Rowenna's approach is to take a comically minimalist definition of religion, one which includes any moral code. So of her conversion from Christianity to environmentalism, she writes that "being good was no longer doing right by God, but doing right by the planet".

At least when people talked about communism as a 'secular religion', they had a few more elements to point to. The communists had their holy books in the works of Marx, their priesthood in the vanguard, and ascetic discipline in their terrifyingly dedicated lives.

You could find many other common points between religious and political movements: a sense of community and shared purpose, a gallery of martyred saints, holidays (think of May 1 as a spring holy-day for atheist workers).

I'm not so interested in debating whether or not political movements are religious ones, per se (briefly and non-rigorously: if it doesn't include belief in the supernatural, I wouldn't call it a religion). But I do think politics (in a broad sense) can occupy much of the same ground as religion. In Durkheim's terms, they're both cures for anomie, malaise confronted with the lack of any externally-imposed social order. Despite being very uncomfortable with the apparently conservative implications of the idea of anomie (i.e. the suggestion that the masters must give people rules and orders, to prevent them falling into devient despondency), I find it a useful concept for describing something that seemingly afflicts a lot of people (including me, and a lot of my friends). And the answer has to include building your own morals, and community, and saints and icons, and identity. Whether that comes from your religion, your politics, your family, your subculture, from music, art or even from the pursuit of money -- it's all the same. [My lodestone here, as everywhere else, is The Invisibles, with its existentialist vision of flexible, shared personalities, each inhabiting its own utopia].

From this perspective: if something looks like a religion, that probably just means it's doing its cultural job of providing a bulwark against the meaninglessness of life. Greenies should be proud of being called cultists, and everybody else should be horrified that so few other political movements are strong enough to inspire more than grudging tolerance from their followers.

Because Marx was obviously a fan of horror. It's in many of his catchiest phrases - the spectre of communism, tradition which "weights like a nightmare on the brains of the living", or capital as "dead labour, that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour"

Derrida apparently devoted a book to this theme; personally, I'd much rather encounter it as children's television.

'Angst essen seele auf' (ali: fear eats the soul) fits into that stereotype, though perhaps not in the way a plot summary would suggest. Emmi, a middle-aged German cleaner, meets Moroccan migrant worker Ali in a Munich bar. They begin a relationship and, to the disgust of society at large, eventually marry.

Racism and social opprobrium are omnipresent, but as background rather than theme. The fear of the title isn't of foreigners or violence or economic hardship; it is fear of small acts of cruelty from your friends, as they protect whatever small scraps of social respect they have by kicking out at anybody below them. The sole cure for fear is desperation; characters come together only when they have nothing to lose.

The first scene covers all this in microcosm. Emmi walks into an unfamiliar bar, half-full of migrant workers. She's rigid with anxiety, not knowing where to look or where to put herself, aware that all eyes are upon her. But she's here, overcoming fear and cultural barriers, because she has nothing else: her husband is long dead, her children ignore her, her work gives her nothing but shame. If she had just a little more self-respect, just a little more status to defend, she would retreat back into a world of petty closed-mindedness. Fairly soon, she will. So will everyone else in the film: all the characters betray themselves and their companions through small acts of social cowardice.

The government response has been, rather pathetically, to call them 'behind the times'. Bleating that markets = modernization = good was pretty shaky at the best of times, but now it seems positively ludicrous. And the students' demands are much saner:

• Self-directed life and learning
• Free access to education, and the abolition of tuition fees, training fees, and childcare costs
• Public financing of the education system, without corporate influence
• Democratization of educational institutions, and strengthening of their self-government

I went along to support the Berlin demonstration earlier today, and found myself strangely weepy. I don't know if they can win, mind, given the current hopelessness of the SPD and the rest of the European centre-left.

From a more radical corner, the squatting scene is headed for a busy week. One place is due for eviction tomorrow -- and then on Saturday comes something more ambitious -- a massive, and pre-announced, attempt to squat the currently disused Tempelhof airport. It sounds insane, but I'm gradually coming to see the logic of it. Turning an abandoned space into a temporary hippie playground appeals both to my head and my heart.

• Democracy Now. Amy Goodman must be one of the most hyperproductive activists out there, a throwback to the living-for-the-cause agitators of the 19th century. With a small team, she somehow puts together an hour-long tv/radio news broadcast every weekday. It's campaigning journalism with production values to equal or better the mainstream media. I wish I could find a European equivalent of this; Democracy Now does a great job of picking up stories from around the world, but it's really a USian affair.
• In Our Time. The best thing on Radio 4, Melvyn Bragg and a few academics holding a no-frills discussion on some topic they know inside-out. Shamelessly highbrow, and generally fascinating.
• IT Conversations is a mixed bag. They collect (mainly) talks from computer conferences, and repackage them as podcasts. Both the content and the audio quality are very variable. Generally good are Moira Gun's 'Tech nation' series, and anything recorded at an O'Reilly conference. [The white, male faces gracing most of their listings do tell a story -- but mainly, I think, about the IT industry as a whole, rather than IT Conversations itself]
• Here is my unsorted collection of nice things to listen to. Some good, some bad, some I never got round to playing.

I've also discovered that The West Wing works even better as an audio-only experience. If only it were financially viable to get Aaron Sorking writing radio plays!

These are, with very few exceptions, excellent. The speakers are major figures: ministers, Nobel prizewinners, the top tier of academics, journalists and pundits. They're mostly very thoughtful, and pitched at a high enough level to be interesting. Some of the upcoming events also look very, very good.

This nugget from the Berlin Beach Camp, an annual get-together of couchsurfers at a lake near the city.

