The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2

by Peter Weiss

  But the Social Democrats were governing as a minority, said Ström. In the Second Chamber, one hundred thirty-three representatives of the bourgeois parties sat across from eighty-six Social Democrats and eleven Left Socialists; in the First Chamber, the bourgeois parties had double the number of seats as the other side. Instead of finally seizing success after almost a hundred years of beating at the gates, the Social Democratic Party had to lead a state that had been declared bankrupt by the business owners. Let’s see how you do with this, they cried out to the government, and it was obvious that they would soon have to give up. The postwar boom had brought in maximum profits for the industrialists. The workers had had every last drop sucked out of them, they could be left to their own devices for a while, kept as a reserve that cost the factory owners nothing. Induced market crashes and factory closures were used to suppress wages, often by up to fifty percent. Recalcitrant union sectors were shut out. The crisis could not be tackled with strikes. Soon, the number of unemployed had risen to a hundred thousand. In the metal industry alone over ten thousand workers were laid off. There could be no thought of social reform, all motions were voted down, the focus was now on providing financial aid to the affected families. Later we had to concede, said Ström, that by holding fast to their democratic principles despite attempts to bring them to their knees through extortion, the Social Democratic Party was actually promoting the course of progress. We too, he said, were closer to the Social Democrats’ rejection of violence and their condemnation of a coup d’état than to the dictatorship of the proletariat that we had now recognized in our program. Our bond with the Soviet state was of a moral kind; we were fighting against ourselves when we claimed to be opponents of Branting, who emphasized the notion of socialist evolution over socialism as a dogma, and who reproached us, former adherents of Luxemburg, with her erstwhile fear that the dictatorship of the proletariat could become a dictatorship of the Party apparatus over the proletariat. In the conflict, said Ström, between the task of placing all our energy in the defense of Soviet Russia and the realization that we needed to create a national basis for the guiding principles of our party, we ended up in a state of paralysis, unable to act. The revolutionary catchwords that had been conveyed to us by the Soviet Party corresponded less than ever before to the power relations in the country, and yet we couldn’t abandon them, as that would have led to our exclusion from the Comintern. The notion that we could exist purely as part of the global organization led by the Soviet Party clashed with the opinion that we would only be viable once we had established our autonomy; and both were correct, a destruction of the Soviet order would also have meant our own destruction, just as the lack of practical suggestions on everyday issues robbed us of credibility in the eyes of the populace, who didn’t want myths but bread and work. We attempted to combine these two extreme needs; Lindhagen, Höglund, Kilbom, and Aschberg, the banker, traveled multiple times to Moscow—against the wishes of the government, which had broken off diplomatic relations with Soviet Russia—to put aid operations in place and to open up trade routes; and at the same time, we set about once more sketching out our conception of a socialist party based on humanist foundations and incorporating all democratic rights. Had we been able to deliver on our prevailing intentions, he said, we would have formed a party with a future, but by nineteen twenty, when the Comintern issued its theses distancing itself from the Second International, the Central Committee already considered us sectarians, opportunists, petit-bourgeois elements, unworthy of belonging to a section of the Communist International. What we wanted was distorted and decried, as the doctrines of the early socialists had once been. With the rise of a strictly disciplined, hierarchically structured party, the scientific rigor of thinkers such as Babeuf, Buonarotti, Owen, Blanc, and Cabet had been dismissed; they were at best recognized as sources of inspiration and otherwise declared dreamers and fantasists. For us, their utopias were still something worth striving for; supplemented with new economic findings, they could be forged into an image of society that fit with our views and with the traditions in the country better than the authoritarian model with which we were supposed to be falling in line. But at this time of civil war, of the Entente Powers’ blockade measures and plans of attack, the Soviet Party needed to be able to trust the foreign Parties, said Rogeby, they needed a support structure and had to be certain that the structure was not dominated by Social Democratic interests. That which had been achieved in Russia and was now being put to the test was to be adopted and extended in the West; and there, time and again we saw the failure of the proletariat in the face of military and economic institutions and in the face of Social Democracy, which claimed sole title over the workers’ movement. Feigning radicalism, in their new program the Social Democratic leadership returned to the definition of the antagonistic conflict between work and capital, spoke not of concessions and reconciliation but of class struggle as the sole means of removing the system of depredation. At the same time, though, this militancy was annulled with the assertion that capitalism was not capable of exploiting the growing productive forces. Upon reaching the highest level of accumulation, it would void itself of its own productive force and have to make way for industrial democracy. Thus, in its