WHY “CHOICE” IS NOT ENOUGH! An Overview of Abortion in the US, Historically and Today

[Fire on the Mountain is pleased to post this new article by Mirk. Like the last one of hers we ran, on the 2012 elections, this was originally written for Rødt!, the magazine of the Norwegian political party called Red. 

The forces of sweetness and light have had cause for celebration lately as the homophobic right wing has taken a terrible beating on the legal front and in the opinion polls alike. But with International Women's Day only a week away, we had best not forget the damage they continue to do to women's reproductive freedom. This article lays out just how grim things really are.]
 

by Judith "Mirk" Mirkinson

When I was 21, I had my first abortion.  It was 1972 and New York was one of the few states that had made it legal.  I went to a lovely clinic and was surrounded by women from all over the East and Midwest of the country.  

By the next year, the Supreme Court had passed the landmark decision Roe v Wade which made abortion legal everywhere. The decision was made on the basis of the right to privacy and due process--covered by the Fourteenth and Ninth Amendments to the Constitution. “Roe” (as it came to be known) was the culmination of centuries of struggle over who would control women’s reproduction in the US.

I was one of the lucky ones. I had grown up with a mother who had talked about abortion and I had marched and fought for abortion myself.  It wasn’t a tragedy, it wasn’t great, it wasn’t the best form of birth control, but there it was. Abortion was essential to my ability to control my own body and decisions--and thus essential to women achieving their full equality.

Control has and will always be the issue when it comes to women’s reproduction. From the beginning of time, women have been constrained through their biology. It is only now that international law (most explicitly through the CEDAW--the Convention to End Discrimination Against Women) is addressing the necessity for guaranteeing reproductive health. But even in countries where women can have access to contraception and health care, regulation of abortion is one way to contain women.

The Case Of The US

The US is a case in point. Control of women in the US has always been intertwined with the issues of race and class. Thus, one can’t talk about the history of abortion and reproductive “rights” without also discussing the intersection of those rights with the history of slavery and racism.

As early as 1632, there were laws governing the reproductive rights of Black women. (UH – THERE WAS SLAVERY!) Enslaved women were considered breeders--a resource to increase the slave population and they had no maternal rights. African women were property and thus their children were also considered property. As a result a child could be taken away at any time. A slave owner could even determine where a woman’s future children would go. For instance one could "leave" a particular woman to one descendant in one’s will, but leave her future children to another! The threat and reality

Read more!

Letter to a Norwegian Historian

[This post requires a little background for non-Norwegian readers. It was written by Morten Falck, long the main science journalist at Aftenposten, Norway's leading daily, and a personal friend. Morten, his wife Sissel Henriksen, and most of my Norwegian acquaintances are members of a newly formed left-wing political party, Rødt (Red, in English). Rødt candidates won office in cities and towns across the country this year, and the party may well place several members in the Storting, Norway's parliament, in the national elections in 2009.

One of Rødt's predecessor organizations was the Worker's Communist Party of Norway (AKP in Norwegian), a major feature of the country's political life since the late '60s. Recent years have seen a spate of articles and books denouncing the AKP as 1. lunatic leftists single-handedly ruining Norway's near-perfect society and 2. totally ineffectual and insignificant. US residents used to seeing today's anti-war demonstrators dismissed as dirty, elitist, granola-eating, America-hating, tree-hugging 1960s leftovers will recognize the pattern--and the purpose: scaring people off from making common cause with a force threatening to the powers that be.

This open letter to one of those critical of the AKP was published in the daily Klassekampen and Morten, knowing I would be interested, kindly had an English translation awaiting me when I arrived in Oslo to attend the recent memorial service for Cde. Tron Øgrim.. Certain that I am not the only non-Norwegian who will find it fascinating, I got his permission to post it here. He has helped further by providing cool graphics, some never printed or posted before.]

A representative of the "social democratic paradise" seeks to engage the young Tron Øgrim in dialogue.

