There seems to be this general misunderstansding that the G8 is a small group of men who make lots of decisions about the future of the world, Illuminati-style.

It isn't.

The G8 is a group of countries: France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canda and Russia.

If you're a citizen of any of these countries then the G8 is _you_.  Your democratically elected representative is the person who was there, meeting with other democratically elected representatives, to push for things on behalf of their nation.

I have a complete failure to understand people who are pushing for an abolition of the G8 - what exactly are they looking for?  Are they wanting a group which includes more countries?  There is one - it's called the United Nations.  Are they fed up with these 8 countries being so rich?  Then pushing for more aid to other countries and a lowering of trade barriers seems to be the logical answer (which is what the Make Poverty History campaign was doing, with a fair amount of success).  Either that or donating some of their own money to Africa.  The amount being pushed for at the moment is 0.7% of the budget - I already give more than that much of my income to charity, albeit not African aid charities, but I wonder how many people are pushing for more aid who don't.

Anyway, I have an almost complete lack of empathy for those people who seem to want to destroy some kind of mythical overlord system, without any clear idea of what it even is, let alone of how to organise things without allowing the heads of democratic nations to meet and talk about how to increase aid and help the starving.

I'm engaged in discussion elsewhere about money, social systems, etc.  I'm maintaining that:

Money is an abstraction for the value of property. The only way to remove it will be to get rid of the concept of property. The problem is that this leaves you with no way to encourage people to produce things or perform services. Which is fine if you only want to do things with/for your friends, but unless you personally know a farmer, a doctor, a dentist, etc., etc. who are willing to do favours for you, you're going to need _some_ kind of incentive.

Now, I know that there are a variety of social systems - I'm wondering if anyone has managed a non-monetary system with a large group of people for any length of time - is the 'problem' of incentives surmountable, or do-able in any other way?  I've certainly not encountered anything which seemed even vaguely credible.  There's the fudge of socialism - where some of the money is taken away and used for the good of all (and I'm in favour of this, obviously - I like the NHS), but is there a true alternative that's actually liable to work in reality?