by Peter Weiss
At Brecht’s house an intellectual freedom had established itself that allowed us to overcome the current plight and made historical perspectives possible. When I left the factory or met up with Rogeby I was governed by the everyday, and the gate to the world of sweeping interpretations and connections sought to slam shut in my face; what was directly before us and holding us down demanded to be investigated. While we had been working on the Engelbrekt piece, something like a feeling of belonging in this country had grown within me; I saw myself putting down roots in Sweden. Germany no longer had anything to do with my heritage; I only had a few friends left there, in the underground. Czechoslovakia, whose citizenship I had once possessed, was foreign, Paris was miles away, Spain laid to waste. The whereabouts of my parents was unknown. Now, if I acquired a picture of the political reality that surrounded me, of the conditions to which I was attempting to adapt, this happened between two poles, as it were, in a continual shifting of perspectives. In Brecht’s field there was luminance, unbound imagination, while the things Rogeby conveyed to me were afflicted by severity, the fog of working life. The contradictions permeated one another, bled into one another, and a fabric emerged that could serve as a backdrop to my current existence. From this point on, a point which would become like the date of my birth, I developed a desire to get to know the history of this country. By looking into the Middle Ages, or, as earlier, into antiquity, I had developed a feel for universal connections. Now, after my hours at the laundry boiler and the smelting furnace, in the drafty cellars and corridors, the machinery rooms which with their rods, pipes, and belts sprawled like vined forests, a wish surged up within me, to not just be an observer in a stopgap solution, but to enter into a present that was replete with the experiences of these last few decades. I wasn’t seeking a national identity—the concept of having a homeland had no validity for me—the point rather was to consolidate my own function by intensifying my relationship to a totality. For more than a year I had been positioned at a particular workplace, as one wage laborer among others, and had participated in practical and union matters, but my activities after my day’s work in the factory shut me off from my coworkers. Having been made a member of the Social Democratic Party en masse, I was camouflaged by the governing party itself; as a foreigner, I was not allowed to belong to the Communist Party. The risk of my conspiratorial meetings with German Communists being discovered meant I had to remain alert and reserved at all times, even in the presence of like-minded individuals. Even though I was a messenger in the service of the Comintern, I was not beholden to any organization. Though I was involved in the procurement of material that would be used in the antifascist struggle and was aware of the efforts within the Party to expand its illegal German support points, I had no intention of returning to Germany. I had to piece together this existence—sometimes seemingly spent in a vacuum, sometimes surrounded by many-sided and palpable realities—to form a single entity. Stateless, in possession of an alien’s passport that was only ever valid for three months, I had begun to prepare myself for a future in a country to which I had hardly given a thought only a year and a half earlier. Only the language that I had brought with me into exile, this language that took on form through reading and writing together with Brecht, Hodann, Bischoff, made me somehow incongruous with this new environment, and perhaps this isolating effect would endure even if I were able to express myself like a native. The existence of another language inside of me had to be accepted. This interior language was my only possession; preserving it formed part of my self-preservation, although this prerequisite was entirely different from the unquestioning manner in which Brecht—the accomplished one, at peace with himself—interacted with his idiom abroad. Making use of insights I had picked up while passing through areas in which national borders had been annulled and only the movements of collectivity had force, I began to make my language into a tool that I could wield. With Brecht I experienced the first impulse to attempt to give the current moment a historical charge. Ström, the chairman of the city council, one-time cofounder of the Left Party, the Communist Party, who had subsequently returned to the Social Democrats, had come over for a visit. A remark by the deputy had steered the conversation to Brecht’s book about Caesar. The right-wing press had compared him with Catiline, said Ström, when he had been appointed to the First Chamber of parliament in the fall of nineteen fifteen. The agitator, they said, secures his entry to the senate. The Catiline conspiracy, used by Brecht as material to depict in parable form the period leading up to the emergence of fascist domination, was transferred by Ström to the period of the previous war, and it was as if Brecht suddenly had doubts as to whether Caesar, or even Engelbrekt, could be used as figures whose actions could illustrate something about the conflicts of our times. In the difficulty of finding explanations for the catastrophe that afflicted us, he had sought events that appeared to contain recognizable patterns. That Brecht gave up his work on both the Caesar novel and on the piece about Engelbrekt in