Dear Hans Petter Sjøli,

You have written a book about the history of the Norwegian Marxist-Leninist movement, Mao, Min Mao. That history is my history as well, and you have kindly mentioned my name en passant on page 24. That is why I write you this letter. For I do not recognise my own history in your rendering.

That is not primarily because of errors you make in the details, like when you tell us that the leftist scholar Gutorm Gjessing was a professor of biology. That certainly would have come as a surprise to him, sitting in his office at the ethnographic museum! Such errors could make me suspect you of sloppiness – but never mind, we can all make a mistake.

It is more serious when you write that the Socialist People’s Party (SF) in the 1960s was "a Mecca for industrious troublemakers from the 'east side' with a liking for green tea." (p. 19) Green tea? We had not even heard of the stuff in the Sixties. This kind of error shows me that you lack sufficient knowledge of the background. You seem to take the situation of today for granted, and make your assessments from that. But please remember that the Sixties was before we hit oil. It was before the Value Added Tax was introduced. It was back when Norway was a (relatively) poor country, and before the selection of commodities offered became overwhelming. The Sixties was another world.

You call yourself a historian, and claim to have researched the history of the Marxist-Leninist movement. But that makes your description of the Bryn-Hellerud-area of Oslo, a cradle of the movement, rather odd. "There are far more petty-bourgeois villas than worn city blocks or apartment buildings in the area," you tell us on page 22.

"Worn city blocks"? Here, far out in the rural Østre Aker district, where the apartment buildings sprouted from peasants' fields during the '50s and '60s? And why don’t you pose the question of who lived in these wooden houses that you call petty-bourgeois villas? And since you make a point of it – did the Marxist-Leninist movement have the most members in the apartment buildings or in the wooden houses?

Petty bourgeous villas? Here is the Bryn Hellerud area seen from the west in 1951. The author, then six, moved into the apartment pointed out by the foremost red arrow in December 1951.

The Bryn match factory is pointed out by the red arrow in the center of the picture. Klosterheim is situated among the trees just beneath that. Tron Øgrim lived approximately where the red arrow in the upper left corner is pointing. The three red circles shows brick works along the Alna river and the railway, which can be seen running horizontally through the picture. Teisen high school is situated just outside of the picture to the left (in the opposite direction from the first red arrow), Bryn railway station, with the former brewery, and the then active textile mills along the Bryn falls are just outside the right picture frame.

Being a historian, you ought to know we are talking here of an old working class area, the scene of the famous match workers' strike of 1889, maybe the most famous strike in the whole history of the Norwegian working class, because it was the first woman workers' strike. It became an area of brick works, textile mills, chemical industry, breweries, etc. (The Bryn Temperence Union was founded prior to the 20th century by workers' wives who were infuriated because the brewery sold beer in pails to the brickworkers on payday. Bryn-Hellerud SUF, the core from which the young Marxist-Leninist movement sprang in Norway, held our meetings at Klosterheim, the hall of the Bryn Temperence Union.) Bryn was the first "railway station town" in Norway, as the station was established in the growing industrial center at the Bryn Falls. You will find plenty of sociological facts about the environment in Pål Steigan’s book At the Square of Heavenly Peace, which is listed among the sources in the back of your book..

Why are you placing quotation marks around "east side"? Maybe it is just a part of the rhetoric? Starting from page one you employ an ironic – not to say sarcastic – distancing toward the object of your research. A rather elaborate choice of words seems designed to lead the reader's thinking. (Just one example: “The chairman lit the path” (page 18) – to make us associate Mao Zedong with the ultra-left Peruvian guerrilla movement “Sendero Luminoso.” But historically and logically this is to turn things upside down.)

