Reposted from tallahassee-redhills imc - link to original at bottom of page.

Report From Porto Alegre #4: On "Life After Capitalism" Forum, Independent Media, Income And Consumption And Michael Hardt And Toni Negri's Book Empire
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Saturday, 25 January 2003
by Dubravko Kakarigi
Email:  dubravko@kakarigi.net

Summary: After having attended large sessions the day before, today I decided to attend some workshops.
There is a whole series of workshops at the WSF 2003 under the common title "Life after capitalism" a forum within a forum that focuses on strategy and vision. It includes 35 events addressing antiwar perspectives, movement viewpoints, political and economic vision, and many dimensions of daily life.

It is not easy to pick from many hundreds of workshops, so I decided to attend the one on media and another one titled Income and Consumption after Capitalism.

Topic Panel: Media
This workshop is of a particular interest to us IMC folks, so it's not a surprise that many were in the audience, one IMC person was the moderator of the debate, and three were on the panel. The advertised panelists were:
David Barsamian of the Alternative Radio, an independent, award-winning, weekly radio program produced in Boulder, Colorado.

(AR presents information and perspectives that are ignored or distorted in the corporate-controlled media. The one-hour program is broadcast on more than 125 public radio stations around the world. Financed by sale of CD recordings of the programs.) and Raimundo Pereira, executive director of Reportagem, a monthly publication from and about the Amazon region of Brazil.

Mr. Pereira's emphasis was on the consequences of electronic movement of money and parallel exchange
of information that influences movement of money. Neither of those two flows recognizes national borders, happens potentially very quickly and under conditions of monopoly. This phenomenon is tightly related to the
globalization. In response "we need to study socialist movements of the 20-th century and revitalize them," says Mr. Pereira.

Mr. Barsamian pleads with us to stop being the victim. "We need to create positive images, we need to tell our own stories, break down the stereotypes. People in the US have no idea what's going on in the world. It is easy to become cynical, negative and give up." Telling our own stories and hearing different points of view
may get us out that vicious cycle. (My thoughts immediately connect that with the idea that we need to identify our own agenda and not just follow what is served to us by the main media. Our main media
have become instrumental in setting public agenda by the government by rarely questioning the propaganda and just playing along in order to maintain that cozy relationship with the various government officials which gets them in the door. This is fundamentally dishonest and shameful and, moreover, makes the main media accomplices in our government's criminal behavior
around the world.)

Several IMCistas (Pablo from Argentina,
Toya from Sao Paulo,and Gaba from
Uruguay) shared their experiences of their respective IMCs serving the public by providing the outlet for the people's information while official media continues to prostitute itself. They also spoke to the fact that not many people from the developing world have access to Internet and so, consequently, they are heavily into producing paper and TV news which is much more readily accessible to the masses. Brazil IMC currently compiles a poster type publication which they post all over Porto Alegre.

Second workshop I wanted to attend started on a bad note, location was double booked and only one
panelist showed up, Jonathan Neale from Great Britain. The other two, Barbara Ehrenreich and Giorgio del Fume never appeared. Well, it ended on a bad
note too. While some of his comments made sense ("from the time we start working in the morning until we leave we live in a dictatorship," "world of work is fundamentally undemocratic"), Mr. Neale prescriptions for how to accomplish a more just model of earning income and consuming was full of demagoguery and party-line recipes not worth repeating here.

Empire:
In the meantime, an IMC colleague informed me that he heard that Michael Hardt (the co-author with Toni Negri of Empire) was scheduled to speak shortly thereafter in the room next door. Understandably this generated a lot of excitement. For a good reason, this ended up being
a debate between Chris Harman of the Socialist Workers Party of Great Britain and the editor of the Socialist Worker and Michael Hardt.
Many people attended this presentation and attentively listened to the arguments in the debate. What seemed to have had to be a debate on the strategies of moving beyond capitalism turned into an attack on Empire. It is not possible to write all the details of the debate, especially since they would have to be put in the context of knowing the book in question. But the debate did reveal some of the rigidity and narrow-mindedness of the old left. Mr. Harman insisted on the old schemes of the vanguard, the leading role of certain category of the working class in the struggle against the common enemy, that being capitalism. He attacked the idea of "multitude" proposed in Empire as baseless since, according to him, the traditionally defined working class is on a rise, the appearance and maturity in strength and importance of the informational worker sugested in Empire is a dangerous myth according to Harman, and Hardt and Negri are thus dangerously misplacing
the emphasis in the wrong quarters. At the end of a lively presentation and many contributions from the audience (yours truly suggested that the platform-based organization of people's movements is being displaced by the issue-based coalitions as a result of advancements in communication technologies which made platforms unnecessary and an impediment to people becoming an active, dynamic actor in creating its own realities), I had to ask Mr. Hardt whether or not Mr. Harman was just ignorant or is there
something else in the offing. The arguments were so clear that only a narrow-minded ideologue could continue promoting the ideas of the past in spite of the
evidence supporting otherwise unless he had another agenda in mind. I will leave that for you to ponder.