It's official. It's a war.

For some 20 months, from Seattle through Washington and Melbourne and Windsor and Philadelphia and Los Angeles and Prague and Davos and Quebec and Goteborg, tactics have been escalating on both sides as the protests against gatherings of the world's unabashedly ruling elites have gotten larger and more raucous. In Seattle, some 50,000 nonviolent protesters and blockaders were overshadowed by literally a few dozen window-breaking vandals. By the time of Quebec and Goteborg, large blocks of protesters had embraced property destruction and the hurling of everything from teddy bears to Molotov cocktails.

On the police state side, the brutality that shocked the world in Seattle was actually a step removed from what it could have been. National Guard troops with live ammunition stood by but never opened fire. As the protests have escalated, the wholesale use of chemical warfare against protesters--whether they were breaking any laws or not--has, at least in the public eye, become old news, and to many people an acceptable price to pay to keep the "hoodlums" at bay. The media has surely helped; in Quebec and Goteborg, the worst of the police mayhem, like Friday's shooting in Genoa, was best covered not by the combined resources of the world's elite media, but by indymedia.org. The US networks (including the "liberal" NPR) almost uniformly ignore it, blaming the victims of police violence for the violence itself.

And now, in Italy, there is death. It was coming to this.

Make no mistake. For all of its sometimes blind rage, the global movement to confront the corrupt, corporate, anti-democratic, soul-deadening, lethal policymakers shaping the rules of 21st Century Corporatocracy has those policymakers terrified. In many of the so-called Western democracies where these protests have blossomed, the politicians enforcing corporate will are creatures of their paymasters--but they also get elected by feeding on the distrust and discontent of the general public for government. They know perfectly well that if that public turns on them, the movement to reclaim our lives is literally unstoppable. Hence, the marginalization. Anti-corporate protesters are thugs; they're not like you and I. Except that they are, and if suitably afraid, the police would shoot us, too.

Numerous reports are circulating on the Internet of other, unconfirmed deaths in Genoa, but the image that has circled the world is the prone body of Carlo Giuliani. He died, in part, because he and his comrades cornered terrified young paramilitary officers in a tactically foolish way [see sidebar]. He died because he and his comrades identified the police--rather than policies of economic, political, military, social, and environmental tyranny--as the enemy to be fought. But he also died because the police weren't carrying rubber bullets, only live rounds. And beyond Giuliani, hundreds more people--black bloc, peaceful protesters, journalists, and bystanders alike--were seriously wounded, not because of their tactical mistakes, but due to intentional, premeditated attacks by militarized police. It was a bloodbath. War.

The steady demonization of global justice demonstrators by politicians and corporate media has created an opening for sectors of the public to dismiss even cold-blooded murder as a necessary, even useful thing. But anyone who witnessed the videos--which, within hours, included much of the world--reached a different and far more horrifying conclusion. They witnessed, with one death and with the entire weekend, the ugly underside of a global corporate state that casually kills millions each year, that has killed countless activists in invisible (to us) anti-globalization protests throughout the Third World over the last decade.

Genoa is reminiscent of nothing so much as Kent State, where, after hundreds of thousands (at least) of deaths in Southeast Asia, it took the deaths of four young, privileged, American students on a Midwest campus to galvanize opposition and transform the US anti-war movement into a force that shut down campuses across the country for a full season.

Recall that at the time of Kent State, the general public's opinion, shaped by contemptuous politicians and a judgmental media, was that the Guardsmen acted properly and that the Kent State students were anti-American thugs who had it coming. It will be interesting to see whether, 30 years later, we are more desensitized, or more discerning, or whether global technology and global issues will mean that this atrocity has consequences across 24 time zones.

This time, unlike at Kent State, the violence was planned and approved by the highest levels of government. In tandem, civil liberties were thrown out the window, starting with the Italian government's suspension of EU rules allowing free passage of citizens among European countries, all the way through overtly fascistic, Mussolini-invoking cops that brutalized thousands without provocation. Such dangerous, menacing behavior--intended as much to dissuade future demonstrators as to control crowds at Genoa--is likely to continue to escalate until it proves either politically ineffective or no longer necessary.

What's Next?