As research this does not call for much admiration. But it suits the pattern of the book. You start by claiming that "the movement – as far as one can call it by so great a name – achieved very little politically. It hardly affected the social development" in "this country, which in fifty years had changed from impoverished outcrop into a rich, modern and in every way successful society, governed by the workers movement's own party. The revolution had been completed. The Social Democratic Party had in many ways created a social democratic paradise. The working class had got a social and material lift unequalled in history. The social security net was in place…" (page 9-10)

With appropriate modesty you write that this is not the final history, just ”my attempt to understand the Marxist-Leninist movement.” (page 14). But both the ironic language and the prejudiced point of view are obstacles to understanding. You start from a picture of Norway that is unrecognisable, and renders the 1960s and the Marxist-Leninist movement incomprehensible.

I will thank you for making it so clear that you don’t understand, as well as for suggesting why. If history is to be comprehensible, it must be viewed against the preceding times, and every social movement must be understood in relationship to its own time, not the present of some historian living several decades later. Oh, yes, I do recognise the picture of Norway that you draw. They served it to us in school: "The class struggle is over. Norway is the perfect democracy, the best of all worlds." But it was precisely when reality broke the school-peddled myths that we became Marxist-Leninists. Allow me to get a little personal.

Understanding the sixties

On the 25th of January, 1965, Winston Churchill died. He was mourned by many in Norway. The department store Steen og Strøm in Oslo filled its big windows with pictures from his life. One late evening I came by, and stopped to look at the display.

Nedre Slottsgate (Lower Castle Street) lay desolate and quiet. Only a single, elderly gentleman in a gray coat and galoshes came walking through the sleet with a worn leather briefcase under his arm. "Lawyer," I thought.

He came up to me, tapped on my shoulder with a bony finger, nodded towards the picture behind the mirror glass pane, where Sir Winston stood bare-headed and unyielding among the brickheaps in a bombed London street – and said in a somewhat dry voice: “Young man, He didn’t have as much hair on his head as you. But he had so much more within!"

Did I glibly retort ”So that’s where he had it!”? Oh, no, not in my wildest dreams! I had not yet turned 19, and was not yet accustomed to being insulted in public just because I had let my hair grow till it covered the edge of my ears. But I was soon to learn that hair length made me a total outlaw. Nice, cultured grown-ups could freely shower me with disparaging remarks because my hair was longer than average. Elderly married couples would step demonstratively sideways out into the driveway, pointing their fingers and hollering when I was going for a walk with my parents through the quiet Sunday streets of Oslo the following summer (by then both hair and beard had grown longer still) "Hey! Is that a boy or a girl?"

The author, apparently a boy, 1968

The reactions were not unique, rather, typical. The next year a young pupil named Odd Hansen was thrown out of Teisen High School because he had long hair and a beard – and even wore spectacles. The teachers claimed it was impossible to teach such a pupil.

But over the shimmering television screen flickered black-and-white images from the Vietnam war: Children burnt by napalm, captured guerilla fighters: young women and young men with their hands tied behind their backs – youths like us. They were communists, the Norwegian voices repeated after the American soundtrack. A specially vile type of communists, called “Vietcong”. But to me they looked like quite ordinary humans, like us. (At that time, the television still broadcast something called news, dealing with important events all over the world, and it was more than just headlines.)

There was an enormous gap between the suffocating, stagnant, unidirectional, official Norwegian "reality," where all problems, everything that did not "fit in" was swept under the carpet – and the reality that confronted us outside of schools, newspapers and public opinion. Out there, in the world, there was war! Out there, in reality, young girls who had unwanted pregnancies died from illegal attempts at abortion. To bear a child out of wedlock was still a scandal. There was no security. Outside, in the real world, there still existed enormous differences between the poor and the rich, and a quarter of a century after the start of the Second World War, the third one loomed as a substantial threat. The very end, nuclear war. And yet, my hair length was a bigger problem!

We had observed the 25th anniversary of the start of the Second World War and the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, with television serials, radio-programs and movies. Strong anti-war movies like Oh, What a Lovely Warand King and Country. The Russian nuclear tests at Novaja Zemlya had added new and nervous terms like "Strontium 90" to our vocabulary, and the Cuban missile crisis was still fresh in memory. I, like many others, was an ardent pacifist. But the world was standing at the brink of war. Indeed, it was war. In Vietnam, my fellow adolescents were fighting for their lives and freedom against the United States of America, the very superpower of technology.

