So the sources of grievance against the capitalist world order are still there and increasingly powerful. The question is, What form will the backlash against globalization take?

It is clear that socialism cannot be rebuilt in a single country. Workers pushing too hard for higher wages in Michigan will simply see their jobs disappear to Guadalajara or Penang. Only if all workers around the world were unionized, pushing simultaneously for a global rise in wages, would companies be unable to play off one group of workers against another. Karl Marx's exhortation "Workers of the world, unite!" has never seemed more apt.

In theory, then, what the left needs today is a Fourth International uniting the poor and dispossessed around the world in an organization that would be as global as the multinational corporations and financial institutions they face. This Fourth International could push for powerful new institutions to constrain global capitalism. One analogy is the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, when labor unions began to mobilize and the U.S. government developed regulatory powers to catch up with the reach of such powerful corporations as Ford and Standard Oil.

The shortest route to quasi-world government based on socialist principles is for the left to take over the WTO and use it to promote labor rights and the environment rather than free trade. But the left in the developed world finds opposition to this project from poor countries themselves. The WTO is a rather weak organization as it is, dependent upon consensus among its members, and the effort to use it to promote political causes may mark its demise.

Beyond the WTO, it is hard to see how the left will agree on, much less create, new political institutions on a global scale, given the huge differences in interests and culture separating the various groups involved. The coalition represented in Seattle and Washington is very fragile and internally divided—the AFL-CIO will turn on dolphins or sea turtles the moment one of these creatures threatens the job of a unionized worker. While American unions pay lip service to the interests of workers in China, they actually feel themselves in direct competition with the Chinese for the same low-skill jobs. The inability to organize at an international level leads an important part of the left down the road toward protectionism and the safeguarding of American wages and the environment through actions like opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and to China's entry into the WTO.

So where will the socialist impulse lead? Perhaps if it cannot create formal instruments of power, it may invent an entirely new form of governance that might be called government by NGO, or noNGOvernmental organization (contradictory as this may sound). In the recent past, the giant multinational Royal Dutch Shell was forced to back down from important projects in Nigeria and the North Sea as a result of pressure from environmental groups like Greenpeace. NGOs—which are loose affiliations of people based on special interests such as environmentalism—have shown that even if they cannot create institutions that anyone would label socialist, they do have the power to constrain companies and governments from taking actions that harm the interests of the poor and the environment. There is a huge variety and density of such third-sector groups in the world today, benefiting from the same inexpensive information technologies as global corporations.

Government-by-NGO is a long way from anything we recognize as socialism. But the world has changed, and the requirements for effective political action are different today than they were in the 20th century. So while classical socialism may never make a comeback, the impulse underlying it is in the process of leading the world to unfamiliar forms of interaction between left and right. In this respect, Seattle and Washington may be harbingers of things to come.

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