They’ve done it again. Another memorial, another slab of granite or whatever ‘artistic’ contrivance the bourgeois state deems fit to commemorate tragedy. This time, it’s Norway, unveiling a new monument in Oslo for the victims of the 2011 massacre. Fifteen years on, and the ruling class still thinks a pretty sculpture can erase the ugly truth of what happened. It’s a familiar pattern, isn’t it? A collective sigh of relief as they tick a box – ‘grief addressed’, ‘memory honored’ – all while meticulously avoiding the inconvenient questions that fester beneath the surface.

Let’s be clear: the atrocity committed by Anders Breivik was horrific. The lives lost, the families shattered, the sheer brutality of it all. No sane person denies that. But for those of us who look beyond the facile headlines and the corporate pronouncements, the question demands to be asked: how did a society, ostensibly so advanced and egalitarian as Norway, produce such a monster? And more importantly, what does the official response – this sterile act of memorialization – tell us about the mechanisms of power in a capitalist state?

Antonio Gramsci, from his prison cell, understood that cultural hegemony wasn’t just about outward coercion, but about the subtle ways the ruling class shapes our very perception of reality. These memorials, these carefully orchestrated moments of national remembrance, are prime examples. They guide our collective sorrow down pre-approved channels, channeling public emotion into safe, apolitical avenues. They allow the state to present itself as a benevolent protector, a shepherd of the aggrieved, rather than a system riddled with contradictions that can, and often do, breed extremism.

We're told to mourn, to remember, to unite. But unite for what? For the status quo? For the very system that, in its endless pursuit of profit and its cultivation of social alienation, creates the fertile ground for the disillusioned, the forgotten, the radicalized? Breivik was no isolated incident, no anomaly that dropped from the sky. He was a product of his environment, a symptom of deeper societal ills, even if his actions were his own monstrous choice. To build a monument without confronting the root causes is less an act of remembrance and more an act of erasure, a deliberate obfuscation.

What about a memorial for the victims of systemic poverty, I wonder? Or for those crushed by the exploitative mechanisms of global capital? Where are the towering monuments to the workers whose lives are ground down daily in the service of corporate greed? There are none because those deaths are inconvenient, too close to home for the comfortable consciences of the elite. They don't fit the narrative of an external evil that can be symbolically vanquished by a piece of public art.

The working class, both in Norway and globally, doesn't need another stone monument. We need justice. We need an honest reckoning with the forces that tear our communities apart, whether by a lone wolf terrorist or by the insidious, 'legal' violence of austerity and exploitation. We need a society that truly values human life, not just in its dramatic endings, but in its everyday struggle.

So, let them unveil their sculptures. Let them hold their solemn ceremonies. We, on the shop floor, on the picket lines, in the community halls, know the real score. We know that liberation doesn't come from stone and sentimentality, but from collective struggle, from dismantling the very structures that make such memorials necessary in the first place. Until then, these monuments will remain, for us, not just symbols of sorrow, but stark reminders of a system that would rather mourn neatly than confront messily.