by Peter Weiss
Actually, said Rogeby, Palmstierna had more integrity than the rebels who had returned, disappointed and remorseful, to the bosom of the mother party, for he had never disavowed his intention to smother all revolutionary unrest, had never seen the Party as anything but a bastion against Bolshevism. The lesson in the schoolbooks during the war—that, after the voting reforms, the great mass of the people could not automatically exploit their majority position but could only assume possession of their civil rights after considered education—had come from him, said Rogeby. As a child born into poverty, as a young unskilled laborer in the raft builders’ quarters, Rogeby had heard the blind wrath expressed by the elders who had been witnesses to the process of transformation in the Party. Many of them would tell stories about the expectations that had arisen around the turn of the century with the consolidation of the organizations. Those who had been most devastated by the decline were the ones who were old enough to have known Palm, Danielsson, and Wermelin. August Palm, who trained as a tailor in Germany before being expelled because he had also gotten an education in socialist agitation, had been broken by the discord in the Party. He, the limping master tailor, known to all proletarians, ended up blustering on in his mélange of German, Danish, and Swedish about nothing but moral decay and alcoholism in an Old Testament tone. Danielsson and Wermelin, on the other hand, cast out by Branting, had held onto their revolutionary convictions. Wermelin and Danielsson, mentioned only in passing by Ström, stood at the forefront of the workers’ movement, as far as Rogeby was concerned. They were too idiosyncratic, incorruptible, to be able to assert themselves among the careerists. Danielsson had shaped the ideological foundations of the Party, and Branting had taken from him that which could be used in his diplomatic balancing acts with the Liberals. While Branting never showed his weaknesses, Danielsson had exposed himself to all attacks, scorned all protective measures. Through him, the workers had gained an education about the system of the capitalist concentration of power. Having been kicked off the editorial team of the Party paper by Branting, in his own paper, Arbetet [Labor], signing his articles as Marat, he had not just conveyed the goals of socialism but through his depictions of the conditions under which working people were living, he had also initiated Swedish workers’ literature. As a twenty-five-year-old, in eighteen eighty-eight, he’d ended up in prison for a year and a half for slandering the government, to the benefit of Branting, who was about to found the Party. The health of the strong, tall man was eroded by his time behind bars, and after his release he only lasted another decade. He died two days before the dawn of the new century, worn down by his time in the hospitals, the continual attacks on his newspaper, the denunciations coming from the Party leadership. His rejection of the state as an instrument of domination necessarily collided with Branting’s aspirations to take the state by parliamentary means, to establish a form of state socialism. The existing institutions of the state, he expounded, could never be taken over by the working class; they had to be smashed before a socialist society could be constructed, to prevent the old from eating away at the new. But, he went on to say, a revolution could only be successful if it were borne by the majority of the people and took place on an international scale. Studying the Paris Commune, he made the question of proletarian violence dependent upon the violence that the bourgeoisie would use against the workers. His closest comrade in arms, Wermelin, who had introduced him to Marxist writings in his youth, had been ejected from the country; one last time, the poet with the round, wan moon face traveled from America to visit Danielsson in the site of his exile, Malmö, oh Malmö, that city where the petit bourgeois try to choke the reason out of you, where you’re condemned to perish among the half-hearted and the lethargic. Rogeby pictured them, the two exiles, the one gigantic, the other a short and stocky figure, two of the original thinkers in that dark and stodgy time of an intellectual desertification that drove other artists of the era—like Fröding, Josephson, Hill, and Strindberg—mad as well; he wondered what they might have talked about as they strolled along the shoreline in the moist wind blowing across from Öresund. Not about illness, ridicule, expulsion, but about what they called the struggle of the intelligence against barbarism, the struggle of the imagination against sterility; perhaps, he said, they broached the question that was now becoming relevant again in our time, the thesis of the reconception of the notion of class, the removal of the borders between intellectual and physical workers, the acquisition of cultural values by those who, without being aware of it, had made their creation possible; about alliances which in turn could be traced back to connections from the past, to Götrek, to Cabet—and at the mention of Cabet I suddenly remembered Meryon’s depiction of Marat’s house, in the inscription on the turret, Cabat, I now felt I had recognized the connection between the names Marat and Cabet. Much of what Rogeby disclosed was encrypted, just like that old etching. Just as he pointed up to a couple of low, narrow windows while walking across Järntorget, in the old town, saying, that’s where the Icarian crew lived, at Strömmen his finger slid in a semicircle around the islands, the inns under the bridge in front of the palace, the boulevard leading into the royal gardens, that’s where in June of seventeen the officers had to gather