decline, the Social Democratic Party gave the impression that the crisis, which had been conjured up by the owners of capital, was the preliminary stage on the way to a socialized society. As happened so often in the following years, Social Democracy co-opted the challenges issued by the left wing. Wigforss, the Social Democratic finance expert, was adept at instantly adapting the questions posed by the Left Party—about participation in matters related to production and about the economic struggle against the punitive measures of the employers—and adjusting them to fit their reformist program, nullifying the demand for workers’ councils. While the Communist practitioners Kilbom and Linderot were working within the unions to activate them at the level of rank and file, the Social Democratic functionaries propounded the formation of works councils, which masqueraded as a platform for securing the right to workplace participation, but which actually served as instruments for controlling events in the workplace. When the Left Party made appeals for extraparliamentary action against the bourgeois attempts at restoration and for the arming of the working class, the Social Democratic Party pointed to the calm, experimental progress of their activities. Above all, said Rogeby, this offensive line clashed with the liberal and pacifist attitude within the Left Party itself. The group around Lindhagen put together a Humanist Manifesto as an alternative to the Communist Manifesto; Kata Dalström, having converted to Buddhism, agitated for religious freedom; and Höglund, the leader, and Ström, the Party secretary, preferred to speak not of arming the proletariat but merely of disarming the bourgeoisie. We needed time, said Ström. But there was no time, said Rogeby. Lenin’s writings hadn’t even been published here, said Ström; we sketched out a political strategy, a theory of the state, investigated the possibility of an alliance with the Social Democratic Party, and we received nothing but directives aligned with Russia’s war Communism; what’s more, Radek and Zinoviev were already driving a wedge between us—who they viewed as revisionists—and those who were determined to fall in line with the Comintern. We could have forged a synthesis from the differences of opinion and pushed the progression to the left with a unified party and a consideration of our specific conditions, but, against our better judgment, we had to choose the path of fragmentation. Now that the Social Democratic Party had proven itself to be incapable of relieving the misery in the country, the call could be made to return the bourgeoisie to the ministries in order to rectify the labor situation, and by October, after the election of the Second Chamber, in which the Social Democrats lost eleven seats, the king asked the Right Party, which had gained fifteen seats, to form a government. When Rogeby thought back to the years of his youth, he sensed the feeling of being roped in that had become part of the inheritance of the working class. It was in the countryside that the
backwardness was all-encompassing: there was no eight-hour day out there; out there people worked twelve to fourteen hours, sometimes even longer, for starvation wages. And the thing with the right to vote was that, for the Second Chamber elections, men could only head to the polls once they had turned twenty-five (and women not even then); for the municipal elections it was twenty-eight, and with the gap between the elections that often meant an additional deferral, as well as the exclusion of many of the younger, active workers. In March of nineteen twenty-one, said Ström, we contributed to the further weakening of the socialist bloc by tearing our Party apart in the conflict over the acceptance of the twenty-one theses outlining the conditions of membership to the Comintern. Unintentionally, he said, we had ended up carrying out one of these so-called purges, like those now beginning in the German Party. Not yet having recognized how tightly we were binding ourselves to the Comintern, we pushed out Lindhagen, Vennerström, and Fabian Månsson, who wanted an independent party. Our membership numbers, which by this point had dropped to sixteen thousand, shrank by another six. The Party lost almost half of its members of parliament. The faction that Lindhagen headed up for another two years under its old party name before being absorbed into the Social Democratic Party, received five seats, while the Communist Party, as it was henceforth called, had only two members in the Second Chamber. In the fall of twenty-one, with women also having received the right to vote, Social Democracy managed to climb from seventy-five to ninety-three seats and, in this saga of fluctuating figures, retake the government from the Right Party, which had surrendered ten of its seventy-two seats. The business owners immediately went on the offensive. In January of twenty-two, more than two hundred thousand were calculated as unemployed when the youth were included, almost twenty percent of the entire working-age population. The Social Democratic Party was now presenting itself as a radical opposition party. With Palmstierna’s relocation to London as an ambassador and the promotion of the economist Wigforss, the old, patriarchal, liberal position seemed to have been exchanged for a line in keeping with modern, rationalized forms of production. With the revolt in Kronstadt, the failed insurrections in Germany, the rejection of world revolution, the introduction of the New Economic Policy for the Development of Socialism in One Country, the wrangling for succession upon the deterioration of Lenin’s health, and with our internal discord, which was once again threatening to explode, said Ström, the Social Democratic Party, with its unerring parliamentary activities, its leadership—which had remained static for years and would do so for many