Revolution in Ninth Grade - My Future is with the People (Excerpt 1)

The Mälarblick school was situated in-between the wealthy neighborhood that had given the school its name and Västerberg, where blue- and white-collar workers lived. My parents moved out to the new suburb in 1952 after my older brother was born.

Västerberg offered modern apartments and subway access to the city. There were a handful of high-rise apartment buildings, but most apartments lay in rows of three-floor high buildings, which formed squares or rectangles within which the architects had left a few tall pine trees and granite rocks. There were sandboxes for the little children and grass lawns where the older children could blay stickball and hide and seek. The houses of each segment were painted in different colors and had openings towards the neighboring yard or the street. Our apartment lay on top of one such opening to the street and at the top floor my dad had his studio, which had tall cathedral windows.

The first time I realized that Mälarblick and Västerberg were two separate worlds was when I was invited to a teen party. My childhood friend Ronny was also invited, but he declined as he didn’t feel comfortable in the fine villas. For me it was different. My dad was a painter and mom an office manager. And my French pen pal Alain had once sent me a letter with a stamp that showed a bourgeois and nobleman bowing to an artist.

When I was with my Mälarblick friends, I felt like one among equals, but in Västerberg, I was always something of a stranger. My friends’ parents worked in stores, in offices, or drove buses. My dad painted paintings, which to my friends like Ronny was not a real job, an opinion that I’m sure he brought from home.

One thing we had in common and that was probably also true for the Mälarblick families, was that we were newcomers. Our families came from the countryside or smaller cities and were in many ways uprooted from their families and traditions. My parents and their siblings came from the north and settled in suburbs around Stockholm. And when the children arrived, they had less time for visiting their siblings, which meant that we saw our cousins less and less. The modern life offered freedom, but also alienation and a fundamental insecurity about how you act in social situations. They were immigrants in their own country, and we were their children.

 

Our teen parties were innocent events, overseen by parents, usually a mother who served fruit juice and cookies before retiring to another room. We danced shyly and sometimes we played spin-the-bottle, where the person who the bottled pointed at after it stopped had to do something the group decided. It was often things we boys found embarrassing, but that the girls found fun and exciting. Once the bottle pointed at me, I had to go into the next room with one of the girls and give her a kiss on the lips. The others giggled and teased us when we returned after a minute or two. Another game was that one of us boys had to sit on a chair while one of the girls touched our knee with their thumb and forefinger and then moved the grip step by step up along the leg. It made us jittery, but I kept cool when it was my turn and got through it without any embarrassing incident.

 

In the spring of 1968, I started a discussion club that met in my dad’s studio. There we were, six fourteen-year-old kids sitting around a low table on square foam cushions that my mom had helped me dress in psychedelic colors. When we had finished our tea and cookies, we put away the table and spread out a blanket on the floor. I started the tape recorder, shut off the ceiling light and turned on a red lightbulb to set the mood. We lay on the floor face to face listening to Revolver. It was Katarina, Peter, and Marie-Louise from Mälarblick and Lars-Erik, Stina and I from Västerberg. I faced Katarina. We whispered, maybe we talked about school or the latest movie in the theaters. I don’t remember exactly, but I do remember that she brushed aside my hand when I somewhat awkwardly tried to caress her long, dark hair. It was newly washed, and she didn’t want me to mess it up, she said.

The discussion club continued during the summer break, but then at Mälarbadet, a beach in Lake Mälaren. We played, swam, and had ice cream. I liked Katarina and she liked me, but it was a very innocent affair.  

Sometimes I would take the subway to the city where I walked around taking photos of people. I was inspired by Robert Doisneau’s pictures from Paris, which I had discovered in a photo magazine. I wandered around in Stockholm trying to capture human moments with my camera. During my city walks I often ended up by the Speaker’s Corner at Sergels Torg, where I listened to discussions about capitalism and the Vietnam war. 

The daily news during that summer were dominated by France, where president de Gaulle and his prime minister Pompidou managed to squelch the revolution by promising large wage increases to the unions, educational reforms to the students, and a new election where the Gaullists would strengthen their position a lot while the communists lost half of their seats in the national assembly.  

