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“Rather than one dominant political voice, one dogma, one party line, we present you with a collision of subjectivities… moments both intimate and public, charged with inspiration, fear, humor, the everyday, and the historic.”

So begins this 7″ 5″, b&w photo-studded tour of the global justice movement’s many locales and leaderless actors, from a mostly London-based editorial collective that includes an editor of New Internationalist magazine. The book is divided into seven primer-like chapters-”Emergence,” “Networks,” “Autonomy,” “Carnival,” “Clandestinity,” “Power” and “Walking”-each with a headline-like subtitle (e.g., “Power: building it without taking it”). The book as a whole makes a case for “direct action,” or organized resistance to specific policies or decisions, in a manner that owes the most to Gandhi’s targeted nonviolence. The book reveals a movement for whom protest is taken to be a more effective political tool than electoral politics, since the latter realm is, in their view, controlled by lobbies for largely profit-based (rather than people-based) interests. In addition to vivid reportage (including terrific action pix) of specific events around the world, numerous voices explain how they built and now maintain their own “affinity groups,” or small collectives that operate in their own manners, with representatives sent to larger umbrella organizations. The idea is to show readers how to form their own groups and to convince them to do so. With its on-the-ground documentation of and practical tips for protest, this book makes an ideal companion to more big-picture works like Noreena Hertz’s The Silent Takeover: Global Capitalism and the Death of Democracy.

A response for anyone who may have questioned whether anarchy could really work. — ikkygrrl, Fifth Estate, Detroit, Spring 2004

If a book could be a carnival instead of a linear narrative, it would read like this. — Naomi Klein

Jjoyously reflects the rich multicultural lifeblood of these troublemakers and analyzes the economic disparities that motivate them. — Michael Simmons, High Times, 27 February 2004

Reflects the voices of the voiceless…Read this book. — Jeff Conant, Newtopiamagazine, 10 February 2004

This is an uprising as big as the revolution that shook the world between 1890 and 1920. Beware. — Asian Vice President of Goldman Sachs

Author: Various
Edition: pb
ISBN: 1859844472
Publisher: Verso
Release Date: 2003
320 pages