It was a minuscule cross-section of the 60,000 people attending the Forum, and I have no way of
knowing how representative it was. One thing struck me immediately as the meeting progressed: the
Forum itself had had much less of the debate and exchange between different anti-"neoliberal"
viewpoints that we had here in this small meeting.

Talking to the people on the coach, outside the meeting, I found that most had attended very few of the many hundreds of formal sessions of the Forum. Overwhelmed by the vast welter of events, they had spent more time joining the swirl of humanity at the Forum's main sites, dropping in and out of sessions, picking up the atmosphere. Few formal sessions - in fact, none that I heard of - had any structured, systematic debate.


Our little meeting started off with a young man complaining that the Forum's "non-party" stance had been insufficiently enforced. He had been dismayed on arrival at the Forum's main site to find people selling Socialist Worker outside, just like back home in Huddersfield. (Yes - while the SWP's "Marixsm 2002" event this summer in London was full of people promoting sales of Comunismo dal basso, the paper of the SWP's small Italian offshoot, in Florence they sold the English Socialist Worker, and Comunismo dal basso was hardly visible. Don't ask me why).

Others of us replied that the "non-party" stance was a fake. In fact, Rifondazione (the Party of Communist Refoundation) had been the main shaping influence in the Forum, just as the PT (Workers' Party) of Brazil had been the main influence in the supposedly also non-party World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. "non-party" only means that the party influences are kept behind the scenes. It is good and reasonable for parties to vie for influence, but their efforts and arguments should be upfront, where they can be openly disputed and assessed.

A number of people wanted us to keep links among us - coming as we did from very diverse groups - after we returned to Britain. Some middle-aged women proposed that we could meet up again at one or another environmentalist gathering, perhaps Earth First. A younger woman, next to me, muttered: "What about humanity first?" Some disputed openly: environmentalism is not our common political ground.

Gatherings are good, others said, but they have to draw on ongoing activism. The fuel of the Forum in Italy had been activism - trade union struggles, agitation against the planned war. We need equal activism in Britain. Anti-war agitation is one area; the No Sweat conference on 23 November, which will help build international links with the Mexican workers who have successfully established a trade union at the Kukdong/Mexmode factory, subcontractors for Nike and Reebok, will promote another.

One of us, an art student who (so he had explained to me on the coach) had got into politics by way of studying
situationism in his college course, then branching out to read Negri, and now a bit of Marx, was sceptical about looking to the trade unions. The trade unions are conservative, he said, and tied to the Blair government. They will never do anything radical. Another had a different objection. She would find it difficult, though maybe not impossible, to work with people involved in production she found ethically unacceptable, like building new cars. A number of people replied, arguing in favour of working in and with the trade unions, especially with the rank and file.

Soon we were docking in Dover, but we decided to keep in touch by email. For me, the meeting had brought back
memories of another political epoch - the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament of the 1960s. That had something of the same kaleidoscope of political colours, mobilised together by a common opposition to the ruling infamy of the day. CND, however, was a movement - a more or less common structure, with recognised common goals, demonstrations, activities. The "anti-neoliberal" or "anti-capitalist" movement assembled at the Forum is not really a single movement in anything like the same sense. Back-to-nature greenies, liberal NGOs, and militant Marxists will, like it or not, mostly go their own ways after the Forum. There is a common mood, which serves as an entry point to radical politics for many young people - a lot more in Italy than in Britain, as far as I can see, but appreciable numbers in Britain too.

It is as stupid to sneer at that mood as it would have been in the 1960s to stand aloof from the "middle-class, pacifist" CND. But it is not really a movement. The job is really to build a movement, or movements, from that mood.

The nearest thing the new mood has to a unified movement, holding it together, is, for now, probably the movement
against the USA's planned war on Iraq. As far as I know, none of the 60,000 people attending the Forum, despite their vast political variety, dissented from the Forum's support for the anti-war demonstration on the Saturday of the Forum. In Italy, anyway, the anti-war movement does not have the Islamic-fundamentalist element so prominent in Britain, which would scarcely have been at home in the Forum.

Shortly before going to the Forum, I attended a left-wing conference on globalisation, in Brighton, where Alex Callinicos of the SWP put forward the idea that the "anti-capitalist movement" now faces a political sorting-out, its best elements being separated out from the dross and taken further in their political development by extending their anti-capitalism into opposition to war and imperialism.

I suppose there must be a smidgeon of truth to this for the USA, though at the same conference a US socialist confirmed to me what I had surmised from the Internet, that the current anti-war agitation in the USA is led by the most backward of the USA's left-wing groups, the "Marcyite" Workers' World Party, which considers Iraq, like North Korea, to be "socialist". Such a group can hardly serve as an axis for a viable new left!

In Europe, though, as a comrade from the French LCR - evidently exasperated by having the SWP berate the LCR for insufficient anti-war militancy and excessive concern to differentiate itself from Islamic fundamentalism - told me in Florence, this idea of "the war" as the fundamental political dividing line in the "new anti-capitalist" milieu is radically false.

For a start, in France, the whole spectrum of official politics - up to and including Jacques Chirac - is at least nominally "anti-war". "After decades of lecturing us on the question", the comrade said, "it now seems that the SWP itself is adopting a sort of 'campism'" - a view of the world politics as driven by the struggle of "imperialist" and "anti-imperialist" camps, rather than of classes.

Class criteria - whether the anti-capitalist and anti-war enthusiasm of the new radicals leads them to get involved in the vital, but lengthy, work of involvement in grassroots working-class and trade-union organising - remain central. Our job as socialists is to find ways, like the No Sweat campaign, of making the path to working-class politics more accessible and clearer.

Martin Thomas is a member of the Alliance for Workers' Liberty, part of the Socialist Alliance in England, Wales and supporter of the Solidarity Tendency in the Scottish Socialist Party.