The Ghost of Communism

You can blame Sweden Television, the documentary Program Assignment Review or the program manager Janne Josefsson. In the Gerhard Helskog style, Swedish state television through two programs has investigated the past of the Swedish Left Party and party leader Lars Ohly. What they find is not beautiful to anyone.

But it is not possible to blame SVT. Or Janne Josefsson. The Left Party has been captured by the ghost of communism, as it swept across half Europe for three-quarters of the last century.

While the Left Party has told its voters, members and quite a few party activists that the close ties to the Communist parties in the East were cut already under the leadership of CH Hermansson (1964-1975), SVT can document that the contact was eastward intensified from 1977 and right up to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. While Hermansson ensured that the contact that actually took place was strictly formal, central party leaders led by Lars Werner's leadership (1975-1993) fraternization with embassy people and party people from the East: Bathing-room conversations with spirits in the DDR's embassy, ​​where you hand out your own party traps, can hardly be called something else.

There is little doubt that CH Hermansson and Lars Werner were different types of leaders: Where the former established central principles for eastern contact, the latter let it all go further. It provided space for party cadres who thrived as guests of honor on free trips to Prague or Pyongyang. In retrospect, it is difficult to say whether the tribute speeches to the Quislings in the Czech Communist Party were known to Lars Werner, or whether it was actually a personal outburst of joy from the expelled – if he was – party member.

Two years after Werner takes over the leadership, the split in VPK is a fact: A group of party members have grown tired of Hermansson's unfriendly line towards the communist parties in the East – continued by Werner. In 1977 they break out of VPK, and form APK. They have ambitions to replace VPK as the Communist Party in Sweden, including taking over contact with the parties in the East. But instead of taking the consequence that the VPK and the communist parties are for different, VPK chooses to give APK battle over contacts east. This fraternization continues virtually until the Berlin Wall is in ruins. Werner and his central party counterparts couldn't have cared more about what was happening around them than Honnecker or Jaruzelski did.

All this is history. A story The Vänster Party settled at the beginning of the 1990 century, under Gudrun Schyman's leadership (1993-2003). They published their White Paper, which explained the party's historical flaws, and Schyman spoke at the National Assembly to throw the concept of communism at the scrap heap of history. Then they looked to the future to carve out a leftist policy after the Cold War. The result was a party much like Norwegian SV and Danish SF, sometimes with a support in the area SV today has.

It would last for ten years, until Schyman had to resign due to clutter with his tax return. From the back room – the party secretary's office – Lars Ohly sailed up as the new party leader in 2003. And truth be told, it is his fault that we who sit and watch Swedish TV pull out 20-year-old stories do not think host Janne Josefsson hunts witches.

It's not about what Lars Ohly said and meant in the 1980 century. He was not the only one who said and meant stupid things, and requiring repetitive penance exercises or self-casting nowhere. But have you by virtue of being a "communist" meant that it was necessary to curtail bourgeois-democratic rights, that North Korea was a role model, that the GDR was a spearhead for peace, it sounds hollow to say “I was wrong” without also saying “I am no longer a communist ”. When Lars Ohly today says that he has always been for democracy, and always been a communist, and that nothing has really changed, he arrogantly avoids his necessary settlement. It was not the right wing that polluted the concept of communism. Ohly, many of his party colleagues and not least his party comrades in the East managed it on their own.

Now he is carried forward by a younger generation who experience "communist" as a euphemism, and who – like previous generations' Swedish communists – struggle to see the danger of totalitarian tendencies within the socialist / communist tradition. And even worse: Where Gudrun Schyman took moral and political leadership to ensure that the settlement with the communist era became not only a symbolic, but also real, settlement, Ohly evades his responsibility.

There is a lack of adult political leadership that over time will lead the Vänster Party itself to history's scrap heap. Lars Ohly largely won his position of power in the Left Party by riding on the desire of young and old nostalgics to bring to life old concepts and contradictions. It is difficult to understand that he will be able to take over the party today.