A Scandinavian contribution before the 1970s. It was the achieve. ment of Tom Gustafsson and his comrades that they helped to open it
There is no doubt that Scandinavia remains capitalist, with the evils that implies. Tom Gustafsson and Swedish leaders were adept at pointing to internationalism the strength of plained that it was the organized workers in Scandinavia that had produced a level of mass than anywhere
He had a strong confidence
TOM GUSTAFSSON, a founding leader of the Swedish section of the Fourth International and a central leader of the Fourth International itself, died on February 6, and his funeral and memorial meeting were held on February 13. His contributions and character were well illustrated by the funeral and the memorial meeting that followed it.
GERRY FOLEY
Founded at the start of the 1970s, the Swedish section remains a relatively young organization, with few, if any members over 40. Most of
Tom's generation were there to mourn him, and he was in the same age range as the bulk of the party.
The crowd that filled the funeral chapel and memorial meeting was made up essentially of young people.
There were a number of small children. There was an extremely strong feeling of human solidarity and common devotion to an uplifting purpose.
The mourners were the image of the humanistic revolutionary party that Tom Gustafsson set out to build only a decade and a half ago, a party to end the age of terror and servility and usher in a new one of enlightenment and free collaboration. In that sense, they were as much a likeness of him as the picture on his coffin.
Leaders tend, of course, to bear the image of their organizations and vice versa, especially in the case of small revolutionary groups. But in fact, Tom's outstanding characteristic as a leader was that he did not impose himself, but rather helped to learn and to work together.
What made the resemblance between Tom Gustafsson and the Swedish section was that he faithfully represented the processes that created
Swedish tradition of
Scandinavian humanism and idealism.
The reading of a poem by the Swedish-
Finnish poet Diktonius was a fitting
Swedish leader was a very cultivated person. He was well-versed in the works of the novelists of the
24 life of the workers and poor farmers that form an important part of the modern literature of his country. At the same time, he was fond of the modernist Swedish-Finnish poets, both vibrant Diktonius and Edith Sodergran, whose art is complex, and introspective. He also contemporary writing with a lively interest. Communicating with workers
All that did not interfere with his practical political lightened it, and probably helped keep it on course. He was an organizer, always at the center of the organization of any party event. For some years he worked in a factory, in the context of his party's campaign to root itself among workers. He gave a fundamental importance to being able to communicate with ordinary workers, address their interests and the revolutionary party. But he saw this always as part of a scientific process of liberating the minds and development of people.
He did not fall into the common 'Leninist" (actually Stalinist) fallacies of viewing workers as a battering ram to power and of glorifying the effects of the brutalization of working-people goes along with that sort of outlook. In that respect, he was helped by the fact that, in Scandinavia, the brutalization of the working class is considerably less than any place else.
In that sense, as in others, Scandinavia is a very important window on the world. It is one, unfortunately, the Fourth International largely lacked that there would be a working-class revolution in Sweden, and that it would be a very powerful one. But, at the same time, he acknowledged workers fought under better conditions than workers
Why were the conditions better? Essentially, I think, because Scandinavia has participated in advanced capitalist development without either becoming a major capitalist power itself or becoming entirely subordinated to one. It owes that to its position between England and Germany until World War II and to its position between East and West since.
While it is true that in Scandinavia the bourgeoisie often hides its interests behind claims of dedication to international peace and order and democratic international development, these are at least more progressive pretexts than those generally used by other national capitalist classes. And they have led to some benefits for those fighting exploitation and opression around the world, for example for the Chilean democrats, socialists and revolutionists who escaped imprisonment and execution through the Swedish embassy in Santiago.
Modern Sweden was built up, like Denmark - the other Scandinavian period of expansionism and greatpower politics extending from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the nineteenth.
The shattering of those ambitions forced a turn toward conceptions of social development relying more on developing human potentialities, involving human values. Representative of this attitude were the SwedishFinnish poet Runeberg and the Danish scholar, poet and educator Grundtvig. The former's cycle of poems of the conquest of Swedish Finland by Russia created an image of dignity and honor undiminished by defeat. That went hand in hand with Runeberg's celebration of the lives and qualities of ordinary people, for which he is regarded as the precursor of the Swedish social writers.
