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multiple oppressions of race, gender and sexual orientation, and insist that the only way to provide justice and dignity for indigenous peoples is to change the entire racialized system. They insist that power has to be ‘collective and communal’ and want to create non-electoral approaches to democratic change. Delinking refers to the relocalization of livelihood ideals and a return to local sovereignty. This set of ideas proposes a radical restructuring of the globalized political economy with localities voluntarily cutting themselves off from global markets in labor, goods and capital. Although this is the least familiar form of resistance, a number of activist groups, including anarchists, movements in defense of small businesses, sustainable development movements, sovereignty movements and religious nationalist movements, embody its goals. Three distinct concerns inform their ideas: economies in dialog with their ecological bases; community economic health; and political autonomy, including the assertion of a people’s right to govern their own lives. The most articulate version comes from anarchist thought, which has long advocated local economic autonomy and the disappearance of the state. With a prolific youth membership, anarchism is involved with animal rights, feminism, anti-racism, music, homelessness, free speech and concerns about police and prison abuse. Does the WTO have to go?
After the Second World War trade reassumed the crucial position for the growth of economies it had held in the second half of the nineteenth century. Increasingly trade became the single most important part of the expansion of economies linked into a globalizing system. Global institutions governing the conditions of trading relations among countries were, at least potentially, placed in positions of great political-economic power. But the recognition by nation-states, particularly the USA, that the global governance of trade might exert significant control over national economies, and the apprehensions aroused by this in a system riven by international competition, long prevented this potential from being formalized in an institution. Instead international trade was intermittently regulated through rounds of bilateral and multinational negotiations and the set of agreements known as the GATT – ‘intermittently’ because agreements could be unilaterally abrogated, retaliatory actions could easily be initiated, especially by powerful countries, and there was little in the way of an enforcing mechanism. But the number of countries