Category: Activism, Analysis, etc.

Last Thursday we had yet another meeting in the student parliament – scheduled to last 5 hours! And trust me that is one boring place to be, at least as long as we are in the absolute minority.

However, this time I thought I had found something that would be so clearly imperialist and against the principals of everyone, that they would not dare say anything against it. So I brought up a resolution against the Norwegian oil company that started investing in Iraq without the approval of the central government in Baghdad – you might remember our actions last spring and fall.

However, they quickly voted against even considering saying anything about it, as it was seen as being “somethign that the student parliament shouldn’t say anything about”. Hmm, well that might even sound logical to some bureaucrats.

However, at the very same meeting, they managed to declare their support for the campaign for democratizations of Belarus – a campaign that pretends to be nonpartial and support nothing but free elections in Belarus. But in reality only supports one candidate…

Update: The Belarus16 campaign removed all references to Milinkevich on Monday, after we send out a press release…
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In recent years, I have repeatitively been asked to whether I am an anarchist or a socialist – and I’ve always had a hard time answering it. When my French discussion partner came by last night it was there again: “How can anything work, if everybody has to decide upon everything?,” he initiated the conversation, “won’t that just be total chaos?”.

Well, yes, of course I do believe in organizing thing and my political socializisation process happened inside political parties. And I haven’t really changed my mind about parties either: I am quite sure that itis the high amount of organization in socialist political parties as well as in their youth organizations in the Scandinavian countries as well as Germany that have contributed enormously to the high level of consciousness of what’s going on – in the country side. While you can find anarchists mainly in the centers of large urban complexes thinking relatively freely and organizing locally, socialist parties tend to have more of a structure that can accomodate actvists and people with interests in what’s going that live furhter apart, on a day to day basis. Parties send snail amisl to the entire country, have people emloyed at offices (as far as possible spread out throughout the country) and actively try to built up local groups by outside intervention in those areas that they’re not present yet.

Traditionally though, parties have been quite hierarchical, and as the flow of information to a large extend was controlled by those leaders on various levels who had the means to travel around the country (now all that is done through a whole web of different email lists, both party-internal and others crossing party lines, that noone really can control), the whole structure and the day to day politics could be manipulated by a handful of central leaders – and therefore it is questionable how different a system ruled by these guys would have been (or has been in those countries with succesful socialist revolutions) compared to today’s rather hierarchical capitalism.

And that’s where the my anarchist streak comes in: the fundamental believe in having flat structures to as large a degree as possible and not having to follow various party lines that one fundamentally disagrees with. However, as someone who has seen the inside of several parties I can tell you that the parties I know in Scandinavia/Germany are a lot more anarchist in the way they organize themselves in the internet age -no matter what the official party doctrine might be. For example the way campaigns are planed at the Red Voting Alliance of Norway (RV), for whom I fixed computers and built up the previous web page for severals years, is not that one makes a central plan that one expects activists in the entire country to follow through as one might assume. Yes, the plan might be there, but all those sitting at the central office know exactly that all they can give is just suggestions of how to do things (well, the party web site is under their direct control), but in reality it’s local activists around the country that determine what will actually happen. Some things will happen as one suggested, some things will not happen, and some locals always manage to surprise the activists in downtown Oslo with local initiatives around the country that noone here had known about before they see it in the media.

Now today I stumbled upon the following defence of communist anarchism by Murray Bookchin in the old SDS Newspaper New Left Notes back from 1969, but I think it seems surprisingly applicable to today’s situation – take not of the remark of the current technological level of innovation in the US. Read it here

The fall semester is about to be over, and so along come all these causes that one needs to go on the streets for again. Two of the main actions our peace group from the university is involved in is protesting the spread of nuclear technology for civilian use by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Of course, it’s leader El Baradei is mostly known for trying to control the nuclear plans of countries such as Iran, Iraq and North Korea. And surely, that makes him a worthy recepient of the Nobel Peace prize. However, it is not only the IAEA that has a second agenda in its back hand, but also El Baradei ended a presentation on the future of nuclear power in Paris this spring with the words: “It is my hope that, during this conference, we can consider how each of these factors can be addressed, to ensure that nuclear energy remains a viable source of safe, secure and environmentally benign energy.”

