ABSTRACT
This chapter will not try to offer an exhaustive documentary account of the movement-partly because these works have done that job better than the author could—although it will delineate what the author think to be its most novel and notable features. The World Social Forum is probably the phenomenon which best justifies any reference to anti-capitalism as a coherent movement; it is the place where the ‘movement of movements’ comes together. The heyday of the summit protests is now sometimes thought to have passed, with the largest gatherings and most spectacular confrontation with authority having taken place at Seattle in 1999, Prague in 2000 and, perhaps most notoriously, Genoa in 2001. Recent years have seen a now very widely documented shift to the left in South American electoral politics. Radical pluralism and refusal of identity bring to mind Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famous celebration of the minor.