mid-March might have had to do with the realization that those models were subjected to their own historical laws and couldn’t help us out of our crisis situations. In his youth, Ström had read the book by the Danish historian Bang, with which Brecht was also familiar, in which Catiline—unlike in bourgeois historiography, which portrayed him as a violent criminal and demagogue—was portrayed as a social reformer. The clash between the Roman owners of capital and the impoverished populace was the main theme of this work. As in Brecht’s novel, the emphasis was placed on the efforts of the ambitious, heavily indebted Caesar to latch onto the revolting forces in order to then rise to power himself once they had been crushed. Being called Catiline, said Ström, was not inaccurate, for he too—then the secretary of the Social Democratic Party and the leader of its left faction—had belonged to a wealthy family, as had the leader of the slave hordes and initiator of the street clubs. And ultimately, after all the political intrigues, the fact that he was able to fulfill the economic requirements to be eligible to run for a seat in the upper house once he had turned thirty-five had been crucial. That meant he possessed property valued in excess of fifty thousand kronor and had paid tax on an annual income of at least three thousand kronor, which, with the value of the currency at the time, was only possible for a small, moneyed minority. It was not due to general elections but to internal dealings among city councillors that he joined the forum of the elite. For their part, the high-ranking electors had been entrusted with the municipal administration by a vote, the outcome of which was determined by the propertied classes: participation was limited to people aged twenty-eight and older who had reached the minimum income threshold of four hundred fifty kronor, had never received support, had paid off all debts, and maintained a fixed address. On top of this, the results of municipal elections were scaled according to a forty-degree curve, which meant that the votes of people of means were worth up to forty times more than the votes of those who only just managed to reach the first rung. And yet, the fortyfold system set down in nineteen hundred nine, which took into account not just capital, real estate ownership, and the number and size of production sites possessed but also livestock numbers and the number of workers employed, was a step forward from the prior five-thousand-degree model, which had guaranteed the domination of a number of potentates over the disenfranchised populace. In the election of the Second Chamber, the principle of one man, one vote applied, but only those who paid tax on an income of at least eight hundred kronor and could show property to the value of at least six thousand kronor were eligible to vote. This meant that, here too, most of the workers—especially the younger ones, lacking permanent employment, regularly changing their place of residence—were excluded. As a result of the mass campaigns, the large-scale strikes of nineteen hundred two and nineteen hundred nine, and the growing influence of the Social Democratic Party, lawmakers were forced to revoke the financial census, and only a minimum age and the requirement to have paid taxes in the preceding three years was retained
. In nineteen hundred eleven, the new laws entered into force. Women remained without the right to vote for another decade. Though the workers had now managed to get their party into the Second Chamber as well, and in the same numbers as the right-wing coalition, the bourgeoisie—to whom the main faction of the Liberal Party belonged—still outnumbered them almost three to one, and from their position in the upper house, which they dominated completely, they could dismiss all motions that were passed up to them. In the history of suffrage, Brecht saw the class struggle progressing in its most dour form. In this realm, legally founded bastions could to be seized, backwardness was propped up by legislative periods, and strategies could be continually developed to combat the slightest hint of radical ideas. Brecht wanted Ström to tell us more about Swedish parliamentary democracy, the progression of which had determined the position of the bourgeoisie and the essence of the workers’ movement, first in the lead-up to nineteen hundred eleven—considered the year of democracy’s breakthrough—and then up until the time that the Social Democrats first formed part of the government, in March of nineteen twenty; and on into the thirties. In order to understand the impact of Social Democracy within Swedish society, we had to place it in the context of the of the liberalization of the bourgeoisie. From the first socialist cells through to the formation of the unions and the Party, liberalism had also been developing; skillfully adapting to the desire for renewal, often charging ahead, picking up the latent strands, redirecting them and weaving them into their own causes. With its progressive wing engaging in collaborations with the Social Democratic leadership groups, the bourgeoisie—in possession of the means of production and bolstered on the right by the police and the military—was able to maintain its predominance. Guided by the principle that changes had to take place through peaceful, parliamentary channels, with each endeavor, Social Democracy remained in a dependent relationship with its ideological opponent, and everything it gained from this opponent had to be paid for by sacrificing their original