Merely twenty years had passed since my parents fought the same struggle against the German Nazi occupants. But still the important thing was that you dressed like your grandpa and wore a haircut like a US marine. Form was the important thing, the surface, the look of things, not the content. If we did not have the same conditions, we still were to look the same! Newly ironed tulle curtains, clean fingernails, membership in the state church. It was essential not to deviate. The pressure to conform was unbearable. No one asked for your opinion. The politicians took care of opinions on your behalf. And though the social democratic politician Einar Førde did not coin the sentence until much later, it was supposed that "We are all social democrats."

I commence

In 1965 I participated in my first march against the war in Vietnam. I dragged a friend along, for I knew no one there. But I had to participate in that demonstration. I had to express my opinion. So was I interested in politics, then? I was not. Art, literature, movies and theater, history – and biology, but not politics. But the world meant something to me, for that was where I intended to live.

The march started from the square outside of Centrum Cinema. A couple of hundred participants rallied there, serious grown-ups with hats and coats, some youths deep in parkas. They were strangers, unknown to me, but obviously many of them knew one another. That demonstration did not make me an activist.

But the next year I got acquainted with Bryn/Hellerud SUF.

1966 was a year of active recruiting for the Bryn/Hellerud local section of the Socialist Youth League, SUF. (The SUF was the youth section of the Sf, the Socialist People's Party, then the leftmost of Norway's large electoral parties.) My brother was elected editor of the school newspaper at Teisen High School, and became a member of Bryn/Hellerud. But I did not follow suit. I was older, had turned twenty, and taken the preliminary course of philosophy at the University, today called Examen philosophicum. I had objections, I didn’t like communism, I was concerned about the environment.

Members of the
Bryn/Hellerud
local section of
the Socialist
Youth League, a
hothouse for
future leaders
of the AKP.

Right: Jorun
Gulbrandsen
Below: Tron
Øgrim

But the Bryn-Hellerud-section did not give up. One night the doorbell rang. Outside stood Tron Øgrim. He stepped out of his botfores (a sort of ankle-high lined winter galoshes), deposited his fur-coat, I brewed some tea (ordinary Earl Grey!) and we withdrew to the boy’s room. During teapot after teapot, night by night, we discussed topics like pacifism, war and peace, revolution, communism, socialism, the Chinese cultural revolution, economics, philosophy, materialism and idealism, dialectics and metaphysics, the atomic bomb, literature, art, environmentalism, and of course science fiction – or Tron would not have been Tron.

We discussed Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the Swedish diplomat Georg Borgström's books on food supply for the world’s exploding population – and Reverend Malthus. Or if there was any hope for the great whales. Then Tron came armed with a copy of Scientific American. Tron was well prepared. In the end I had no arguments left, and only one road was open if I wanted to keep my self respect: I had to join. Tron made me a Marxist, and for that I will always be grateful. He taught me to see how the world works.

You wonder why we became Marxist-Leninists. But every opposition in the world was Marxist-Leninist. The Chinese Cultural Revolution was a revitalisation of Marxism-Leninism, it was seen as extremely liberating, and inspired uprisings and protest all over the world. Anti-imperialists the world over called themselves Maoists. It would have been a much greater mystery had we not become Marxist-Leninists.

Did we make a difference?

To see whether the Marxist-Leninist movement has had any significance, we have to look at Norway before the movement emerged, and see what changes have taken place.

I remember a discussion during a Norwegian lesson in high school, after an essay about whether women might or ought to be employed outside of home. It may have been in the autumn of 1963 or spring, 1964. We were 24 pupils in the English class, with a great majority of girls. But during that discussion only two – maybe three – were of the opinion that women ought to have their own occupation! One of the heavy counterarguments came from a boy who lived in the military apartments at Ulven. His mother had been away the preceding week, and there had been no one to empty the ashtrays!