their men who refused to fire on the workers during the mass demonstrations. From intimations, supplemented or contradicted by Ström’s statements, my image of the course of the political developments gradually crystallized. Even though there was often a groaning about the dishonor and wounds they had to bear, though people said that the pressure had become impossible to withstand, though torpor and exhaustion had set in again, the workers, said Rogeby, had never lost their instincts. People always said that they had allowed themselves to be led astray, but they were doing what they could. It was easy to say they should take what they needed, but what, he asked, could they do against a single strategically positioned machine gun. For those who had money and military might behind them, everything was possible, the doors of the enormous edifice of civilization were open to the owners, as soon as they took their first steps it was decided who would stay below and who would make it to the top; in the schools and barracks, the divisions had long ago been drawn, one lot get the secure jobs, the others head to the workbenches. What the propertyless wanted to achieve was something entirely different, an inversion of everything we had known, of all forms of life; in that context, it was craven to say they had given up, had submitted, when their efforts and the sacrifices they had made were infinitely greater than the energy the other side needed to invest to achieve their self-affirmation. Ström spoke of the advocates of realpolitik who, with endurance and calculation, concentrated on what could be achieved; sure, they had been able to tally tiny gains, and that was better than having to cop the trouncings that came after overly ambitious lunges at lofty endeavors. Rogeby spoke of the voices that rise up from the humiliation, the wasting, the accumulated and restless brooding, from the outsiders who were familiar with the sucking spiral into numbness. Ström followed those who would soon occupy government posts which, in their continual contest with the bourgeoisie, they would lose, win back, hold onto, and be forced to surrender again. Rogeby saw the overcoming of anonymity, the effort to gain access to their own voices, he saw the accumulation of the documents bearing witness to an arduously acquired literacy. Among the poets and orators who captured the forces surrounding them like mediums and brought them to voice, speakers from proletarian backgrounds were now appearing: a cork-cutter called Menander, a day-laborer, Gabrielsson, a printing plate maker by the name of Hellborg, a seamstress, Maria Sandel, a sawyer, Östman, a raft-maker and tracklayer, Hedenvind-Eriksson, a mechanic, Larsson, a farm worker, Moa Martinson. The concept of education was shifting, the school of reality could be found everywhere, and everywhere, visions could emerge, all experiences began to resound in a commonality, individual experience and collective knowledge, the national language and the language of the world pervaded one another, slowly laying the foundations for the imaginat
ion of a classless society. Time and again, up until the strike movement of the thirties, said Rogeby, genuine spokespeople were found among the workers; even today, with the density of the repression, there were many people in every workplace who knew the issues in detail; but who, we asked ourselves, bore the blame for the uninterrupted domination of finance, why had the working people not been able to bring about the overthrow. Rogeby rejected the notion that the compromises of Social Democracy alone were responsible for the fact that there had not been a decisive change in the circumstances of wage laborers or in the dynamic between the classes since Branting’s first government, pointing as well to the incapacity of the Communist Party to convey a convincing political alternative. In June of nineteen seventeen, he said, the objective preconditions for the development of a revolutionary situation were there. The Left Socialists had called for a general strike, the workers had headed in to the parliament from the outskirts of the city, the workers and the soldiers had begun to band together, the opportunity to pull away from Social Democratic politics was there—but even before its first test of strength, the new party failed. The masses were willing to act, but there was a lack of leadership capable of coordinating the impulses, of consolidating the spontaneous alliance between the striking workers and the young conscripts who had left their units, and of getting the weapons—indispensable for the insurrection—into the hands of the people. Tens of thousands stood on Helgeandsholmen and in the surrounding streets and squares chanting their demands to abolish the First Chamber and the monarchy, to begin forming workers’ councils. Branting, however, in order to give an appearance of decisiveness, had already put together a workers’ committee straight after the constitution of the Left Party—but one tasked with averting calls for strikes and diverting their energies into election preparations. Units of cadets broke up the crowd and blocked off the Riksbron from Gustav Adolf Square with their bayonets raised; up in the castle courtyard waited Count Douglas, who in nineteen hundred nine, as a company commander, had kept reserves at the ready, the troops armed as if for war; and now the mounted police joined the party, charging into the crowds. Those seconds on the fifth of June, the blurred slashing of the saber blades, the prancing horses, with tails trimmed short, the masses of people fleeing every which way, the windows in the façade of the foreign ministry packed with onlookers, the fallen figure, legs pulled up to his torso, arms wrapped around his head to protect it, the surrounding