For global justice advocates who weren't in Genoa--that's all but about 150,000 of us, including most Americans--the initial shock of the compelling and repellent images is fading, and sober realization is moving in like a hangover. The late-night conversations and soliloquies go something like this:

"World leaders cannot go anywhere on the planet now without being confronted by enormous numbers of protesters. Some of us are violent. Most are not. We're all demanding changes in policies that go to the core of the power these politicians both represent and lead.

"For each of these many policies, things are neither getting better nor even staying the same. They are getting worse, at times rapidly, even irreversibly. Therefore, the movement spawning our street protests--but including many other tactics and forums as well--will either stay at least as large or get larger. Maybe much larger.

"It will not go away. Since it's essentially leaderless--or full of leaders--and transcends so many different issues and places, our movement cannot easily be either co-opted or repressed. Yet politicians can't satisfactorily address any of our core demands without damaging at least some of the corporate and economic interests which put them in power.

"This leaves policymakers with three generally unworkable options: 1) dramatically change policies; 2) use reforms to split or co-opt the movement; or 3) repress the movement, violently if necessary.

"All three will inevitably happen. How do we maximize the dramatic, positive policy changes and minimize their instinctive tendency to repression?

"Enough people thrive on big gatherings and cat-and-mouse street battles with police that the large demonstrations will in some form continue. More protesters will die. How many, and to what end?"

This is the $64 trillion question. So far, the global justice movement--which, it should be noted, exerted itself in enormous numbers for years in the South with minimal impact in the "developed" world--has proven, in the mere 19 months since Seattle, that it has legs. In the face of escalating security measures, it has managed to disrupt summits exceedingly well, repeatedly drawing the attention of the world's media and the ire of paramilitary state forces. It has, in some arenas (especially around debt relief), resulted in reform-oriented gestures that are grossly inadequate but still far better than could have been imagined two years ago. It has broad public support in some parts of the world (especially the South). In George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, the world sees an ignorant fool with terrifying power; and Dubya, unlike Bonzo's buddy, has no competing superpower to either slow him or scare allies into submission. Bush's friendly, arrogant, clueless face may turn out to be the best recruiting tool global justice activists could ever have wanted.

But is public opinion enough? What we are talking about is confronting a global empire, specifically, one controlled by the United States on behalf of transnational capitalism. Without wanting to resort to a word that has been, for far too long, trivialized, the changes being demanded by this movement are revolutionary. The global justice movement, so far, has been an inspiring spectacle, but hardly the stuff of such changes.

We saw, 12 years ago, how rapidly a popular movement can take hold and shake a world. Over 30 countries experienced nearly entirely bloodless revolutions in the span of a few months in 1989-90, and nobody saw it coming. The people in those countries were often responding to generations of cruel repression, but they were also rebelling against forces thought to be impervious, and which proved (except in Beijing) to be deadly but paper-thin. And in 12 years, there have been vast changes in the speed with which the planet can be circled by information, tactics, inspiration, and images like a dead Genovese man in the street.

The global justice movement may be on the cusp of something, but nobody seems to know what. It is far too multi-faceted and scattered to "lead," or even steer. The possibility for entropy or brutal repression is very real. Less real--so far--is the possibility for sweeping, positive change from either existing or new institutions, but once the rhetoric is stripped away, that's the goal. Such changes almost certainly cannot happen, let alone happen soon, unless some people are envisioning paths for how, from our current set of circumstances, a new, previously unimaginable world might unfold.

Here at home, a majority of the public knows that these protests are occurring, but doesn't even have a clear idea of what the protesters are upset about, let alone want. Even as American activists point towards IMF/World Bank meetings in Washington DC Sept. 28-Oct. 4, it's time to start envisioning beyond the street warfare. What must emerge are not ideologies or utopian blueprints, but practical, just, achievable, and necessarily imaginative solutions to vexing problems and conflicting needs--and ways to make those solutions visible, comprehensible, and desirable to the public. It's a tall order. But if activists show that an entire constellation of global policies is fundamentally flawed, and don't give others a clear idea of what they want instead and how to get it, somebody else will fill that vacuum. And it won't be good.

Good firsthand accounts of the brutal paramilitary attacks on the Genoa demonstrations can be found at Indymedia (www.italia.indymedia.org) and Z-Net (www.zmag.org). Portions of this article were originally published by Working Assets (www.workingforchange.com on) Friday, July 20, and Monday, July 23.