ABSTRACT
As we have long argued, the central feature of 1968 as "world revolution"—a revolution that actually began in the early to middle 1960s and lasted for about ten years-was a systemwide rebellion directed simultaneously against two targets. On the one hand, it was directed against the dominant forces of the capitalist world-system and, as such, it appropriated anticapitalist ideologies from older antisystemic movements in addition to its own anticapitalist ideologies. On the other hand, the differentia specifia of 1968, in comparison with previous antisystemic upheavals, was its onslaught against the achievements of the historic "Old Left"—the social democrats in the West, the Communists in the East, the national liberation movements in the South-on the grounds that these movements were weak, corrupt, in connivance with the dominant forces, neglectful of truly dispossessed strata, and arrogant.