objectives. It was not that socialism, borne by the majority of the voters, slowly infiltrated the flesh of capitalism; instead, capitalism simply absorbed this social movement into itself. Almost imperceptibly, revolutionary ideas evolved into their reformist, pragmatic form, the combative organizations of the populace, surging forward, often manifesting a revolutionary strength, were made into tools of revisionism. It wasn’t just the bourgeoisie’s peacekeeping forces—mobilized the moment a flashpoint emerged—who fought off the proletarian demands; the leaders of their own party also played their part, silencing them with appeals to the need for reasoned patience. During the conversation, which continued over a few afternoons that month, Ström presented this process of back and forth as the sole possibility of attaining a just, liberal, and democratic regime, and it was precisely the years of deviation, of the search for a quicker alternative, he said, which had confirmed his viewpoint. He saw the defensive character of his party politics not as a renunciation of socialist ideals but a compliance with historical conditions. Basing his position upon the value of the individual human life, he adhered to a transformation secured through consensus, even if time and time again it was made evident that this collective entity, this state of free solidarity, was unable to emerge due to the unshakeable violence of the bourgeoisie. At the same time as the first reading groups were founded, around eighteen forty-five, by journeymen arriving from Paris, where they had become acquainted with the doctrines of Cabet, Proudhon, and Blanc, the Friends of Reform societies appeared, organized by bourgeois groups. In the former, initial steps were taken in the struggle for a people’s parliament, for universal suffrage, and the shortening of the working day, which could last up to sixteen hours; in the latter, the young journeymen, having been freed from the yoke of the masters after the dissolution of the guilds, were to be won over for new forms of paternal guidance in educational associations. The impulses issuing from France brought a League of the Just to Stockholm as well, but Cabet’s Icaria—the realm of peaceful Communism, in which everything belonged to everyone and total equality ruled, in which the people themselves reigned, anyone could be elected to any position, in which the fraternity of true Christianity was brought to life, as Götrek the bookseller had claimed—was all too utopian to endanger the suggested foundations of the liberals. To the extent that it was possible in the still half-feudal, agrarian countryside, Götrek kept himself informed regarding the upheavals that had shaken Europe in eighteen forty-eight. He was the one who translated and published The Communist Manifesto that same year, who spurred the typographers to form the first trade union, and he was also the first person to be subjected to the blows of the police and thrown in a prison cell for standing up for the rights of the working class. The preparations for the conversion of the old house of the estates into the house of representatives, with two chambers, were controlled by the bourgeoisie, with the workers, lacking comprehensive organizations, still unable to push through their initiatives. Steering the country economically, setting the development of industry in motion, the bourgeoisie was able to present itself as a progressive force, distracting from the fermenting social conflicts through advances in constitutional reform. The final phase of the bourgeois revolution had taken place, if somewhat late, toward the middle of the nineteenth century. The transition from the feudalist to the capitalist system of domination had been accompanied by compromises and extortionate deals within the upper classes. Behind this economic revolution, this transfer of power from the patronage of the landed gentry to the top posts of the financial world, a revolutionary transformation of consciousness took place, set in motion by the demands of the workers; the bourgeoisie, up above, armed with the weapon of money and with their sights set on raising profits, drifted toward increased opportunities for exploitation, while below, the forces that bore this new era within itself were shifting. While revolutionizing production methods and finding effective applications for their wealth, the owners of capital were afraid of the strength of the working masses and were forced to show them a certain amount of goodwill, a readiness to make concessions, and yet time and again they managed to impressively thwart these forces through sophisticated chicanery. The duplicity of liberalist thought extended all the way to the king, the patriarchal figure of Oscar. His hand forced by the unrest in France and Germany, the regent donated five hundred riksdaler every year to support the expansion of the worker’s education associations, while he had courtiers and respectable citizens ensure that, rather than discussions of political and social problems, the associations hosted lectures of an exclusively ethical and moral nature. And yet, from Almqvist and Blanche right through to Strindberg fifty years later, all the best minds had been on the left side of the democratic movement, just as, with their intertwining strands of socialist and liberal thought, the workers’ party had also possessed a critical, left wing from the outset. The later battle of the right against the rebels, which led to the victory of conservatism within the Social Democratic