The '60s really was another world, and I doubt you would have liked it there.

The fight for women’s equality with men met with opposition from broad sections of the official Norwegian society. It was far from evident that women were entitled to their own occupation. An individual woman’s right to decide for an abortion, which you may consider an evident democratic right, was actively sabotaged by the Socialist Left Party, which gave the individual conscience of a single, male Member of Parliament higher priority than the right of women to control their own bodies.

The fight for kindergartens for everyone has still not been won, and the fight for equality at work will probably go on for a long time yet. But today the demand for the six hour working day has wind in the sails, and it is generally accepted that women have the right to provide for themselves. Would the world have changed in the same way without us?

When the SUF raised the issue of Palestine, shock waves penetrated far into The Socialist People’s Party (our mother party). The party weekly Orientering and the party central committee took a clear stand against us. Now even the former conservative Prime Minister Kaare Willoch agrees with us. Do you think this has happened on its own?

When we supported the South Vietnamese resistance, the National Liberation Front (NLF), people asked “Are you a communist?!” to shut us up. The best answer was a clear and loud “Yes!”. That shut them up. It still is legitimate to be a communist in Norway. In the mid 1960s the Cold War was at its sharpest, and the shadow of McCarthyism loomed heavy im public opinion. It was close to sacrilege to criticize the USA, whatever the reason. Now, a great majority stands against the US war in Iraq. And everyone agrees that the US was a bandit and an aggressor in the Vietnam War. A lot of people also agree that the US is an imperialist state. Do you think that has happened by itself?

We headed into work places and met petrified unions whose leadership were shocked by any initiative from ordinary members. The members were to listen to their elected representatives, and apart from that, keep "order in the ranks." Newly employed at the Freia chocolate factory in the autumn of 1970, I took the podium and proposed that we should support the on-going strike among the bus and tram drivers of Oslo. My local union leader was married to a striking bus driver, but she was a member of the ruling social-democratic Labor Party, and so she (and the rest of the board) opposed the proposition. But they lost the vote. Their panic was palpable.

On page 47 you tell us: "Towards the end of 1969 [the organisation initiated] the most widespread strike activity in recent times in Norway." Don’t you think that all the strikes might have come as a result of actual unrest among the workers? We raised the fight for local mobilization, against the rule of pampered union bosses and suffocating Social Democratic control of the labor movement, we supported local demands and local actions. Today another climate has taken hold in Norwegian industry. Local initiatives are normal. Union bosses loyal to the government are no longer in monolithic control.

We broke the sixties’ dank conformity, we expanded democracy.

Keeping the EU's thumb off Norway

The fight against ruling class efforts to bring Norway into the European Economic Community (EEC) was critical, yet you focus on the slogan we used! You write that EEC was "the name the Vote No people used for the European Community (EU)." No! The name European Economic Community had been commonly used in Norwegian debate since the early Sixties. With the aim of sugaring the pill, the Norwegian Department of Foreign Affairs pushed Norwegian membership in 1971-1972 under such new banners as European Commonwealth (EF) and European Economic commonwealth (EØF), to draw on the Norwegian traditions of collectivity, but to no avail. The most rational name was of course that which had been used in the debate all along, and which people understood without further explanation. [During the 1994 effort to re-raise this question, when the AKP again played a leading role in urging our fellow Norwegians to Vote No, we used the term European Union, because that was the one evryone understood. It didn't help advocates of Norway joining--the proposal was still rejected.]

Falck, family and colleagues, again making no difference, during 2nd campaign to defeat EU membership, 1994

You serve up some figures (p. 68) to show that AKMED (The Worker’s Committee Against EEC and Inflation) had no following and no effect. I strongly doubt that your numbers are anything more than guesses. And the Marxist-Leninists worked not only within AKMED, but were active within all sectors of the broader people’s movement as well. We were activists, we mobilized the Norwegian people, and we were of great significance to the victory of September 25,1972.

