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May 1968: what legacy today?

by Webeehive.com

May 1968 is a critical date in recent history. The key figures of that time have grown old and by now they do not hide deception for the turn the world has taken. Most people have forgotten and many others, starting with the eighties' generation, eventually consider it as a piece of history.

Forty years passed since Berkley, London, Berlin, Paris, and Rome were the stage for a Western transnational movement wishing to unlock the governance of economic power, to remove cultural barriers and to democratize democracy. The balance of the 1968 movement is not glorious.

The legacy of 1968 has been wiped out in 1989 and finally diluted in the (fake) roaring nineties. The fundamental issue of legitimating the exercise of power, either by private economic or by public territorial entities, is still the main pre-occupation in Western societies: sophisticated electoral processes and corporate social responsibility constraints are spreading fast across Western countries. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has adopted a more anti-libertarian and authoritarian style of management for their governance issues. As a result, today, the Western societies are confronted with an incomplete revolution turning sour, impairing any reformist project. Simultaneously, the financial control on the media has strongly contributed to domesticate the Western people's cognitive polity process, although with some residual resistance. In fact, it is on the retreat the capacity to challenge the economic globalization and the new consolidation of elites' power in the economy as well as in the decision making processes. Forty years after 1968 two thirds of the world is run by either authoritarian or theocratic systems. In reaction, the West is sliding into centralized populist democracies that increasingly show incapacity to deal with the domestic poverty increase, the demographic gap and the security issues.

Although keeping a discourse prompting anarchic and anti-capitalist slogans, the 1968 movement was in fact brewed within the liberal and capitalist system, without proposing a sustainable alternative. This conformist bottom ground is probably the reason for its historic failure. Notably, some dissent voices, like Pier Paolo Pasolini, were well aware of the movement's shortfalls.

In 2008 the world is still confronted with the issues of democratizing democracy and unlocking the governance of economic power. Probably, the combination of the effects carried by the economic globalization, on the one hand, and the climate change security challenges, on the other hand, could set the basis for a more radical and structural change in the way the world is run. However, after so many decades of conformist doctrine there is the risk that the people may not be able anymore to re-act in a cognitive capacity. Tragically, this may lead to sustaining populist, authoritarian and theocratic forces and elites in the world.