Then came the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, which shut down the Prague Spring and the reform leader’s dream of creating a “communism with a human face.” When we awoke on August 21, the occupation was a fact, and the newspapers show Russian tanks on their posters and front pages. I and my friend from school, Nils, went to the city to protest the invasion. We gathered at Humlegården and marched to Sergels Torg. It was announced that we were 20,000 people there. Everybody condemned the invasion, even the communist party vpk. 

By the end of the summer, I visited Stockholm’s City Museum to see a much talked about exhibit called “So what?” It consisted of large posters full of pictures, facts, statistics, and quotations from famous men. The theme was the destruction of the environment, the population explosion, global poverty, economic inequality, and the rich countries’ waste of global resources.

I found the catalog from the exhibit in one of my boxes and began to read. The message was somber. 

”in 80 years

we have no more oil

no more uranium

no more coal

no more natural gas

if we keep up increasing our consumption at the same rate as now”

 

“For us in Sweden,

The Baltic Sea will have large tracts without oxygen, i.e. without life, rotten and stinking.

Lake Mälaren will be so polluted that it can’t provide drinking water

 

As we now live, we are living at the expense of the underdeveloped countries, consuming the resources that belongs to our children and grandchildren, and at the price of a ruined environment.

You must understand that we can no longer measure our living standard in cars, refrigerators, and TVs.

A high living standard is to be free of wars and nuclear threats, free from hunger and social injustices, from damaging noise and stress,

A high living standard is to give our children a chance to live too.

We must change our attitude if mankind is going to survive.

You must change your attitude for your grandchildren to survive.”

 

One quotation from the exhibit etched itself into my brain. It was from John. F. Kennedy. 

“For the first time in the history we have the means to eliminate hunger: We only need the will.”

That was a moral challenge that required action. We cannot go on as before, I thought as I left the museum. 

A few days later I told the others in my discussion club about the exhibit and suggested that we should see it together. Peter and Stina couldn’t, but Lars-Erik, Katarina and Marie-Louise said yes. We decided to meet at the Mälarblick subway station, but only Lars-Erik and I showed up. I remember that I was both angry and disappointed, mostly in Katarina. It didn’t matter that Marie-Louise told me that their parents had not allowed them to go. For me it was over and so was the discussion club. 

1968 was an election year and many schools held mock election for the students. Representatives from the youth leagues of the political parties visited to present their programs and participate in debates. The young representatives of Folkpartiet wore straw hats and passed out campaign buttons, which we thought was a silly attempt to mimic American politics. Carl, Mikael, Nisse, and I voted for vpk, which if I don't misremember it did well in the school elections but lost half of their votes in the national election. Their youth organization VUF was led by Anders Carlberg, a charismatic student who became famous during the occupation of the Stockholm student council. 

We soon found out that there was a local VUF group in Mälarblick, and that they met on Thursday evenings in a large yellow villa. Carl, Nisse, and I went there and rang the door bell. A large man with blond hair, a goatee, and friendly eyes opened the door. His name was Torsten and he invited us to take a seat in the living room. He said that he and four other students rented the place. The meeting opened and we got a chance to introduce ourselves. The first item on the agenda was the reform of the higher education system, whose acronym UKAS also happened to be the Russian word for a proclamation by the tsar. We school kids had heard about UKAS for the first time during the student protests in the spring. 

After about an hour, tea and cookies were served, and we were invited to join a Marxist study group that was going to start the following week. The first session would discuss Leo Huberman’s brochure The ABC of Socialism, which we could buy for one krona. At nine the doorbell rang and the girl who had opened said that Nisse’s mom wanted to talk to him. She had come to bring him home. The next day, he told us that she had heard that the student collective in the yellow villa were engaged in sex orgies!

Before the meeting wrapped up, Torsten asked if we could help selling a small brochure called You are Studying - Big Business is Profiteering. Carl and I took five copies to show our good intentions.

Two days later, we took the subway to Stenstad where we went door to door in an apartment block for an hour. Those who opened stared confused at the brochure, and in the best of cases said no thanks before shutting the door. We gave up and bought the brochures ourselves, but we could at least return home with the feeling that we had some something for the future. 

Knocking on doors would become part of our new reality and after a few study meetings we understood that we had to go out among the people and explain capitalism to them. We also needed to show how our struggle in the rich world was linked to the liberation movements in the underdeveloped world. So, we went from door to door and there they were, the proletarians, standing in their socks, often annoyed that their TV watching had been interrupted, but some were sympathetic.

