Soundings, 54: Hope and Experience (Paperback)

Issue 54 Summer 2013Buy this issue Hope and experience As well as publishing two more instalments of the Soundings manifesto - Doreen Massey on vocabularies of the economy and Michael Rustin on a relational society - this issue includes articles that engage with and extend its arguments in a number of different directions. Tom Crompton writes from the perspective of long involvement in the environmental movement and discusses how values are articulated in political discourse. Richard Johnson finds sources for hope in Gramsci's work, while Nick Stevenson shows how the arguments in The Long Revolution remain relevant. Kevin Morgan argues that the 1945 Labour government's achievements need to be understood historically as the product of many years discussion and struggle during the interwar period - something that needs to be taken on board by those of us seeking to recreate such a breakthrough. Paolo Gerbaudo discusses the role of young people and horizontal movements in the crisis in Egypt. He is critical of the opposition's welcoming of the army coup and argues that this shows some of the limitations of horizontalism. Anna Coote and Jacob Mohun Himmelweit argue that the distribution of time should become part of political debate, and that we should be putting forward a norm of working thirty hours a week. Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller document the enormous environmental and social damage caused by the growth of the digital economy, and argue that this receives much less attention than might be expected because of our wider technophilia, and the continuing lure of i-gadgetry. Sophie Mayer discusses the movement of international solidarity with Pussy Riot, including the special role of poetry within the campaign. And we also restart our poetry pages in this issue, commissioned by our new poetry editor, Alison Winch. We begin with a selection of three poems from Fit to Work: Poets Against Atos. As Sophie writes: 'The poem and the song are the perfect vehicle for protest - small enough to smuggle by hand, learn by heart or send in a tweet, large enough for the whole world to join in.'