It goes without saying that we were not alone in achieving this. Thousands of people made a giant contribution against the EEC, and can quite rightfully claim a part of the credit for the victory. But we were important to the outcome because we were active, we went out and discussed with people, we offered reasons and we pointed out connections, and we helped organize.

Yet the struggle against EEC membership was just the beginning. In its wake arose local struggles on every rock and in every alley, on every shore and in each fjord. While some kept busy ridiculing the struggle for Blowaway Commons [the Norwegian equivalent of East Nowhere--jh], we connected with and participated in these struggles to defend the living conditions of the Norwegian people. Some of them we lost, and many others we won. Thus we changed Norway, and made it possible to breathe. It is no longer required that you dress according to code and say the same things as your grandfather – or what is decided in the headquarters of the Social Democratic Party. You breathe so freely because we were there. We weren't alone. But we were the vanguard. There was no other political movement in Norway which did all that. We were the motor of all these struggles that changed Norway. Do you think it would have happened like that without us?

In the Sixties, few had even heard much about homosexuality. It could not be mentioned, and was even criminal for males. Now the Salvation Army is loosing support because of its discriminatory practice towards gay people. Isn’t that good? But without seeing the Sixties for what they were, you will not see the difference.

A daily full color newspaper called Class Struggle in a country with a population about 2/3 that of NYC!

This connection, which seems so evident to me, you don’t see. It even looks as though you don’t see the importance of the daily newspaper Klassekampen (Class Struggle). We started a daily newspaper, and have helped keep it going right up to the present. Its very existence, to the left of all the other daily newspapers on important questions like war & peace, anti-imperialism, the European Union – drives wedges in the ice that so easily covers the other newspapers. As long as Klassekampen has not turned totally loyal to the government, it opens breathing space and creates greater space for skeptical and diverse opinions in the other newspapers as well. It is peculiar that you, who work there as a journalist, are unable to see this. And that you don’t understand that this has been a struggle for greater democracy, greater freedom.

Certainly you may insist that we made mistakes, that we were sectarian, and so on. Well, do it in a way that we can learn from, and I shall not protest. But give us credit for what good things we did. And if you are going to say something about Mao’s policies and writings, it would be wise to read him. If not, it will not be possible to understand what ignited us, and you make us look foolish, which we were not.

But you do suggest connections that did not exist. On page 48 you say that the militance of the SUF was partly responsible for the ruling Labor Party drawing over one million votes for the first time in the election of 1969. You know that is nonsense. Twelve years earlier, the Labour Party, with a two percent higher vote, fell short of a million. The numbers hide a growth in the electorate – and it may be a little hard to blame the Socialist Youth League for that? At least at such an early date?

Since I have embarked on the road of anecdote, let me end with a tale about the absolutely rigid and humourless discipline that ruled the AKP. For Klassekampen's Yule party in 1981, a special spoof edition of "Klampekassen" was produced without the knowledge of the editorial board. At that time I was an active book reviewer and participant in debates on the cultural pages, specialising in books on natural history. "Klampekassen" featured a parody of my work: a rave review of a (non-existent) must-have, 12-volume, popular work on the ticks of Norway. Editor Sigurd Allern evidently found it a little over the top, and came over to me during the party with an awkward apology. I will never forget the look on his face when I responded, "I wrote it myself."

We were disciplined because we were serious. But within that discipline, there were room for humour, hilarity, irony, creativity and laughter. Say what you will about the Workers Communist Party, but don’t ever call us tedious.

Morten Falck

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Tron Øgrim, Bang A Basin!

I first titled this Tron Øgrim, RIP, but that's really the Latin phrase "Requiescat In Pace" (Rest in Peace). Tron was neither a big personal fan of resting, nor, as a pretty hard-boiled materialist, did he believe in an afterlife, even one resembling a deep, quiet nap.

Instead, I will cite in his honor the 1964 Talk On Questions Of Philosophy by Mao Zedong, the Chinese revolutionary leader and thinker whom Tron met in Beijing once:

If there were no such thing as death, that would be unbearable. If we could still see Confucius alive today, the earth wouldn’t be able to hold so many people. I approve of Chuang-tzu’s approach. When his wife died, he banged on a basin and sang. When people die there should be parties to celebrate the victory of dialectics, to celebrate the destruction of the old.

