A series of UN conferences from 1992-2002 on issues of Environment, Social Development, Human Rights, Women, Racism, Population and Development, Habitat, and Development Financing became the focus of organizing for activists around the world. UN conferences on women since 1975 have helped not only to shape a common set of demands on States regarding women's equality, but also to galvanize women's activism at all levels-with some 40,000 women present at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China (1995). Women also emerged as strong voices in the other UN conferences. This series of UN conferences provided the focus, momentum and funding resources that enabled the creation of networks and infrastructure for global women's movements on multiple issues. They particularly strengthened NGOs, which are the formal vehicles for civil society representation at the UN.

 Activities at these global conferences have largely been coordinated through national and international NGOs and trade union leadership, with limited participation from grassroots women and a limited impact on grassroots women's lives. Vanessa Griffen of the Gender & Development Programme, Asian and Pacific Development Centre, Malaysia argues that women's successes at the international level, for example in addressing violence against women, have not begun to change the deep patterns of patriarchal oppression for women at the local level.¹⁸ I would not minimize gains at the global level. Nonetheless, I concur with Griffen's assessment that the power to demand implementation must be grounded in strengthened mobilization of women with a feminist and class consciousness at the local level, not limited to NGOs or to global work. This is what makes the perspective of Comandante Esther so interesting-such mobilization is happening, often unbeknownst to global feminists.

MADRE, a US-based women's human rights organization, notes that there is no longer a possibility of choosing between local and global work:

Women from the global South.argue that when local conditions are so heavily impacted by global trends, community-based activists must be equipped to understand and impact developments in the international arena.Community-based projects must include components that provide training to enable women to influence macro policies. Otherwise local work remains a limited and, ultimately, exhausting venture for women. That's why MADRE brings the voices of community-based women into international processes.and insists that the women's movement devote resources.to guarantee that the international arena is not dominated by elites. We also believe that . international work that is not rooted in community priorities risks becoming abstract and irrelevant to most women. Ultimately, policies at the local, national and international levels must function together to protect women's human rights.¹⁹

The emergence of a "global justice" movement, particularly since the Seattle WTO ministerial in 1999, brings together progressive NGOs, trade unions, peasant and other mass-based social movements (such as landless workers), and left political parties. This is what's occurring in the World Social Forum, (as well as the WTO, G-8, IMF and World Bank meetings). These world forums are fraught with political tensions. For many social movement groups, NGOs are too dependent on government and private funding, are not accountable to a base, do not utilize democratic decision-making structures, do not represent poor masses, are elitist and too reformist. For many NGOs, some trade unions and certain Left parties are seen as dinosaurs that have democracy and representation in name only, are rigidly hierarchical, dogmatic and manipulative. This divide involves class and other power dynamics, different political agendas, as well as views on "insider" vs. "outsider" strategies.

 However, the divisions can also be a source of strength. As was evidenced at the Fifth Ministerial of the WTO in Cancún, Mexico in September 2003, many NGOs and "social movements" played both roles to great effect-putting mass pressure through street demon- strations on the outside, while presenting specific demands to negotiators on the inside. Despite the military barricades separating these two groups, the divide is not as vast as it appears. The victory that people's movements celebrated in Cancún, when several southern countries walked out of negotiations, derailing US-EU attempts to impose more unbalanced rules, was in no small part due to the strength of these inside and outside voices (both NGOs and social movements), including over 10,000 peasant farmers, and months of intense pressure at the national level.

Feminists bring their own critique to the role of NGOs and political parties in today's movements for social change-particularly the general lack of a feminist analysis by players in both spaces. Much current feminist organizing is also done through NGOs. Some leaders of women's NGOs emerged from left political parties in the 1970s, fed up with the double standards and sexism within those parties. This created a group of women leaders who have radical politics, but are dubious of left parties. While many women are organized through trade unions, peasant and indigenous groups, these women are woefully under-represented in international women's events. They often don't embrace feminism and may see feminist issues as alien to their struggles. At the World Social Forum, women trade unionists, women peasants, and "feminists" have each attended their own events with little dialogue across sectors. However, in Cancún, some women valiantly maneuvered around security blocks to maintain contact between "women's caucuses" on both sides of this physical, class and political divide, involving indigenous Mexican women from Via Campesina in the conversations with NGO women trade experts.²⁰