“Where do you find the energy,” somebody said.

For us, that was a sign that we were doing the right thing. The masses didn’t have the energy. They didn’t understand the necessity of the revolution, but we did, and it was our job to spread the word.

Soon we went to political meetings several times a week and on Saturday mornings we stood outside the state liquor shop Systembolaget selling our newspapers and shaking our collection boxes. Sometimes in the middle of the night we rode a car driven by an adult so that we could plaster the town with political posters. 

Our lives were now enmeshed in politics and when it was time to write an essay in Swedish class, I often managed to write about politics. The topic for one paper “A Foreign Environment.” 

”It’s not that easy to get to the headquarters of VUF and Café Marx if you haven’t been there before. But I managed to find my way to Kungsgatan 84 and pass through a vault into the courtyard which is surrounded by tall, gray, and somber walls. The place reminds me of a deserted warehouse. Ahead of me is an old, worn-out stairway that leads up to a glass veranda. The windows that are not broken are dirty and covered in spiderwebs. I enter through a half open dirty old door. A stairway, surrounded by filthy walls that once were white, takes me to the last stretch towards my destination. Once I am up there, I have four doors to choose from. The first is to the left of the stairs and leads through a hallway where some comrades stand around a table folding flyers. Coats and jackets hang on hooks along one wall. On a shelf sits ten motorcycle helmets on which are written revolutionary slogans. A girl with long, blond hair is making a call from a payphone. I continue into a large room where people are taking down a portrait of Josef Stalin. The comrades in the room are standing, sitting, or laying on the floor. One guy has four empty Vårby beer bottles next to him and he is about to finish a fifth. In another part of the room, Anders Carlberg and a few other persons are discussing something, I can’t discern what. Further back in the room stands lots of boxes and stacks of paper that are damage by fire. I recall that I read about a bomb attack against the 'Eighty-Four' as the place is also called. I exit the room and continue through the next door that takes me to the counter where they are selling beer for one krona and fifty öre. A cup of coffee or tea cost the same. On a shelf lies a row of magazines and brochures, Stormklockan, Zenit, Konkret, Socialismens ABC etc. I buy a beer and a cheese sandwich and enters the actual café, which is situated inside a room behind a door facing the counter. Café Marx doesn’t look like any other café I have visited. In the middle of the room is a large table surrounded by twenty or so red chairs. Along the walls there are a few smaller tables, also surrounded by red chairs. On one table sits an old TV with the picture tube facing the wall. On a sidewall hangs a portrait of Karl Marx with a red flag on each side. On the opposite wall I find Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, and Ho Chi Minh, plus a map of Vietnam where all places that are liberated by the national liberation front, NLF, are marked by red miniature flags. About a dozen comrades are sitting in there discussing over a beer or a cup of coffee. However, it is time for me to leave, so I take the stairs down towards the courtyard, and in a couple of minutes I am back on Kungsgatan.” 

The Du-reform of 1967 was rather innocent compared to 1968, but not the underlying message, which was that we all are equal. Before the Du-reform, young people were supposed to address adults with “Ni” and commoners were supposed to address people of power in the same way. In school, we students still used “magister” (not exactly “Sir” but similar) and “fröken” (like Mrs. or Miss), but it was not as self-evident after the reform.

There was a lot of talk about school democracy during this time, and in the beginning of the autumn semester, each class was asked to select representatives to the student council. When our teacher asked for names, the class turned silent until somebody said my name, possibly as a tease. Then Lars-Erik raised his hand. He had already been member of the council for a year and wanted to continue with it, so we were the two chosen from class 9g1. 

All the representatives met a week later in a classroom to elect a leadership and discuss what issues the council should work on. Carl and Mikael were there from 9g3 and they nominated me as chairman and Lars-Erik as cashier. That’s how I found myself chairman of the student council.

I took a seat at the teacher’s desk and opened the discussion about what we should do. The big issue was the new code of conduct the principal had proposed, and the only suggestion that came up was that students ought to be allowed to stay inside during the breaks if they wanted to. The meeting adopted a resolution that demanded that the students should be allowed to stay inside during the breaks.  

