a movement of movements? Amid the general triumph of neo-liberalism over the past decade—its dynamic still unfolding across the world—pockets of resistance have survived from an earlier age: a handful of beleaguered states, sporadic industrial strikes, small radical parties. The opposition that has caught the headlines, however, is new in character—the ‘anti-globalization movement’, as both adherents and adversaries refer to it. The target that has unified spectacular actions in Seattle, Washington, Prague and Quebec are the international institutions pressing for an ever freer flow of commodities and capital—but not labour— around the globe. Behind these demonstrations lie a gamut of disparate organizations and forces: the strongest still rooted in national political contexts, the newest straining for kinds of internationalism that have not been seen since the eclipse of a revolutionary labour movement. In the monotony of a political order now virtually without significant conflict of ideas, any ruffling of the ideological consensus is liable to attract considerable—even disproportionate— media attention: a paradox to be welcomed, as involuntarily widening the reverberations of dissent. Solidarity with the anti-capitalist core of the new resistance must, however, remain clear-eyed. Inflation of the scale or achievements of an embryonic movement is of no more service than indifference or neglect. An internationalism capable of inflicting real defeats on the hegemonic system would have to target the military and political apparatuses of globalization— the UN Security Council and its NATO subcontractor, in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere—as much as the economic institutions of the WTO or IMF, bringing home the realities of American power behind the screens of multilateralism. But even such limited horizons are better than none. With this issue, NLR starts a series of interviews and texts from outposts of the new opposition. The founding date of its emergence was the first day of 1994, when NAFTA came into force and the EZLN occupied six towns of Chiapas in armed protest against it. A moral leadership extending beyond Mexico has remained with the Zapatistas ever since. Below, Subcomandante Marcos explains the strategy of the fight for indigenous rights after EZLN’s entry to Mexico City in March, prior to the gutting of the San Andrés Accords by the Mexican Congress; and touches on his own formation as a thinker. After the Zapatistas, it has been the North American front of protest that has been most active, and Naomi Klein one of its foremost voices. Here she argues for modesty and realism of self-description—not one movement, but a web of differing forces; not against globalization, but against privatization. The next issue will look at one of these forces, the US mobilizer Ruckus Society.
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