Communist Party of Sweden (SKP)
by Peter Cohen

Comrades!
On behalf of the Communist Party of Sweden (SKP), I would
like to express our gratitude for the opportunity to
participate in this conference. SKP has played an active
role in the international Communist movement ever since the
party was established in 1917.
We believe that it is extremely important for Communist
parties to meet and discuss common current issues, and we
hope that meetings can be arranged at more frequent
intervals. There is an urgent need for coordinating our
efforts in the struggle against imperialism, as we have
stated on several previous occasions, because national and
international questions are basically inseparable - they
comprise the halves of a dialectical whole.
In terms of the theme of this conference, it is natural to
begin by looking back over the past decade. Like many other
Communist parties, we were hit hard in the early 1990s. We
suffered a massive loss of members following the collapse
of the Soviet Union, and we also suffered to some degree
from factionalism, which could not have occurred at a more
inappropriate time.
For us, the 1990s was a period in which we fought for
survival, and many of us saw our main task as keeping the
flame alight. I am glad to report that we succeeded in
doing so, and that we are now gaining momentum. I will
return to this point later on.
The capitalist crisis obviously intensified during the
1990s, in both the core nations and the periphery. The
president of the General Electric corporation of the US,
one of the world's largest companies, stated a little more
than a year ago that "We can see stagnation and
over-capacity in virtually every sector". Stagnation and
over-capacity have in fact been among the main trends in
the capitalist economy since the early 1970s, when growth
rates in the OECD countries dropped by about 50%.
The combination of the collapse of the former socialist
countries in Europe and the intensification of the
capitalist crisis during the 1990s involved among other
things super-exploitation and continuous degradation of
living conditions for the working class around the world,
and to an increasing extent for the middle class in the
core countries. Unemployment continues to rise and poverty
continues to increase, despite continuous manipulation of
statistics, and a tremendous over-accumulation of capital
has been fuelling obscene speculation in stock markets and
money markets.
The symptoms of crisis have been very apparent in Sweden,
where in the early 1990s the Social Democrats abandoned
even the pretense of being socialists. These symptoms
include far-reaching privatization of public services,
dismantling of the public sector, and an attempt to rewrite
labor-market legislation according to Mrs. Thatcher's
model.
As in other countries, in Sweden both Social Democrats and
bourgeois parties attempt to justify these policies by
referring to a mystical process called globalization, which
apparently has the status of a natural phenomenon that
simply cannot be avoided.
Nevertheless, opinion polls and direct experience show that
the majority of the people do not approve of the
government's policies. During the 1990s there was a steady
shift to the left in Sweden, away from the Social
Democrats, in elections as well as in political attitudes.
This shift is not only continuing, but is also
accelerating.
In terms of votes, the main beneficiary has been the Left
Party (VP), which split from the Communist Party of Sweden
in 1977 and has followed a familiar course. The party
leadership has gradually renounced the principles of
socialism, arriving a position where their stated aim is to
govern jointly with a Social Democratic party that is
indistinguishable from its bourgeois competitors.
But the VP itself is deeply split, as a large proportion of
its members insist that they are Communists, and the young
chairwoman of their youth organization has publicly
defended Lenin and his policies. The leadership of the
party have made it very clear that they do not share her
opinions. Just as former working-class supporters of the
Social Democrats are turning to the VP, members of the VP
are turning toward SKP, and we expect this trend to
continue.
Over the past 18 months or so interest in our party has
been growing strongly in terms of new members, increased
sales of our newspaper, and a high volume of visits to our
Internet web site, on the order of 50,000 per month, a
significant number in a country of 8_ million. A large
proportion of these visitors actively request information,
and many of them want to know where they can join the
party. Most encouraging of all is the sharp increase in the
number of party members under the age of 25, and the
revival of our youth organization.
One result of the shift to the left in Sweden and the
evident disapproval of government policies by the majority
of the population has been a media blackout that is more or
less total. Personally, I have not seen anything like it
since the 1940s and '50s in the USA. Whether privately or
publicly owned, the mainstream media in Sweden not only
repress and distort domestic news, but also ignore
reporting in international newspapers to an extent that is
simply ludicrous. And it is literally impossible for a
Marxist to be heard or seen in the mainstream media. A
newspaper like The Independent in London would be regarded
by the media owners in Sweden as dangerously radical.
For example, a few years ago a leading Swedish daily
newspaper published a long article on "The heritage of
Marxism" that was full of distortions and
misrepresentations. We answered by submitting an article,
pointing out that for years the Swedish media claimed that
dissidents in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were
never given access to the media. We asked the editors when
they had last published an article by a Marxist. Sixty days
later, we received a reply: "Believe it or not, we
considered publishing your article...however, it is too
long."