The student council had its own office situated on the second floor and only I and Lars-Erik had keys to it, why we didn’t need to go out unless we wanted to. And students who had any business with the student council were also allowed in, making us the gatekeepers. Once Bettan and her friend Titti knocked on the door, and we of course let them in even if they didn’t have any business with the council. Bettan was the sexiest girl in school. She often dressed in miniskirts and had a pretty face. They sat down in the two couches and chatted while I typed out the protocol from the council meeting.

 

”What should we do with the resolution?”

”We must present our demands to the principal,” said Lars-Erik.

With that we walked over to the principal’s office and pressed the button. When it turned green, we entered.

”Good day. Well, we are representing the student council,” I started a bit nervously while I looked around in the office. There were lots of books on the wall behind the principal. Studies, binders, magazines. To the right of us a window with a view over the school yard. Between us and the principal a large writing desk, which clearly separated us from the authority and the books. He was sitting in his leather armchair, and behind Lars-Erik and me were two chairs.

”Okay. What is the purpose of your visit,” he said, interrupting my thoughts.

”The student council adopted a resolution at our last meeting, which demands that students be allowed to stay inside during the breaks if they want to do so,” Lars-Erik said.

“Well, no, that is not something I can approve of. The board of the PTA and its chair, the Court of Appeal assessor Fahlander agree with my opinion that students should enjoy fresh air during the breaks. And the state school authorities and the chief school medical officer has also recommended that students spend their breaks outside.”

”But isn’t it up to the students if they want to go outside or stay inside? It’s often really cold outside. We don’t want to be forced to stay outside,” I interjected.

”Well, we in the school administration cannot accept such a reasoning and we do believe that it is in the best interest of the students that they go outside during the breaks. I would think Videmark understands this,” he said, only to repeat an argument that we felt was bureaucratic. 

While he was talking, I wondered if I could sit down. The chair is not occupied, I thought. He is sitting. I am tired. Logic dictates that I have the right to sit down, I thought and proceeded to do so, but that was a big mistake. The principal jumped up from his armchair and started yelling.

“What on earth is Videmark doing? I have not asked you to sit down. I dare say, show some respect!”

I was back standing in no time, as if I had sat on glowing coal, whereupon he sat down again, satisfied with having restored status quo. Our discussion continued, us standing, him sitting, until the school bell rang for the next lesson, and we had to leave. Thus ended my first negotiation.

“Old bastard,” I murmured after having shut the door.

 

The principal had won the first round, but we in the student council prepared for round two, which was to publish a school newspaper. The council elected an editorial committee consisting of me, Carl, Mikael, and a couple of other students.

The first issue landed like a bomb, not the least because of the cartoon on the cover that depicted our school as a prison, including a tall fence with barbed wire fence on top and guard towers. In the editorial we wrote that the paper was politically linked to all political parties and asked the readers to correct “any grammatical errors or typos”. As far as the debate about school democracy went, we wrote that “we are pissed off at the national school board since it had not raised us more democratically in school.” And in another editorial comment, we defended the use of curse words in the paper. 

Our chemistry teacher, who had said about school democracy that “if you give them the little finger, they take the whole hand,” was so mad that he threw his copy in the trash can and refused to hand out the paper.

Judge Fahlander came to visit me at my student council office during a school dance. He tried to talk some sense into me about the coming issue of the school paper, where a letter to the editor contained a personal attack on the principal. I listened politely and promised to discuss the issue with at the next editorial meeting, but I also referred to the paper’s policy to not censor what the students write.

The second issue continued in the same way as the first. The cover had a cartoon showing a pipe smoking man who resembled the principal attacking smoking students with a placard. In those days the right to smoke during the breaks was seen as a matter of school democracy. A girl in 9h suggested in a letter to the editor that everybody should start smoking at the same time. “The principal can say whatever he wants. We don’t care!”

Other letters complained about the paper’s leftist slant, a critique that we rebutted on the editorial page: 

“The paper has been called all different things from ‘a damn communist rag’ to ‘a very good paper’ (that is actually true.) The article about the “Calm in Svensson’s living room’ may have had a leftist slant, but we found it so interesting that it should be included. Some letters to the editor were also leftist leaning, but it’s not the editorial committee that writes all the letters. We received too few letters from the conservatives, but many more from the left. So, it is the conservatives’ own fault if some aspects of the paper were communist.”

