The New Radicals

Maybe part of the problem is the word. Globalization. It has a sinister ring, like a euphemism from the same technocrats who gave us "downsizing" during the Reagan years and "pacification" during Vietnam. The term conjures up a futuristic vision of vast, implacable economic processes steamrollering their way across the earth, leveling forests, languages and customs without regard for puny individuals. Globalization: right or wrong, it sounds unstoppable.

Which may be one reason so many people of so many different persuasions have sworn to stop it. The word itself throws down a challenge. The first mass uprising to meet that challenge occurred last year in Seattle, when 40,000 protesters from across the ideological map surrounded, shouted down and roundly embarrassed the assembled representatives of the World Trade Organization. In Seattle--a city whose name has since become a political rallying cry akin to "Chicago in 1968"--environmentalists, union members, human-rights crusaders and old-school populists locked their arms around a spinning globe and, at least for a moment, slowed it down.

They tried to do it again in Washington. Their target: a meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, two great institutions of global finance and, say critics, corporate dominion over the planet's poor and disfranchised. When the organizations met a year ago, about two dozen protesters showed up--barely enough to block a single limo. But mindful of Seattle's violence, D.C. cops last week shut down the demonstrators' "convergence" point (a warehouse) and came out in force. This time, they faced not dozens but thousands of demonstrators on the barricades, all joined by a feeling that the new world order is really a slick new version of the old one, ruled by Big Money and Big Government. On Saturday night alone, police arrested nearly 600 anti-globalists for "parading without a permit." Thanks in large part to the Internet, which has allowed them to cement their bonds, air their grievances and swell their ranks, the activists have got their acts together, the clout of old-fashioned labor welded to the cybersavvy of campus radicals. Their growing movement makes Hands Across America look like a game of ring-around-a-rosy.

A movement of whom toward what, though? That's the puzzle. What's the opposite of globalization? Socialism? Isolationism? Vegetarianism? The answer is all three things, and many more. The radical-chic outfit of the season is a coat of many colors. If you trained a license plate-reading surveillance satellite on Washington last week (or better yet, swept low in a black helicopter), you would have seen bumper stickers, signs and buttons promoting animal rights, organic farming and Pat Buchanan for President. You'd even have seen a soccer ball or two being kicked around by--this is real--something called the Anarchists Soccer League. (Q. How do anarchists score goals? A. Any way they damn well please.)

What you'd have had to look very hard to see in Washington was anyone resembling a leader. Because there isn't one, in the usual sense. No Abbie Hoffman. No Pat Robertson. Sure, Ralph Nader is wandering around (see accompanying story), and so is satirical filmmaker Michael Moore, but they're not calling the shots or giving marching orders. The Mobilization for Global Justice isn't a top-down affair. Like the Internet itself, and unlike the coalition's corporate enemies, the antiglobalist movement is a body that manages to survive, and even thrive, without a head.

It has lots of arms instead, some of them stretching far out into cyberspace. "The Internet has helped people keep in touch in a shorter time frame," says Chuck Munson, 34, who runs a website called that acts as a meeting place for anarchists, who are notoriously hard to organize. "The advantage is that we can communicate with each other quickly."

The Web breeds a sense of togetherness too, and togetherness is important to these activists, so many of whom have spent the last few decades of market capitalism uber alles feeling more than a little isolated. "From my perspective, and I came out of the '60s," says Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, "Seattle was the first time where you saw multigeneration, multiclass and multi-issue in the streets together." Pope remembers marchers hugging each other and a bracing moment when a group of young radicals gave a clenched-fist salute to several construction workers, who responded in kind.

This feeling of solidarity grew online long after the last splinters of glass from Seattle's vandalized Starbucks had been cleaned up. While their foes were busy checking real-time quotes for Intel and GE, the antiglobalists were swapping digital photos of police brutality, reading Noam Chomsky's essays on media brainwashing and posting tips on defending against pepper spray (wear a handkerchief soaked in vinegar). The irony of all this is stark, and possibly galling to the technocrats: the Web was supposed to be globalism's great tool, not a forum for its enemies. The Web was supposed to weld together markets into one enormous worldwide trading floor, not organize thousands into picket lines.