"The Left's reaction to industrialisation in the early nineteenth century is intructive. Like globalisation today, industrialisation then was also a fact of life with some damaging side-effects. Today's rock-throwing militants who trash McDonald's are the modern equivalent of the Luddites who trashed factory machines. But both are and were minorities. The majority in the early nineteenth century formed friendly societies and trade unions - the origins of the modern socialist movement. There is the same split in the anti-globalisation movement today: between the balaclava rock-throwers with their nihilist ideology on the one hand, and Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and Drop the Debt on the other."

This little homily neatly encapsulates all the myths, half-truths and outright fabrications the political elite holds to be true of the "anti globalisation" movement. "Anti globalisation" is a convenient handle for describing our agenda - it paints us into a corner as anti-technology, anti-organisation, anti-progress (when quite the reverse is true). New Labour dimly understands what an organisation like Greenpeace is all about. It has a chairperson, a head office, and company headed paper. Hell, it's practically a corporation with a social conscience. What they can't deal with is non-organisational protest, like at the Munich Security Conference last weekend, when 7,000 plus took to the streets on their own account.

And indeed, there are many in the democracy movement who seem desperate to fall into the trap and draw a thick line between "violent" anarchos on the one hand and sensible third-way protesters on the other. It would certainly be very convenient for the police if such a distinction could be made.

In reality, the democracy movement is a symbiosis of interests - complementary rather than competitive. New Labour's managerial Social Darwinism precludes any serious analysis of such a complex movement - it is far easier to stereotype all non-organisational protest as Luddite and "nihilist". (Although in the context of a world where 20,000 civilians starve to death each day, the true definition of "nihilist" seems rather elusive.)

But this is more than just simplification on the part of government ministers and Grauniad hacks - it is part of a long-term strategy to undermine the essential cohesiveness of our movement. Remember the Spirit of Seattle? That is what we are all about, not long diatribes about how dreadful the SWP are. I am an anarchist, but I am willing to work alongside anyone who can contribute to a protest, irrespective of ideological differences. Every posting that criticises a fellow activist is a posting that is not concentrating on the real target - the class system. Don't waste time on sectarian comments - get on with attacking the criminals who perpetuate this ghastly mayhem called "global capitalism".

Peter Hain's "progressive internationalism" smacks all too openly of the kind of crony capitalism practised two centuries ago by the East India Company. The general idea is to suborn local rulers through gunboat diplomacy (while physically eliminating any resistance), thus opening virgin markets to one's rapacious industries quite literally at the barrel of a gun. Then it was India and China - today we have Pipeplineistan in the shape of central Asia.

Never in the past hundred years has such a great amount of (former Soviet) territory been so quicky occupied by American troops with so little protest. Conveniently, the same old Stalinist rulers have been kept in place to suborn the local population. But what reserves of oil and natural gas!

Peter Hain won't bother to explain why Afghan "democracy" is so important to him, yet Uzbek democracy can wait another hundred years or so. Or why it is that Saudi torturers must be invited to arms fairs (even when they torture British citizens) and Iraqi torturers bombed into the stone age. Or why the Foreign Office is desperate to "engage" with Burma and North Korea, whose human rights records are equally non-existent (since there are no human rights in Burma or North Korea). Could it be the prospect that a war without end will bring in its wake endless contracts for "reconstruction"?

War and capitalism can never be defended without practising the kind of intellectual yoga all too common in the Labour Party. And why are the British government (with 100,000 troops at their disposal) so afraid of a few anarchists anyway . . . maybe it is because we are beginning to make a difference. Pass the half-brick, comrade!