area cleared, the gendarmes off in the distance having lost interest in him, the throng of bodies on the bridge, a boy climbing a lamppost, instantly caught by the lash of a whip, and the arrested worker between the two men in uniform, his hands held together behind his back, right and left the greatcoats, the rows of glistening buttons, the glinting sables, tassels on the handles, the grim, gray faces under spiked helmets, straps under the chin, and in the middle the face stretching upward into the light, neck straining out from an open shirt, the pride in the features winning out over the breathless surprise. Instead of Höglund, who had declared the streets to be the parliament from the balcony of the Riksdag, it was Branting who, rushing out to call the hordes to order and leading them to the workers’ club on Barnhusgatan, was able to assume the role of the tribune of the people. The appeal for unity, previously issued by the Left, was now picked up by Branting’s party; the union leaders demanded an end to the strike, which had been called illegitimately; the autumn elections promised to be a success for the Social Democratic Party, where they were expecting not just to increase their share of the seats but also to occupy ministerial posts; their nonviolent rise to participation in government was imminent. For a few days, the Swedish workers had been way ahead of the situation in Western Europe with their counterslogan that power could only be won by toppling the reign of capital. For the first time, the confidence of the bourgeoisie had been shaken. Then came the hesitation, the confusion. The threat of expulsion from the confederation of trade unions forced the workers to break off the strike that had been called by the Left. As unified as the workers were on the fifth of June, they still didn’t want to risk splitting from their organizations. Without union membership they would have become isolated penitents. The bond between the conservative party leadership and the union bosses proved once again to be stronger than the cumulative will of the masses to achieve radical change. The inexperienced Left Party was not able to assert itself in the face of the established Social Democrats. If the frustration among the workers lingered for a few weeks, soon enough the restraint and caution urged by Branting was smothering the insurrectionary energy. As after the major strike in nineteen hundred nine, in June of seventeen the union functionaries once again strengthened their right to determine the political action of the working class. The reprimanded had to bow to the fact that a general strike demanded centralized initiative and leadership. Industrial peace also had to be reached, without which, as contractually stipulated, the planned negotiations with the employers association could not take place. After the retreat into the factories, Branting’s workers’ committee was dissolved. It was no longer needed. In the German Social Democratic Party, the events in Sweden had been followed with consternation and anxiety; a year later, the lessons that had been learned were put into practice. It had been shown that the power of the people could achieve nothing without a strong party and far-sighted leaders, which is why the murder of the key figures of the German Revolution became the first concern of the bourgeois-socialist alliance. When Ström said there had been no revolutionary situation in Sweden, although this conclusion was correct in hindsight, it also attested to the indecisiveness of the Left Socialists when faced with the opportunity to contribute to the emergence of such a situation. Even if we had been in agreement, said the lawmaker, we would still have been no match for Branting’s personality, around which a cult had been built up after the model of the German Social Democrats. In October of seventeen, four Social Democrats were appointed to the newly formed national unity government, headed up by the Liberal Edén, with Branting as finance minister, Palmstierna as naval minister, Rydén as minister of education, and Undén as a minister without portfolio. The next government was to belong to the workers—and to the members of the Left Party, who had formed an electoral coalition with the Social Democratic Party—and it would be led by Branting. Despite their organizational weakness, the Left Party comprised twenty thousand members and had won eleven seats in the Second Chamber. Not up to the task of street fighting, their leadership group turned toward parliamentary confrontations, which promised more success. The radicalization of the working populace seemed unstoppable. They would no longer be pushing for universal suffrage, the eight-hour day, but for the construction of the socialist republic, the appropriation of the country’s goods and means of production by the working class. And yet it was not the upsurge of the Left but the measuredness of the right wing of Social Democracy that came to be seen as a sign of strength. No longer confined to the opposition, the Social Democratic Party could offer the workers a program that addressed their most immediate objectives. Despite the fact that the Left Party’s diversity of perspectives better reflected the situation, their theoretical approach meant that they were unable to appeal to the masses. For the voters, the arguments in the Left Socialists’ program about the dangers of the Social Democratic Party’s philosophy of power and its belief in authority and its bureaucratization were less decisive than the fact that the two parties agreed about the centrality of parliamentary democracy; and in this domain they preferred the Social Democratic Party, which with over eighty seats was by far the largest party in the Second Chamber, making it better positioned to represent their interests. If we could just achieve universal suffrage, went the prevailing belief, we would also be able to make social justice a reality. By entering into an electoral coalition despite the fact that they were competing with each other for seats, the two workers’ parties had built that bloc of mutual condemnation and dependence which had remained necessary for every subsequent atte