more—conveyed an impression of solidarity. With the Soviet Party now attempting to catch up to capitalist working conditions, handing out concessions and profit incentives to industry and agriculture, it was approximating, he said, the methods that Social Democracy was also pursuing in order to reach state socialism via state capitalism. The Social Democratic ideologues were able to capitalize on this in their election propaganda, pitting their peaceful alternative against the Soviets’ dictatorial force. When on the first of May, said Rogeby, tens of thousands of Social Democratic workers streamed down Karlavägen beneath red flags on their way to the gathering at Ladugårdsgärdet, singing the International as they moved through the quarter of the haute bourgeoisie, accompanied by jeers from the windows, it seemed as if there were no differences between the objectives of the workers’ parties; but during the working day the contradictions emerged. Though they still shared the same battle hymns, the Communists viewed their efforts as connected with the events in other countries and attempted to strengthen the front against capitalism, while the others, the great majority, shaped by the policy of concessions and compromise, took the path of working day reforms, which promised access to prosperity for all if they could only ensure the Party was strong enough. Often growing exhausted and then picking themselves back up, defeated in April of twenty-three, in the autumn of twenty-four they reclaimed the government for their party. The foundations of the labor movement, however, were the unions, and there the parties wrestled for the leadership of the workers. It was as if they wanted to prove, time and again, the thesis that they would never be able to transcend unionist thinking on their own. The Social Democratic functionaries attempted to hold onto the workers through the obligatory membership to the mass party—the same party that was using the unions for revisionist ends—while the Communist cadre endeavored to prepare them for revolutionary action. In the efforts of the two parties to form an alliance between the industrial workers and the rural proletariat, contradictions became apparent that would lead to an intensification of the antagonism between the parties, and to the second break in the Communist Party. Höglund and Ström wanted to work together with the Social Democratic leadership to create a common front, but the Comintern ordered that the parties remain separate. In order to become an effective front against monopoly capital, the United Front had to be under the leadership of the Communist Party. The workers were to be won over for this front. Once again, the Party’s top-ranking committees were concerned with questions of principles, hair-splitting, debates on whether capitalism was in the epoch of its demise, which would make the revolutionary concentration of the proletariat appropriate, or rather in a phase of stabilization, which would necessitate a tactical retreat. In the lower ranks of the Party, the reasons for the disputes remained incomprehensible; the rank and file, who now numbered only nine thousand four hundred in total and were willing to enter a coalition with the Social Democratic workers, were surprised by the split. After Lenin’s death, said Ström, the executive committee of the Communist International had become nothing but a body for carrying out interrogations, meting out punishments and demanding apologies, confessions, penance. Höglund, who had declared his allegiance to Trotsky, had been vilified in Moscow by Zinoviev and Bukharin; I was also accused of having an un-Marxist, unrevolutionary attitude, said Ström, because in one of my books I had mentioned Balabanoff, who had just been expelled from the Soviet Party. And thus, shortly before the elections for which the Social Democratic Party was gathering the populace together, we ended up in a quarrel over the one true faith. The two groups—one demanding a break with the International, the restoration of autonomy, the other arguing that our key task was to protect the Soviet Union, which had been forced into isolation—managed to keep the Party on its feet until the elections were over. The Party lost two of the seven seats they had won the previous year. The Social Democrats, strengthened by the dissolution of the Left Party, picked up eleven new seats in the Second Chamber. At the congress in November, the explosion that led to the formation of two Communist Parties occurred. Höglund, the previous leader, and Ström, the Party secretary, had the majority of the Central Committee and the members behind them. Claiming the legitimate leadership of the Party for themselves, they shut out Kilbom, Linderot, Sillén, and Nerman, who made up the majority of the editorial team of the Party newspaper. They, in turn, having been granted authority over the Party by the Comintern, shut out Höglund’s group. In the vicious struggle for the newspaper Folkets Dagblad [The People’s Daily], the minority snatched victory, and the independents set up a competing newspaper, Nya Folkets Dagblad [The New People’s Daily]. Since both parties claimed to be the true Communist Party, they spent a year spreading confusion among the workers, but after that, said Rogeby, most of those who had followed Höglund and Ström returned to the Comintern Party. The reformist tendencies in the independent Party had become increasingly manifest; the need for a proletarian party was becoming more evident; and what’s more, the Comintern’s attacks on Social Democracy had grown more convincing. Basically, said Ström, we had initially accepted the principle of the dictatorship of the proletariat for a transitional period, as had been set out by Lenin. We had also been willing to make our decisions in accordance with democratic centralism, provided that it indeed operated from the ground up. But then, as Soviet centralism began deciding on our decisions, we saw ourselves compelled to return to our original concepts. We offered to maintain
