Now that the initial surge of euphoria and adrenaline is slowly dissipating into afterglow, it's time to dissect the S11 protests against the World Economic Forum's Melbourne summit. What made them a success? Here's an attempt at some answers.
1. The tactic was right
S11's chosen tactic — a mass, non-violent blockade — proved to be a masterstroke; not a magic tactic for all time and circumstances, certainly, but the one most suited to this occasion.
The decision to blockade the casino was in tune with the protesters' desire to do more than just go through the "normal channels", while also allowing the opportunity for participation by tens of thousands. 
The size of the mobilisation established our legitimacy as a bona fide people's movement and flung WEF director Claude Smadja's accusation that we were "oppressive minorities" right back in his face.
Numbers also provided strength — cowards as they are, police attacked only when they considerably outnumbered us. A smaller blockade would have resulted in the bloodbath police threatened.
And the adherence to non-violence, in spite of all the debate about it beforehand, worked like a charm. By refusing to be provoked into street fighting, the peaceful blockaders threw responsibility for the violence back at police, again confirming that it's always best to put the enemy in the role of aggressor.
2. It takes all sorts to make a revolution
The source of S11's strength was its breadth and diversity: unionists, students, old-time lefties, the newly radical, men, women, black, white, anarchists, socialists, feminists, environmentalists, almost everyone.
This diversity allowed it to appeal to an enormous cross-section of the Australian people, to present itself truthfully as a genuine response to the evils of corporate domination of life.
Its appeal was far, far greater than if it had come across merely as a "student action" or a "union action" or a "greenie action".
This diversity was also crucial to building S11. While the S11 Alliance was the main practical organiser of the blockade itself, the incredible momentum for that blockade primarily came from outside that group, from all the many different, self-starting people who wanted to see it work.
3. Diversity can be unified
Of even greater significance is that S11 proved that diversity becomes powerful when it's unified. When they stand together, all the different pieces coalesce into something far greater than the sum of the parts.
It certainly helped that that unity only needed to last for one event and for three days — and it required considerable patient, tireless work from many people to manage even that.
Nevertheless, that such a movement could hold together was no small feat in itself and should greatly expand the left's possibilities for future alliances.
This success should also lay to rest one idea, a remnant from a discredited postmodernism, which has throttled the left's potential for some years: the idea that movements can only be unified by oppressing and silencing the separate, often conflicting, identities within them — that collectivity requires the sacrifice of individuality. S11 showed that's not true, or at least need not be true.
4. Organisation counts
Now this gets more controversial: the blockade worked because some people dared to organise and coordinate it, and not leave it to autonomous groups all doing their own thing.
Certainly, autonomous groups did do their own thing; many made an enormous contribution, some less so. But if it had been left at that, the blockade would have been nowhere near as successful, and could well have imploded into total chaos.
By providing marshalling at most blockade points, "spotters" to monitor police movements, a stage and platforms of speakers and an overall coordination between the marshals, the S11 Alliance provided the blockade what it needed: a central nervous system.
This allowed quick communication, troubleshooting, reinforcement of weak blockade points, experience-swapping, political content and motivation, liaison with other groups like Trades Hall and medical and legal teams, media coordination and unifying projects (like the "victory march" on September 13).
This was not the "Seattle model". The blockading of the World Trade Organisation meeting last November relied far more on spontaneity and autonomous affinity groups doing whatever, without a coherent, overall plan.
S11, in contrast, was far more organised and coordinated. As one disgruntled journalist for the Sydney Morning Herald remarked to a marshal, "I was in Seattle, you guys have it all over them, I could get in and out at will there".
5. Organisations count
This level of coordination did not arise out of nowhere; it was rather the result of the deliberate decisions and the carefully laid plans of particular organisations.
Some have compared the global movement against capital to a swarm of bees, powerful because headless, and have revelled in its spontaneity. This captures a certain truth: the movement's surge of the past year has been largely spontaneous and it is a unity of many different "bees".
