“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.

The others in the coordinating group were all really nice, but there is just this cultural gap between us, that is hard to bridge. And now I’m not talking about “culture” as in “national culture” or “ethnic culture”; with “culture” I mean “organizational culture” – the way of conducting things, the aims one has and most of all: the dedication one is willing to give for a cause. Several of the others had a background from the central leadership in huge organizations and so they were used very much to this administrative way of thinking. Now I know the culture in these central leaderships as well – to a large part from the start-up days of Solid and to a lesser extend from RV (where I have never held an elected position (but once or so), but have been in charge of various electronic things which in reality gave me some central control). I know that kind of culture, but I don’t like it – especially when it’s done in the control freak way. One difference is though that the groups I have been working with have all had a clear political message – pointing towards a more or less clear political goal representing a vision of a diferent world, while several of the others have been working with groups that are to span over a large amount of people with lots of different opinions and only focusing on one narrow political aspect.

However, although knowing the centralized culture, I prefer to have things done in groups that aren’t larger than that decisions can be made amongst those participating – and in Norway that is actually possible due to the media that is quite friendly towards the left. Then one can rather cooperate on various issues on an equal basis if one needs to do anything bigger.

Unfortunately, I am heavily outnumbered with my views on the Norwegian left, which has an extremely centralized tradition. Now I’m glad that I actually live in Oslo, cause also those living somewhere up north of the polar circle have all their decisions made for them down here in Oslo by some central-command-VIPs, as I talked about earlier.

Now my project for the last three semesters has been to try to create a little bit of local patriotism up at the university, to try get things going without this idea that one has to act upon commands that come from some central source 2-3 miles away downtown somewhere. To an extend it has worked, I believe, but not with all groups. That’s why I want to concentrate on Blindern Fred – the independent peace group at Campus. These people are the best anyways, and I don’t think I have ever received so much good energy as these have given me!