Now one should certainly be critical of nuclear proliferation of any kind, but does that mean that one can’t receive the Nobelpeace prize? I have decided for myself that I can support El Baradei personally, for the work connected to trying to stop the spread of nuclear weapons, but I strongly disagree with the IAEA and its work on the spread of atomic energy – and the pure existence of nuclear power plants also makes it a lot easier to built those nuclear weapons.
(read also this letter in Aftenposten that I signed)
Another issue we’re involved in is the Norwegian Oil Corporation (DNO), as they are now the first foreign oil company to actually drill in the region. Our first action on the matter was small, but we got some media attention anyways. I think it is important especially for the foreign media to see that also Norwegians protest this stuff. besides, it is one fo the few cases where we’re actualyl resposnible for protesting against the “Norwegian capital” when they’re trying to exploit foreign people and regions – and that is probably the most important point in making sure one is on the right side in the international class struggle, if you wanna get all Marxist about it…

So Germany finally got a Chancelorete!
But that is not all. Not everything seems to be the same in good old (west-)Germany these days: both Social Democrats and Conservatives are now led by East Germans. Although this fact has triggered some to announce that the whole German unification to be one huge trick with the real plan being a west ward expansion of the GDR, the East Germans in charge in those two parties re unfortunately of the hardcore anti-communist kind.

But how much longer will this whole charade go on? Not many more years, at least if we are to believe Schröder’s wife, Mrs. Köpf-Schröder; for Schröder’s military good-bye reception she chose the song “Mackie Messer” (in addition to “Summertime” by George Gershwin and Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”.). The “Mackie-Messer”-song is part of the “Three Penny Opera” and displays the social decay of the late Weimar Republic (that is the Germany that was before the Third Reich – led by the social democrats with the communists voted mainly by unemployed).
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For those that don’t know t yet: The Left Alliance is a student party which we started last spring and ran for seats in the student parlament. We are the smallest of all parties with our 9 MPs, but that does not hinder us in being the most active.
Now one branch of our strategy is to try to seek media attention around some of our main causes – and that can turn out quite funny as we only have one newspaper for the students at the university (well, plus a radio station).

This week we set a new record, as we managed to get in:

– an endorsement of two candidates for the board of the university (representing faculty), signed by me:

http://universitas.uio.no/?sak=46978

– two letters to the editor, each written by one of our MPs:

http://universitas.uio.no/?sak=46976

http://universitas.uio.no/?sak=46979

And two news stories about causes we are strongly involved in:

http://universitas.uio.no/?sak=46988

http://universitas.uio.no/?sak=46964

In addition we were mentioned briefly in at least two other pieces. And of cause they put me and Benjamin (another MP who is quite strongly involved) on the funny page:

http://universitas.uio.no/?sak=46959

Now if only we could change the world as well… 🙂

PS: it was brought to my attention that this might look as we’re not about anything but to get in the media. Well, yes it’s part of our strategy, but with a strategy you tend to want to achieve a goal – which in our case is not to get into the student newspaper but rather, boradly speaking, is about changing the world into a more progressive direction.

It is not many weeks ago that I complained about the way I look like this 1968-alike dinosaur among my fellow students all of who have no relation to the protests in Prague (2000), Nice, Gothenburg, Copenhagen, etc. which have been so defining for quite a few of us.

But suddenly the crises of the system seems to be there again-or at least the outskirts of it: in the US, more than half of Americans believe that the President is lying. The summit in Argentina that lasted up until yesterday, which was supposed to set up the establishment of an All-American free trade zone, ended with Bush leaving early with no result coming out of it, and Maradona calling him “human waste”, while president Chavez of Venezuela just calls him “Mr. Danger” – when he is not either on the phone with Mr. Castro or citing some famous socialist revolutionary.