 

Mikael went in the same class as Carl and lived with his mom and big sister in a high-rise near the Västerberg shopping center. His dad lived in the city.

We became friends and met almost every day after school. He liked to play chess and took it very seriously while I mostly played because it was fun. He was a pacifist, and I became a pacifist for a while, but I got sick of it after having been attacked on the school yard by a pair of twins from Mikael’s class. It was in the beginning of the winter, and I wore a six-foot-long blue scarf. The boys were small, but they were two, and they managed to grab one end each of the scarf and tried to strangle me. I tried to practice non-violence, but in the end, I gave up, took back the scarf and chased away the pest. Pacifism had proven impractical, at least in the school yard. 

Mikael was also interested in girls. When we went to a conference for new student council representatives, he flirted with two girls and talked them into coming to our hotel room. He bragged and said that he mastered hypnosis. One of the girls agreed to sit on a chair in the middle of the room while Mikael tried to hypnotize her. He tried for fifteen minutes until she got bored and disappeared with her friend.

On one evening when we met, he had just said goodbye to his girlfriend Lotta, who had brown hair and was tall and thinly built like him. He told me that she liked me and suggested that I take over. It’s great to have a girlfriend he said, adding that she had let him touch her breasts. I remember that I felt the whole thing awkward and said that she wasn’t my type.

The topic of girls was almost always there when we were not discussing the state of the world. Once when we had been at my place talking about girls, he suggested that I should call one of the girls in my class and invite her over. I was fairly shy, but he eventually got me to call Stina, who had been a member of the discussion club during the spring. She was happy that I called and said that she would love to come over. Mikael was happy about the outcome and left for home.

The doorbell soon rang, and she came up to my room. I turned on the red light and put a record on the turntable. It didn’t take long before we kissed and made out in my bed. It was nice of course, but I wasn’t interested in her. We went to the same class, so I was embarrassed when I met her the next morning, but I pretended that it was raining, and so did she. 

There was a vending machine attached to a wall right next to the Västerberg square. I had never seen anybody using it and nobody wanted to be seen using it. It was a rubber vending machine, and it was like it was calling me every time I saw it. Like many boys my age I wanted to lose my virginity and that without making a girl pregnant, so I needed condoms, but I didn’t want to get caught buying them. There was something embarrassing and shameful about the whole thing. The machined offered anonymity, but only if you were not seen.

I set out to the corner by the square many times to purchase the necessary protection, but my nerves failed me over and over, and a couple of times when I had stopped in front of the machine with my three kronor in my shaking hand, I heard footsteps and quickly resumed my walk with a pounding heart. One dark winter night I found myself in front of the machine and not a person could be seen or heard. I took out my coins and put them into the slot one after another. There was a rattling metallic sound as they fell into the container, but when I tried to pull out the drawer with the condoms it didn’t work. I pulled and jerked and banged on the machine with my fist, but to no avail. It must have frozen in the cold. Frustrated and three kronor poorer I hurried home.

Eventually I did manage to buy a packet and placed a couple of rubbers in my wallet in case I would be lucky one night. 

In early December we occupied the school hall. It was a spontaneous action that began when a couple of guys in 9g3 got together in the hall and said that they intended to stay inside during the lunch break. As soon as we heard about it, Lars-Erik and I went there to see what was going on, and it didn’t take long before we had joined the protest. 

The administrative office and the teacher’s lounge were just above the hall and from there you could easily see what was going on where we were. It only took a couple of minutes before the principal came down and told us to leave the hall and go outside. Nobody obeyed, which stunned him. One of the students sat nonchalantly on the floor playing with a pocketknife. The principal once more asked us to leave the hall, and then took down the names of all who refused. A couple of days later everybody involved got a letter sent home about the incident requesting a parental signature. Dad signed but didn’t say much about it. Maybe he saw it as a prank, which in his mind wasn’t that bad. 

My Swedish teacher mostly ignored the politics in my papers, but that was not the case when I wrote an essay inspired by Göran Palm’s bestseller Indoctrination in Sweden. The rubric was “Criticism and debate in today’s Swedish society.” 

“Indoctrination is a world heard ever more often in today’s Swedish society. I believe that Sweden like other capitalist societies use indoctrination to shield our capitalist social structure.

(Teacher: Even more effective in a country with strict censorship. Here we do hear leftist’s views, that is a counterweight!)

