The major characteristic of the international situation over the last few years has been an unprecedented right wing offensive aiming at the dismantling of all the social advances and rights won by the workers' movement... Alongside this, quite logically, we are seeing repressive policies attacking the poorest sections of the population, the young people, and all those who actively oppose the dictatorship of the markets. Finally, we are now living in a permanent state of war. The Bush administration's philosophy aims at legitimizing the right of the USA to intervene militarily as soon as its political, military or economic interests are threatened. The European Social Forum in Florence has come at just the right time and has a real importance. It is part of the resistance movement building up everywhere in the world against the capitalist globalization which the European Union is at the forefront of. The forum is a unique opportunity for thousands upon thousands of activists from unions, campaigns, and political and other organizations, to debate and share experiences. But it is also a chance to prepare together at a Europe-wide level the necessary counter-offensive to stop the neoliberal policies ofdestruction which are continually worsening inequality and discrimination in our societies. The debates during the forum, and during the general assembly of social movements, will allow us on the one hand to fix priorities for mobilization against the free-market obsessed, imperialist priorities of the European Community, and against the institutions which the European Convention wants to set up. It will also allow us to move forward in the building of a continent-wide anti-war movement.
But the importance of the forum is more than this. After decades in which internationalism was stifled by the division of the world into two blocs, the European Social Forum will without doubt be one of the elements which people will point to in a few years time as having helped in the establishment of a new international organisation of workers and the oppressed. No-one knows today how such an organization will be built, but we do know, all of us, that such an organization has never been so necessary, to give credibility to a vision of liberation which can be a true alternative to the bankrupt system of capitalism.