Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity by Jeremy Brecher, Tim Costello and Brendan Smith, Cambridge, Mass.: South End Press, 2000, 154 pp., ISBN 0-89608-622-4.

Not long ago, Margaret Thatcher’s triumphant “there is no alternative” to global neoliberalism echoed everywhere, the common sense of our times. That was before Seattle, Vancouver, Quebec City, Genoa, Washington, Prague, and Porto Alegre, and before what Naomi Klein calls the “most internationally minded, globally linked movement the world has ever seen.” The successes of the movement for global justice are impressive. Not least are the victories against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment, the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle, the land mines agreement, and stopping the World Bank’s Narmada dam project. Underlying these victories is the mobilization of a new political constituency across space and class around an array of global issues, from debt to sweatshops. For the authors of Globalization from Below the longer run significance of this new political formation lies in the convergence taking place among diverse movements: their overlapping memberships and concerns, increasing awareness of common interests, and their incessant networking around the world. This, they argue, is leading to an “historic break” defined by a choice between “globalization from above,” engineered by corporate and state elites, and an internationalist, democratic and solidaristic “globalization from below.” The authors’ starting point is that globalization from above fosters a “race to the bottom” in which countries compete with each other for trade and investment through privatization and deregulation, by offering tax and other incentives for investors, and by reducing labour standards and the social wage. This race is not only between the global North and South but often most destructively among Southern countries. In this context, globalization from below is entering a new phase. The main thesis of the book is that global justice movements must evolve past resistance to new forms of popular democratic control. This requires solidarity across national borders, identities and narrow and immediate interests. Hence the authors reject alliances with nationalist right wing movements in the U.S., France and elsewhere on the grounds that they are antagonistic to equality and democracy, and to labour, environmentalists, feminists, immigrants, racial and other minorities—in short, to much of the constituency of globalization from below. The authors are silent, however, about nationalist movements in parts of the Third World where national capital is weak and where nationalism is often aligned with popular democratic and anti-imperialist politics that may be consistent with globalization from below. Much of this book is devoted to explaining the nature of the new politics of social movement coalitions and “advocacy networks, particularly those that are central to the global justice movement in the U.S. These networks knit together various non governmental organizations, religious bodies, popular media, foundations, consumer groups, intellectuals, parts of governments and state structures, and a host of varied, often local social movements. Each is autonomous from the others, yet they are increasingly converging, we are told, coordinated by decentralized leadership and new information technologies. This new organizational form, with its emphasis on individual responsibility, reflects the breakdown of older forms of community-based politics in much of the North, particularly those based on the industrial working class. This new form, it is argued, also parallels new decentralized, globalized forms of “networked capitalism.” The analysis of social movements draws on Gramsci’s work on counter hegemonic movements and on Michael Mann’s seminal Sources of Social Power. Mann argues that major societal changes develop out of “interstitial locations” around dominant institutions. By linking marginal forces into networks and by creating new ideologies for disparate beliefs and traditions, social movements have historically changed dominant societal institutions. A recurring theme of Globalization from Below is the development of …