It was Tom and his companion, International Viewpoint 6 April 1987
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Birgitta, who shared his literary who introduced me Runeberg's works. I find it impossible low to dissociate them. Tom had a quiet, unassuming but unflagging sense if dignity that I came to identify with he personalities in Runeberg's Fanrik
Another positive feature Scandinavian tradition is that despite he relative smallness of the countries ind their relatively sheltered place in ecent history, there has been a strong of participation in universal struggles, reflected in the outstanding of revolutionary problems
Scandinavian literature, Ibsen's Brand and Strindberg's Master A special contribution
One of the constants in Tom's olitical outlook was the conviction ;hat Scandinavian workers and revoluionists had a special contribution to make to the world revolution and o building the world revolutionary the Fourth International. I
I first came in contact with Tom and the Swedish section in 1972, when I went to Scandinavia with Malachy McGurran, a representative
"Official" wing of the Irish Republican movement, who was doing a speaking tour on the Irish question at a high point in the struggle. (It was just after the Bloody Sunday
There was a sharp dispute in the Fourth International at the time about how to relate to third world revolutionary movements with a guerrilla strategy. It affected the attitude to the two factions of the Irish Republican movement at the time, since one of the elements in the development of the "Officials" was a rebound against previous guerrilla warfare experience. Tom and I were on opposite
Stalinism, of course, is an international phenomenon that attracts by the force of great-state power. Sweden was not proof against it, and there was even a certain basis
Many capitalist country. I found myself negotiating with most virulent brand of it, the thirdperiod Stalinists of the KFml(r) in Goteborg. Their leaders were a textbook example of the kind of intellec. tuals who become Stalinists out of belief in the power of evil, that is, of gangster methods. Since the power ful are evil, the way to become powerful is to be evil, to be "tough." That shows that you are a "winner," as opposed to the perpetual the Trotskyists, who show their weakness by talking about principle and democratic methods.
As irony would have it, it was not long after McGurran's tour that his own organization succumbed to the same Stalinist temptations, the lure of power seemingly offered by an alliance with the Soviet bureaucracy from the height of their "success."
Under that influence, the "Officials turned into the opposite of everything that they and McGurran believed in. It was not the first time, nor the last, that this has to a revolutionary organization.
way in which Tom Swedish section approached collaborawith revolutionists with other views continued to set a positive example long after McGurran and the "Officials," as he knew passed from the scene, and a lot of other water had gone under bridge as well. It offered a positive alternative to factionalism and Stalinwhich are both logically and historically related.
The fight against such conceptions shaped the Swedish section in its formative period. Tom fought them all his life, and effectively, because he fought not just out of moral indignation but out of scientific understanding. He had a marvelously sharp eye for political crookedness, and systematically exposed it.
Most of all, he and his party set an example of the power of other methods, an example of particular importance on the border of Eastern Europe, the lands of the mother church of Stalinism.
properly pointed out at Tom's memorial Socialism for which the Fourth International fights cannot be achieved by enlightened and humanitarian revolutionists. That follows from the nature there is another aspect. A world revolution cannot be accomplished without the overthrow of Stalinism, without the contribution of hundreds of millions of people who have experienced terror and servility in the name of socialism, in the name of "the leading role of the Party, have been betrayed by gangsters and of a democratic, humanitarian revolutionary party on the frontier of the Stalinized world is a major step toward offering a convincing revolutionary and internationthe masses oppressed and mocked by Stalinism. That goes hand in hand also with the role that Swedish revolutionists can play in helping the victims of repression in the third world, since their country and, to varying degrees, their few that take a relatively enlightened attitude toward refugees and can be pressed to make a minimally genuine of defending rights of oppressed peoples. the promise of the Swedish workers' and revolutionary movement, offered an effective example of them for the international movement. It is a good deal stronger for that. It may already have had a decisive effect. Who
IMR sides of the debate. But that did not at all affect the way he responded to the McGurran tour and my connection with it. He was entirely positive
THE SPRING 1987 issue of the English language theoretical jourand practical.
Fourth International, International Marxist
He immediately saw that the task was to help build any Irish solidarity
Women and work in Western Europe — Jacqueline Heinen tour, no matter by which organiza-
• The ideological crisis of the Italian workers' tion, and that the way to help best was
Democrazia Proletaria and the LCR by building unity in action, excluding no one. The obstacles to that were the two big Maoist organizations that at
Anti-apartheid struggles and class struggles — Claude Gabriel the time dominated the Swedish far
• Workers' and farmers' government left. Both were convinced that they were the one true church, and both claimed Irish Republicanism, on the basis of opposite criteria, as part of their spiritual empire.
International Viewpoint 6 April 1987 nal of the now available. It contains the
• Italy: discussion between
- Document
Bloody conflict in Yemen following articles:
of the Fourth International
Salah Jaber
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