The News From Nowhere '60s-style protesters, on a strange trip without a map The images from Genoa provoked a powerful nostalgia. Out of the smoke and fury, you expected to hear Aretha, the Doors or the Stones. You waited for Abbie Hoffman to take over the mike. Or to find Tom Hayden moving around the perimeter, masked in dark glasses. Hey, man, they'll make everything clear. And if not, Abbie will always make us laugh. Except that it's not the '60s anymore. And it's not about Vietnam and the draft and the need for true civil rights. It's not about broken boys coming home in body bags. It's not about Vietnamese girls running down country roads with phosphorous scorching their skin. It's not about making sure every American can vote, or about smoking dope or making love instead of war. It's about globalization. No wonder so many intelligent citizens look at the TV screens, see kids smashing windows at McDonald's or Starbucks, and ask a very simple question: What exactly do these people want? There were no simple answers in Seattle or Quebec or Göteborg, Sweden, where the globophobes earlier tried out their act. There were no simple answers over the weekend in Genoa, where 150,000 protesters showed up to harass the meeting of the Group of Eight (the seven leading industrial nations, plus Russia). As in the great '60s demonstrations, the overwhelming majority of protesters were peaceful. Unlike the '60s, the issues were a blur. Many of the televised marchers were gray with middle age. As in Seattle, some were trade unionists, or environmentalists, or academics, or forlorn old Communists. They explained to some reporters what they were against: the growing power of multinational corporations, the exploitation of Third World workers, the corporate assault on the world's environment. Fair enough. A few were surely conspiracy nuts, blaming all injustice on secret societies from the World Bank and the Trilateral Commission to the Illuminati or the Order of the Knights Templar. Too many believed in the existence of the One Big Reason for human misery. Anarchy Takes Center Stage But a minority of self-styled anarchists came to Genoa looking for trouble, and found it. The hardest core were members of an Italian group called "Tute Bianchi," or "White Overalls." They got a lot of the ink and much of the TV footage. Similar nut jobs showed up in the '60s, too; many were provocateurs, encouraged (or paid) by Red Squad cops or the FBI to discredit the anti-war movement. In Genoa on Saturday, a police helicopter filmed men handing out baseball bats to these descendants of Kropotkin. They seemed to know exactly where to train their cameras. This fevered minority cursed and snarled and threw rocks. They heaved Molotov cocktails. They hurled themselves upon the fences keeping them out of the "red zone" around the Piazza Verdi, where President Bush and the Group of Eight were meeting. They got what they wanted Friday: a martyr in the person of one Carlo Giuliani, 23. The shooter was 20, a conscript in the paramilitary Italian carabinieri. In the end, of course, Carlo Giuliani died for nothing. At this stage of the globe's wretched history, capitalism has won and globalization is here to stay. It has been here, in fact, for a long time, and every young Italian should know that history. The Roman Empire, after all, created the basic model for globalization, and the Medici in 1450 had branches of their bank in 10 different European cities, including London. For more than two centuries, Britain operated the most successful of all globalization schemes, in competition with other European powers. The U.S. globalized in 1898, grabbing the Philippines and Puerto Rico from Spain, then wrenching Panama away from Colombia at gunpoint. State-imposed globalization is nothing new. Fueled by Profit What is new is the removal of the conquering foreign state from the system. The current version of globalization was created by multinational corporations, for profit. The system flies no flag and has no gunboats. Its expansion since the end of the Cold War has been made possible by welding corporate interests to modern technology. The Internet, television, satellites have indeed made the world smaller, and that drives the profound nostalgia that suffuses the anti-globalization movement. Many globophobes want a world that has already vanished. They insist that national identities are being eroded by Starbucks and "The Sopranos," by the arrival of modernity, by migration. They correctly fear that the old idea of the nation-state is eroding; in a world of 6 billion people, nobody can eat flags. But they sentimentalize the so-called simplicity of life in Third World countries, where everything was sweet and fine until the pineapple company came and bought the land. Or the maquiladora opened in Mexico. Or Nike inflicted its factory on Thailand. The unacceptable truth is this: Most of the poor places of the world want the things that come with globalization. The village is no longer enough. They want American movies and music, American-style fast food, American-brand sneakers and jeans (no matter where they're made). It's not a plot. It's a choice. Nobody jams a pistol to their heads and forces them to buy such goods or services. And they don't cease being Mexican, Brazilian or Thai when they go to see "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider." Most of all, they want what American, Japanese and European companies can give them: jobs. These jobs — part of the lure of globalization — have changed their lives. People who once scraped a bitter living out of subsistence farms can now have more than one change of clothes, beef once a year, or houses that collapse in summer storms. Yes, they are underpaid by the standards of Detroit or New York. Yes, some working conditions are far from perfect. But their children can now think realistically about going to high school, even the university, and the workers themselves would laugh at the safe, white middle-class activists who insist that they are victims. Wanted: Saner Voices There are, of course, great uncertainties in all of this. In northern Mexico, more than 200,000 jobs have been lost since the American economy got sick last October. Most such workers played a part in a complicated trans-national process of assembling goods for the global market. One must assume that each job helped feed four people, so that 800,000 Mexicans have been affected by the layoffs. It could get worse. The collapse of the U.S. economy would be a globalized calamity. That's why other critical voices must be heard on this subject. There are decent, intelligent people, many of them capitalists, some of them chastened Socialists, who want to reform what is called globalization. They want liberal values to be an essential part of the shaping of the globe. They want the international institutions to be more open and democratic. They want to prevent exploitation. They want globalization to serve as a lever that can reduce corruption, stupidity and tribalism in the countries of the poor. In short, they want globalization to be humane. The furious Luddites on the streets of Genoa gave us a few days of street theater, and one young corpse. But they offered no vision of the future. In contrast to the real world — where people leave remote villages for the metropolis in search of jobs, food, medicine and education — they were as sad and dismal as any other nostalgia act.