So who was this guy? Tron Øgrim was a Norwegian revolutionary and Communist. Born into a family which had taken an active part in Norway's resistance struggle against Nazi occupation, he became active in the global upsurge of students and youth in the 1960s. He was a leader and theoretician who helped bring into being the Arbeidernes Kommunistparti (Workers Communist Party) of Norway. The AKP was one of the most successful of the anti-revisionist parties that sprang up in advanced industrial countries in the 1970s. It merged only this year with the Red Electoral Alliance (itself a AKP spinoff where Tron had made his political home since the 1990s) into a new party called Rødt, meaning Red.












(From left, Tron, Pål Steigan (of the AKP) and some Chinese dudes...)


There's much more I could say about Tron, and I may try in a future post, but right now I want to point directly to a profound class on the theory and practice of revolution he was in the process of teaching, a class that I and, I hope, hundreds of other people were taking at the time of his death. Tron was one of the very first listmembers when another Norwegian, Magnus Bernhardsen, started an invaluable internet resource, the Leftist Trainspotters e-mail list. The 'spotters list, as members call it, tracks developments in left organizations around the world, with a generally observed "no polemics" rule that keeps a bunch of participants with dramatically diverse politics in line.

A couple of years ago, Tron sensed that the revolution in Nepal, led by the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) was a development of world historic significance. He began tracking it with a fierce intensity. Soon the Leftist Trainspotters list would get posts almost every day, sometimes more than a dozen at a time, on the Maobadi (the Maoists) and other political and social forces in Nepal. Usually these would just be articles from the English language press, mainly Nepalese and Indian, often with a brief comment attached to highlight a particular point or development. Some listmembers complained and more just hit the delete button, but many of us read with fascination.

One lesson in Tron's "course" had to do with epistemology, the study of how we come to know things. Tron practiced in a thoroughgoing way some basic Marxist principles about knowledge. First, he sought truth from facts. I am hardly alone on the US left in being inspired by the success of the comrades of the Maobadi in their struggle to free their country from feudalism and imperialism, but for too many of us, things stop at "Boy, is that ever cool! Too bad there's nothing like this happening here." In particular, Tron was careful to reserve judgement and consider the sources of information which suggested problems in CPN (M) theory, strategy, tactics, structure, policies, organizing or ability to respond to changing conditions, but he never dismissed that information out of hand because it made him uncomfortable.

A second point on epistemology. Tron understood, and was showing us, that the general resides in the particular. It was only by steeping himself in the everyday realities and political minutiae of the rapidly changing situation in Nepal that he could develop an overview which could genuinely be used to make sense of developments. Did he use Marxist categories, like class, armed struggle, bourgeois democracy, reformism, etc.? Sure, these were his starting point. But he was able to apply them in a deep way because he schooled himself to the point where he could tell you, for instance, the political history and current role of scores, probably hundreds, of individuals and groupings in the bubbling political life of a tiny Asian country.

The other big lesson I have been learning, or relearning, with Tron as teacher is just what a tricky and complex business making a revolution is, even in a small country that Western experts call "underdeveloped." The CPN (M) launched a classic Maoist people's war in 1996, and in less than a decade controlled a wide swath of Nepal's countryside, and drastically destabilized the old monarchy that ruled the country. Rather than continue fighting, with the attendant toll of damage and death among the people, and the risk of Indian military intervention, the Maobadi, under a truce, entered a complex process of negotiation and election to pursue their goal of creating a New Nepal. It was this more than anything else that drew and held Tron's attention.

