Situating Occupy | Adbusters Culturejammer Headquarters
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Perhaps the greatest world historian alive today, Immanuel Wallerstein, has argued that since 1789 all major revolutions have really been world revolutions.
The French revolution might have appeared to only take place in one country, but really it quickly transformed the entire North Atlantic world so profoundly that a mere 20 years later, ideas that had previously been considered lunatic fringe – that social change was good, that governments existed to manage social change, that governments drew their legitimacy from an entity known as the people – had been propelled so deeply into common sense that even the stodgiest conservative had to at least pay lip service to them. In 1848 revolutions broke out almost simultaneously in 50 different countries from Wallachia to Brazil. In no country did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterwards, institutions inspired by the French revolution – universal education systems, for instance – were created pretty much everywhere.
We see the same pattern recur in the 20th century. The “ten days that shook the world” in 1917 took place in Russia, where revolutionaries did manage to seize state power, but what Wallerstein calls the “world revolution of 1968” was more like 1848: it rippled from China to Czechoslovakia to France to Mexico, took power nowhere, but nonetheless began a broad transformation in our sense of what a revolution might even mean.
