In April, at the institutions' spring meeting in Washington, civil society groups in the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review Initiative ans-wered decisively, No! The Jubilee South-initiated International Debt Tribunal called for total debt cancellation and the closure of the Bank and Fund. The "World Bank Bonds Boycott" gained more momentum when more large US cities agreed not to profit from Bank bonds in their investment portfolios.

But because of the adverse balance of political power in the world economy, this is a long struggle.

The bloc of neoliberal international elite managers appears to be holding the Washington Consensus line, notwithstanding the temptation of many on the far right – like George W. Bush – to apply proto-fascist formulae to both geopolitics and economics. The US economy had fallen into recession well before the September 11 catastrophe, and a "double-dip" back in 2002 was a distinct possibility given the failure of the EU, Japan and many other countries to compensate.

Helping to bolster the sole superpower's claim to economic predominance was ally Tony Blair and his chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown. The Federal Reserve Board's chairperson, Alan Greenspan, lowered interest rates urgently, while US treasury secretary Paul O'Neill gave rich individuals and large corporations huge tax cuts to keep happy and keep spending, and started a protectionist war with a 30% tariff on steel imports.

The leaders of the Bank, IMF and WTO - James Wolfensohn, Horst Koehler and Michael Moore - maintained their devotion to corporate and banking power, and often specifically US economic interests. Neoliberal apologists appeared generally unmoved by the unfolding economic crisis.

Genuine reform under the leadership of this crew appeared impossible. In the wake of the September 1999 firing of Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, it is hard to take seriously any notion that the Bretton Woods Institutions can make fundamental changes from within.

At that point, two years before he won the Nobel Prize in economics, Stiglitz had criticised IMF structural adjustment policies and crisis-management in East Asia and Russia. Bill Clinton's treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, immediately met with James Wolfensohn over the latter's desire for a second five-year term, and soon thereafter Stiglitz was dismissed "with a fig leaf", in the words of Columbia university economist Jagdish Bhagwati: "a sorry episode". Insiders say that Summers insisted that Stiglitz simply had to leave if the US was to support the Wolfensohn reappointment.

The short-lived "post-Washington Consensus" philosophy that Stiglitz introduced was not particularly radical, as it simply posed the need for state intervention in the event of market failure and for more attention to "sustainable development" goals like equity and environmental protection. But the 2001 Nobel award he shared with two other US economists recognised Stiglitz's "information-theoretic" approach to markets, which does fundamentally undermine the neoliberal faith in self-correction, deregulation and growth. The main point is that "asymmetry" between market players can lead to large-scale distortions – and hence Stiglitz-style policy prescriptions are generally limited to more transparency, more competition and a bit more government regulation to eliminate those distortions.

While not a movement-builder himself, Stiglitz won a following from other economists who pushed slightly heterodox viewpoints, but squarely from within the general framework of neoliberalism. Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia, and Paul Krugman of Princeton and the New York Times stand out.

Other international reformers were aware of widescale market failure. Financier/philanthropist George Soros, at least one national G-7 leader – France's Lionel Jospin - and UN secretary-general Kofi Annan all suggested imposition of a "Tobin Tax" on international financial transactions. This was not merely an abstract theoretical problem, at a time when Argentina defaulted on its foreign debt, in the wake of other high-profile national bankruptcies: Ecuador (2000) and Russia (1998).

Just as worrisome, a currency crisis emerged in South Africa, when Manuel's allegedly "sound macroeconomic policy" was also reduced to rubble during 2000-01 and the value of the rand slipped by half. Restoring tough exchange controls against the unprecedented capital flight, so as to deter rich white people from expatriating their apartheid-era wealth from the New South Africa, proved just too trying a challenge for Thabo Mbeki, as a function of the prevailing ideology and power relations.

His response was to promote a Washington-friendly New Partnership for Africa's Development, which was quickly delegitimised by Mbeki's inexplicable HIV/Aids policies and his support for the March election theft in neighbouring Zimbabwe. Still, the G8 Summit in Canada requires a Third World front man, and Mbeki may have to fill that void.

The resurgent Far Right, meanwhile, proved to be just as durable an affliction as economic crisis, and the more the latter spread the happier the former appeared. This political tendency gained great momentum in Washington when the Supreme Court selected Bush as US president in December 2000. The five justices, who overruled the citizens of Florida and the majority of US voters in that election, were all chosen by the new president's father a decade earlier.