Why? Because when a revolutionary situation is present in a country, all kinds of unexpected and overlooked contradictions and social forces suddenly come to the fore. In Nepal, this has included oppressed nationalities, both indigenous and immigrant (like Tibetans), with their own languages and cultures. Suddenly they have pushed their way into the roiling center of political life. Some, like the Magars in the west, have tended to united behind the Maobadi as the force most dedicated to breaking the old feudal system and challenging the privileges enjoyed by the majority (Nepali-speaking) Khas people, while others, based on old contradictions between various nationalities, are being actively courted and organized by reactionaries and Hindu chauvinists to oppose or sabotage the alliance of political forces the CPN (M) has entered to fight for a republic.

And though the national question looms large, which any Maoist would expect, it is far from the only contradiction suddenly becoming more prominent in Nepal. Just last week I exchanged emails with Tron about the Blue Diamond Society, an organization formed to fight for the rights of Nepal's impressive array of sexual minorities. I asked, among other things, what he thought about charges, mainly in the Western media, that the Maoists were puritanical homophobes.

Here's what Tron emailed me in response, accompanying the most useful of the articles he had forwarded to Leftist Trainspotters:

I post some material below.

First, here, my thoughts.

I dunno about the Maobadi, but I'd GUESS

a) That the Maobadi has never had this high on their radar (just like every other party in Nepal).

b) So I'd expect that the party would be chock full of traditional and spontaneous prejudice, just like the western commie and socdem movements 30-40 years ago.

I'd also expect that there are milieus IN and AROUND the M, who are totally opposed, modern, secular and influenced by the modern western gay liberation and left movement.

c) It is very easy for western journalists to come there and describe stupid statements - and even brutal acts against gays, which would not surprise me as the big and undisciplined Maobadi movement has hotheads who have been beating up more or less everybody else, except for tourists! - as results of "the party line"

Not taking into account what I guess may be the case -.

+ This is an expression of general social prejudices in Nepal

+ This is NOT a "line" as the Maobadi (I guess) has very LITTLE line on this.)

(Take this story of the two lesbian lovers alleged to have been held in a Maobadi camp. This may be true (or it may be different: These girls may have been "recruited" and just happened to have been lesbians - which is not very nice either. Or something else. However, even if this story IS true, I'd be very surprised if this has been discussed and decided on a high policy level in the CPN(M).)

Of course, I may be wrong on this.

d) I don't believe in journalism which prettifies "left crimes and errors". Like Mao said: Soviet farts stink, too!

I do, however, believe in nuanced journalism who try to describe it like it is.

If there's two sides on this q (or more!) - to get that clear.

AND, very important: WHICH WAY DOES IT GO? Developments?

To the better or worse?

My 50 øre.

All the best -
cto

That short note, generously knocked out in a few minutes at the request of someone he had only met a few times, shows the value of the comrade we have lost.

I can't say I much feel like banging a basin, but I will go out today and belt a couple of good Norwegian beers to celebrate the victory of dialectics--and to honor one whose everyday political practice taught me some dialectics.

Tron Øgrim, ¡Presente!


UPDATE: Greetings Norwegian Guests!

We are in the midst of a small-scale but spontaneous display of people's globalization. Folks at one of Tron's online "homes"--the Leftist Trainspotters e-mail list--who have never spent time in Norway have been stunned to see the extent of the coverage of his death, as numerous newspaper articles (not just obituaries) are posted to the list by Magnus Bernhardsen and others. Norwegian Wikipedia, where Tron was a valued contributor today has the flag of Norway at half staff on its logo.

At the same Norwegians seem surprised to learn how much respect old Tron had earned around the world. Dozens of messages from across the globe have filled the Leftist Trainspotters list, lamenting Tron Øgrim's death, showing how widely he was respected by revolutionary thinkers everywhere.

This Fire on the Mountain post has had hundreds of hits today. Spurred by a link at a hastily erected website, Tron Øgrim er død, and some kind of instant message propagating on Telenor, Norwegians appear to be eager to see what someone from another country has to say about old Tron. At last check, more than 70% of our visitors today come from Norway! Welcome, and please feel free to drop a further word in the comments section below on how Tron's death is being felt in Norway.

Read more!