How the 'movement of movements' embraces radical diversity and rejects both economic and religious fundamentalism

Two small yellow packets lie on the drought-dried soil, beckoning brightly against the mute colours of Afghanistan's ravaged landscape, a child hobbles towards them, eyes open wide, small hands reaching out in excited anticipation. The child hesitates, her eyes sweep nervously left to right, which one to pick up first?

If she chooses the one on the right, the "aid" drop, she will stem her seemingly perpetual hunger for a few hours with the alien taste of crackers and peanut butter. If she chooses the one on the left, the cluster bomblet, she will be blinded by a flash, her hands will be blown off and bang - she will join the invisible ranks of 40,000 children that die everyday, somewhere in the world, mostly from hunger and curable diseases.. In that moment she has two choices, but neither will alleviate the humiliation of poverty that has blighted her life.

Meanwhile, Bush and Blair, speaking from the carpeted rooms of power and privilege, give us another choice: "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists". A choice mirrored in bin Laden's stark video messages " these events have divided the world into two camps, the camp of the faithful and the camp of infidels". So here we have it - two false choices, that's what this phoney "war" seems to be about and that's what our world system thrives on, the choice between good and evil, barbarism and civilisation, the "free" market or protectionism, the economic fundamentalism of "McWorld" or the religious fundamentalism of "jihad".

US and British foreign policy is not aimed at giving anybody any real choice. Nor does it seek world peace : it is intended to enforce a particular kind of capitalism. A system that forces everywhere to look and feel like everywhere else, the same food, the same insecurities, the same clothes, the same suffering. War is one way of achieving this. The World Trade Organisation, which forces countries to "open" their markets to "competition" and imposes the rules of the market into every aspect of our lives, is another.

The last time the World Trade Organisation had a ministerial meeting, in Seattle, two years ago, thousands took to the streets and shut it down. Since then every economic summit, from Chiang Mai to Prague, Quebec to Davos, has resembled a medieval siege as the growing number of protesters , (in Seattle there were 50, 000, in Genoa over 200,000) , have surrounded the walled and fenced conference centres, and declared their demands for another choice, the choice of life over profit, real democracy over the dictatorship of the markets.

A movement of movements has sprung up on every continent in the last decade. The depressing notion of the end of history has been challenged with a new sense of hope, hope that history could be extracted from the realm of the stock exchanges and be grasped in our own hands. Against the monoculture of economic globalisation, people have been demanding and creating worlds which thrived on diversity, worlds where local people took back control from corporations and distant bureaucrats. The Hope was contagious, it was a young punk spraying "We are winning" on a wall in Seattle as her friends were being sprayed by pepper gas; it was the Korean activist demonstrating on the same day in front of a Seoul government building announcing "We are receiving news from Seattle...and are greatly motivated and moved by them. Our struggle is your Struggle !".

Hope was seeing a movement made up of so many different peoples and cultures grow so fast, so quickly, so irresistibly. In under 600 days we had helped name the global problem as capitalism and had begun to develop extraordinary international networks of inspiration to begin the slow process of imagining and constructing worlds beyond greed and competition. Then history did what it is best at - it surprised us all - September the 11th happened.

Since then our minds have become filled with images of ruins and death as stories of anthrax attacks and potential nuclear strikes fill our screens. Repressive legislation targeting dissent and difference are hurried through parliaments. Many of us have became paralysed with fear, despair has taken over; it seems hope is rationed in times of war. When hope is extinguished hate is liberated, because without hate, wars are very hard to legitimise.

Yet at the same time, what happened on September 11th made many people in the privileged global North question everything. It made many of us reassess our lives. We heard bankers and financiers doubt the value of their work, we saw the compulsion to compete being momentarily replaced by community and co-operation, as many of us were propelled into searching for renewed meaning in our lives. Somewhere among the ruins of the World Trade centre and the shifting rubble of Afghanistan there lies a sense that perhaps this crisis is an opportunity, perhaps the tension between hope and despair, between laughter and tears, will open up a creative space for radical change..

There is little doubt that we have come to the pivotal point of a unique historical period, a period of great transition. The whole system is in crisis and when systems reach such points of disequilibrium, small gestures can have big effects. Radical change becomes easier and more likely. A space has opened up, either we fill it with competing forms of fundamentalism - the handmaidens of fear - or we fill it with diverse forms of co-operation, coexistence and creativity, the fruits of hope.

With the collapse of certainty, there also lies a great sense of clarity, a realisation that everything is connected, an understanding that attempts to force life everywhere into a single mould are bound to fuel perpetual conflict and insecurity. Commentators have been saying that the global movements for life, autonomy, land, dignity and justice, are dead, that to be against capitalism is unacceptable in a post September the 11th world. But these movements aren't going to go away, far from it - they are the only viable alternative to a world so fixated on dualities , so obsessed with the imposition of singular ideologies, so addicted to the big - big office blocks, big money, big solutions, big bombs, big wars, big mistakes.

This week, unwilling to risk a re-run of Seattle, the WTO will meet in the inaccessible Middle Eastern autocracy of Qatar, where all forms of protest are banned. There they will continue on their mission where inevitably we will be given a another meaningless choice - either we are for more "free" trade, more privatisation and less regulations on corporations or we are for terrorism, US, Trade Representative Robert Zoellick has already stated that "Trade ... promotes the values at the heart of this protracted struggle."

As they meet, hundreds of thousands of people across the world will be taking local decentralised actions. This will include teach-ins taking place in 100 town squares across Italy as well as in Lebanon, Thailand, Japan, Tunisia, Bangladesh and China, In Canada the Raging Grannies will be singing their catchy tunes, while strikes will occur in Nigeria, popular education caravans will travel across Turkey and the Philippines, Indian farmers are planning to commandeer government grain stocks and distribute it to the poor, in Australia several thousand metal workers will march, in New York the offices of corporate offenders will be visited in a special evening tour, something will take place on every continent.

Perhaps this war is the swan song of global capitalism , the unravelling of the empire. One seemingly impregnable empire began its decade of unravelling with a war in Afghanistan, perhaps this is the next one to end there. What will we be proud to tell our children, in years to come? That our desire for revenge led us to bomb one of the poorest countries in the world, which resulted in the starvation of several million people and took us to the brink of a third world war? Or will it be easier to look them in the eye and tell them that we stopped the world from tearing itself apart, that we used this opportunity, this moment in history where "everything changed", to actually change things, to build a safer world, a world made up of many worlds, a world of one no and many yesses.

The Spun editorial collective - November 5th 2001