Bush had a right-wing flank of his own to worry about, led by commentator and perpetual candidate Patrick Buchanan, and a powerful reactionary Republican bloc in the US Congress centred around Tom DeLay, Jesse Helms and Trent Lott – who all mainly saw the World Bank and IMF as agencies behind a socialist plot to promote cheeky Third World leaders. Internationally, Jorg Haider in Austria and Jean-Marie le Pen in France mirrored this bizarre, reactionary tendency, which got a new breath of life in France during the first-round April presidential elections.

The Far Right had become dangerously resurgent thanks to the lunatic-fundamentalist Islamic group Al-Qaeda which hijacked four airplanes on September 11. While on the surface it first appeared as a blow to official US morale, the terrorist attacks soon provided justification for establishing something akin to a police state, which Bush and his big business allies warmly welcomed.

What were Third World elites up to at this stage? A few nationalist leaders - Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Fidel Castro and coup-survivor Hugo Chavez in the Caribbean corner of Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela, respectively – regularly spoke from the Left. Robert Mugabe became notorious for his "Talk Left, Act Right" approach to politics, including a notorious electoral theft in March.

Most notably, though, Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad - an anti-Semitic authoritarian - showed in 1998 that capital controls could be implemented in a major emerging market without the threat of US military intervention. Nigeria's Olusegun Obasanjo made some anti-systemic sounds as head of the Group of 77 developing nations and when in February he broke with the IMF because of an apparent desire to spend more state money in the run-up to a presidential election. Vladimir Putin sometimes appeared anxious to break from the lock-step of Russian neo-liberalism, but also bonded well with US imperialism.

After adding up a variety of these small-scale nationalist projects, the sum is not yet sufficiently impressive at the global scale to merit much attention. The hope that India would lead a Third World revolt against the World Trade Organisation - as Zimbabwe had done in Seattle in December 1999 - was dashed in Doha, Qatar last November, and again in March when the government changed course on genetically-modified food.

Who, then, can catalyse substantial social change in an era of disempowered states, extreme international economic chaos and additional military-induced suffering? Little hope appeared from those immediately to the left of Washington: the existing set of national rulers and nationalist leaders, conscientious establishment intellectuals and philanthropists, or international agencies. Instead, the "global justice movements" - often misnamed "anti-globalisation" - still represent the best prospects for resolving the global crisis.

What is continually acknowledged by global-justice activists, is that while enormous progress has been made in identifying the world's most substantial social, environmental and economic problems since the movements began building several years ago, subsequently, mass consciousness-raising and protest have not yet translated into substantive change.

Cognisant of the hostile power relations, most activists are humble about the extent to which they imagine that global elites really want help from those marginalised by their system. In short, it is now clear, the elite-reformist gambit is doomed to fail because nothing is really on offer.

The most dynamic forces within the movements have arrived at that simple realisation - not only because of high-profile battles in London, Cologne and Seattle (1999); Washington, Melbourne, Prague and Nice (2000); Gothenburg, Quebec City, Genoa and Brussels (2001), and New York and Barcelona (2002) - but because of the conditions that gave rise to "IMF Riots" and massive anti-neoliberal protests across virtually the entire Third World over the past two decades.

For many Southern social and labour movements, Seattle was a catalyst to transcend the IMF Riot as knee-jerk protest against neoliberalism. Instead, mass-democratic activist responses have characterised the subsequent protests, which have featured anti-neoliberal programmatic demands. In some instances, particularly in Latin America (Bolivia and Ecuador), the activism reached a near-insurgent stage; in other sites (South Africa, Nigeria and India), many millions of workers became involved in mass strikes against neoliberalism; in yet other protests (South Korea, Brazil, Turkey, Argentina), tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets in waves of militancy.

What are the prospects for a genuine alternative? The place to find ideas is in local social struggles. Writing from Johannesburg, it appears to me that a series of strategic principles of social justice are beginning to take the following forms:

•"deglobalisation of capital" and decommissioning of the multilateral agencies that work most aggressively on behalf of transnational capital;

• delinking from those circuits of finance, commerce and direct investment that actively underdevelop Africa;

• denuding South Africa of its explicitly sub-imperialist role in the region and denying Pretoria the pretention that by joining the neoliberal project, on terms largely dicta-ted by Washington and the world's financial markets, Africa as a continent will progress; and

• "decommodifying" - i.e., making free at a basic lifeline consumption level – access to the basic goods and services that we all need to survive, and in the process defining a generous social wage to which all people have a human right.

South Africans who host counter-summit events at the time of the World Summit on Sustainable Development in late August will desperately need the solidarity and vision of progressives across the world. Only with comparisons of the sort that began in the Porto Alegre World Social Forum meetings can we take forward the search for fair finance and for a different, non-commodified world.

Patrick Bond teaches at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, and is associate researcher with the Alternative Information & Development Centre, Mowbray, South Africa.