But that is not it – read on for my examples of how the world is sliding into another revolutionary epoch… 😉
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An interesting issue for Marxist social anthropologists is the way nationalism seems to survive as an ideology – despite quite a lot of factors that one might think would go against it. Most of all I’m thinking about the increased amount of communication across country boundaries which has been made possible through the internet. Another factor is probably the cutbacks in social services and the universal upgrading of the military and police power of the states, which both should make it hard for a large part of the population to identify with “their country.”

However, somehow nationalism (in the broad sense meaning simply that people identify as being part of a “nation” that usually has a state of its own) seems to survive, although in new forms. Now it is of course questionable how strong it actually is at any given time and whether the national identity people carry is their one and only or primary identity, or whether it is just one out of many identities — much in line with what many current Marxists like Eric Hobsbawm have been saying for quite a while.

Nevertheless, the cases one can observe can be quite funny — I have just seen a Norwegian and a German of it. I’m not going to analyze them very much. Just read and be amused! 🙂

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As some of you probably know, we just got a new government in Norway, and so now the “Socialist Left Party” is part of the government. While they held talks, we were a few that did some theatric action around the place where they were talking (seepost a few days ago).

Well, now they are finished talking and have released a new plan for the Norwegian part of the occupation force in Iraq. The plan is now to leave a grand total of 1 soldier in Iraq. Yes, you read correctly, there will be a Norwegian occupation force of ONE (O-N-E) soldier in Iraq!

Now, this is ridiculous, and of course it’s meant to be just too little for anybody in Norway getting mad at it, while Bush can still list Norway as a supporter on his “war on terror” in Iraq.

Now what should we do about it?
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As most of you probably got by now will Germany’s next chancellor be a female – Angela Merkel. Although she represents the Christian democrats (=Conservatives), she has a past from the political system of the former East Germany (DDR). In the youth organization Free German Youth (FDJ), she was a “secretary for agitation and propaganda”. Now whether that was on a local level or on a higher level seems to be hard to figure out. In either case, that position is something that you wouldn’t just do, if you didn’t believe in the system on some level. So she is not the first woman to take that post – she will also be Germany’s first Stalinist to become chancellor! Congratulations!
In general, the elections went just as I had predicted, with the Left Party gaining enough votes to make both a Social-democratic/Green and a Christian-democrat/Libertarian coalition impossible. However, what I had not believed was that Schröder would completely ignore the Socialists. This means that the majority that SPD/Green and Left Party hold will actually turn into a government with the CDU having the upper hand.
However, I certainly hope Bavaria’s arch-conservative Stoiber is right in predicting a radicalization of the masses. This should hopefully mean an even bigger Left Party next time, but even more importantly it should mean the build up of an opposition movement outside the parliament. And I must admit that I am impressed by the German left – they usually seem to have so little interest in cooperating and they split all the time over the most bizare issues. But right now they really look like they are about to make it! Congratulations!

“Finally Free,” I thought this morning upon waking up. Although I had predicted the passing away of summer since about mid august on this blog, it was a much freer Johannes that woke up this morning and realized that fall had finally invaded Oslo. Or lets call it autumn, and lets say “arrived” and not “invaded.” Cause this is a happy event. Yesterday two things happened: we had the release party of the social anthropological yearbook (which I have been using most of July through September to set, have been co-editor and written an article in).

The other thing was not quite so funny, as yesterday was the end of an era. I dropped out of the coordinating group of Attac Blindern. I had been sitting there since last December, and I felt that I had been doing an overly large proportion of the work connected to it. And also, we really didn’t manage to get new people active within Attac. We were only a handfull of activists a few years back (2001), that together started Attac at the univeristy – even before it was started nationally. But then the bureaucrates started moving in. While most of my former co-activists have left Attac a long time ago and have been denouncing it as a career-building project for single individuals, I tried to cross some fo the divide, after returning from Douglas, AZ and the experience of a place with no anti-capitalist left to speak of at all.
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