Another result of the crisis has been an anti-Communist
campaign that is unparalleled in ferocity and vulgarity
within Sweden. Since capitalism has obviously failed to
fulfill the rosy promises that were heard in the early
1990s, the owners of the production system are anxious to
convince the people that there is still no alternative. So
we are treated to so-called documentary films about the
history of the Soviet Union in which viewers are informed
that Lenin said "We must be prepared to exterminate 90% of
the world's population in order to establish Communism".
In this climate, cooperation between Communist parties in
Sweden has naturally been more urgent than ever. Since the
late 1960s there have been several parties in Sweden with
Maoist or Trotskyite backgrounds, but there are also
branches of international parties have been established by
Communists who fled to Sweden to avoid persecution in their
homelands.
For a number of years, SKP has worked closely with local
members of the Communist parties of Bolivia, Chile,
Colombia, Iran (the Tudeh Party), Iraq and Greece, all of
which share a Marxist-Leninist approach with us. In
addition to joint May Day demonstrations, we have acted
jointly on specific issues, both domestic and
international, and we also organize conferences and study
groups.
Perhaps the most successful of our joint actions was
participation in the series of daily demonstrations in
central Stockholm that were held in the course of NATO's
criminal attack on Yugoslavia in 1999. We also participate
actively in a committee called "Stop the Bombing", which
includes members from non-Communist parties, although none
of them have been authorized by their party leadership.
All of us agree that one of the main problems we face - in
addition to the usual and persistent lack of money - is
access to the media. But none of us expect this problem to
disappear, and we are agreed that the only solution is to
patiently continue working to expand contact, especially
with young people.
The problem of access to the media is related to another
problem, namely that a large proportion of the Swedish
population between 15 and 45 has been deprived of basic
historical knowledge, so that we often have to begin
discussions by establishing facts that many party members
regard as self-evident.
On the international level, SKP has participated in a
number of international conferences over the past ten
years, and in cooperation with the Communist Parties of
Finland and Norway as well as the Russian Communist
Workers' Party, we have run a campaign against the EU's
Northern Dimension, a so-called policy initiative that is
aimed at militarizing the Baltic region under NATO's
leadership and ensuring access to raw materials within the
northern region of the former Soviet Union on terms that
satisfy Western capitalists. In this connection it should
be mentioned that within Sweden opposition to membership in
NATO is growing strongly.
In connection with international conferences of Communist
parties, we believe that two issues are of great
importance. One is the general relationship between the
OECD nations and the peripheral countries in the capitalist
system, which is continuously distorted by the bourgeois
media. The other is the specific attempt of international
capital to create a global low-wage economy by pitting
workers in different countries against each other.
The struggle against imperialism cannot succeed without
strong solidarity between the working class in the
developed countries and the periphery.
SKP is convinced that it is essential for the working class
in the OECD countries to understand that the economies of
these countries are highly dependent on exploitation of
workers and raw materials in the periphery.
This is not a new problem. In Imperialism, the highest
stage of capitalism Lenin quotes from three letters of
Friedrich Engels. In the first of them, written to Marx in
1858, Engels states that "The English proletariat is
becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most
bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at
having a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat
as well as a bourgeoisie. For a nation that exploits the
whole world, this is of course to a certain extent
justifiable."
In a letter of 1881 Engels refers to "...the worst type of
British trade unions, which allow themselves to be led by
men who have been bought by the capitalists, or at least
are in their pay."
In the following year, Engels wrote "You ask me what the
English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly
the same as they think about politics in general - the same
as what the bourgeois think. There is no workers' party
here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals,
and the workers gaily share the feast of England's monopoly
of the world market and the colonies."
Engels' description may be somewhat exaggerated, but it
applies generally today in the OECD countries, where about
13% of the world's population consumes about 65% of the
world's product. And where decades of propaganda and
collusion by social democrats and capitalists have been
designed to ignore this simple fact, and the explanation
for it.
The current phase of imperialism involves the emergence of
a higher form of fascism, spearheaded by the US, the EU,
NATO, the WTO and the Transatlantic Business Dialogue. The
last remnants of bourgeois democracy are being discarded -
or have already been discarded - by the upper class, with
the aim of establishing an international administration for
exploiting a planet that they consider to be their
property.
Although establishing an international organization of
Communist parties would be premature today, for a number of
reasons, SKP believes that it would be useful and feasible
to set up a working group composed of representatives of
various parties. This group could function effectively with
the help of modern telecommunications.
The group's task would be to develop a basic
statement of purpose and policy that deals with the main
manifestations of capitalism today, relating national and
international issues in a way that is easily comprehensible
to people who are deprived of historical perspectives. This
statement would be relevant for the working class in all
countries, and would underline the need for international
solidarity. And it could be an effective first step in
revitalizing the international Communist movement.