The idea of the corporate media being a barrier to democratic discourse is not new. However, with the emergence of the Internet, debate has been renewed in recognition of the need for a public sphere separate from the corporate and public sectors. The ability of on-line media to network and enhance the organisational activities of groups and individuals has suggested the possibility of a greater degree agency from civil society and its citizens. Creative applications of the Internet technology during the S11 protests demonstrated the ability of the Net to not only function as an organisational tool but also as a form of civil disobedience in cyberspace. The tongue-in-cheek link to John Farnham’s ‘You’re the Voice’ – chosen as the S11 song – and the clever ‘hactivism’ which redirected users from www.nike.com to www.S11.org, generated considerable discussion within the press, radio and television media. This publicity alerted new audiences to the existence of the site incrementally increasing the number of hits the site received. The old media was important in publicising and drawing attention to the new, highlighting the fact that, although the Net is an important new tool, activists still largely rely on coverage in the traditional media and cannot rely solely upon the emerging communications networks.

Initially developed out of a synergy of public, civil and private co-operation, the Internet has enabled this reformulation of political dynamics. However it is quickly becoming more and more privately driven. IndyMedia, an initiative of shared technologies, ideas and knowledge, has carried on the tradition from which the Internet emerged. As Rhonda and Michael Hauben note in their history of Usenet and the Internet ‘the development of the Net was the result of the work of many computer pioneers from the academic, government and research sectors working cooperatively to produce a significant public resource.” The researchers had no proprietary products to support and no commercial deadlines to meet. They did not develop products that commercial sector could (and would) develop. Interestingly most news media, during the S11 protests, highlighted what they saw as an apparent contradiction in the use of ‘corporate’ technology by an ‘anti-corporate’ movement. Both the IndyMedia and S11 sites provide useful examples of creative and effective uses of a technology when in the hands of citizens. This new movement of technological application, radicalism and creativity – dating back to the urgent postings of the Zapatistas (EZLN) of Chiapas, Mexico in 1994 and the international campaign against the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) – has gained momentum in the wake of the protests against the World Trade Organisations in Seattle of last year.

Seattle saw the inception of the first IndyMedia ‘channel’ aimed at providing up to the minute independent coverage of the anti-WTO protests. IndyMedia centres have now sprung up all over the globe using a common html code and format created by Sydney’s Catalyst computer geek collective. Within minutes photographs, text, video and audio material can be uploaded for all to see, reply to and add to within the one website. Unlike radio, television or newspapers, where feedback is slow or non-existent, electronic forums such as this ensure quick interaction among all participants. IndyMedia has been successful in empowering citizens by generating spaces for interaction at the local, national and global level rather than being constrained to the specific representations offered by large media institutions. Such an initiative proceeds from a logic of engagement founded upon notions of production and involvement rather than consumption and spectacle. Witnessing the rapid postings of breaking news and first- hand accounts uploaded every few minutes during N30 in Seattle, A16 in Washington and S11 in Melbourne may suggest directions for a more participatory media environment. The world has never witnessed the ease with which news and information is transferred at amazing speed and with excellent results.

One of the greatest achievements of the IndyMedia initiative has been in its ability to challenge the ideas of who is and who is not an authoritative journalist. Notions of legitimacy and credibility that go hand in hand with the tradition of journalism are disregarded in preference for a free dissemination of information. The Catalyst system allows anyone – with access – to publish to a global audience under the banner of IndyMedia regardless of political affiliation or persuasion. A high level of participation and the high quality of content, despite a lack of editorial control, has shown the open-publishing model to be enormously successful and useful to journalists and citizens alike when searching for information. Such independent coverage has been extremely important given the mainstream’s misunderstandings and misrepresentations of the S11 protests. The most notable examples were a number of print and television reports written using PR company, Hill and Knowlton’s ‘S11 background brief.’ The brief contained incorrect claims regarding the S11 and related movements. For example, both the Age and the Herald Sun reported that the Seattle protests had mobilised around a meeting of the World Economic Forum, as the Hill and Knowlton brief suggested, when in fact it was the World Trade Organisation. A degree of public confusion was to be expected after such passive journalism.