They're kicking off with an attempt to bounce of the MP expenses kerfuffle to give constituents the power to recall MPs. So far they're pretty vague about what this would entail, and I'm not entirely clear on the benefits. Sure, a few immensely corrupt MPs might be removed. But I dread to think how many local campaigns could end up diverting their energies into unwinnable attempts to remove their MPs.

I'm mildly concerned about a few aspects of their site: the petition page doesn't make it clear whether 38 Degrees will hold onto your email, and they aren't offering any email address to get in touch with them. But it's early days yet, and these are things that will doubtless get ironed out quickly. Plus David Babbs is involved, so I already have a fair amount of unpleasantly old-boyish confidence in them.

You could see rave as a whole, and the nuum in particular, as modernism's last stand, or unexpected comeback, long after the ideals of modernism had been abandoned, eroded, questioned, everywhere else....Miraculously holding pomo at bay, the nuum preserved within itself, within its own partially cordoned off space, the heightened temporality of peak-era modernism: a sensation of hurtling into the future.

K-Punk, incidentally, has a nice little defense of criticism.

Berlin's squatters mostly feel they're fighting a rearguard action, defending decades-old social centres from the inexorable march of private investors.

But I'm, for once, more optimistic than most, and more convinced that squats are an essential part of the urban ecology. Squats are to a city what strikes are to a firm, valuable more as threat than as activity. They challenge the belief that individual buildings in a city can function as private property, without obligations to their neighbours. A building without its surroundings is purposeless, worth no more in itself than its counterparts standing abandoned across East Germany. City buildings can only exist symbiotically, and when one is left empty it harms the others. That harm is fundamentally social, but it can also easily be translated to financial terms as the loss of house value.

Naturally, I don't think every building should be squatted, or that existing squats should be inviolable. All else aside, a little tension keeps the squatters honest. The squats that survive are the ones which contribute to the life of the city.

So I don't mind that Berlin's squats are under pressure. They're always under pressure, and so they should be. But for every squat evicted, another deserves to be created (at least!). And I still believe that it will happen.

A fortnight ago, it was the popularity of Irish dancing in Belarus, as a troupe of dancers from Minsk passed by on their way home from a competition in Duisburg. Apparently step-dancing got started in Belarus at the start of the decade, imported from Moscow(!). It's since grown rapidly, with teachers brought in from Ireland, and students traveling to international events. Apparently, the Irish dominance at these events is rapidly declining, with dancers from Eastern Europe creeping up the leader-boards.

Maybe it shouldn't have been so surprising, beyond the surreal cross-cultural charm of saturday-night Slavic-Celtic jigs in a Berlin apartment. It fits right into the whole sprawling North European obsession with the middle ages, something you can find everywhere from Norwegian metal bands to Russian forest-lovers. It's very apparent in Berlin, and presumably much stronger elsewhere in Germany. I've not ventured out to any of the numerous re-enactment fairs -- an immense cottage industry, or perhaps more accurately a communal labour of love. Being more at home among cities than trees, I content myself with the Wednesday-night medieval music sessions in Arcanoa.

The Belarusian trend is clearly part of this; the one English-language description I could find is on a site devoted to "Medieval Belarus".

As for the corner-house, it has lately been packed out by a family of 12 making their way on a massive year-long journey across eurasia.

If it takes off, this could become a very useful resource. Leaflets ofen show campaigns at their most brutal and desperate. Enhancing the collective memory of what politicians have done is a great way of holding them to account. That goes for the outrageous behaviour that comes out during elections (who remembers the Tory slogan "if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour."? Would pictures help?). More importantly, it goes for the little promises that are made and then ignored, safe in the knowledge that what's said in the campaign vanishes soon afterwards.

Of course, libraries do have collections of this stuff; there's one at LSE, and another in Bristol. But I doubt they get much attention, except from academic historians and the occasional zealous party worker. Online images have much greater potential, provided the intial enthusiasm is enough to start it snowballing.

But, magical as it may be, the odds are that it won't exist in fifty years' time. Such places depend entirely on the personalities and culture involved, which change in a matter of months or less. Most disintegrate or are reabsorbed into normality, and only a very few walk the cultural tightrope for decades.

So these projects are reinvented and forgotten year by year. Permanent Hospitality has made a point of documenting itself, but I'm not convinced that words can capture any more than the basic institutional structure of such a place. It takes a work of genius such as The Electric Kool-aid Acid Test to get inside the heads of a culture (and it becomes harder, not easier, when the group are less self-consciously exhibitionist than the Merry Pranksters).

Usually, the only way of getting at the spirit of the place is through the minds of the people touched by it. I am inordinately excited by the knowledge that the hundreds of people who have encountered the project are now spread in tiny pockets across the world, bringing their idea of it wider into the project.

All of which is by way of introduction to this short essay on the hacker spaces movement, which shares at least a little with the ideology of other intentional communities. I'll leave the main thrust for another day (briefly: I disagree that being self-consciously 'political' is essential, or even necessarily helpful), but I entirely agree with the call for oral history:

To get there we really need a more explicit sense and understanding of the history of what we are doing, of the political approaches and demands that went into it long ago and that still are there, hidden in what we do right now.
So to start off we would like to organize some workshops in the hackerspaces where we can learn about the philosophical, historical and other items that we need to get back in our lives. Theory is a toolkit to analyze and deconstruct the world.

Not new, of course: once the Whole Earth Catalog, now worldchanging and a flotilla of websites provide the maps. But, especially given the noticeable age-segregation of so many projects, I feel an increasing need to pick the brains of greybears (and...erm...greybeardesses) who have been through it all before.

[ETA: As usual, Mike adds a comment that's considerably more informative than the post itself. Mike, you rock.]