Party, reproduced the early predominance of the tendencies aimed at striking a reconciliation between the classes. When the bourgeoisie reformed the parliament in eighteen sixty-six, given the nepotism that had hitherto prevailed, it seemed to be a decisive step toward democracy. Lacking centralized leadership, and disguising their political gatherings with cover associations in response to the increased surveillance in the wake of the formation of the First International, the workers were forced to bend to the will of the bourgeoisie—particularly since the bourgeoisie had promised them a second chamber of democratic representation. Previously, the representatives of the four estates had convened separately. The first estate, comprising ten thousand people, had its seat in the house of nobility. Fourteen thousand belonged to the second estate, the clergy, sixty-six thousand to the third estate, the bourgeoisie, and two million to the fourth estate, the peasantry. Nowhere was the fifth estate, the proletariat, represented. Yet the power possessed by the four governing estates to pass resolutions was not proportionate to their
size; rather each received a quarter of the whole. That which was discussed separately was then brought to collective negotiations and ultimately enacted by political coalitions and alliances, to the benefit of the nobility and the prelates. The elimination of the disproportionate distribution of votes in the rule of the estates, along with the rapid rise of reform-minded liberal organizations, gave the impression that the hegemony of the upper classes had now been broken, but in truth, the bourgeoisie, in alliance with the estate owners and in cooperation with the aristocrats, had managed to crush the first charges toward the organization of a proletarian class, and for a few years, with their revolution from above, they took the wind out of the sails of the still heterogeneous masses of workers streaming from the countryside to the cities, from artisanal trades to the factories. Legally tying suffrage to property relations, they also protected the privileges of the nobility, which, with the approach of the socialist menace, had recognized that an alliance with the bourgeoisie was necessary to ensure their own survival. The social reforms that, up to the present day, formed the basis of Social Democratic politics had come about under Prime Minister De Geer, who—a banker, industrialist, and landowner of noble lineage—personified the alliance between the ruling classes. Sometimes appearing as a harbinger of democracy, sometimes reveling shamelessly in their status as a chosen few, a cultural elite had infiltrated the educational organizations and workers’ associations; the Liberal Party, which had been founded in eighteen sixty-eight, more than two decades earlier than the Social Democratic Party, was already determining the makeup of many of the workers’ clubs through the introduction of idealistically tinged topics. Setting up savings accounts and taking out insurance policies, the establishment of consumer cooperatives and questions of temperance and morals were to replace the demands for universal and equal suffrage and the shortening of the working day. Following the defeat of the Paris Commune, a consortium of the richest citizens gifted the workers an organization to support their associations. Here, under this supposed patronage, they were able to erect an apparatus for investigating revolutionary tendencies, often working hand in glove with right-wing labor leaders. In eighteen eighty-one, as Master Palm, the Swedish Bebel, held the first socialist gatherings, the Liberal Party controlled the milieu surrounding the workers’ organizations, and the Party combated the Socialist Club—which would go on to join the International—with an umbrella workers’ association headed up by antisocialists. Barred from participating in elections, workers began expressing their opinions, turning to strikes and mass demonstrations, causing an immediate split in the movement that would lead to the formation of the Social Democratic Party, with one side demanding a unicameral parliament, the abolition of the standing army, the arming of the people, and the revolutionary transition to a socialist society, and the other arguing for the parliamentary conquest of the state. Reformism and revolution clashed, and the contradictions in the Party worked out to the benefit of the bourgeois bloc. Branting came from the liberal camp. Quickly sidelining Palm and maintaining close connections with the liberals, he also had the ability to draw in the proletariat with radical slogans. Under the red flag of internationalism he spoke of the liberation of all the oppressed and exploited, of the party they aspired to create as a revolutionary party. He could also be viewed as a revolutionary, having been sentenced to prison time for publishing offensive articles, but the progressively minded bourgeoisie allowed him to lead; they knew they could rely on him, for he personally ensured that the left-wing leaders Palm, Wermelin, and Danielsson were neutralized and sent into exile. Before going on to tell us about his Communist interregnum, Ström argued that the path that Branting had taken was the right one; Branting, the pragmatic proponent of realpolitik, did not praise refusal in the face of the bourgeois state but an engagement with the state, which they could turn into their own means of power. He condemned the outbreaks of anarchy and actions that lacked the support of the majority of the people, and