In the hands of capital owners and their protectors—in Sweden the government—indoctrination is dangerous and unfortunately incredibly effective. To avoid criticism and disappointment with the capitalist society they use different means of indoctrination. I will here try to explain how some of these works.

The school is a very effective and profitable instrument for controlling the worldview of the students. Beginning in the lower grades, they are encouraged to accept and assimilate in our current unfair society.

(Teacher: Our society=Sweden is not unfair to the young generation. You probably think of Sweden as a capitalist country in contrast to the underdeveloped countries.)

Those who are doing well in school are rewarded, called clever, get good grades and maybe even a prize. However, if you were not born with a knack for reading or is not as mature as your 'clever' friends get neither accolades, good grades nor prizes.

(Teacher: This has changed a lot! However, one must assume that people have different capabilities. Not even in the most equal of societies do all people have the same IQ.)

You are also called lazy and stupid.

(Teacher: Not if you work according to your abilities.)

Religious instruction tricks the children to believe in a lot of silly things about God who created the world in six days (he rested on the seventh,) the story about Adam and Eve, and much similar nonsense.

(Teacher: You are free not to believe!)

The children are given a positive belief in a higher being. These things limit the children’s imagination and makes them believe that they should accept and obey all rules set up by the bourgeoisie.

(Teacher: What are we then to say about the Mao cult? Huge leaps of thought!)

Children are given the faulty impression that they live in a society where there is total freedom, democracy, and justice. In the lower grades, the foundation is laid for the reactionary and often anti-communist propaganda that flourishes in Sweden. In the middle grades, thoughts are introduced about West’s so-called advantages over other parts of the world. This reaches its peak in grade 7 through 9 where we are told that 'high living standard' is to have the most cars, washing machines, TV-sets, and bills per inhabitant. Most students will never learn that Sweden for example is one of the leading countries in the suicide statistics. Students will seldom get any factual information about the socialist countries.

(Teacher: Fact is that these countries also use indoctrination. They do paint us (including You yourself) as capitalist crooks!)

In the textbook Today’s Society (used in grades 7-9 in social science) the People’s Republic of China is not even in the index. Is that a coincidence that the most populous country in the world is not even mentioned in a social science textbook?

(Teacher: This is because we know very little of the facts. But it is getting better: We had Snow’s movie on TV the other day. It is China’s own fault. You have a China cult, not a factual knowledge of China. You don’t understand that China raised an iron curtain around the country during a period when they rebuilt their country. Now they are starting to let people in, but only a few tenths.)

In the same book India is called the 'world’s largest democracy,' and the U.S. is called 'the world’s richest nation.'

(Teacher: Factually correct!)

It doesn’t let you know that 20 million people are starving in the U.S.A.

(Teacher: CBS did in a TV-program about 4 months ago!)

This book as well as some other textbooks spread a distorted image of communism and anything that has to do with communism.

(Teacher: You have yourself made a distinction between real communism and practiced communism! How is your sharpness of thought here!!? It’s a matter of definition, right!)

You also find indoctrination in many other parts of society, for example in the reactionary American cartoon magazines, in mass media, which is inundated with bourgeoisie concepts. The lousy and violent TV-series such as Ironside, High Chaparral, Laredo, and Mission Impossible stuff us full of reactionary prejudices and a glorification of violence.

Here I wanted to highlight the bad forms of indoctrination that you find in our capitalist state, Sweden. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to discuss the positive kind of indoctrination that exists in China and in the schools belonging to the American rights movement.

(Teacher: Where is freedom and human happiness? Must that too be indoctrinated?

The topic: Not the stated, but Hateful capitalist indoctrination in our country. This will land you a 1 in the gymnasium, absolutely! It is a requirement in all countries that a writer sticks to the subject he has given in the headline!

Language: Between 4–5!)”

 

1968 was over, but for us the struggle continued.

My grades from the autumn semester were good, so I didn’t worry for the spring semester, which was the final before gymnasium (high school). I went to political meetings every week and participated in Marxist study groups. We read the Marxist “classics,” plus Man’s Worldly Goods by Leo Huberman, Monopoly Capital by Baran and Sweezy, and Report from a Chinese Village by Jan Myrdal.