Both corporate and public media seemed to have difficulty grasping the concepts of affinity groups involving fragmented and decentralised ways of organising. S11 saw the emergence of pragmatic and creative groups – such as the S11 bicycle courier network (i)Xpress, Food not Bombs and IndyMedia – not easily confined to a system of rhetoric or totalising logic. The anarchic structure of organising which emerged was perhaps difficult for the mainstream media to document due to the common formula governing the construction of news items. The time limitations of the news format, demanding concision and the production of neat binary oppositions, does not lend itself well to a comprehensive coverage of something as diverse and complex as the S11 protests. Whereas there are clear difficulties in the format of mainstream news, oversimplification of the issues was inappropriate as both the political issues and the protesters themselves were multifaceted and resistant to basic explanations. The Internet technology, as applied by the IndyMedia news service, was much more conducive to permitting a proliferation of heterogenous voices.

In addition to this a perhaps basic yet important point was echoed by protesters throughout the three days – the bulk of Australian media is owned by members of the World Economic Forum.

The inabilities of the mainstream media to comprehensively document the issues and events surrounding S11 are contrasted by the growing number of community based, independent media outlets and individuals granted a forum for interactive dialogue through IndyMedia. The IndyMedia site provides a ‘channel’ for open discourse, free of editorial, as a simple click on the ‘publish’ button enables anyone and everyone to upload their stories. Rather than challenging or infiltrating the mainstream the objective of IndyMedia is to create a system outside of the dominant socio-political culture, empowering citizens by providing greater access and opportunity. Under this method of communication the traditional concept of the ‘audience’ is refuted – challenging the reader/writer to come to their own conclusions by wading through the diverse range of stories relating to s11 and other events. The sheer enormity and breadth of information available has lead to a greater level of engagement with both the issues and the other reader/writers. Creating this space for audience control has harnessed the inherent qualities of hypertext – unlike the majority of on-line news services, which remain overwhelmingly one-way in their transmission.

Despite the advent of such innovative modes of news delivery and more than 30,000 visits to Melbourne IndyMedia to date, the fact remains that the majority of news is gained from traditional television, print and radio media. With only half of the Australian population having domestic access to the Internet those involved in IndyMedia have always been well aware of the limitations of an on-line news channel. In light of these important shortcomings, a print version drawing on content from the site, Indy Bulletin, was produced daily throughout S11 to S13 and a SKA TV documentary, Melbourne Rising, was also produced drawing on footage from a number of independent film-makers. A screening of the documentary has already been scheduled to occur in Prague before the mobilisation against the International Monetary Fund who plan to meet there on S26.

The workings of the group were inhibited by a lack of permanent physical working space, economic constraints, and difficulty with securing publicity in the mainstream media. The Seattle IndyMedia Centre had a budget of over $70,000 (US) to cover the actions against the WTO in November last year – IndyMedia Melbourne worked unfunded. The positive response to IndyMedia in its short life span has demonstrated the need for more interactive, independent media with a view to enlivening the public sphere. IndyMedia will continue to fill this role as long as the public continue to produce and publish content.

www.melbourne.indymedia.org

mim@antimedia.net

Alex Kelly is a Swinburne Media student who was actively involved in the co-ordination of Melbourne IndyMedia

Jason Gibson teaches at Swinburne University of Technology in Media and Communications and Sociology

S11 was the latest in a series of global protests that have become branded – J18, N30 – in such a way as to suggest that the series will be indefinite – S26 in Prague, O3 and so on. Part of a global movement whose ultimate potential cannot yet be accurately assessed, S11 marked the full entry of Australia to the round of global protest against neoliberalism. It was a strategic and tactical advance in the conduct of protest.

S11 was the first protest in this ‘series’ in which the decentralised affinity group structure meshed effectively with a tightly co-ordinated ‘marshalling’ structure throughout the protest. The J18 protests in London had been pseudo-affinity structured – a tight core group of long-term revolutionaries steering a European style ‘love parade’ into a violent protest. The Seattle N30 protest had a genuine affinity group hub-and-spokes organisation model, but this had limited its tactical effectiveness with the result that forces were split between blocking intersections and blockading the conference centre where the WTO was meeting.

Melbourne’s S11 was significant in that it was the first global action in which the protest worked effectively together without the need for either a single overarching organisation – such as People for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1980s – or without suffering a split between the command-structure organisations – such as the socialist groups – and the decentralised and participatory groups. That is not to say there was no friction. Many participants believed that the marshals were overstepping their defined role of keeping the crowd informed as to the balance of forces around the various entrances and exits, and were actively commanding. Several quit on Tuesday and those who remained on duty were largely from the socialist group ‘Red Bloc’.

