Nice. As a veteran of this movement, I say we faced two pitfalls. One, exogenous, was 9-11. After nearly two years of continuous organizing, the air was popped from our balloon overnight. Within two weeks, most of our infrastructure was gone. Progress is a vulnerable enterprise.
The other, endogenous, was a focus on wonky global policies we were poorly positioned to solve. Some we did, eg HIPC debt. But the fact that arguably the biggest victory is an obscure acronym shows that we did a poor job connecting to workers' interests here at home.
Power and institution building were mostly deprioritized, and no comprehensive narrative about neoliberalism was really built. 20 years on, it's only just now happening, by scholars such as @FeliciaWongRI @samuelmoyn @zeithistoriker and others.
One area we did succeed in is seeding a new generation of organizers. If you know a 30 or 40 or even 50 something kickass organizer in labor or environmental work, chances are they logged time in the global justice movement. It was one of the few political refuges for Gen X.
