For the past few years, the global justice movement has been like the child at the back of the crowd as the parade of history wheels by. As the pundits applaud and the marketeers cheer, we stand and shout that the Empire has no clothes, that its cloaks of finery are woven from financial fictions and economic voodoo.

Yet despite the present system's transparent contradictions and unsustainability, we also tend to imagine that its power is total, and to underestimate our own power to change it. The UN Development Program describes the current gaps between the world's richest and poorest as "grotesque" and "historically unprecedented," and the challenge of this new Empire seems overwhelming. But resistance is inequality's corollary.