he focused on the most immediate tasks, on pushing through the right to vote, the eight-hour day; he championed what was achievable within the context of the capitalist system—portrayed not as riven by crises at all but actually rather robust—and in doing so he attempted to win over the majority, through alliances with groups from outside the working class who wanted to contribute to an expansion of the rights of the people. Alongside the emergence of the mass party, that instrument for achieving the workers’ increasingly combative demands, the bourgeois union for parliamentary reform had also grown, and the universal suffrage alliance competed with the Social Democratic Workers’ Party to appeal for parliamentary improvements. The bourgeois government, backed up by the First Chamber—which was dominated by the Liberal Party and the right-wing groups—could rest assured that no changes that might endanger society would get through. In order to increase its number of seats in the Second Chamber, Social Democracy had to conceal its inner antagonism and project an image of unity. Torn between revisionist hope and revolutionary illusion, the workers supported their party in the elections, but, in the intervening period, they drifted increasingly into extraparliamentary action. Just as the bourgeoisie had immediately opposed the committee of the confederation of trade unions with a worker’s association that ran job placement programs and negotiated individual wage agreements, so too in response to the union organizations’ joining the Party did they form their own workers’ federation, which, in the escalating conflicts, provided them with strikebreakers with a legally protected right to work. The bourgeoisie still called the product they were proposing to the workers a people’s parliament, but, after crippling the feudal state, the workers now began to call for a general strike. This first major campaign, in April of nineteen hundred two, was at once an announcement of proletarian solidarity and of secession from the right-wing party leadership. The contradiction between the positions was now brought into focus, and the antagonism—between those who rejected collaboration with the bourgeoisie, whose police troops had beaten down the strikers; and Branting’s supporters, who remained willing to cooperate—became irreconcilable. During those days the populace had seized control of the Party, had exercised social democratic power from the streets and squares of the cities, and in so doing had given teeth to the negotiations for voting rights taking place in the parliament. Another seven years would pass before a provisional, deficient electoral reform would be added to the constitution; but while the Party was being driven in an increasingly revolutionary direction by its leftist ideologues, by its radical youth arm and the impatient workforce, the owners of capital were also strengthening their own organizations. Immediately after the strike they came together to form an employers’ association and took measures more forceful and severe than any of the actions that the workers had ever considered employing against them. The strike leaders were dismissed, their names put on blacklists; many of the workers who had participated in the strike lost their apartments in the factory housing and then, now homeless, were prosecuted by the courts for vagrancy, thereby losing their right to vote; and henceforth, the columns of strikebreakers were supplied with clubs and revolvers. Organizing the economy, the business owners stipulated the fundamental principles which, some three and a half decades later, set down in the Saltsjöbaden Agreement and sealed under a Social Democratic government, the union spokespeople were still unable to overcome. In paragraph twenty-three of the statutes of the agreement, today inverted to paragraph thirty-two, they appropriated for themselves the right to discretionary power over the management and distribution of work, to freely hire and fire their workforces. And, just as they did in in December of thirty-eight, as a concession, they approved the right of the workers to expand their union organizations without hindrance; at the elections, however, it became evident that the bourgeoisie had managed to drive a wedge into the working class, to deepen the chasm that had opened up around the turn of the century between a favored stratum and the masses of wage slaves. Those who defended the reformist path could be pi
tted against those who, remaining below the income threshold, wanted to take up violent methods. Thus, the aristocracy of the working class, who wanted to retain what had already been achieved and who sought to secure what further improvements could be afforded by capitalism, became the most avid watchdog in the quest to prevent a leftward drift. Following Bernstein’s thesis that the capitalist state, with its capacity for rapid industrialization and increases in production, created the material security necessary for the development of a democracy, Branting—angling for an electoral alliance—consolidated his relations with the Liberal Party and, with calls for calm, peacefulness, and frugality, attempted to fend off the storm that was once again threatening to gather into a general strike. It was understandable, said Ström, that at that time Branting’s main focus was on increasing the Social Democrats’ seats in the parliament; his party still only had thirty-four representatives in the lower house, compared to a hundred representatives from the Liberal Party and roughly