ABSTRACT
Another world is possible1 is the unofficial motto and hopeful mantra of the social movement ATTAC, which was launched in France in 1998 and has now expanded to include associations in forty countries as well as a transnational network that plays a key role in the World Social Forum. ATTAC’s extraordinary capacity for recruitment and mobilisation is a political phenomenon of tremendous significance for the broader anti-globalisation movement – or to use the terminology preferred by ATTAC members, for the ‘alternative globalisation’ or ‘globalisation-critical’ movement. Students of this movement have been working to identify the rallying force for its diverse membership, ranging from public intellectuals, teachers and ecumenical leaders to small farmers, environmentalists and advocates for the homeless and unemployed. What unites them is a critique of neoliberal globalisation, understood as an ideology and set of policy programmes that prioritise greater freedom and protection for financial markets and multinational corporations and reduce the autonomy and prerogatives of communities and citizens. The distinctiveness of ATTAC’s ideational contestation of neoliberalism lies in its construction as ‘critique turned towards action’, which encompasses both identity and distributional struggles, is based upon solidarity between the developed and developing worlds, and insists on the primacy of agency at the local, grassroots level.
