London

Two years ago some smart leftists here put together an event called the Battle of Ideas, and the mix of provocative themes, well-run panels and competent speakers worked out well. I was invited to speak at a couple of sessions in the third Battle at the end of October and was happy to find its organizers threading a sane course past the rocks on which left-organized confabs usually founder: viz., endless mastication of the obvious, marked disinclination to address any new ideas, overblown preachments to the converted. In fact, on the surface at least, this didn't seem like a particularly "left" affair, which probably explains why that weekend a thousand people were milling around the Royal College of Art, next to the Albert Hall.

Waiting for my first panel ("Digital Commons: Does New Technology Add Up to a New Sphere?" My answer: no), I thought back forty years to what these days would be called a signature '60s event, namely, the Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation, held over two weeks in July 1967 in a magnificent railway repair shed known as the Roundhouse, built in the 1840s in north London. There was nothing circular about those proceedings. It was full-tilt forward to revolution, personal and political.

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