Fired Up

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 froman 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 notjust that they are doing so without the inducement of conscription or any other direct threat to theirwelfare. It's not just that there have already been meetings or demonstrations in almost every nation onearth. It's also that the campaign is being coordinated globally with an unprecedented precision. And thepeople partly responsible for this are the members of a movement which, even within the past few weeks, themainstream media has pronounced extinct.

Last year, 40,000 members of the global justice movement gathered at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegrein Brazil. This year, over 100,000 -- from 150 nations -- have come: for a meeting! The world has seldom seensuch 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 muffledthe protests for a while, but since then they have returned with greater vehemence, everywhere except theUnited States. The last major global demonstration it convened was the rally at the European summit inBarcelona. Three hundred and fifty thousand activists rose from the dead. They came despite the terrifyingresponse to the marches in June 2001 in Genoa, where the police burst into protesters' dormitories and beatthem 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 thisrising. Ever ready to believe their own story, the newsrooms have interpreted the absence of coverage (by thenewsrooms) as an absence of activity. One of our recent discoveries is that we no longer need them. We haveour own channels of communication, our own websites and pamphlets and magazines, and those who wish to find uscan 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 globalmovements of this kind. The socialist internationals, for example, were repeatedly interrupted by nationalism.When the nations to which the comrades belonged went to war, they forgot their common struggle and took toarms 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 theircountries prepare to go to war. We can no longer be called to heel. Our loyalty is to the principles we defendand 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 majorchannel 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, butminor themes in almost all mainstream political discourse. We are told that the mind-rotting drivel which nowfills the pages of the newspapers is a necessary commercial response to the demands of younger readers. Thismay, to some extent, be true. But here are tens of thousands of young people who have less interest incelebrity culture than George Bush has in Wittgenstein. They have evolved their own scale of values, andre-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 thericher nations.

We have often been told that the reason we're dead is that we have been overtaken by and subsumed withinthe anti-war campaign. It would be more accurate to say that the anti-war campaign has, in large part, grownout of the global justice movement. This movement has never recognised a distinction between the power of therich world's governments and their appointed institutions (the IMF, the World Bank, the World TradeOrganisation) to wage economic warfare and the power of the same governments, working through differentinstitutions (the Security Council, NATO) to send in the bombers. Far from competing with our concerns, theimpending war has reinforced our determination to tackle the grotesque mal-distribution of power which permitsa few national governments to assert a global mandate. When the activists leave Porto Alegre tomorrow, theywill take home to their 150 nations a new resolve to turn the struggle against the war with Iraq into acontest 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, asyet, more eager than wise, fired by passions we have yet to master, burning with fury and untempered love. Wehave 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 splitsbetween the movement's marxists, anarchists and liberals are well-rehearsed, our real division - between thediversalists and the universalists -- has, so far, scarcely been explored. Most of the movement believes thatthe 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 createdemocratically-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 onfrom the playing of games and the staging of parties, that we are coming to develop a more mature analysis, abetter grasp of tactics, an understanding of the need for policy. We are, in other words, beginning for thefirst time to look like a revolutionary movement. We are finding, too, among some of the indebted states ofthe poor world, a new preparedness to engage with us. In doing so, they speed our maturation: the more we aretaken 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 area gathering force which might one day prove unstoppable.

George Monbiot is Honorary Professor at theDepartment of Politics in Keele and Visiting Professor at the Department of Environmental Science at theUniversity of East London and the author of CaptiveState: the corporate takeover of Britain, and the investigative travel books Poisoned Arrows,Amazon Watershed and No Man's Land. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian, UK.