Multitude Project

“world revolution of 1789,” followed by the “world revolution of 1848,”

break out almost simultaneously in fifty countries

In no case did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution—notably, universal systems of primary education—were put in place pretty much everywhere.

The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which, much like 1848, broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything.

a revolution against state bureaucracies

birth of modern feminism

Revolutions are thus planetary phenomena.

transform basic assumptions about what politics is ultimately about.

ideas that had been considered veritably lunatic fringe quickly become the accepted currency of debate

Until 1968, most world revolutions really just introduced practical refinements:

in most cases, the rebels didn’t even try to take over the apparatus of state; they saw that apparatus as itself the problem.

It’s fashionable nowadays to view the social movements of the late sixties as an embarrassing failure.

The ironies are endless. While the new free market ideology has framed itself above all as a rejection of bureaucracy, it has, in fact, been responsible for the first administrative system that has operated on a planetary scale, with its endless layering of public and private bureaucracies: the IMF, World Bank, WTO, trade organizations, financial institutions, transnational corporations, NGOs.

the Global Justice Movement that peaked between 1998 and 2003, was effectively a rebellion against the rule of that very planetary bureaucracy.

I’ll take an obvious example. One often hears that antiwar protests in the late sixties and early seventies were ultimately failures

But afterward

they refused to commit U.S. forces to any major ground conflict for almost thirty years.

Clearly, an antiwar movement in the sixties that is still tying the hands of U.S. military planners in 2012 can hardly be considered a failure.

What happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power?

When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint?

The theorist Michael Albert has worked out a detailed plan for how a modern economy could run without money on a democratic, participatory basis.

Myself, I am less interested in deciding what sort of economic system we should have in a free society than in creating the means by which people can make such decisions for themselves.