In another way, activism can become just another one of the many lifestyles out there, with its own consumption creed to separate the righteous from the unclean. Given such obsessive attention to consumer detail and/or identity, it is small wonder that we have so much trouble working together.

It is also no surprise that our dissident cultures can be alienating to the average person; more elitist than populist. We often disdain religion and patriotism, which for many people are defining verities in their value systems. Our activist-speak itself can be off-putting, as if we expect others to meet us where we are, rather than the other way around.

Self-righteousness may be seductive, but it is self-defeating, as it hurts any effort to change minds. We have to be inviting, not judgmental. Sometimes listening well is more important than speaking boldly; at least if we are here to learn as well as teach. If we think to have all the answers, we are wrong.

None of this, of course, justifies the extremity of Collier and Horowitz's turnabout. If the moral of Destructive Generation is presented as a foregone conclusion--"the radical future is an illusion"--it remains highly debatable. Collier and Horowitz's own words have the stink of disillusion born out of illusion. Horowitz rose from a "red diaper baby" milieu, steeped since birth in an insular radical left subculture, closely linked to the Communist Party U.S.A. This narrow background was not unique to him, but hardly typical for much of the '60s movement. It is certainly alien to my own upbringing, and may have predisposed Horowitz toward a naïve faith that was the natural precursor to his subsequent neo-conservative disaffection.

I still believe that another, radically more just world is possible. However, if our visions are to be realized, we must come to grips with illusions like those hinted at above. Most fundamentally, we must move past righteousness and self-deception to a more grounded, self-demanding stance.

In early 2004, I bought a fascinating new anthology--We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism (Verso, 2003)--at Left Bank Books in Seattle. A full decade and a half after the supposed victory of free-market capitalism and Collier and Horowitz's obituary for the left, this book offered a starkly different vista. With its upbeat title and foreword by Naomi Klein, renowned critic of corporate globalization, this handsome, compact tome is at once a celebration of a new movement and a call to expanded action.

"This isn't a book, it's a brick with which to shatter cynicism," wrote one commentator on the back cover, and he isn't wrong. Edited by a British and North American collective out of reports from across the globe, the book documents the rising resistance to neo-liberal economics and the institutions that enforce them from Seattle to South Africa to Thailand and beyond.

But for all that is beautiful and hopeful in We Are Everywhere, it is hardly free of illusions. In the book's "Opening Salvo," the legacy of 17th-century Briton Gerrard Winstanley is evoked. Like the others in the Digger movement, Winstanley argued that "the Earth is a common treasury for all." This simple assertion provides the missing link between ancient millennial Jewish and Christian traditions, modern communism and anarchism, as well as the current movement against corporate globalization.

Acting on these beliefs, the Diggers led hungry, landless peasants in a takeover of an unused commons on St. George's Hill in Surrey. Shortly before the brutal suppression of this prophetic if doomed endeavor in 1649, Winstanley wrote, "Thoughts and words ran in me that words and writing were all nothing, and must die, for action is the life of all, and if thou dost not act, thou dost nothing."

This is an appropriate epigraph for We Are Everywhere, for action--and that of a very specific kind--is the watchword for the kaleidoscopic global mosaic of images and dispatches collected in this anthology. Photos of dramatic street protests are everywhere. In page after page, we witness masked rebels in tear-gas-heavy confrontations with riot police; demonstrators scaling fences, breaking down walls, spraying graffiti; a shouting protester with a clenched fist, carrying his skateboard emblazoned with a "fuck war" slogan; a broken store window in Spain; radical cheerleaders outside of Niketown.

This imagery can be--and often is--very stirring. But how real is it? Will our new world be built mainly in the streets, fighting the police? Is this revolution? Is it even democracy? Is "anti-capitalism" a sufficient basis for collective action? Can we hope to realize a vision based simply out of what we are against? Is there any kind of unity over what we are for, how to achieve it? Given immense differences in class, culture, race, and nationality, is there even truly a "we"?

