LONDON — The belligerent actions of the Italian state at Genoa last month were a declaration of war against young anticapitalist protesters. That, anyway, is how they were understood.

The symbolic isolation of the Group of Eight leaders, contrived by great artifice, broadcast their remoteness. The measures taken to preserve that isolation made all those outside into sans-culottes; at a stroke, this isolation of the elite and exclusion of the lobbies for the poor turned the protesters into the leaders of all the world's excluded, silent, barefoot masses. It made the poverty and powerlessness of most people in the world appear to be a deliberate artifice, contrived by the capitalist elite so that the G8 elite could preserve its comfortable isolation.

It's hard to think of anything more that could have been done to give the protest a coherence, a political spirit and a resolute moral appeal. The tens of thousands of middle-aged Christians, earnest charity workers, veteran socialists, youthful anarchists, who poured into Genoa for the G8 meeting had had little in common except a focus on the economic and political power of the G8 leaders.

By the end of the Genoa meeting the motley bands of protesters on world poverty had become the defining moral crusade of this 21st century. Suddenly, extraordinarily, abolishing world poverty became a feasible slogan for capitalist politicians instead of a religious dream.

We do not yet know what chains of command led, in particular, to the violent police raid on the Genoa Social Forum, which was trying to coordinate those attending the court of the G8 leaders. But if Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy, apparently U.S. President George W. Bush's new best friend, thought he was doing his patron a favor by treating the protesters as scum he surely made a serious mistake in judgment.

The funeral speech given by the father of Carlo Giuliano, the young Italian shot dead by the police, was powerful, eloquent and widely reported. He said: "These young people with torn trousers, pierced faces and broken shoes, you should not judge them. They have full hearts, heads that think."

The unspoken contrast with the G8 court in its impeccable trousers and skirts was profound. One immediate consequence of the Genoa meeting is the glare it put on the contradiction at the heart of the G8 meetings. The contradiction is between the needs for privacy and privilege, which allow a summit to do business, and the need, in the era of global capitalism, to openly deal with the lack of power, prosperity and peace among the masses of people worldwide.

The summit is held so that world leaders can speak without the cumbersome and distorting formalities of diplomatic protocol. As powerful men, they want to be able to discuss important things without having to worry about the trappings of democracy: their constituencies, parties, television and newspapers. It is this illusion of privacy and authenticity that justifies the summit — as if democracy itself must always impede the truth and the capacity to make decisions.

So to have this sort of meeting among themselves, they want to close themselves away from the eyes, ears and yapping mouths of the public. They need to hold the summit to be able to say, "Look, global corporations may be great voracious monsters, but we the politicians are truly the dragon-slayers, ultimately more powerful than the chief executives of Telecoms Inc."

And yet all leaders of capitalist countries are currently experiencing the most severe crisis in their legitimacy. The pattern of their meetings, gathering, without secrecy, in some city, where they are feted and honored by proud municipal dignitaries, belongs to a past era. That was an era when political authority passed up through a stable hierarchy with many intermediate levels — town council, city council, party assembly, etc. — to represent and contain local voices. The men at the top of these hierarchies were seen to be connected to the people, who voted, at the bottom.

All that has changed. National leaders are now connected to the people through the fickle media. While Japan's Junichiro Koizumi may be enjoying the mass popularity that the media can deliver to a good-looking man (as it did to Tony Blair in his first term as prime minister), this contagious "love" is not stable. Virtually all the G8 leaders, including Blair, are now dogged by the tag that they received less than 50 percent of their nation's vote. Bush is preceded everywhere he goes by the reminder that he "stole" the election from Al Gore.

So the G8 leaders have to display their political power both against the unelected chief executives of global corporations and the unelected torn-trousers of the protest army. That is, their ultimate card is the claim that their power is uniquely legitimate in a future of liberal democracy. It is this claim that has been so profoundly challenged before, during and since the Genoa summit.

By coincidence, this took place at the same time that last-minute negotiations were being held to rescue the Kyoto global-warming agreement from the American dustbin. In these negotiations, unlike the G8 meeting, the politicians of the developing world had a primary place. The unintended effect of this coincidence was to dismiss Bush as a player in global democratic politics.

The juxtaposition of the consumption of oil, gas, food and water and the resulting waste in the United States with the disease and near-starvation of much of Africa and southern Asia was potent. The technological grip over sources of food and even human life being developed by American biogenetic corporations is inducing dismay in the pope and both fear and rage in the most reputable nongovernmental organizations.

Many of these organizations have the money and resources and the will to provide protesters with information not only to fuel the protest campaigns but also to mount legal actions against the U.S. government. Against this, Bush looked nonplussed. As his advisers attempt to win over one or two allies for the U.S. side, the momentum of the poverty protesters seems destined to swell and advance.