A democratic multitude

Any way you measure it, November’s European Social Forum was a spectacular success. After the nightmare of the G-8 meetings in Genoa a year and a half before, the prospect of any large-scale convergence of globalization activists in Italy was a matter of widespread trepidation. Almost as soon as organizers named Florence as the location, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi announced that “police intelligence” had discovered that activists were planning to wreak widespread destruction in the ancient city. The announcement was backed up by an endless campaign of scaremongering on Italian TV and in print media, much of which is owned by Berlusconi.