Yet for all the dissatisfaction there was no collapse of protest self-discipline, or of the protest itself. The system of balancing forces around key gates, and of abandoning gates that could not be blockaded when numbers fell, was maintained. Confusion was minimised. Violent outbreaks by angered protestors was almost non-existent. Despite the usual mistrust between command-structure groups and decentralised groups, the marshalling system was largely adhered to.

This clear tactical advance on Seattle is partly due to the lesser degree of hyper-individualism of Australians (the affinity group model developed as a way of accommodating the fragmented nature of American identity politics). More importantly however, it is an indication that the global movement is dynamic – its strategy and tactics are developing, it is learning from itself.

The predictable response of the state has been one of violence – in this case, one that went beyond that legally sanctioned to the police force. The ‘backwardness’ of the Australian state in these matters clashed with the forwardness of the global protest movement – the result being baton charges against non-violent resistance. Meanwhile in the Czech republic, the government is preparing for S26 by establishing low-budget tent cities so that protestors arriving from all over the world have somewhere to stay. Yet Prague S26 may well be one of the last such events where protest is met with a measured and liberal state response. If the IMF meeting is seriously disrupted by protest the global elite will come down hard on Vaclav Havel’s hippie bullshit, and any state wanting to host these lucrative events will have to guarantee that it can make them run smoothly. S11 Melbourne was a harbinger of what can be expected in the near future, many times worse and with bullets not batons.

What will happen to the movement then is anyone’s guess. It will probably replay the sixties/seventies historical course and split into community organisation and armed struggle factions. It may be strengthened rather than weakened by the more naked display of state power that is on the way. But it is vital that protestors understand what we have lived through in the last two years – an Indian summer of permitted dissent, with winter moving in fast – and begin to think strategically about how they will respond to this.

The Prague autumn will be a decisive test for the emergent movement, opposing the extension of unregulated free trade to every facet of life on the planet. Lack of easy entry past Czech borders, and the possibility of a heavy police crackdown will hit hard — the movement will reach a crisis point from which it will either move to the next level or dissipate entirely.

It would be fair to say that the 1998-1999 global anti-World Trade Organisation (WTO) protests took many of us by surprise, and that this demands some re-examination of the forces and processes for change that exist today. The World Bank, the WTO and the pro-free-trade first-world press have pulled out all the stops in their efforts to portray the protestors as a ragbag of luddites, protectionists and economic illiterates, only to find that the protest movement had put down roots in so many separate areas of social life — churches, unions, students, the professional-managerial classes — that such misconstruction merely damaged the credibility of the vilifiers. The World Bank’s James Wolfensohn and the WTO’s Mike Moore bend over backwards in public to talk about the costs and benefits of free trade, as the machines they nominally run grind on remorselessly, imposing futile major projects, and murderous structural adjustment programs on the non-developing world. But they are smart enough to know that they face a real challenge.

So where did the protest come from, and why did it suddenly catch fire? The small but growing movement against global marketisation was given a double boost in 1998, when the Jospin Government withdrew France from discussion towards the establishment of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment at the same time as the UK anti-genetically modified foods movement won mass support, cleared GM foods from all the supermarkets, and brought the hitherto unassailable Monsanto to its knees.

These victories seem to have focussed a movement that had already begun to coalesce with new methods of organisation. The expansion of the Internet has allowed special interest protest groups to operate more efficiently and communicate more effectively, but it was only when this was combined with new modes of organisation that an event like Seattle became possible. Learning from the anti-structural/command excesses of the 1980s, the organisation of diverse organisations via affinity groups, protest councils and the like has allowed for protests that can have a greater degree of strategic planning and organised tactical response than was the case fifteen years ago. The configuration of protestors within smaller groups focussing on issues of particular interest to them minimises the need for preliminary debate about organisational styles, membership and the like. People go to — or come from — the groups within which they feel most comfortable.

The network aspect of this has been played up, but in reality the network structure has only been of optimal effect because it has been complemented by a traditional — if temporary — command and decision-making structure.

