I discovered these two books reviews yesterday: one in Norwegian (Norwegian) by the student magazine at our institute, and this one (English) at a pretty good anthropology website. Although they write in rather different ways, they both focus on the fact that I was very much engaged in the world of my informants in Douglas and the latter specifically critisizes the fact that I concluded with what I thought needed to be done.

Now I do agree that their criticism is valid, as far as we are speaking of liberal academic practice. This is what we today know as being the practice in “academia” and it is what gets you high grades: self-censor yourself to say absolutely nothing while showing how many books you have read so far.

This contrasts highly with the ideals I am trying to follow: For a Marxist (and I am excluding the academizised version of it for now) the point of conducting and research or study is precisely to be better skilled to change the circumstances under whih people exist and suffer.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it. (Marx 1845 Theses on Feurbach: II, VII, XI)

and for a radical such changes will with necessity be huge and, uhm well, radical… 🙂

Hi there, you guys haven’t heard from me for a while. Now you might have thought that the system finally got me, but the truth is that this is only the state of affairs temporarily. In other words: the teaching practice takesquite a lot of time that I could have used on other projects. That does of course not mean that it’s not fun any more in any way.

And also, the silence here is somewhat of an exaggeration if you look at what I actually am able to get done. One of the things I did get done was to discuss the Muhammed picture case in Flensborg Avis (they do not let you find stories under one month old at their site). Now there are two reasons why I did it there: First of all it’s exactly NOT because I have any plans of ever going back to the wicked border area Germany/Denmark (where the paper is based), quite on the contrary: I know I can write stuff in that paper with a readership far far away from here without having to feel repercussions from my surroundings. Secondly, to a large extent I praised the Norwegian government’s handling of the case and asked for the resignation of the Danish prime minister for their extremely poor and confrontational imperialist-minded handling of it all. And what point is there in addressing a Norwegian audience telling them that they and their government are doing everything exactly right?

Continue reading Vote for Venstrealliansen – And yes, I’m still Alive! →

So the newest scare is upon us.This time it’s the birds who’ll be coming to get us. After sheep, bees and cows, it’s about time for the birds to be trying their luck with ending human civilization. And the media helps us in explaining just where the battle man against bird stands at the time, while governments are doing just exactly what makes common sense when they send out experts in allbody dresses whenever a dead bird is reported anywhere within a few hundred kilometers of any known cases of the Avian Flue. It’s just as professional as it wasfor them to ask us to stop the car and walk through some chemicals whenever we were passing some border line during the heydays of the Mouth-and-Hoof disease (whenever someone goes to a farm, it’s very likely that he’ll wear the same shoes as he will wear when he takes an airplane some days later, right?).
As far as I’ve heard, altogether three cats have so far managed to contract the virus — and that was on the Island where it was first found (Rügen). Now I’ve seen quite a number of pictures of cats eating various small birds in newspapers all across Europe after that, and the number of headline stories about how to avoid getting it yourself have risen immensely as well. Alone on that island, the German military collected 3000 dead birds. Frightening? Well, not if you consider, that under 20% of those found had the virus, and only a small percentage of those actually died of it. (On the 21st of February, when they had found 1000 dead birds, the number of infected cases was 79 — while the north-eastern part of the island houses 69,000 wild birds and altogether 400,000 chicken live on the entire island). And while world wide there have been no cases of cat to human transmissions yet, the German army was granted the right to use a Tornado fighter jet in order to find more bird carcases — of course without result — as one couldn’t tell the difference between dead and alive birds on the pictures they shot! In Russia, Deputy Speaker of the national parliament Vladimir Zhirinovsky is reported to have suggested to arm all males between Sochi and Crimea (both at the Black Sea) in order to stop the yearly bird migration to and from Turkey.

Ts, ts, what can I say? Maybe this is a good time to go out and waste a lot of money on yourself at the mall — you know you might not live to see tomorrow.

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…
Continue reading Orange Revolution in Belarus? →

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