Posted on 31-1-2003

Justice's New Deal
by George Monbiot, Guardian UK.

Mr Bush and Mr Blair might have a tougher fight than they anticipated. Not
from Saddam Hussein perhaps - although it is still not obvious that they
can capture and hold Iraq's cities without major losses - but from an
anti-war movement that is beginning to look like nothing the world has seen
before.

It's not just that people have begun to gather in great numbers even before
a shot has been fired. It's not just that they are doing so without the
inducement of conscription or any other direct threat to their welfare.
It's not just that there have already been meetings or demonstrations in
almost every nation on Earth. It's also that the campaign is being
coordinated globally with an unprecedented precision. And the people partly
responsible for this are the members of a movement which, even within the
past few weeks, the mainstream media has pronounced extinct.

Last year, 40,000 members of the global justice movement gathered at the
World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil. This year, more than 100,000,
from 150 nations, have come - for a meeting! The world has seldom seen such
political assemblies since Daniel O'Connell's "monster meetings" in the
1840s.

Far from dying away, our movement has grown bigger than most of us could
have guessed. September 11 muffled the protests for a while, but since then
they have returned with greater vehemence, everywhere except the US. The
last major global demonstration it convened was the rally at the European
summit in Barcelona. Some 350,000 activists rose from the dead. They came
despite the terrifying response to the marches in June 2001 in Genoa, where
the police burst into protesters' dormitories and beat them with truncheons
as they lay in their sleeping bags, tortured others in the cells and shot
one man dead.

But neither the violent response, nor September 11, nor the indifference of
the media have quelled this rising. Ever ready to believe their own story,
the newsrooms have interpreted the absence of coverage (by the newsrooms)
as an absence of activity. One of our recent discoveries is that we no
longer need them. We have our own channels of communication, our own
websites and pamphlets and magazines, and those who wish to find us can do
so without their help. They can pronounce us dead as often as they like,
and we shall, as many times, be resurrected.

The media can be forgiven for expecting us to disappear. In the past, it
was hard to sustain global movements of this kind. The socialist
international, for example, was famously interrupted by nationalism. When
the nations to which the comrades belonged went to war, they forgot their
common struggle and took to arms against each other. But now, thanks to the
globalisation some members of the movement contest, nationalism is a far
weaker force. American citizens are meeting and debating with Iraqis, even
as their countries prepare to go to war. We can no longer be called to
heel. Our loyalty is to the principles we defend and to those who share
them, irrespective of where they come from.

One of the reasons why the movement appears destined only to grow is that
it provides the only major channel through which we can engage with the
most critical issues. Climate change, international debt, poverty, the
hegemony of the G8 nations, the IMF and the World Bank, the depletion of
natural resources, nuclear proliferation and low-level conflict are major
themes in the lives of most of the world's people, but minor themes in
almost all mainstream political discourse. We are told that the
mind-rotting drivel which now fills the pages of the newspapers is a
necessary commercial response to the demands of younger readers. This may,
to some extent, be true. But here are tens of thousands of young people who
have less interest in celebrity culture than George Bush has in
Wittgenstein. They have evolved their own scale of values, and
re-enfranchised themselves by pursuing what they know to be important. For
the great majority of activists - those who live in the poor world - the
movement offers the only effective means of reaching people in the richer
nations.

We have often been told that the reason we're dead is that we have been
overtaken by and subsumed within the anti-war campaign. It would be more
accurate to say that the anti-war campaign has, in large part, grown out of
the global justice movement. This movement has never recognized a
distinction between the power of the rich world's governments and their
appointed institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, the World Trade
Organization) to wage economic warfare and the power of the same
governments, working through different institutions (the UN security
council, Nato) to send in the bombers. Far from competing with our
concerns, the impending war has reinforced our determination to tackle the
grotesque maldistribution of power which permits a few national governments
to assert a global mandate. When the activists leave Porto Alegre tomorrow,
they will take home to their 150 nations a new resolve to turn the struggle
against the war with Iraq into a contest over the future of the world.

While younger activists are eager to absorb the experience of people like
Noam Chomsky, Tariq Ali, Lula, Victor Chavez, Michael Albert and Arundhati
Roy, all of whom are speaking in Porto Alegre, our movement is, as yet,
more eager than wise, fired by passions we have yet to master. We have yet
to understand, despite the police response in Genoa, the mechanical
determination of our opponents.

We are still rather too prepared to believe that spectacular marches can
change the world. While the splits between the movement's marxists,
anarchists and liberals are well-rehearsed, our real division - between the
diversalists and the universalists - has, so far, scarcely been explored.
Most of the movement believes that the best means of regaining control over
political life is through local community action. A smaller faction (to
which I belong) believes that this response is insufficient, and that we
must seek to create democratically accountable global institutions. The
debates have, so far, been muted. But when they emerge, they will be fierce.

For all that, I think most of us have noticed that something has changed,
that we are beginning to move on from the playing of games and the staging
of parties, that we are coming to develop a more mature analysis, a better
grasp of tactics, an understanding of the need for policy. We are, in other
words, beginning for the first time to look like a revolutionary movement.
We are finding, too, among some of the indebted states of the poor world, a
new preparedness to engage with us. In doing so, they speed our maturation:
the more we are taken seriously, the more seriously we take ourselves.

Whether we are noticed or not is no longer relevant. We know that, with or
without the media's help, we are a gathering force which might one day
prove unstoppable.