Rodt

Template:TOCnestleft Rodt is a Norwegian political party. The party was founded in March 2007 by a merger of the Workers Communist Party and the Red Electoral Alliance. Bjornar Moxnes is the Red Party's current leader.

Rodt states that a classless society is its ultimate goal in its own official political program. They further specify that "this is what Karl Marx called communism".

The label is a result of many of the party's leading members promoting communist values, either currently or previously; notable examples are Erling Folkvord and former party leader Torstein Dahle. The party's main principles are based on replacing capitalism with a socialist society, including a strong public sector and nationalization of large businesses, while its core ideology espouses the revolutionary socialist aims for "the workers" to "take the power", and the creation of new legislatures. However, the party makes clear that it does not support violent "armed revolution" formerly espoused by its predecessors.

Rodt has 10 county council representatives nationwide and 80 municipal representatives. In the 2013 parliamentary election, it was the largest party which failed to win a seat. The party entered parliament in the 2017 election, winning 2.4% of the votes and its first seat ever in the Storting. The last time a far-left party had representation in the Storting was when its predecessor party, the Red Electoral Alliance, won a seat in the 1993 election.

The party favors the welfare state and high taxation upon the wealthy as a means of tackling continuing inequality in Norway. Since its formation, notable groups have merged with the party, the most notable example of this being the Trotskyist International Socialists. The party consists of various internal factions, including the Trotskyists, Marxist–Leninists, and democratic socialists.

AKP baggage

AKP openly endorsed the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, and when that party's forces invaded Phnom Penh, Klassekampen had "Long live the free Cambodia" as their front page headline. Support from AKP continued in spite of the killings which were reported during Pol Pot's rule. At that time, AKP considered these reports to be a part of a smear campaign against the new regime, and AKP had delegations visiting the country.

Much of the party's inner workings have been clandestine in nature, for instance the precise number of members is kept secret. The party program has been considered violent and extreme since it called for armed revolution before 1990, and kept the possibility of having to "defend the revolution with arms" open since.

Rodt election breakthrough

In the September 2021 Norwegian elections Rodt went from one member to eight in the Norwegian parliament.

They are Bjornar Moxnes, Seher Aydar, Marie Sneve Marinussen, Tobias Drevland Lund, Mimir Kristjansson, Sofie Marhaug, Geir Jorgensen, Hege Bae Nyholt.

State of the party

In September 2017 Jacobin’s Ellen Engelstad — editor of the online journal Manifest Tidsskrift — had a chat with Marie Sneve Martinussen, the deputy leader of Rodt (the Red Party) about their strategy for the election and their analysis of the current state of affairs in Norway.

MSM Our membership has doubled since 2013, and most of the new members are younger: the majority are born in the 1980s, although we have representation from every age group.

EE Your party was founded in 2007, but has roots in the Maoist movement of the 1970s, among other currents. Can you say something about your party’s formation, and also how this past has been used against you?

MSM The party was formed in 2007 when the Workers Communist Party (AKP) and the Red Election Alliance (RV) dissolved to form Rodt together with AKP’s youth party Red Youth (RU) and independents. RV was originally the electoral front of AKP, but since 1991 it has worked as an independent party. I joined Rodt in 2009 and don’t know all that much about its past. However, a party consists of its members, and since a majority of them joined after 2013, that past is not all that relevant to them. When the media asks us questions about Pol Pot and our relationship to democracy, many of our members don’t get it. It’s not that they are upset or feel hurt, they just don’t understand the relevance of that history.

The formation of Rodt happened at the same time as the global financial crisis, at the same time as when the Socialist Left Party (SV) formed a government with Labor and opened the Barents Sea for oil and gas drilling. Later that government joined the NATO-led war in Libya, so there was a new radicalization in my generation and a demand for a real socialist party.

EE You have been talking more about ideology and capitalism in this election, which is unusual in Norway. For instance, in a lecture by party leader Bjørnar Moxnes about your party’s politics that filled four rooms to the brink at the House of Literature in Oslo. Why are you focusing on this subject, and what feedback are you receiving on this approach?

