An introduction

A movement without a name? Its left wing - young fighters on the streets at the summit sieges of Seattle or Genoa - call it ANTICAPITALIST. Its right wing - the speakers in the vast tents of its Social Forums at Porto Alegre, Mumbai, Florence, Paris and now London, call it ALTERMONDIALISTE. Or, if you want something that sounds safe but you don't like ugly neologisms dreamed up in the offices of the French newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique, you can call it the GLOBAL JUSTICE MOVEMENT.

Whatever you call the "movement of movements" it is suffering from an identity crisis - one which goes well beyond the choice of names. Speaking frankly it does not know where it is going. Does it want to "fix or nix" the international financial institutions? Does it want to abolish capitalism or create a 'fair and equal' market? Does it want to take power from the hands of the warmongers? Or is any talk about "taking power" just too twentieth century, too passé for words?

Many of the most influential people, who organise its counter-conferences and call its mobilisations, do not even see this as a problem. From the Attac campaign for a small tax on foreign exchange to the Zapatista guerrillas in Mexico., the key players tell us to 'rejoice' in what is simply a space, a forum, an agora. The cunning of history has led them to use the Greek and Latin words for - yes - a marketplace.

They warn sternly that this marketplace must not become the site of a struggle for power. There is no need or possibility to take decisions there. Strange - since all markets - apart from the cloud cuckoo-land one described in the books of neoliberal theorists - are always just that. The Roman and Athenian marketplaces were, moreover, the actual physical location of ancient democracy. And democracy is precisely a struggle for power between parties and classes.

In the market of ideas, too, some sellers are more equal than others. Those with a newspaper or a publishing house, those with an NGO, a trade union, a university department or a party with dozens of deputies can flood the bookstores....

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