These are urgent questions. While I desperately want to believe in a reasonably unified global "we," I am not sure that such exists, at least not yet. We Are Everywhere may not aid this process as much as it would like, for in its desire to celebrate what it optimistically describes as "an irresistible global uprising," the book can seem to blithely equate the theatrical street protests of the West with grassroots movements of the less privileged world.

To me, an action to "reclaim the streets" by the children of relative privilege in a vague quest to recover public space dominated by cars and other corporate culture seems awfully esoteric. If some link to the Diggers--or more recent movements like Sem Terra in Brazil--can be made, an illegal street party, however "radical," surely does not carry the same value or meaning as landless peasants risking their lives to squat unused land and feed their families. Again, the two struggles are not entirely unconnected. But they are hardly equivalent, and it is dangerously illusory to suggest otherwise, as this book sometimes seems to do.

My mission here is to mix what is best in both the brutal self-criticism of Destructive Generation and the heady, hopeful spirit of We Are Everywhere. In a way, this book also aims for the same target as Alinsky's--although I could never title something as presumptuously as Rules for Radicals. Instead, I hope that this is rendered with some genuine humility, as well as passion.

This book rises out of the necessity to act, yes; however, it also exists to challenge actions taken without deep reflection. It seeks to query the motivation of the radical, the activist, to ask disturbing questions: What role does self-interest play in our activism? How much do we really believe in and value people? Does radicalism sometimes provide a cover for self-affirmation, even elitism? How often do we assess our activism on its results, not its intentions? My answers to such questions will not always be reassuring. This book is a paradox, at once a manifesto that poses questions and an anti-manifesto that suggests that while words are never enough, neither are actions.

The following chapters will, in turn, suggest the limitations of tribal and subcultural approaches to change, while examining the left's tendency toward elitist, insular politics, divorced from organic engagement with a broad mass of people and their concerns. Ideas we often disdain--religion, patriotism--may not only be routes to hearts and minds, but sources of revolutionary potential. Unbalanced emphasis on identity or lifestyle can divide us, shredding our possible power.

Hypothetical arguments "for" or "against" violence are rarely useful, as naked force is a weapon relevant only in certain, very narrow contexts. In the end, our search for a fundamentally different planet must be rooted in the world as it is and people as they are, not as we would wish it/them to be. To do otherwise is to squander our dreams, to sacrifice them on the altar of radical illusion.

This book seeks not to be a brick, but a horsefly, nipping at the reader (and writer) as to rouse us from the complacence of what too often passes for radicalism. It is a book that critiques revolution without abandoning its pursuit. Perhaps this is just as it should be. We find ourselves in an odd, ominous, yet exhilarating time where hopes engendered by a rising global-justice movement collide with the reality of immense and still growing corporate power, aided immeasurably by reactionary regimes in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere.

The triumph of capitalism and resultant "end of history" is no longer taken for granted. To some, it seems that there are sparks in the global air that could catch fire, opening a whole new era for humanity, for the Earth itself.

But will this mean the rise of a definitive corporate hegemony--or a return to some romanticized yet benighted past? Either is possible. If our world is locked in a battle between "McWorld and Jihad," as scholar Benjamin Barber has suggested, with one aggressive, authoritarian force feeding the other, is there another way? Could our sparks ignite a quantum leap toward real democracy, both economic and political; in other words, a revolution?

The stakes are high, and the outcome uncertain. Still, the call to courageous, thoughtful engagement is inescapable. Our actions will help write the next chapter in this drama, so we must make them as intelligent and effective as possible. Belief is needed, but absolute commitment to truth seeking and self-examination must be the foundation of this work. To put it plainly, we cannot afford to fool ourselves--too much is hanging in the balance.

In this energizing, scary moment, then, this is my "inoculation" and my rallying cry; a book not about purity or certainty, but about balance and possibility. The entire aim of the pages to come is simply this: to help us claim all the power we could have, together; so that we might build the world of our dreams, the world we so desperately want and need. I offer up these words in hopes that you find something of value here, even if it is to show what not to do. May they serve, if only in the smallest way, to keep the viruses of fatalism, cynicism, and self-delusion from infecting our souls, even as they push us persistently toward the light of a new--and better--day dawning.