mpt to assert themselves against the bourgeois hegemony. The party of the Left Socialists, later the Communist Party, was decisive in the battle against the cobbled-together Right Party, the Liberal Party, and the newly founded Farmers’ League, but in the process it ended up in the very position its founders had wanted to avoid, that of an avant-garde which, as a result of internal divisions, did more to provide wind for the sails of reformism than to push the working class toward revolutionary consciousness. Rogeby, with his broad face and flat nose, hands clasped under his chin, stared into the darkness that contained his childhood and this political turning point. He saw himself in his father’s drab kitchenette. Before him lay the years of arduous forward motion through the sediment of the failed insurrection. Late at night on the sixth of November, Lenin had proved that the moment to roll the dice of revolution had to be chosen carefully, and in Sweden this historical moment had been missed. The resolve required to face off against such an overpowering adversary had only existed in Russia, he said. The magnitude of the achievement of Russia’s steadfastness could be measured against the crushing of the German Revolution, the failure of the European proletariat, the rapid expansion of capital, the conspiring of the Western powers against Russia. Here, he said, working together with the bourgeoisie and the army, the Social Democratic Party was advocating for intervention in Finland, where, after the declaration of national independence, Mannerheim’s White Guards and German battalions were staring down the workers who had proclaimed a popular government. In defense of freedom, the freedom of bourgeois domination, Palmstierna had weapons delivered to Mannerheim, his declared sympathy for the people of Finland excusing this breech of the laws of neutrality; and Douglas, after secret negotiations with German Foreign Minister Kühlmann, put together an expeditionary corps. The slaughter of the Finnish socialists allowed a generation of Swedish generals to cut their teeth, providing them with experience that was able to be put into practice again on the same stage today. Condemning the Swedish intervention in Finland, declaring their solidarity with the Russian and Finnish revolutionaries, calling for an immediate ceasefire, the Left Party demonstrated its internationalist stance. Though many workers had been cowed by the victory of the counterrevolution in Finland and were given to entertaining the slander of the Social Democratic Party against the splintered Bolshevik revolution, which they accused of sowing nothing but calamity; for others, those November days in Germany had aroused a sympathy for the slogans of the Left. Once more fear spread through the bourgeoisie that the workers would band together to demand the formation of workers’ councils, the ousting of the king, the dissolution of the army, the arming of the people, and control of production, and people sat in their barricaded houses, money was sent overseas, suitcases were packed. And like in August of fourteen, at the end of the war, Social Democracy once again worked to ensure the maintenance of the status quo. Palmstierna had sent out armored cars, and their guns would be aimed at the workers. Once more the hesitation, the bated breath. The outcome of the German Revolution was uncertain; there too, the proletariat seemed to be overpowered by reactionary forces, and anything the powerful working class of Germany couldn’t achieve would never be able to be won in Sweden. After the bloody German January, the bourgeoisie could open their shutters once more. The financial oligarchy quickly recovered from its fright, and rising up behind this group that had long been involved in world finance were the Entente Powers, who would not allow menaces of the kind that had just been weathered to emerge in Sweden. When the Communist International was formed in March of nineteen nineteen, the Second International too—strengthened through agreements with the owners of capital, the generals—was ready to enter this new epoch. And all those who had still hoped for a collective front of all workers had to witness their betrayal, and every attempt during the following two decades to salvage the notion of unity was doomed to be smashed by this underlying betrayal. The Social Democratic Party, providing assurances that the monarchy and the First Chamber would be maintained, ascended to assume the government, while the Left Party, after having joined the Third International in June, became a cadre party which never again reached the membership numbers of its early years. In nineteen twenty, said Rogeby, with the introduction of universal and equal suffrage, the eight-hour day—even if there were still restrictions—and the formal establishment of democracy, access to the actual power of the people was cut off. Ever since the workers had gotten their mass party into government, they had achieved nothing through class struggle; everything was now given to them from above, by the Party, by the state, and their defeats too were no longer brought about through large actions of solidarity but through failed negotiations up above, in the parliament, or between the union leadership and the employers’ association. Most of us, said Rogeby, saw the twenties, in which exploitation was supposed to be abolished with the ballot, as lost years.