Is anti-globalisation just mindless ranting?

One very big event and one very small event have collided to make me think about the anti-globalisation movement again this week. While the political rock stars of the left were gathering – along with 120,000 people – in Porto Alegre, Brazil, I discovered that five people – one an old friend, the others acquaintances – have been chucked out of Cambridge University for their radical anti-globalisation activities.

The members of Cambridge's Anti-Capitalist Action (CACA) group who have been excluded for five terms include Matthew MacDonald, the balaclava-wearing Eton schoolboy seen kicking in a McDonald's window during the May Day riots of 2000, and my friend, Riccardo Vitale. I last saw Riccardo during the Genoa protests two summers ago. He was dashing towards gunfire, yelling something about capitalism; I was just about to jump, inadvertently, into a hornet's nest in an attempt to get away from the tear-gas.

Now Riccardo and his friends have been thrown out because they turned an empty, unused shop into a squat into which several homeless people moved, who began to turn it into a house for themselves. CACA also used it as a base to sell fair-trade coffee outside Starbucks, trying to help Guatemala's poverty-riddled coffee-growers and to draw attention to what they called Starbucks's exploitative practices.

The idea that these students are simply petulant kids is wrong: they have put their lives on the line in the occupied territories to protect suffering people, standing in front of Israeli tanks and keeping medical supplies going, and they will soon act as human shields in Iraq. Although I disagree with the latter decision, it is impossible to deny that they have more genuine empathy and sheer guts than most of us.

The CACA people I know represent the best and worst of the anti-globalisation movement. On the plus side, they show that the tabloid stereotype of the anti-globalisation protesters as akin to football hooligans, crashing across the globe in search of mindless tribal violence, is false.

They are propelled, instead, by horror at the fact that, for example, there are 18 million people in Africa who are HIV positive but are being denied access to protease inhibitors that could greatly increase their lifespans; or that 600 million people on our planet will not have access to clean drinking water today; or that a billion people live on less than a dollar a day. They knew their statistics, and they could discuss development issues like many of their contemporaries discuss football. A good third or so of them have been to the developing world and seen these monstrous injustices for themselves. It is painfully easy to understand why returning to our own rich societies makes some of them so angry that they want to scream and howl and trash the joint.

Of course it is tempting to sneer at Old Etonians slumming it. In one of my nastier moments I dubbed CACA "champagne anarchists", only to see the term picked up by the Mail on Sunday and used in a hatchet job. I am ashamed that I sneered at them. The absurdly harsh punishment inflicted on these students is a sign that King's College Cambridge is turning its back on its radical heritage in the face of these tabloid harangues.

Yet I also cannot deny that there are serious faults with many of these protesters' ideas and actions. The anti-globalisation movement remains too often trapped in an easy oppositional mindset, ranting against all governments and all existing models of human organisation. It is just silly to rage against "capitalism" as the source of all the world's evils. There are many different forms of capitalism, some more morally acceptable than others. I loathe the US- and IMF-driven ultra-capitalism that has led to plummeting life expectancies in IMF-run economies across the world: look at Russia, where many people are, astonishingly, living far fewer years than even under the nightmare of communism. Yet to leap from condemning this to condemning all capitalism – including the Swedish model of restrained, social democratic markets – is lunacy. A different capitalism is what the world's poor need, not its abolition (and replacement with what? Anarchy? Command-economy socialism?). This means that the puerile Marxism of groups such as the Socialist Workers Party, which shrieks "One Solution – Revolution" at every anti-globalisation rally, to the bemusement of everybody else, must be ditched. The tag "anti-capitalist" needs to go altogether if the movement, which has been more helpfully termed the global justice movement, is to be taken seriously.

And the protesters need to define their cause more sharply. This will mean that some individuals who have, disgracefully, been lauded by the movement will have to be renounced. Look, for example, at José Bové, the Poujadist French farmer who was acclaimed after he dismantled a McDonald's restaurant to cheers from the movement. He now happily puffs his pipe in Porto Alegre as he militantly defends French agricultural subsidies.

Yet it is these very hand-outs from the EU (and the US's fat farming subsidies, too) that are crippling Africa. Every cow in Europe receives from Western taxpayers more money than each African woman– and Bové wants the cows to be given more. In the West, we spend $1bn a day on agricultural subsidies. This is $1bn that cannot be earned by Africa's desperate fledgling farmers. If subsidies were reduced by just 1 per cent, Oxfam has shown that Africa could immediately earn from farming seven times the sum that the world currently gives them in aid.

If the anti-globalisation movement is to have any intellectual coherence, it must decide between greedy protectionists like Bove and those living in abject poverty in Africa: their interests are diametrically opposed. To offer both Bove's acolytes and Africa's farmers warm applause and generous words on this, one of the most urgent moral issues on earth, is simply dishonest.

It is hardly original to point out that the movement is too negative and contradictory. So let's be bold and actually answer the question: what should they be for? The movement could mutate, over the next few years, into something truly exciting: a movement for the democratisation and strengthening of humanity's supranational institutions. Many of the issues the protesters raise – the environment, endemic poverty, redistribution from rich to poor – cannot be tackled at the level of bitty, fragmented states, no matter how well-meaning their governments. Gradually, arguments for precisely this idea – matching the globe's economic globalisation with a counter-veiling political globalisation – are emerging.

For example, the anti-globalisation thinker George Monbiot will outline in his important forthcoming book, The Age of Consent, a radical manifesto for a global justice movement. If the IMF, World Bank and United Nations were accountable to the people over which they rule – instead of just remote financiers – their policies would rapidly change.

Here, at last, is an exciting, clear agenda for the good people of the anti-globalisation movement. Will the protesters, by the time of the next Porto Alegre gathering, have begun to fight for this better, democratic world that rejects vicious neoliberalism?Or will too many still be dreaming facile dreams of a revolution that will never come?

johannhari@johannhari.com