Lots of young people - a general political atmosphere, if such a thing can be judged, of enthusiastic, generous
identification with people's struggles everywhere against entrenched power.

To locate our (the Alliance for Workers' Liberty) workshop on "Capitalism, nation, classes, Empire" in the Forum website had been easy. Just search for any item that mentioned class - and you would narrow your choice down to our workshop and just one other, out of the many hundreds of meetings at the Forum.

To sneer would be wrong, though: I had a sense of a new political generation emerging, and on the whole moving in a healthy direction.

The main building has two floors of political stalls, almost all from campaign groups rather than parties. Our stall had Women in Black on one side, a Kurdish solidarity group on the other, Peace Brigades International opposite us, and a campaign against sanctions on Iraq next to them.

At any given time there are three or four large "conferences", maybe 20 middle-sized "seminars", and dozens of smaller "workshops" running. There are two main sites outside the Fortezza, and the workshops are spread across Florence and, sometimes, the surrounding villages too.

On the Friday evening, 8th, I went to a "conference" on "social and state economy". How typical it was, I don't know, but it seems significant in itself.

The "slogan" of the whole Forum is "Against neo-liberalism, war and racism - another Europe is possible". The
"conference" on social economy looked like it should be a pivot of debate on the shape of that "other Europe", the nature of its alternative to "neoliberalism".

It was a debate that wasn't a debate. The long introduction from the chair, Giorgio Dal Fiume, his interpolations between speeches, and most of those speeches, focused on building a "social economy" alongside the private business and state sectors.

Felice Scalvini, president of a European federation of cooperatives, thought that cooperatives could influence the
conduct of private big business if they chose their tactics right. Carola Reintjes from Spain explained that her dream was an alternative supermarket chain across Europe, selling social-economy products.

Michael Albert from the USA expounded his model of participatory economics, which excludes all central planning but has been put into practice in a small publishing firm, South End Press. Giorgio Dal Fiume himself thought it necessary to stress that in advocating the social economy he was not proposing privatisation of services currently run by the state.

Then, at the end - after the late hour, and the lack of heating in the meeting hall, had sent most of the audience away, reducing it to a few hundred - the last speaker was called. It was Yannis Milios, a Marxist economist from Athens.

Briefly and coolly, he argued that an economy regulated by money can not but be capitalist. Those with more money buy the labour power of those with less, and use the transaction to make more money by way of exploitation.

No persuasion, no good example, can make the money-owners guide their business affairs other than for profit. There is no way out without a fundamental political change through which the working people can collectively take over the productive wealth of society.

Milios got warm applause from the audience; but the short discussion that followed, round written questions from the audience, suggested that his arguments had gone way over the heads of the other platform speakers.

Martin Thomas, Florence 08/11/2002