close relations with the Comintern. Their doctrine wouldn’t allow for that. We were condemned as heretics, which only strengthened our desire to establish a socialist party in our own image. But in nineteen twenty-six, following Branting’s death and Sandler’s brief assumption of government, we came to the realization that nothing could be achieved from within this small party, that we would never get beyond submitting motions that were either voted down or had to be adopted by the Social Democrats, that we needed the mass party, as it was only there that we would have access to the full spectrum of working people. Initially we perceived our return as a humiliation, but the Social Democratic Party had also suffered a defeat that year, and had to surrender the government once more to the bourgeois camp. With the renewed rise of a reactionary wave, they required all the support they could get. And he turned right around and started currying favor with his old comrades, said Rogeby, and venerating Branting, the patriarch, in his writings. The departure of the reformists proved to be a boon for the Communist Party. During nineteen twenty-eight, the membership numbers rose from four thousand to eighteen thousand. In the elections that year, they reached their highest tally, snaring eight seats with almost six and a half percent of the vote. For those of us who were then finding our way to Communism, said Rogeby, it was a given that the Party would act in concord with the Soviet state, which was being threatened by the Western powers. We attended less to the brutal regulations in the Soviet Union than to its successes in industrialization and collectivization. The foreign policy of the bourgeois government—once again with Lindman, the leader of the Right Party, as prime minister—conformed with the request from the Western powers to destroy development in the Soviet Union. Domestically, they attacked the union organizations, strengthened the strikebreaker commandos, and had prison sentences handed out to Communist agitators. More and more, the industrial democracy that Wigforss had added to the Party program had revealed itself as a tool for establishing harmony between employers and employees. Precisely because he was considered progressive, Wigforss was best positioned to deceive the workers. He dismissed their power to create revolutionary change in society and pointed to their inability to assume high-level posts in industry and the state. But to avoid completely turning his back on the plans for socialization, he promised schools and other institutions, under union management, where workers could be trained to become future managers. The industrial pseudodemocracy only benefited the business owners, for under the pretense of giving the workers a say, but with no talk of collective decision-making, such platforms could utilize workers’ technical experience and insights to increase productivity. The strike in the mining districts, which was maintained for half a year, did not lead to major united struggles against finance capital—which had now, according to the analysis of the Comintern, reached its imperial stage in Sweden—but rather to an agreement that only reemphasized the powerlessness of the workers’ organizations. The agreements made between the union bureaucrats and the employers’ association after the capitulation of the general strike in nineteen hundred two were set in law, and new paragraphs were drawn up which would be ratified a decade later, in Saltsjöbaden. Collective wage agreements complying with the conditions of the employers were forced on the trade union associations. Industrial peace was manufactured by banning strike actions for the duration of a wage agreement. The owners were afforded the privilege of hiring and firing workers as they saw fit, and of merging or shutting down factories. In conflict situations, strikebreakers had the right to freely exercise their profession. Not just the union organization but every single worker was henceforth responsible for observing these ordinances. Transgressions were punished by a labor court. The law, said Rogeby, was whatever served the owners of the means of production; crime was anything the workers initiated themselves. When Ström spoke about this era it was as if he had always propounded the arguments of Social Democracy. So durable was the fabric of the Social Democratic Party that all deviations disappeared into it like chance occurrences. He saw no betrayal in the collaborationist policy of the union leadership. They were merely responding to the circumstances. The means of production were in the hands of the capitalists, the economy was booming, attacks against the existing society would have jeopardized their own livelihood. In the Second Chamber, ninety Social Democrats and eight Communists faced off against seventy-three representatives of the Right Party, twenty-seven members of the Farmers’ League, and thirty-two Liberals; in the First Chamber, fifty-two Social Democrats and one Communist were dominated by ninety-seven members of the bourgeois parties. If we didn’t want all our achievements in social reform to be crushed, said Ström, we had to make concessions on economic matters. The slogans of the Comintern, said Rogeby, class against class, which took aim both at the owners of capital and at Social Democracy, were justified. If war was to be declared on imperialism, then Social Democracy, which had become its handmaid, had to be included. The designation of the Social Democrats as Social Fascists, however, poisoned the atmosphere within the unions. Once again, opinions diverged in the Communist Party as to how the union should go about its business. In the estimations of the Comintern, the capitalist