Except yours

I spent all of yesterday afternoon at my institute's library reading John Burnheim's practical proposal to reform parliamentarism towards anarchism via what he calls Demarchy (meaning more participative and less bureaucratic government structures). He is on the programme of my interesting class on Demokratietheorie and I'm glad I took this class this semester with this professor - one of the last to present himself as belonging to the marxist-hegelian tradition. The texts we have are often very close to Utopian thinking - in the sense that thinkers, authors, tried to make proposals for political structures to offer "real" democracy, as opposed to the Parliamentary Elitocracy or Oligarchy.

I keep being bothered by that one line my ex boss said back in November when I told her about this class (she'd asked me what I was doing this semester). "Nah this is where we see how far from reality theory can be..." If there is one area where theory has a visible and direct impact, it is the thinking of institutions and the organisation of society. Where do our constitutions come from? I was too baffled by her remark to react appropriately and thus keep the remorse of not having helped her develop a more open and creative conception of "Democracy".

I took a break from my reading, note taking and thinking, and went upstairs to the cafeteria for a coffee. It turned out I didn't have enough money on my cafeteria card, nor were the 50 cents left in my pocket sufficient to cover the coffee. The lady hesitated but seeing as there was little she could do with the coffee, she told me to be careful next time and let me go. I put on my Most Embarrassed Face and thanked.

I chatted with two guys who were in my project class last year. One is now unenthusiastically writing his final thesis and can't wait to start working "and get some money". He agreed that most of the careers we aimed for were solely based on social status, and I said I had abandonned all interests in that and didn't want to have a job. They looked at me funnily and said I'd have to find a way of financing myself though. I gave the example of Longo Mai, and the more silent guy eventually said that was the sort of thing he could imagine doing too. The first one said it did sound ideal, but experiments weren't his thing. "Growing up in East Germany was enough in terms of experiment for me". I found that a weird conception of "experiment" (isn't our present system also an experiment?) but said I could understand that not everybody wanted that sort of lifestyle.

We got to talk about our Project papers. I couldn't really remember what they had chosen as topics, nor could they remember what the other one had done. Both excused themselves by saying there'd been so many presentations of research projects that they really couldn't remember any of them. Then they both looked at me and said "actually, except yours". They'd found it'd sounded so concrete, well done and interesting, and I'd shown so much enthusiasm, that they had been both impressed. I was flattered. No need to immediately mention the fact that the paper didn't exactly turn out how I'd planned.