funding 97
• ‘affluence’, post-war 16–17, 23
• Afghanistan invasion 35, 38, 183
• Africa
  • life expectancy 27
  • resource inequality 28
• aid 163–167
  • and alternative technologies 170
  • emergency 163, 164
  • overlap with East–West confrontation 164–165
  • relations with class interests in industrial economies 166–167
  • for trade 164–165
  • unintended consequences 163–164
• AIDS 27
• al Qaeda 37
• Allende, Salvador 31
• alternative culture 201–202
• alternative movement see new social movements
• alternative technologies 170, 200
• Angola 165, 183
• anti-capitalist movement 41–42
• Argentina 157
• arms race 35, 190
  • dysfunctional aspects 180
• arms trade 158, 162, 164–165, 177, 191
• artists, innovative 102, 104–105
• Arts Council 95, 100
• atomic bomb 175, 181–182 see also nuclear weapons
• Australia 156, 157

• Bagehot, Walter 71
• banking crisis, 2007–8 33
• Barraclough, Geoffrey 25
• Bauman, Zygmunt 25
• BBC 94, 95, 100, 103–104
• Beirut attack 184
• Berlin Wall, opening 25
• bilateralism 184–185
• bin Laden, Osama 35
• biological weapons and warfare 169, 173, 184
• Blair, Tony 38
• Bolshevik revolution 10
• bondage
  • bonding perceived as 125
  • cancellation by socialism 126
• bourgeois democracy 81–82
• bourgeoisie 128
  • decline in Britain 118
  • denial of the general interest 123
• Brandt Report 159, 162, 164
• Braverman, Harry 53
• Brideshead Revisited (BBC programme) 103–104
• Britain 16
  • alternative radical culture 105
  • class composition 117, 118
  • deindustrialisation 58–61
  • gender pay rate equalisation 28
  • immigration and identity 149–150
  • income distribut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgements
• Further Acknowledgements
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Towards 2000
• A Short Counter-Revolution
• The Analysis Reconsidered: ‘Industrial’ and ‘Post-Industrial’ Society
• Democracy Old and New
• Culture and Technology
• Class, Politics, and Socialism
• The Analysis Extended: The Culture of Nations
• East–West, North–South
• War: The Last Enemy
• Resources for a Journey of Hope