Pål Steigan

During his leadership of AKP (m-l), Steigan traveled to countries under communist regimes, such as China, Czechoslovakia, Albania and Cambodia (Democratic Kampuchea).[1] He met Mao Zedong, Enver Hoxha and Pol Pot.[3]

After meeting the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot in 1978, he began to support the regime,[4] later admitting his support for the genocidal Khmer Rouge was a mistake explaining that he now believed it was not Marxist.[5] He has continued to be criticised for bearing a personal responsibility for his political support to the regime.[4]

In 1978, he told an interviewer from The Call, the newspaper of the American Communist Party (Marxist–Leninist), that since the foundation of the party five years earlier "we have been waging a struggle against two brands of revisionism" in Norway, "the Brezhnevist, Moscow revisionist type party, which is the old so-called Norwegian Communist Party, and a newer Eurorevisionist party."[6] According to Steigan in the same interview: "[I]t’s obvious that the Soviet social-imperialists are planning to take Norway in the initial stages of a war over Europe."[7]

He is a critic of capitalism, writing that it "has inflicted so many defeats upon the working class and people all over the world that it’s hard to give an account of them."[8]

Steigan's memoirs En folkefiende (A public enemy) were published in 2013.[3]

Steigan, Pål, Veiskille: finnes det noen vei ut av miljøkrisa? Oktober Forlag, Oslo, 1990, 244 s.