MSM It is a conscious choice to talk about capitalism and how it works during the campaign, and something has happened in the world that makes that easier: namely, climate change, inequality, and changes in labor. It is extremely important how we talk about this, and we couldn’t have done it ten years ago. But the world has changed and we are conscious of how to explain concepts like capitalism and socialism today, of how to reclaim Marx for our time.

EE You are also looking to the Left elsewhere, and often talk about Corbyn, Podemos, and Sanders. You have even gotten some help from the Bernie Sanders campaign this year. In Oslo, lots of young people wear “Bjørnie” t-shirts and “feel the Bjørn” buttons. What have you discussed with the Sanders campaign, and has it changed your strategy?

MSM We are very inspired by the Sanders and Corbyn campaigns, and have been talking to Momentum a lot as well. There are big differences between the countries, but the general direction is the same. We have learned a lot about campaigning, for instance, about diversity as an organizational strategy. The “Bjørnie” thing, for instance, is not part of our official campaign, but a fringe thing that some activists are doing.

We have also learned to aim high. For example, we have been organizing two summer festivals called Popvenstre (Pop Left) in less than a year. It might sound like a strange priority, but it comes from the belief that a political movement needs culture and enthusiasm; everything that Labor lacks. There is a huge will to act now; after all, it’s a question of saving our planet. We want people to feel they are part of a bigger phenomenon and to build a broad movement.

American connections

Larry Cohen

Reidar Strisland February 24, 2018 ·

Larry Cohen, the chair of Our Revolution, rocks The Red Party's strategy conference.

Reidar Strisland January 9, 2018 ·

Fit Happy to have received Larry Cohen confirmed to Vendepunkt-Rødts strategikonferanse. Larry is a former trade union leader in Communication Workers of America and is now leading Our Revolution, Bernie start last year.

Wong, Sandberg and Ahmed

Reidar Strisland June 16, 2017.

Yesterday I received the good news that Norwegian Professional Writers Association has decided to support my project about writing book about the United States and the progressive movement around Bernie Sanders. I celebrate that with a long weekend of visits by central organizers from the precisely Bernie campaign. Do you want to hear me lead conversation with Claire Sandberg, Winnie Wong and Moumita Ahmed you simply have to get at Popvenstre-en festival med politikk og kultur in kubaparken tomorrow. The Festival already starts kl11. 15 with an exciting debate on right populism with beni and Emma Rees, the leader of corbyn organization Momentum. In 16.10, I'm going on stage to lead conversation about steel in the United States.

Reidar Strisland with Claire Sandberg and Winnie Wong.

A delegation of Norwegian activists attended the People's Summit in Chicago in June 2017, and a few days later, three American activists Winnie Wong, Claire Sandberg, and friend and collaborator Moumita Ahmed (founder of Millennials For Revolution)—accepted their invitation to travel Oslo to see Nordic social democracy first-hand. We learned about the effort by the left-wing Rodt party to bring together young urban voters with working class rural voters to protect and expand the welfare state—at a time when nationalist appeals of the far-right are gaining traction here, as they are throughout the west. We were also there to speak at Popvenstre, the Roedt party's outdoor festival of music, politics, and culture, and to run some trainings for party leaders ahead of their general elections this fall.

We met Reidar Strisland, our main point of contact from the Rodt party, at the central station in downtown Oslo. Reidar -- a 28 year-old author and teacher -- attended our People's Summit training on distributed organizing and was excited to share the knowledge with the rest of his collaborators, so the first order of business for us in Oslo was getting out the slide deck and running a similar training for Roedt party grassroots activists in their downtown office.

All of the mostly young Norwegian activists gathered in the Roedt party meeting room were steeped in US politics. Someone asked Winnie about other major political figures in the US. She asked the room to see how many people have heard of Elizabeth Warren, and nearly every hand shot up.

