OBITUARY A Scandinavian contribution to internationalism 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 before the 1970s. It was the achievement of Tom Gustafsson and his comrades that they helped to open it for us.
There is no doubt that Scandinavia remains capitalist, with the evils that implies. Tom Gustafsson and other Swedish leaders were adept at pointing that out. Tom always carefully explained that it was the strength of the organized workers in Scandinavia that had produced a level of mass civilization higher than anywhere else. He had a strong confidence 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 that the Swedish workers fought under better conditions than workers elsewhere.
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 subordina. ted 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 country whose independence spans the modern period - on the ruins of a 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
Founded at the start of the 1970s, the Swedish section remains a relatively young organization, with iew, il 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 people 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 both - the Swedish tradition of strong working-class organization, a high level of culture, an ingrained democratic outlook and a generally Scandinavian humanism and idealism. The reading of a poem by the SwedishFinnish poet Diktonius was a fitting touch at the funeral.
The 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 the vibrant Diktonius and Edith Sodergran, whose art is complex, lyrical and introspective. He also followed contemporary Swedish writing with a lively interest. Communicating with workers
All that did not interfere with his practical political activity; it enlightened 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 recruit them to 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 under capitalism, which inevitably 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
Birgitta, who shared his literary nterests, who introduced me to Runeberg's works. I find it impossible low to dissociate them. Tom had a quiet, unassuming but unflagging sense of dignity that I came to identify with he Swedish national character like he personalities in Runeberg's Fanrik Stals Sagner.
Another positive feature of the Scandinavian tradition is that despite he relative smallness of the countries ind their relatively sheltered place in ecent history, there has been a strong ense of participation in universal struggles, reflected in the outstanding portraits of revolutionary problems in Scandinavian literature, such as Ibsen's Brand and Strindberg's Master Olaf. A special contribution
One of the constants in Tom's political outlook was the conviction ;hat Scandinavian workers and revoluionists had a special contribution to make to the world revolution and io building the world revolutionary party, the Fourth International. I earned to share it. I first came in contact with Tom and the Swedish section in 1972, when I went to Scandinavia with Malachy McGurran, a representative of the "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 massacre.) 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 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 and practical.
He immediately saw that the task was to help build any Irish solidarity tour, no matter by which organization, and that the way to help best was by building unity in action, excluding no one. The obstacles to that were the two big Maoist organizations that at the time dominated the Swedish far 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
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 for it, as there is in any capitalist country. I found myself negotiating with the most virulent brand of it, the thirdperiod Stalinists of the KFml(r) in Goteborg. Their leaders were a textbook example of the kind of intellectuals 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 "losers," 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 and by the methods they proposed 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 happened to a revolutionary organization. But the way in which Tom and the Swedish section approached collaboration with revolutionists with other views continued to set a positive example long after McGurran and the "Officials," as he knew them, had passed from the scene, and a lot of other water had gone under the bridge as well. It offered a positive alternative to factionalism and Stalinism, which 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
IN THE SPRING 1987 issue of the nal of the Fourth International, now available. It contains the 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 sorts of methods, an example of particular importance on the border of Eastern Europe, the lands of the mother church of Stalinism.
It was properly pointed out at Tom's memorial meeting that the Socialism for which the Fourth International fights cannot be achieved by "ice-cold fanatics." but only by enlightened and humanitarian revolutionists. That follows from the nature of the goal.
However, 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," who have been betrayed by gangsters and political swindlers.
The building of a democratic, humanitarian revolutionary party on the frontier of the Stalinized world is a major step toward offering a convincing revolutionary and internationalist alternative to the 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 repres sion in the third world, since their country and, to varying degrees, their neighbors, remain among the very few that take a relatively enlightened attitude toward refugees and can be pressed to make a minimally genuine show of defending the democratic rights of oppressed peoples.
Tom personified the qualities and the promise of the Swedish workers' and revolutionary movement, and 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 knows? IR English language theoretical jourInternational Marxist Review, is following articles:
• Women and work in Western Europe — Jacqueline Heinen
The ideological crisis of the Italian movement
Livio -Maitan • Italy: discussion between Democrazia Proletaria and the LCR • Crisis in the PLO — Document of the Fourth International • Bloody conflict in Yemen — Salah Jaber Anti-apartheid struggles struggles — Claude Gabriel • Workers' and farmers' government — Steve Bloom Available from PEC, 2 rue Richard Lenoir, 93108 Montreuil, France (please mark envelopes clearly "IMR"). Individual copies £2. SOI$S. Subscriptions for 3 issues: Surface mail all countries £8501$141 90FF; Airmail Europe £8 50/100FF; Airmail oulside Europe $18. Cheques to "PEC". Bank transfers to PEC, BNP Robespierre, Acct 230179190. Postal transfers to PEC, CCP No. 2 322 42T Paris.
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