system was facing a worldwide crisis as a consequence of overproduction and unrestrained speculation. The moment of revolutionary possibilities had arrived. A United Front of the working class would be able to bring down imperialism in this weakened state. In the attacks on Social Democracy, however, a strict distinction had to be made between the workers and the leadership. Linderot and Sillén convened a unity committee that was supposed to mobilize the union membership. The group around Flyg and Kilbom, however, were anticipating that the boom would continue. They also considered the opposition too weak to withstand the countermeasures of the Social Democrats. Leading Communists had immediately been shut out, the threat of being excluded from the unions hung over anyone who wanted to join the committee or sympathized with them. Kilbom, and with him the majority of the union functionaries, assumed that the United Front could only be realized in cooperation with the Social Democratic Party. The unions had to remain intact. The Communist cadres must not be isolated from the members of the other workers’ party. It was an impossible dilemma. The Social Democratic leadership was not willing to enter into any alliance, and the Comintern likewise rejected the suggestion of establishing a United Front from above in coalition with the Social Democratic Party leadership, describing it as pacifist and opportunistic. The unity committee, said Ström, did not want to create unity but rather to splinter the national confederation of trade unions. In the group faithful to the Comintern, there was an expectation that the workers would join a front that was formed from the ground up. But few were willing to accept being ejected from the union for joining the opposition, which would mean risking their job. The Comintern pressed for escalated confrontations; Kilbom’s group demanded that order be maintained in the unions. Here too, said Rogeby, it was unimaginable that the Party would shatter under the weight of these controversies. The members were sure that the Central Committee would not be willing to endanger the Party in its strengthened position purely in the interests of dogmatism. But instead of further expanding the work of the union, said Ström, the Party severed itself from its base. What played out in the days of October nineteen twenty-nine, he said, no longer had anything to do with Marxist rigor, with discipline, proletarian responsibility. Flyg, the leader of the Party, and Kilbom, editor in chief of the Party paper, with the majority of the Central Committee, the members of parliament, and the union workplace representatives behind them, shut out Sillén, Linderot, and their supporters. Meanwhile, these two, who had been conferred the right to lead the Party by a commission of the Comintern led by Manuilsky and Ulbricht, shut out the majority group. The events that had taken place five years earlier at the instruction of the Comintern were being repeated, but this time, said Ström, in the escalating madness, the coming degeneration within the Soviet Party was beginning to reveal itself. The persecution of dissidents began t
o take on metaphysical dimensions. On the ninth of October, he said, while the Communists were fighting for their Party headquarters, funds, membership registers, for their newspapers and archives, accompanied by brawls and gunshots, I understood why the workers in this country stuck to the Social Democratic Party. The animosity, said Rogeby, was well-founded. Right to the end, the Social Democrats—and with them, the Communists who tended toward the Social Democratic ideology—had held fast to the belief in the stability of the capitalist economy. In doing so, they had given free reign to developments that could only lead to catastrophe. The formation of the proletarian front had been prevented. Because one side wanted to seize the initiative too quickly, by force, said Ström. While the others, said Rogeby, still believed it was possible to negotiate with the bourgeoisie. While the Social Democrats gave in to the vision of the folkhemmet, the people’s home, which had been decreed by Per Albin Hansson as a veil for all unresolved problems, and while the Communists tore apart their Party—Kilbom’s group took the printers of the Folkets Dagblad on Luntmakargatan and Sillén’s troop the Party headquarters on Torsgatan, while seven thousand members were gathered in the independent Party and only four thousand remained in the Comintern section, with the other seven thousand lost to Party life for some years—capital, according to the prognosis of the Comintern, had reached the limits of its expansion and was moving toward its own violent redistribution. Once again it was time to disempower the working class, to rob them of their capacity to make demands. Though the efforts to annihilate the Soviet Union had fallen short, they could still harm the workers and their organizations through the production of privation and misery. In the process, the anarchic regime of finance did not spare its own camp. It accepted enormous losses in order to maintain its system. On October third, with plummeting stock prices on Wall Street, the maneuvers had been set in motion that were to lead to the annihilation of the weak and the ultimate triumph of the giants. At first it was those without property who were affected. Unemployment would quickly wear them down, soften them up for subservience. Then the smaller and mid-sized traders and savers were devastated; it was business against business, monopoly against monopoly, concern against concern, trust against trust, until only the strongest remained, snapping up the assets of the bankrupt on the cheap. And the leaders of the workers’ parties, blinded in their disunity, gave imperialism yet another deadline to allow it to recover and prepare itself for the ultimate arena of thievery: war.