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RedditReading this book I was prompted to ask myself whether another global upheaval like 1968 could happen again. I came to the conclusion that it is almost inevitable. In France today the two Trotskyist groups that came to the fore in 1968 recently obtained 31 percent support in an opinion poll, ahead of the Socialists as well as the Communists. But this is not the reason another test looms. It is because we really have now reached the interactive stage of the communications revolution. In 1964 McLuhan gave a brilliantly prescient summary of this revolution, in a passage quoted in Nairn's 1968 essay:
Robin Blackburn spent 1968 in Havana, Prague, Berlin and London.
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Speak Again, Memory
Greg Grandin: Readers of Fidel Castro's My Life will find explanations of the Cuban Revolution, but no apologies for its suppression of dissent.
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The Creep of Things
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow: Two new anthologies explore the virtues and occasional shortcomings of Bill McKibben's quest for environmental salvation.
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Hello Cruel World
John Palattella: The narrative journalism of David Samuels finds conversation, color and conflict in the vortex of American life.
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The American Way of Spying
Spencer Ackerman: The history of American intelligence-gathering is rife with incompetence, dysfunction and contempt toward legislative oversight.
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The Last Angry Man
Jeff Kisseloff: Eliot Asinof, blacklisted author of Eight Men Out, created a lifetime of work celebrating rebels and victims of injustice.
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The Novelist and the Murderers
Nathaniel Popper: Francisco Goldman's The Art of Political Murder sparks calls for accountability in Central America's "kingdom of impunity."
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City of Fear
Jon Wiener: A new book explores the historical ties between African-American and Japanese-American communities in Los Angeles.
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For a Social Bailout
Robin Blackburn: Let's reinvent progressive economic policy, starting with our own sovereign wealth fund to deal with urgent social needs.
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Perishable Goods
Robin Blackburn: A new biography of economist Joseph Schumpeter explores his insights into the emerging world of globalized capitalism.
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The New World Order
Robin Blackburn: Two new books examine the diverse and ambitious alliances that led to the end of slavery in America.
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The True Story of Equiano
Robin Blackburn: Vincent Carretta's Equiano, the African is the complex narrative of a Carolina slave who bought his freedom, married an English woman and published a memoir on his life as a seafarer and gentleman.
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Of Human Bondage
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You Had to Be There
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The Bourgeois Revolutionary
Wealth and work become information factors and totally new structures are needed.... With electronic technology, the new kinds of instant interdependence and interprocess that take over production, also enter the markets and social organizations. For this reason markets and education designed to cope with the products of servile toil and mechanical production are no longer adequate. Our education has long ago acquired the fragmentary and piece-meal character of mechanism. It is now under increasing pressure to acquire the depth and inter-relation that are indispensable in the all-at-once world of electric organization.
All these processes are far more advanced today than they were in 1968. The world is no longer divided by the cold war. It's true that the Islamic world is culturally resistant to the West, but it is now within the same global communications space. All this persuades me that there is a greater potential today for a type of "global storm" that will see even stranger alignments and interconnections. So perhaps, as we used to say, 1968 was just a rehearsal. The actors were still trusting too much to improvisation and had yet really to understand their parts. Will their successors be better prepared next time?
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