It has been quiet on venstresida.net for the last couple of weeks. One important reason for this is that I have been away on Attacs first European Summer University together with 7-800 Attacies from all over Europe (and a few from other countries as well).
http://www.european-summer-university.eu
In the coming time I will therefore be recapitulating a few of my experiences there. Hopefully also in the audiovisual form, as I have quite a bit of video which needs editing and publishing.
After 8 hour on train, and 24 hours on the norwegian Attac-bus I reached Saarbrücken in Germany on friday afternoon (010808). That night all the different Attacs gave a short presentation of their work, and Attac Norway (because of technichal difficulties) gave an acapella version of the old Attac hit "Taxual Healing".
http://venstresida.net/?q=node/8
The program of the university was exessive with many parallell workshops and forums, so naturally any one participant could only hope to cover a tiny fraction of the entire event. Take a look at the program here: http://www.european-summer-university.eu/media/en/Program_en_part.pdf
As a beginning I will give a few links to things I participated in, and come back with details and audiovisual content at a later point.
I was asked to hold a talk at a forum about the labor unions, and I will present my lecture notes later, but already now you can listen to the entire forum at ESUs documentation section.
I also participated on a very interesting workshop about higher education with participants from Norway, Germany, France, Italy and Marocco. The main conclusion was that the Bologna process, which had the pretext of making it easier for students to study all over Europe (a good thing), has had the practical consequenses of creating a market for higher education in which education is being streamlined, and more and more a tool for the economy, and less an important forum for critical thinking. We have now made a European network, and will continue working on these questions, and seeking other alliance partners across the continent.
Apart from this I of course listened and watched to quite a few very interesting lectures and debates. I thought the debate between Susan George and Dot Keet in the "Europe in a changing world”- forum was quite interesting. Keet quite effectivley attaced Georges image of a globally leading social Europe by looking at previous and current practises. Already now you can read a short report on the forum here:
http://www.weed-online.org/themen/wto/1540099.html
I also listend to the forum where Erik Reinert amongst others talked about “Power and instability of the financial sphere”. Hopefully I will get some video of that availabe eventually.
I also enjoyed Sven Giegolds talk in the Podium debate "Attac in Europe – How to bring our forces together", and John Hilary from War on Want talk in the Forum “Global Europe”. Hopefully I will also be able to present some of this eventually. However, if I had gone to other debates, I probably would have recommended these instead. One debate I am sorry I missed, was the “Can capitalism and ecology be reconciled?” forum. (Norwegian readers may already know what I think about that.) I am however aware that the Austrian "Radio Attac" was there, so perhaps I (and you) can get some of this also from their website http://www.radioattac.at/. (Perhaps by downloading their transmission from 04. 08. 2008? UPDATE: Obviousley not, I'll have to watch their site the coming days.)
All these things mentioned, I however must point out, that the Kung Fu Workshop of course was the most rewarding - the only close competition was José Bovés mustache! Be water my friend!
