I WAS not old enough to be politically engaged in 1968. Yet even though I was only eight at the time, I can nevertheless recollect some of the dramatic events of that year, including footage of Vietnam and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

After reading numerous books on the period and talking to lefties born only a little while before I was, I am well aware that for numerous middle-aged activists proudly define themselves as soixante huitards.

Not uncommonly, they insist that the well documented revolts across the planet – accompanied by a classic rock soundtrack, of course – provided enough of a glimpse of what revolution looked like enough to instil lifelong socialist convictions.

We still cannot know the long term impact of 2011, of course. But what we have witnessed so far in many countries is capital H History on a scale at least on a par with the dramatic occurrences of five decades ago.

This can most clearly be seen in North Africa and the Middle East. Authoritarian regimes have been toppled in Tunisia and Egypt, with Libya likely to follow soon. Syria, too, has been shaken by generalised insurrection.

The eurozone crisis has led directly to general strikes and political rioting in Greece and the mass occupation of public spaces in Spain. Analyses of the recent outbreak of rioting in the UK, and the short-lived student protests before that, will differ. But as I have argued before, they too contain an implicit political dimension.

One way and another, countries as diverse as China, Chile, India and Israel are witnessing mass mobilisations of wildly differing proximate cause, yet all indicative of generalised discontent with the existing political system and those that have so conspicuously benefited from it.

And of course, there is a feedback loop at work here. Everybody is able to watch what everybody else is doing, if not on the telly than at least on YouTube. I don’t know about you, but I am finding all of this truly gripping stuff.

The 1968/2011 analogies are not exact, of course. This is most obvious at the level of political awareness. One impact of the extended spell of neoliberalism under which we have lived of late is that the left has been permanently on the back foot, unable in most countries to attain clarity in ideas or to build significant social roots.

In consequence, it has not been the primary beneficiary of this year’s wave of unrest. The numbers turning towards explicitly Marxist, quasi-Marxist or anarchist ideas are limited, with variants of liberalism, nationalism and even racist rightist populism gaining ground instead.

Doubtless some people will be pinning hopes on a mechanical insistence that changing social conditions not just can, but must, turn inarticulate anti-elitism into class consciousness. Those that don’t believe in miracles will ask them to spell out the concrete rather than theoretical grounds for this expectation.

My fear is that a once in a lifetime chance for the left to make a breakthrough is going to waste, and it is the 68ers now in the leadership that must be blamed for this state of affairs. They really should have known better. Never trust a hippy, as we used to say.