The Raymond Williams Society is delighted to republish Owen Jones’s new introduction to the reissue of May Day Manifesto 1968. Originally edited by Williams, Stuart Hall, and E.P. Thompson, the manifesto was the work of a wide range of teachers, writers, and researchers who formed a ‘self-organizing, self-financed socialist intellectual organization’, as Williams explains in the 1968 preface. The group, which also included the likes of Iris Murdoch, Terry Eagleton, Dorothy Wedderburn, and Ralph Miliband, collaborated on what was a counter-statement, or challenge, to the policies and direction of Harold Wilson’s Labour Government. Here, Owen Jones, in a different context, renews the call for an ambitious socialist programme, one which would aim to lay the foundations for radical, social transformation.
Owen Jones writes…
It was a time of rebellion, revolution, struggle, occupations, strikes – and of living, breathing hope that the old order was in collapse, and that a new society was possible. Nineteen sixty-eight is perhaps best remembered for les évenements of May and June in France: the tidal wave of street demonstrations, factory and university occupations, and barricades. The red flag was hoisted over factories, protestors sang The Internationale, and revolutionary slogans adorned posters and banners and were daubed on walls, like: ‘Humanity will not be happy until the last capitalist is hanged with the entrails of the last bureaucrat’.
Continue reading May Day Manifesto: The Legacies of 1968