Marching through the streets of Rome alongside a million other anti-war protesters on February 15, factory worker Valerio Conti captured the mood in one simple, eloquent statement: “When there are this many people, there’s a special feeling,” he proclaimed. “It’s as if we really have the ability to change the world.”

There can be little doubt that the anti-war movement which has erupted onto the world’s streets genuinely has the ability to change the world. Even after the smaller, but still impressive, mid-January round of demonstrations, the Washington Post opined that we were witnessing a “global insurgency from below,” as hundreds of thousands of people from faith, social justice, student, anti-racist, labour groups, and countless others joined the protests. Then came the marches on February 14-16, and the movement took a qualitative leap forward.

The sheer numbers involved are staggering. A million in both London and Rome; even more in Barcelona. Hundreds of thousands in Berlin, New York, Damascus, Sydney and Paris. Tens of thousands in Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto.

The New York Times estimated that “more than 800,000 people turned out in 150 rallies in the United States” – almost certainly a significant underestimation of the numbers involved. More accurately, the Times noted that in a mere six months the movement has grown at a rate the anti-Vietnam war movement took four years to achieve.

A mass movement on this scale redefines the field of political debate by forcing its way into public consciousness. It breaks down atomization and feelings of helplessness, energizing its participants and filling them with a sense of collective empowerment. It builds new solidarities and new capacities for changing the world.

At the same time, the movement also needs a sober assessment of its current limits. While mass rallies are crucial points of convergence and mobilization, monthly marches are not enough to push the movement to higher levels of effectiveness. For that, concerted grassroots organizing is required – street-corner leafleting and speakouts in local communities and workplaces, anti-war teach-ins at schools, universities and union halls, local protests at government and military offices or against corporations involved in military production.

And forms of direct action are necessary to raise the level of self-mobilization within a movement which still tends to be overly orchestrated by organizers at the top. Fortunately, there are some promising initiatives in this direction. In Britain, railworkers and others have pledged strikes in the event of war. In the Netherlands in February, activists locked themselves down on airport runways to protest the movement of military goods and equipment. In some countries, students are organizing anti-war walkouts. All these developments are crucial if the movement is to sink deeper roots in society and build the collective organizing capacities of thousands upon thousands of activists.

To that end, open and democratic movement spaces are vital – local anti-war committees and coalitions in communities, workplaces and schools – that provide people with the opportunity to develop their skills as movement builders, as people who shape the struggle in which they are involved. To this end, the movement needs to become a laboratory of forms of local and direct democracy that, by creating counter-examples to the empty parliamentary “democracy” dominated by corporate wealth and power, give activists a sense of how society might be differently organized.

At New Socialist, we see radical, democratic mass movements as opening up the political and organizational horizons that point towards socialism from below – a society of grassroots democracy where corporate-capitalist power has been overturned and replaced by new forms of self-organization of working class and oppressed people. But the idea of socialism from below sounds like an idle abstraction unless it connects with the actual experiences of thousands of people organizing to change the world.

That’s why we see building the anti-war movement and building the movement for socialist democracy as completely interconnected. Historically, socialists have played absolutely central roles in developing mass social movements that brought about radical, even revolutionary, change. This is because socialists operate with an intransigently oppositional approach to those at the top of society.

Rather than soliciting their support, or impressing them with our goodness and respectability, we seek to shake the foundations of their system. And that means building movements based upon militancy, solidarity, democratic self-organization, and mass and direct action.

If the inspiring global anti-war movement is to rise to its full potential, if it is to create a real “global insurgency from below,” then its activists will need to develop anti-capitalist analysis, build truly democratic forms of self-organization, and link opposition to the war abroad to the fight against the war at home on immigrants, the poor, unions and people of colour. To this end, we need to build a socialist current which can help the anti-war movement rise to the task of genuinely changing the world.

*New Socialist Magazine is published by the New Socialist Group. We are involved in various struggles, including anti-war and Palestinian solidarity activism, anti-poverty and housing activism, immigrant rights and anti-deportation activism in the No One Is Illegal campaign, rank and file trade union activism, and global justice activism. To help build mass movements from below, we argue for democratic decision-making, solidarity with other struggles, popular education, direct action, and putting people's needs before profits.