In great upheavals, analogies fly like shrapnel. The electrifying protests of 2011—the on-going Arab spring, the ‘hot’ Iberian and Hellenic summers, the ‘occupied’ fall in the United States—inevitably have been compared to the anni mirabiles of 1848, 1905, 1968 and 1989. Certainly some fundamental things still apply and classic patterns repeat. Tyrants tremble, chains break and palaces are stormed. Streets become magical laboratories where citizens and comrades are created, and radical ideas acquire sudden telluric power. Iskra becomes Facebook. But will this new comet of protest persist in the winter sky or is it just a brief, dazzling meteor shower? As the fates of previous journées révolutionnaires warn us, spring is the shortest of seasons, especially when the communards fight in the name of a ‘different world’ for which they have no real blueprint or even idealized image.

But perhaps that will come later. For the moment, the survival of the new social movements—the occupiers, the indignados, the small European anti-capitalist parties and the Arab new left—demands that they sink deeper roots in mass resistance to the global economic catastrophe, which in turn presupposes—let’s be honest—that the current temper for ‘horizontality’ can eventually accommodate enough disciplined ‘verticality’ to debate and enact organizing strategies. It’s a frighteningly long road just to reach the starting points of earlier attempts to build a new world. But a new generation has at least bravely initiated the journey.

Will a deepening economic crisis, now engulfing much of the world, necessarily speed a global renewal of the Left? The ‘bullet points’ that follow are my speculations. Designed to instigate debate, they’re simply a thinking-out-loud about some of the historical specificities of the 2011 events and the outcomes they could shape in the next few years. The underlying premise is that Act Two of the drama will entail mostly winter scenes, played out against the backdrop of the collapse of export-led economic growth in the bric countries as well as continuing stagnation in Europe and the United States.

First, we must pay homage to fear and panic at the high tables of capitalism. What was inconceivable just a year ago, even to most Marxists, is now a spectre haunting the opinion pages of the business press: the imminent destruction of much of the institutional framework of globalization and undermining of the post-1989 international order. There is growing apprehension that the crisis of the Eurozone, followed by a synchronized world recession, might return us to a 1930ish world of semi-autarchic monetary and trade blocs, crazed by nationalist ressentiments. Hegemonic regulation of money and demand, in this scenario, would no longer exist: the us, too weak; Europe, too disorganized; and China, with feet of clay, too dependent upon exports. Every second-rank power would want its own enriched-uranium insurance policy; regional nuclear wars would become a possibility. Far-fetched? Perhaps, but so is the belief in time travel back to the roaring days of the 1990s. Our analogue minds simply cannot solve all the differential equations generated by the incipient fragmentation of the Eurozone or a blown gasket in the Chinese growth engine. While the explosion on Wall Street in 2008 was more or less accurately foreseen by various experts, what is now rushing toward us is well beyond the prediction of any Cassandra or, for that matter, three Karl Marxes.

If the neo-liberal apocalypse is actually nigh, Washington and Wall Street will be seen as the chief exterminating angels, having simultaneously blown up the North Atlantic financial system and the Middle East (as well as scuppering any chance of mitigating climate disaster). Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan may be seen in historical retrospect as acts of classic hubristic over-reach: quick Panzer victories and illusions of omnipotence, followed by long wars of attrition and atrocity that risk ending almost as badly for Washington as did Moscow’s venture across the Oxus a quarter-century before. The United States has been stymied on one front by the Taliban, supported by Pakistan, and on the other by Shiites, supported by Iran. Although still joined at the hip with Israel, able to fill the skies with assassin drones or coordinate a lethal nato assault, Washington has been unable to extract a guarantee of immunity for American forces in Iraq, limiting the number of boots on the ground in a fulcrum Middle East state. The democratic uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt saw Obama and Clinton obliged to politely applaud the beheading of two of their favoured regimes.

The obvious dividend of the pull-back—a more rational equilibration of us military might and objectives to shrinking fiscal resources and global economic economic clout—is still hostage to mad plans hatched in Tel Aviv or a mortal threat to Saudi absolutism. Although Canada’s vast heavy-oil reserves and Allegheny gas shales reduce direct us dependence on Middle East fields, they don’t unshackle the American economy, as some claim, from world-market energy prices determined by politics in the Gulf.

The unfinished Arab political revolution is epic in scope and social energy, a historical surprise comparable to 1848 or 1989. It is reshaping the geopolitics of North Africa and the Middle East, leaving Israel as an obsolete outpost of the Cold War (and therefore more dangerous and unpredictable than ever), while enabling Turkey, jilted by the eu (not a bad thing, it turns out), to reclaim a central influence in lands once Ottoman. In Egypt and Tunisia, the uprisings also helped to redeem the authentic meaning of democracy from the bowdlerized versions peddled by nato. Provocative parallels can be drawn with ‘floral revolutions’, past and present. As with 1848 and 1989, the Arab mega-intifada is a chain-reaction uprising against a regional autocratic system, with Egypt analogous to France in the first instance, perhaps East Germany in the second. The role of counter-revolutionary Russia is today played by Saudi Arabia and the Gulf sheikhdoms. Turkey impersonates liberal England as a regional model of moderate parliamentarianism and economic success, while the Palestinians (stretching analogy to the breaking point) are a romantic lost cause like the Poles; the Shias, angry outsiders like the Slovaks and Serbs. (The Financial Times, for its part, recently encouraged Obama to think like the ‘new Metternich’.)