We felt an enormous desire to understand the world, but not only that. We almost instinctively understood Marx’s eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, which said that ”philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

And we were assured that we were doing exactly that as we marched, ran mimeograph machines to produce flyers, collected money for the NLF and sold newspapers outside Systembolaget. We were activists! And we were convinced that everything was possible.

 

We published a new school newspaper in the spring of 69 and named it The Comrade. The name was a wordplay since we wrote for our class and school comrades, but comrade was also the preferred attribute we revolutionaries used.

The first issue was despite that pretty mild. In the editorial I discussed stress in school: 

”Long term, I think it makes sense to invest in youth since they are the ones who will take over society in the future. If we can afford to send rockets to the moon and if we can afford to mismanage arable areas in the third world, we can afford letting our youth study in harmonious schools.”

 

The second issue was anything but mild. Real school democracy is a “big slap in the face of capitalism” an article declared on the editorial page. The issue was a call to arms and the reaction didn’t take long. Within a couple of weeks, a rival paper appeared. It was called The Tribune and its editor wrote that The Comrade was a “communist rag” which of course was true. The end of the spring semester approached but we didn’t give up and put together a third issue which we took to the school caretaker for printing. He was friendly but said that he had been told not to print anything before he had printed a bunch of material that he had just received from the principal. Carl and I decided to skip school in the afternoon and print it at Café Marx. A couple of hours later we were on the way back home with issue number three of The Comrade, which we distributed the next morning.

"Big Spectacle: The Principal Ruminates” page one declared in war headlines.

We had gotten our hands on an issue of The Teacher’s Magazine, where the principal compared us to China’s culture revolutionaries in an interview. He had a point, but what we took after was in fact the youth movements and the student protests in the US and Europe. 

”They are talking so much about indoctrination in school since they don’t share our views. However, for the rest of us, there is hardly any indoctrination, other in the sense that we are instructed by the educational standards to prepare the students for the democratic society, in the sense of western democracy with representative democracy etc. I do sometimes have the feeling that our education is so neutral that it is unable to engage the students.”

 

Two days after we published The Comrade No. 3, The Tribune published an extra issue where its editor delivered a broadside against me personally. I was sitting at the student council office thinking about how to answer when three teachers showed up. They were upset about the attack and suspected that reactionary teachers had helped The Tribune. Soon we sat around my office desk working on a sharp rebuttal.

The semester was just about over, and nobody expected us to make a comeback, but a couple of hours later I ran over to the school caretaker with an extra issue of The Comrade, which we handed out on the last day of school.

 

VUF held its congress in the spring of 1969 and all members were invited to participate. Carl, Mikael, Nisse, and I went to the movie theater at Brommaplan where a couple of hundred revolutionaries had gathered. We took our seats and waited in excitement. Almost immediately after the chair had declared the congress opened, one of the delegates raised his hand and said, “a matter of order!”

He took to the floor and gave a short speech where he complained the itinerary was sent out two weeks too late and that item number seven and eight needed to be moved up so that the discussion about the nomination of board candidates came before lunch. Before he had finished another delegate raised a matter of order regarding the matter of order and began to argue against the first matter of order. Another matter of order was raised, and it was followed by yet another one. As we were new to this, we soon lost count and didn’t understand what was going on. It would take two hours before all matters of order had been laid to rest, and by then it was time for lunch.

During the afternoon the discussions about the organization’s policy and relations to vpk became heated. VUF was after all the youth affiliate of the party, but most speakers didn’t want to have anything to do with the party, which in their eyes was little more than a support party for the social democratic party and had betrayed the struggle against the US imperialism. The contradictions were intense and when it became clear that there would not be any agreement on the political platform, the congress instructed the Executive Committee to formulate a new political platform and then call an extra congress.

 

Back then there were plenty of discussions about what socialism would look like. We attended teach-ins to learn more about China and Cuba. Many progressives had posters of Fidel and Che Guevara on their bedroom walls next to Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. These socialist paradises attracted not only young revolutionaries, but academics and cultural personalities who participated in guided tours and returned with stories that painted a positive image of Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s cultural revolution.

We read Peking Review, China Reconstructs and China Pictorial. The latter was packed with pictures of beautiful landscapes, smiling peasants and the mandatory portraits of Chairman Mao. I remember that I once showed a copy to Dad, who skeptically commented that almost every image featured Mao and Lin Biao, who had just been chosen as Mao’s designated successor. 