In a time of strengthened global capitalism and a weakened Left, there are fewer groups that directly cite the seizing of state power as their political goal. Some, like the Workers' Party (PT) of Brazil or the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) of Bolivia, have linked union and mass-mobilization to an electoral agenda. Others, such as the Zapatistas in Mexico, appear to be mobilizing to seek concrete gains for indigenous peasants faced with the onslaught of trade liberalization, but not seeking to gain control of the State. Many of the players in the "global justice movement" represent social movements focused on specific demands regarding land, markets, environmental degradation, privatization of basic services, jobs and livelihoods-in efforts to push back the onslaught of capital-without a broader political project. In an age when considerable power is concentrated in transnational capital, whose interests are represented by the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization, it is increasingly difficult to contemplate national alternatives (via either elections or revolution) apart from broader regional or global challenges to capital. Some theorists ask whether there is an "outside" to global capitalism at this point.²¹ This poses the question of what it would take to get "outside" this dominant global system, or indeed, whether that is possible. Brazil seeks to assuage the fears of investors and creditors, while mobilizing a Southern bloc in an attempt to shift North/South power relations. Cuba, Vietnam and China, to different degrees, are integrating into the global capitalist economy. Nicaragua, with the highest per capita debt in the world, is fully back in the neo-liberal fold.

The political goal may not be clear to many of us at this time, while it is perhaps too adamantly clear to some political groups. This makes gatherings such as the World Social Forum, or broad feminist coalitions, very complex arenas, where the electoral left, revolutionaries, anarchists, issue-based NGOs, social movements seeking short-term demands, and identity-based groups (as well as mainstream development agencies and even the Vatican) all converge to propose alternatives.

In dialogues I recently had with three observers of Latin American struggles, I got very different responses regarding our political goals. Commented one US observer who has been closely involved in both Cuba and Nicaragua, "If we're not ultimately dealing with taking state power, what are we doing?" Yet from the perspective of an Indian colleague who lived in Nicaragua during the revolution, many leftists in small, poor nations of the South do not see taking state power as a goal at this time. In recent years this approach has resulted in imperialist "contra wars" and the violent undermining of the project, where thousands of people are massacred. Said a third person, active in the Coca and Water-privatization battles in Cochabamba that just culminated in ejecting the president of Bolivia (October 2003): "despite the sacrifices, if we don't struggle we don't survive-we have no choice." For her, it's not a question of whether or not to challenge state power, but when and at what relative cost.

Feminists struggle with this question through the additional lens of patriarchy. They simultaneously criticize the state as enforcer of patriarchal relations, and make claims upon the state to deliver women's rights and broader societal demands. Feminists have bitter experience with so-called socialist states (or left political parties) which replicated patriarchal relations, but they continue to see the role of a transformed, egalitarian State as a vital arbiter of societal needs and rights.

The short-term task, in many styles and approaches, is building mass power to contest the imposition of terms by capital (at national, regional and international levels), through organizations that can negotiate alternatives with the State that go beyond the rejectionist positions taken by some street activists. Be they political parties or social movements, these groups must have mass accountability and clear alternatives for progressive social change. They must also address patriarchal relations within their ranks as well as in State and society. Without this leadership, the lurch towards religious fundamentalisms may only intensify.

Both the Zapatistas and the Workers' Party are interesting examples in this regard. In Mexico, the Zapatistas, an indigenous peasant movement, are challenging the state's ability to impose a particular political and economic agenda; they are organizing and educating masses of peasants, negotiating with the government, and even, among a few leaders, bringing in a feminist agenda! And despite the limitations global capital imposes on Brazil, Lula's Workers' Party played a leading role in organizing Southern nations to challenge the US and EU at the Cancún WTO meeting, and seeks to build a Latin American trade bloc to challenge US dominance of regional trade negotiations (Free Trade of the Americas Agreement).