Imagine a country paralysed by protest, with hundreds of thousands of people blockading the highways and barricades springing up everywhere. The orders of the police, the appeals of the government and the condemnations of the media are being ignored. More people are joining the popular uprising. The cause for dissent? The policies of the G8 industrialised nations.

This is not a vision of the anti-G8 protests soon to take place in Scotland. This is happening in Bolivia right now.

Article continues
Bolivia has qualified for Gordon Brown's latest debt relief package, due to be ratified at next week's G8 summit. It also qualified for the previous one, the Highly Indebted Poor Countries initiative. The remit for qualification on both occasions was not only extreme poverty and indebtedness but also "good governance". A notion that, of course, for the G8, involves the privatisation of state assets, including water, gas and oil.

In fact, it was only in return for further control over Bolivia's economy that a portion of its debt was cancelled. This is but one example of why debt relief, in many parts of the world, has become synonymous with an intensification of the neo-liberal onslaught. As businesses have profited to the detriment of the poor, resistance has become a matter of survival.

We live in confusing times: millionaire pop stars shake hands with politicians and tell us that what the poor need is for more power to be given to the G8, that this will make poverty history. Yet, around the world, those excluded from power are increasingly reaching the conclusion that the lives of ordinary people, wherever they are, are unlikely to be improved by the policies of the G8. And, moreover, that the task of building alternatives to the current inhumane and ecocidal social order lies squarely with us.

In other words, while the Bolivian popular uprising may seem worlds away from the protests being planned in Scotland, there are several very real and important parallels that connect these seemingly different realities. The issues at stake, such as human dignity, poverty, access to land and control of resources; and the primacy of active resistance, whether blockading the roads of Bolivia or the roads leading to Gleneagles, are clear illustrations of this. However, and perhaps more importantly, the organisational forms being adopted by radical movements across the world are also displaying increasingly common features.

Ever since Mexico's Zapatista rebels declared "Enough is enough!" in 1994 when protesting against the extreme poverty the Chiapas indigenous peoples were experiencing, a rich tapestry of struggle has been woven by social movements around the world. Weaving between the world's north and south they reveal an increasingly global movement which is resisting capitalism while simultaneously creating living alternatives.

Some of the most important threads that run throughout this "movement of movements", and which connect the Bolivian uprising and the groups organising around the G8 summit, are those of decentralisation, autonomy and horizontality. These are movements in which power is dispersed in diffuse networks, where difference is celebrated rather than sublimated, and where there are no official leaders or spokespeople.

"Take me to your leader!" is not only the first demand of aliens to earthlings in science fiction movies; it is one echoed by police to protesters, journalists to revolutionaries. But it is a demand, when directed towards the participants in the global network of grassroots anti-capitalist movements, that can never be met. Ask the workers of Zanon, one of many self-managed factories in Argentina; the squatters of European Social Centres; the Zapatistas; or the participants in the US Direct Action Network, which shut down the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle.

All will tell you that the means towards radical social change are inseparable from the ends. All will be able to show you their own, distinct, experiments with alternative modes of social organisation. While none can offer a perfect blueprint for a future society, they each demonstrate that other worlds are possible.

Several hundred people, as part of the Dissent Network, have spent almost two years organising resistance to the approaching G8 summit, while attempting to demonstrate exactly such alternatives. Meetings have typically been open, participatory (and slightly chaotic) assemblies. People have sat in circles, allowing everyone present an equal voice, as opposed to sitting facing a panel of specialist speakers. Decisions have been made through a process of consensus, taking the opinions of everyone on board, rather than deferring to a central committee.

Perhaps most ambitious, however, are the "convergence" spaces that have been opened by Dissent for those wanting to get involved with resistance to the summit. Based in locations across Scotland, their aim is to provide spaces in which everyone can get involved in shaping what takes place, and the alternatives to be demonstrated.

One of these spaces, the Hori-Zone, "a zone of self-organisation, horizontal decision making, ecology and autonomy in action", lies less than 15 miles from the luxury Gleneagles Hotel. It is a huge, temporary, self-managed space on the outskirts of Stirling. Based on the principle of ecological sustainability and employing, where possible, fossil fuel-free power sources and ecological toilets and water systems, it is preparing to welcome thousands of protesters from around the world.

The space will be self-run as a complex experiment in direct democratic processes. With more than a slight nod of acknowledgement towards Argentina's popular uprising in 2001, which inspired many involved with Dissent, the Hori-Zone will be divided into barrios, or neighbourhoods, each of which will be responsible not only for the day-to-day running of their area of the camp (cooking, disposing of waste and so on) but also for deciding upon, and planning, the means by which they hope to resist the summit.

The G8 meetings are about the consolidation of power. This year is no exception. The policies are the same, only the spin is new. However, whether this year's summit will be remembered for grandstanding yet more duplicitous agreements, or as the moment in which the world that the G8 represents is rejected, is up to us. If we are to choose the latter, it is paramount that we begin to develop and demonstrate living alternatives to capitalism in the here and now. The Hori-Zone may turn out to be exactly such an example. We hope to see you there.

• Lisa Michael is a member of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and Adam Jones is a member of Brighton Dissent; both are involved with the Dissent Network, promoting resistance to the G8 summit. Details at Dissent