But the movement-as-swarm is an idealisation and misses another truth: the backbone of all social movements is inevitably provided by organised groups with established ideologies, conceptions and influence, whether unions or activist organisations or radical political parties. This current movement is no different.
In this case, without the coordinated activity of certain organisations (the Democratic Socialist Party, for instance, or Friends of the Earth, or the militant unions like the CFMEU and the AMWU), S11 would not have had the impact that it did. The tactic of a mass, non-violent blockade might never have been adopted, the broader union movement might never have backed it even to the extent it did, the blockade itself might never have been coordinated.
6. Democracy is the only effective unifier
The best-laid plans would have all come to nought if they hadn't enjoyed overwhelming support. This blockade was organised and coordinated because participants wanted it to be so, not because it was enforced; the power to decide always rested with the blockaders themselves.
Each blockade site made their own decisions through democratic discussion and voting — on whether to sit or stand in the face of police, on when to end each day.
Far from being an external and deadening imposition, as the advocates of the Seattle model feared, the S11 Alliance's coordination melded with the protesters' striving towards greater cohesion.
Routine marshalling, such as shoring up one blockade or another, was done by request. More complex marshalling (such as the motion for the "victory march") was done by proposal and simultaneous vote at each blockade site.
This should lay to rest another hoary myth on the left: the near-pathological fear that "leadership", from anyone, is contrary to the goal of self-emancipation. In this case, the organisations at the movement's core "led" by persuasion and, by so doing, they enabled the movement's self-organisation.
7. It's the message that matters
All this so far has been to do with the techniques of struggle, rather than its political and ideological essence. But one of S11's most crucial lessons is the importance of the political message.
After all, we failed in our stated, technical objective: to "shut it down". The summit went ahead. All we could do was disrupt it, not stop it.
But the real battle is never the technical one. It's the battle for political legitimacy, for public opinion, for "hearts and minds".
The reason we were victorious was because of the power of our anti-corporate message and its multiplication by 20,000 voices. The summit went ahead but, by its end, it was discredited, revealed to millions as a gabfest of cosseted business leaders who could only meet with the assistance of police batons.
Our self-identification as "anti-capitalist" also prompted millions to, perhaps for the first time, consider the overall, the fundamental: what sort of social system should we live in? That alone is a tremendous victory.
8. Vague is charming but harmful
S11 was limited by its ideological and political vagueness. The movement communicated the sources and depths of its anger but its solutions were indistinct and unclear.
What does S11 say about the World Bank's debt relief plans, for example, or about how international trade should work, or about what we should do with transnational corporations?
This movement needs to outgrow its present, childlike fuzziness. It needs to develop a greater ideological, as well as organisational, cohesion so that it can communicate more than basic emotions.
Otherwise, the spokespeople for this movement will not be of the movement, but outside it. It will be left to people like the ACTU's Sharan Burrow or those in far-from-radical non-government organisations to articulate what our solutions are.
Our movement can be as vibrant or even as organised as it likes. But if these people are defining what is seen as the movement's political standpoint, ours will not be a revolutionary movement, but rather its opposite. We'll serve quite different agendas from what we intended.
9. There is an alternative
This growing, international movement's anger at corporate greed and tyranny, its targeting of transnational corporations and their political lackeys, its self-description as "anti-capitalist" puts it on the road to the ideology it needs to embrace: revolutionary socialism.
United around such an ideology, it could find the ideas to guide its storming of heaven.
Paradoxically, the S11 experience has also provided revolutionary socialism with part of the thing it lacks: a practical and contemporary example of the people's power which lies at the heart of the socialist idea.
It felt like it at the time but that feeling wasn't just euphoria. S11 did show how possible, how easy, how wonderful it is to rise up. If we can build a small town around Crown Casino based on solidarity and popular democracy, why not the whole world?
[Sean Healy was one of Green Left Weekly's correspondents in Melbourne to report on the S11 protests. He is also a member of the national executive of the Democratic Socialist Party.]