After the training, the group headed to a cafe nearby to hear about the current state of play in Norwegian politics. In its current incarnation, the Rodt Party formed in 2007, and has been growing quickly in the past few years. Since 2013, formal membership has roughly doubled. The party's new young leader, Bjornar Moxnes, has attracted scores of millennials to join its ranks, sparking "Bjørnie" comparisons. Roedt politicians currently hold ten county council seats nationwide and have 80 municipal representatives, and they're hoping that the upcoming election on September 11 is their chance to break through a key threshold that will allow them to gain eight seats in the legislature.

To address this deepening inequality, and the growing inclination of the Norwegian government to run the welfare state like a private enterprise, the Roedt party launched its "Inequality Norway" campaign with a series of redistributive policy demands. With the slogan "Community Works," Inequality Norway underscores the belief that a society based on cooperation and equality is fairer than a society based on capitalist competition.

When we arrived at the outdoor festival in Kuba Park in downtown Oslo on a hot, glorious Saturday for our first panel on the main stage, it was only a few days after the dramatic and unexpected result in the U.K. general election.

There was a lot of excitement in the air about what might be on the horizon—not just about the possibility of Prime Minister Jeremy Corbyn sitting down with President Bernie Sanders within a few years' time, but more broadly about a new common sense rejection of austerity and inequality in favor of policies that ensure a decent standard of living for all.

We were joined in a discussion on the emergence of competing left and right populisms by Paolo Gerbaudo, author of the new book, The Mask and the Flag, and by Eirik Grasaas-Stavenes, a Norwegian journalist who came to the US to cover the People's Summit for Klassekampen, the leftist daily newspaper in Norway.

There were a ton of other panels throughout the day on intersectional feminism, the importance of protecting workers rights by strengthening unions, and fighting for just refugee and immigration policies The day closed out with evening performances by some of Norway's hippest bands (with Samsaya and Awesomnia headlining).

With two more days in Norway following the festival, we spent hours in trainings and breakout strategy sessions with Roedt party organizers digging into the nuts and bolts of digital and social media best practices, barnstorms, peer-to-peer text messaging, dank memes, and more.

On our final day, we also had a chance to sit down with Madnus Marsdal from the Manifest Center for Social Analysis, a Norwegian left think tank doing innovative work advocating for expanding the welfare state and also running popular education programs training union workers on policy.

Reidar Strisland US tour

Dennis O'Neil October 13, 2016 ·

Last night the NYC branch of Freedom Road Socialist Organization sponsored a small get-together of local labor activists, Sandernistas and other lefties to conversate with Reidar Strisland. Reidar was recently youth leader of the Oslo section of Rodt ("Red"), Norway's most radical mass party. He is in the middle of a two month US sojourn to try and make sense of the US election and learn more about the Sanders explosion in particular for a book he is writing.

ATTENTION, folks in Detroit, Lansing, Toledo, Chicago, Standing Rock, Seattle, San Francisco (where he will be November 8) and LA: Want to learn about Norway and Rodt in advance of next year's parliamentary election there and talk to an interested young European about our rather peculiar election year? And/or have a couch or someplace he can crash in your burg? Friend him directly and drop my name.

FRSO contributors

Contributors to an article on US movements in Norwegian Marxist journal Rodt, No 2, 2012.

• Arnljot Ask: USAs svanesang? side 26
• Meizhu Lui: Rulletrapper og tredemøller: Derfor ender farga i USA sist side32
• Evan Sarmiento: «Occupy» i ein overgangsperiode side 38
• Michael Leonardi: Okkuper Kommisjonen for regulering av kjernekraft (før det er for seint) side 48
• Nicole M. Aschoff: Ei fortelling om to kriser: Bilindustrien i USA side 54

Mirkinson connection

In 2012 Judith Mirkinson addressed the Norwegian Womens Conference, organized by Rodt magazine of the Norwegian Red Party, on the situation on "the women's struggle in the U.S".

Rodt Oslo comrades

Rodt Oslo August 29, 2015 ·

With Nina Reim, Mikkel Becker Aakervik, Tale Marte Daehlen, Ali Mirahmadi and Reidar Strisland.

References

Template:Reflist