The media like to dwell on the violence and property damage committed by anti-capitalist protesters. The reality, though, is more complex. In Seattle in November 1999 it was tooled-up riot police who fired plastic bullets at the faces of unarmed demonstrators. In Prague last September, as even the Reuters news agency admitted, it was a mere handful of people that hurled bricks through windows and scrawled graffiti on walls of ancient buildings. On several occasions during the Prague protests, demonstrators intervened to dissuade a minority from throwing stones that, they contended, threatened the safety of others, as well as undermined the main message of the movement. For the vast majority, criminal damage is simply not what these protests are about. On the other hand, the level of practical, caring mutual support to be observed at Prague was impressive. Total strangers from across the world, who may never meet one another again, shared their food, water and first-aid equipment. They linked arms across the roadway, to protect one another against riot police. In the days that followed, they picketed the Czech Interior Ministry and embassies around the world to demand the release of hundreds of people Czech police had arrested in a random sweep after the main demonstrations had ended.

The most unlikely allies now work co-operatively together, sinking ideological differences for the sake of the common cause of resisting globalization, of ending hunger and poverty, and of bringing about a more just world. As British Aerospace joins with Marconi to become BAe Systems, as Monsanto transmutes into Novartis and McDonalds' franchises proliferate around the globe like a virulent outbreak of measles, resistance becomes equally widespread across national state boundaries. As Kevin Robinson, a Liverpool docker involved in a battle against employment casualization, put it in 1996, "Where capitalism and big business have no boundaries, we should have no boundaries either. There should be a coming together for all of us." Or as the slogan has it, "Resistance is as transnational as capital."

This co-operation has had unexpected results for all those involved. New organizations have arisen, expressing perspectives both anti-hierarchical and open-minded -- new grassroots groups, like the Norwegian "Alternative International Socialism", that insist on libertarian democratic forms of organization, and reject the dogmatism of traditional Marxist-Leninist parties. Syntheses are formed between traditional Eastern religious practices of yoga and meditation, and new economics movements. The anti-globalization movement is joined by trade unionists and peace activists, human rights campaigners, and environmental movements of every shade of green.

The new spirit of protest against international capitalism has played its part in motivating support for those local and individual acts of resistance that preceded the big anti-globalization demonstrations of 1999, and continue to occur wherever a suitably motivated two, or two dozen, are gathered together. In general, non-violent direct action meets with a sympathetic reaction from the broader public.

In France last July, when local farmer José Bové led the dismantling of a local McDonald's, he was surrounded by thousands of cheering supporters as he rode to court in an open wagon. Though Bové was eventually jailed for three months, his resistance to the destruction of local agriculture by corporate food production was hugely popular. He was only doing what Indian farmers have done in recent years, in burning piles of Monsanto crops, whose genetically engineered sterility threatens their ability to save seed for a new harvest.

In Britain in the gm/Greenpeace trial, a jury found twenty-eight protesters not guilty of destroying crops, on the grounds that they had acted to prevent pollution of the environment by gm-contaminated pollen.

The 1997 acquittal of five women charged with criminal damage for their destruction of a Hawk fighter, made by British Aerospace and destined for sale to Indonesia, followed a similar pattern. In the recent Trident Ploughshares trial, following an action in which peace activists targeted the British nuclear submarine system, three women were acquitted. In all these cases, the sympathy of juries and the local community support from church groups, trade unions and individual well-wishers have been overwhelming. Direct action protesters at the nuclear bases of Faslane and Coulport in Scotland have remarked on the respectful, even sympathetic, attitude of the Scottish police who arrest them when they break into the bases. "They don't want Trident here, either," the protesters say. Solidarity is in the air.

THE POWERFUL and traditionally conservative trade unions of the United States have started reaching out beyond their narrow interests. The afl-cio -- the us equivalent of the British Trades Union Congress -- now calls for countries to develop local production for self-sufficiency, while condemning the flight of us capital to zones of exploitation in the poorer parts of the world. The pattern of solidarity is replicated wherever state governments are moved to heed the voices of collective protest raised in the streets. When Egypt's President Hosni Hubarak publicly condemned the West's bombing of Iraq, he prefaced his remarks with the reasoning that if the citizens of Columbus, Ohio, could stand up and be counted, then surely he could do the same. The grassroots anti-globalization movement has similarly empowered representatives of the G-77, the organization of so-called "Third World" nations, to denounce current exploitative policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (imf).

Anti-globalization protesters have repeatedly proved their ability to work together, overcoming seemingly unbridgeable differences. Indeed, diversity has become the very source of their strength as thousands, united by a common cause, lay siege to the bastions of economic power. After Prague, World Bank President James Wolfensohn declared that the World Bank shares with anti-globalization protesters a common aim of ending world poverty. However sceptically one might wish to regard this statement of Wolfensohn's, it is a clear indication that the protests cannot be ignored, and seem unlikely to go away until something in the world economic order is radically changed.

"I know what they're against but have no sense of what they're for," remarked South African finance minister Trevor Manuel, about the demonstrations in Prague. Perhaps we can offer him a list. We are: for sustainable, healthy, locally-based agriculture, for the placing of human need before corporate profit, for the rights of small farmers, workers and consumers everywhere to an economically just and socially harmonious way of life, in which everyone can earn a decent living without exploiting anyone. For a world free of violence. These are the aspirations of just about everybody who ever attended a mass protest outside the meetings of the World Trade Organization or the IMF.

Whether the recent crop of mass demonstrations and local direct action protest -- still sporadic and isolated, for all the media hype -- can translate into mass action for abolition of the existing unjust system depends, ultimately, on the resistance to globalization of billions of people. Landless peasants, small farmers, green activists, factory workers worldwide feel the terrible effects of corporate power over their lives, but have as yet only begun to realize the potential for change they wield. •

Margaret Jones is the author of Prophets in Babylon and Heretics and Hellraisers.