The facilitators of this new-style movement have deliberately kept the program minimal. Drawing together groups from across the spectrum — from anti-technology anarchists to corporate reformists — they demand nothing more (or less) than the abolition of the WTO. In fact even such a minimal demand is not subscribed to by all the groups in the movement. Many would like to see the WTO strengthened and with a different character — a world trade organisation that regulates the global economy to ensure adherence to labour, environmental and cultural standards. Nor is the composition of the movement wholly dedicated to these standard left/social movement goals. Much of the clout at Seattle was provided by the Teamsters who had turned out in force, and were ‘geed up’ by a rousing speech from Reform Party far-right candidate Patrick Buchanan.

But such a movement hangs together only as long as it meets with no significant success. When it has achieved a degree of power and public support sufficient to get proposals for global political change on the table, the cracks will start to show. Many of the shock troops for the Seattle protest came from veterans of Earth First and the Ruckus Society — American anarchists whose critique is leftist, but whose solution of frontier-style self-organisation sits on the libertarian-right end of the spectrum.

Furthermore there is no clear road to the end ostensibly being sought. GM companies found themselves suddenly surrounded by angry consumers and shareholders — their individual, private nature making them easy to topple. Nothing less than a mass withdrawal from the WTO is likely to crush it, and that seems unlikely anytime soon.

In the midst of this explosion of action, it has become almost impossible to talk about the lag in theoretical understanding of the contemporary situation. After twenty years of defeat and all but total marginalisation, such talk is held to be defeatist, jinxing. At the meetings that flowered across Europe after the successful J18 protests of mid-1999, even the most purist of the remnant revolutionary marxist sects pulled their heads well in, for fear of being shouted down at even the most cursory mention of ‘class’, ‘ideology’ or the like. Anarchism of a determinedly anti-analytical nature has become the dominant tone of the movement, especially in Europe, connecting with punk/situationist style groups such as Reclaim the Streets, the rave movement and other subcultures. This is being re-evaluated in the UK, after a series of ill-thought-out and counterproductive actions — such as digging up a public park in order to ‘reclaim’ it — but there is no immediate prospect of a lift in consciousness.

Nevertheless it will come. As the disastrous and stultifying final stages of Marxism-Leninism become a historical memory, and the ineffectuality of action without theory becomes apparent, a hunger for praxis will arise. What currently passes for a political philosophy among the new anti-global-free-trade movement derives neither from Marx, nor Bakunin, nor even Rousseau, but from Pollyanna. It is a stark refusal to acknowledge the profound contradictions of community and individuality, global connection and democracy, surplus production and equality, and an ideology whose minimalism disguises the contradictions whose fault lines run across the middle of the protestors’ own lives. I can’t be the only person to have stopped off at a Starbucks en route to a demonstration whose participants were busy trashing one.

Such a historical juncture throws the question of what is to be done firmly back on ‘theoretical producers’ as to how they communicate with groups who may once again be receptive to a fundamental rethinking, whose vision may now be wide enough to encompass a new big picture. Above all, this must connect the everyday life of the North with the global and corporate structures oppressing the South. This is a prelude to a post-marxism that does not go under that name, a new key to understanding the world. It is one that has been underway for some time in the publications of this organisation, and from other quarters. Continuing the revolutionary spirit of what has gone before means abandoning much of its vocabulary — and with it the ubiquitous ‘post’ prefix that went with it. Class, alienation, labour-power, value, ideology and so on — the general structures which underpin them have not changed, but their particular and material form has, and these new phenomena must be named and identified. ‘Class’ for example can be a general term to cover material social categories/agents, but its particular form is still interpreted as a relationship to ownership of the means of production — where physical production has been the privileged term. To theorise a world in which intellectual production will determine the form of value requires a rethinking of material social categories. ‘Class’ may now be too laden with the particular connotations of Marxism to serve as a useful general term for these categories/ agents.

To talk in a new way of the contradictions of an information/media/excess society and to show that such phenomena are a dimension of the same processes that immiserates the South may be seen as quixotic at a time when many believe that events have confirmed the most basic tenets of Marxism. But without a better picture of how things are, there can be no sketching of a vision of ‘socialism’ that is neither fantastical nor mundane. And without a better picture of what a revolutionised future would look like, there can be no sustained revolutionary (in the widest sense of the term) movement in the twenty-first century.