My paper deals with the responses to the crisis by social movements and the internal dynamics of global activism. The context of this paper is provided by the following questions: What is the role of activism in transforming the current global crisis? What are the alternatives offered? What are the visions that inspire those alternatives? Organisers and participants of the World Social Forum have widely discussed these issues. I reflect on those debates and on the changing mood and political postures of activists. The paper is divided into three parts: “Their Crisis”, “Our Crisis” and “Our solutions”. Shortly after the crisis erupted, the discussions were centred on ''opportunities''. Few months later they were focusing on the ''challenges'' of facing a conjuncture that movements thought, optimistically, could provide the opportunity for rapid change. The third section discusses the elaborations of alternatives to both the global crisis and the crisis of the left. “Civilisational changes” have been proposed by South American and African activists. The first advocate a new alliance between humans and nature, the second explore an emancipatory “new universality”. I conclude reflecting on how activists are profoundly affected by the dynamics of the crisis, and at the same time they suggest that a robust and balanced (emotionally and theoretically) approach to the crisis should focus, first, on a much longer time scale than the crisis itself or its direct causes and, second, on its social and cultural roots.