The cult of personality was a dilemma for us young Maoists, but we blamed it on the fact that China was an underdeveloped country, so it wasn’t really Mao’s fault. For us, the cultural revolution was a way to prevent the revolution to stagnate like in Soviet. We took the images of enthusiastic red guards as a proof that Mao practiced the mass line. I remember that Carl, Mikael, and I once discussed the cult of personality at Mikael’s place. He had said that it was laughable, which I agreed to, adding that we didn’t laugh at the Chinese, but with them. My friends thought it was an excellent distinction.

 

The question of Stalin was an even hotter potato. We had of course heard about his purges and brutality, so it was a tricky question. Under normal circumstances it would be hard to understand how anybody could defend such a leader, but I am writing this in the US where Donald Trump is president, and a large part of the population deifies him. It’s like the believers live in another world with alternative facts. And that’s the way it was with Stalin. I remember a meeting in the large meeting hall behind Café Marx, where the question of Stalin was debated in front of hundreds of young revolutionaries. First out was the radical cultural writer Bengt Alexandersson. He based his argument on Robert Conquest’s book The Great Terror, which in his view proved that Stalin had murdered the Bolshevik Old Guard, was responsible for the bloody collectivization and the labor camps in Siberia. He quoted Conquest’s estimate that 15 million people had died because of Stalin.

A bunch of Trotskyists applauded him when he was done, while the rest of us sat quiet as we waited for Professor Bo Gustafsson, who was one of the founders of KFML. He started by quoting Soviet population statistics, which in his view showed that the 15 million number was unreasonable. And when it came to the purges, he thought Stalin surprisingly patient when it came to trying to win over a political opposition that had responded by sharpened its attacks. They also took advantage of mistakes during the collectivization, but that was mistakes that Stalin had acknowledged. And when the threat to Soviet from the fascist states grew, part of the opposition started to conspire against the party and the government. He quoted two Americans, one historian and one diplomat, who both defended the Moscow trials, which in their view was an attempt to prevent the occurrence of a fifth column in case the country was invaded by Hitler.  

But of course, Stalin had his faults the professor said, and referred to Lenin’s letter to the 13th Party Congress 1924 where he criticized Stalin for being too rough, intolerant, impolite and uncaring. For Gustafsson, it was these faults that contributed to Stalin “relying on the security apparatus instead of the people, disregarded the democratic centralism, blended contradictions withing the people with contradictions between the people and the people’s definite enemies, did not listen to criticism, did not correct errors in time, etc.” during the “sharp and complicated class struggle in the 1930s.”

This was of course serious faults, but we must when discussing Stalin “make a comprehensive evaluation of him and acknowledge his essential historic contributions and political line. And if we do that, I think we can say that his positive sides outweigh his errors.”

Stalin was in other words no more than a human being who had ended up in a very difficult situation. As a pioneer, he had to pay a higher price, which however made it easier for  people coming after him. And to really calm us young revolutionaries, he closed the speech by stating that the birth pangs of socialism are relatively short lived and mild compared to the capitalist imperialism’s centuries of hunger, oppression, and extermination.

That was what our alternative reality looked like, and it was hardly a surprise that it fit perfectly with the image that Mao and the Chinese communists had painted. Stalin had his problems, but he was still one of the “five great leaders.”

In hindsight, one can ask why it was so important to defend a dead and buried leader, but that is not stranger than that people get into fights over religious, ethnic, and cultural traditions that can seem fairly unimportant to outsiders. 

Seen in a really long perspective, the break between the CCP and the CPSU was but one of many schisms that has followed crises of succession. After Mohammad’s death in 632, there was a fight over who should take over after him, which over time led to Islam’s split in Sunni and Shia. In 1054 the Catholic Church was divided into an eastern and western branch, and in 1378, the western branch split giving Catholics two popes who banned each other, one in Avignon and one in Rome. (For some time, there were three popes concurrently.)

For people living with these schisms, it was essential to recognize the right signs and interpretations, because words were not just words, but signals that could be used to identify friends and foes and show who one could trust. The words and leaders we believe in gets practical consequences, whether the leader’s name is Stalin or Trump.

My Future Is With the People is the first part of  a novel with the working title Shifting Passions.