The New Radicals

(3 of 4)

It sounds like Utopia, like Oz's Munchkinland after Dorothy squashed the wicked witch and everyone jumped up from hiding to do a dance. "People are turning out because of the Internet--they don't have to be mobilized," says Beck. One motivator, oddly, is nostalgia, an emotion that the Internet accelerates. Events in Seattle cast an afterglow that continues to spread in the retelling. Kelly Vaughan, 20, a senior at Chicago's DePaul University, recalls sitting at her computer last November poring over e-mail accounts of the frontline action. She instantly relayed the news to a list of about 100 other activists, who thrilled at each new shred of information. "Everyone got excited and wanted to sustain the momentum," she says. Soon new volunteers began appearing, eager for war stories of their very own.

Antiglobalism is big on campus, spawning standing-room-only classes and lectures and getting late risers out of bed at dawn to bone up on the arcana of Third World debt relief. "It all ties back to economic injustice," says Vaughan, who marvels at how the movement has drawn in youthful nonconformists of every stripe. Keith Mann, an adjunct professor of history and sociology at DePaul, agrees that all the antiglobalist roads seem to converge on a single point. "The students feel they are of the same ilk, but they're not sure why," he says. "In an age of diffuse power, this is something students can grab onto. The IMF and the World Bank are a clear and present power."

For the antiglobalists, an advantage to having no head is that your enemies can't lop it off. A disadvantage is having no single voice. Though the coalition is singing one song--We Aren't the World, let's call it--it's hardly singing in harmony. Some protesters can't even agree about the purpose of the rally against the IMF. For Emily LaBarbera-Twarog, who works at the Midwest office of the Campaign for Labor Rights, the goal is "to stop the meeting from happening." For Vaughan the aim is "to give us a voice at the table. We're not just fighting power," she says; "we're fighting specific policies." Munson's agenda is more sweeping: "We want to get rid of the World Bank."

The antiglobalists prove that you don't have to agree on what you're for to know what you're against. And one thing they're against, it seems, is agreement itself. Too monolithic, too uniform, too global. The protesters prefer debate, diversity. They'd like to teach the world to sing in off-key counterpoint. To their minds, the IMF and the World Bank are tyrannical choirmasters with steel batons and a tin ear for cultural differences. They finance mammoth industrial projects that sweep up hundreds of workers from the countryside, decimating small farms and villages while swelling urban slums. They bottle up small streams into huge lakes contained behind gigantic dams, and they steer the contracts for the dams' construction to American and European companies.