The politics of the market has given us individual freedoms, but inhibited any potent form of collectivity. We cannot return to the regulated social life that enabled a 'Fordist' democracy to function. So what now? Neoliberals are terrified of the emerging potential for a dynamic pluralist and democratic society. In this lecture, for the biennial 'Crossroads in Cultural Studies' conference, this potential and its history is explored, along with the possible contribution of cultural studies to such a development.

The Third Revolution by nature of its high mechanisation and non-labour intensity means an ever larger proportion of the general public will be excluded from the production process or remunerated to ever lesser extents.

The Internet Age was meant to change everything - internationalism, commerce, journalism, government - all would be transformed, made equal and boundless by the click. It's time to admit this has simply failed to happen, and what is more interesting than the bad forecasting is the reason that they seemed so tempting in the first place. (This is the text of a lecture delivered in Sydney in December 2011)

Occupy and the direct action movements of today have much in common with the radical movements of the 1960s/70s. Can the new generation move beyond the successes and failures of the past, to develop an alternative political economy?

This is the Raymond Williams Annual Lecture for 2011, coinciding with the publication of a new 50th anniversary edition of Raymond Williams’ The Long Revolution by Parthian Books, for which Anthony Barnett has written the foreword, also published here this week. In the lecture, he considers the potentially revolutionary events of the past year, starting with a double-democratic crisis in the ruling order, asking why now? and what kind of revolution is under way?