sixty members of the bourgeois right. There was no point in saying that the majority of the people couldn’t bring their vote to bear; justice had to be introduced legally, and that could be achieved if everybody fulfilled the conditions of suffrage through industriousness, having a fixed residence, committing to sustained work and the punctual payment of their taxes. Action on the streets could only rob the Party of its good reputation. But in August of nineteen hundred nine, after Branting had given in to the bourgeois demands—approving a minimum age of twenty-four for the right to participate in the elections for the Second Chamber (instead of twenty-three, as had been suggested) and continuing to exclude women altogether—a second major strike ensued. Once again, the masses stood alone with their discipline and endurance. By distancing themselves from the strike, the Party and union leadership subjected the workers’ movement to universal condemnation and the demonstrations to horrible reactionary ignorance. The king traveled to his tennis match in Särö; Lindman, prime minister, leader of the Right, was settling into his summer house in Hälsingland; Staaff, leader of the Liberal Party, headed off to the spa town of Furusund; and Branting traveled to Germany for his vacations. They were all banking on the police troops, together with the civil guards called together by Sydow, the boss of the employers’ association, to keep the hundreds of thousands in check. Only one politician from the Liberal Party followed the events with extreme attention, in a mixture of sympathy and terror. He firmly believed that the working class had been spiritually deformed by poverty and hunger and that, through the provision of nutrition, structured living conditions, and stable schooling, they would be able to be imbued with a patriotic mindset. Belonging to a noble house that had become Pietist, he grew up in the presence of officers, courtiers, and diplomats, was raised with strict rules, reluctantly became a naval cadet as a twelve-year-old, went from the school ship to the Naval Academy; artistically minded, conscience-driven, a bible-reader and scholastic, having taken leave after coming of age and reaching the rank of reserve captain, Palmstierna had turned to charity and become, despite his family’s opposition, secretary of the Central Association for Social Work, chairman of the first Congress for Poor Relief, and a city councillor with the Liberals. He saw the powerlessness, the hardship of the people in this late-summer month. The businesspeople had taken out long-term credit from the banks just in time; after four weeks of lost wages, the workers were demoralized. He was familiar with the cramped, meager quarters of the working families, he had often caught glimpses of them, their sour stench had repulsed him, he had never been able to overcome the nausea, just like the seasickness of his youth; and yet time and again, accompanying the soup wagon of the poor relief, he wanted to enter the homes of these strangers, who would often throw him out. He felt drawn to them in some strange way, he knew he would become their redeemer, would protect them from the perils of godlessness, of feral revolutionary thought. Now he could see his big chance, the strikers had been defeated, the union leaders had negotiated with the employers behind their backs, they were left with no choice but to return to work, to head back to the factories, he could empathize with their humiliation, he had also had to suffer abuse on the frigate, and now he wanted to work for them, in their party, which would inherit the future if it could only be cleansed of falsehood and fanaticism. He had long ago noticed Branting’s isolation, and he wanted to stand by this great pioneer, would say to him, you and I, we are kindred spirits; we both want to put an end to torment and misery, establish mutual trust, human dignity, but you are afflicted by the mediocrity and ignorance that surround you, I want to help you to lift the intellectual level of the Party, to make the Party into a truly democratic party. And Branting welcomed him into the fold. With Palmstierna joining the Party, the alliance between Social Democracy and liberalism was sealed. Now, a liberal government in which Social Democrats would occupy ministerial posts was within reach. The fact that this coalition, characterized by an ideal of ministerial socialism, had still not materialized two years later, as Lindman had to make way for Staaff, could be put down to the fact that the heretical left had rejected every agreement with the liberal bourgeoisie. Now that the Social Democrats had doubled their seats in the Second Chamber and had reached parity with the right-wing bloc (made up of the protectionists and free trade enthusiasts of the moderate group, the Agrarian Party, and the National Progress Party) it had become necessary to take measures to expel the opposition. Palmstierna was well-suited to tackling this task. Quickly making his way into the Party leadership, the parliamentary caucus, he could fully realize his dream of making himself useful. Fearing that, next time, the workers would not make their demands when economic conditions were poor, which would prevent their success, but during a boom, he placed all emphasis on alleviating the conditions of their struggle for survival, on reducing the cost of living, increasing wages; it made him dizzy to see them coming out of the factories, pale and hunched over. He wanted to impart his idealism to them. He hated the agitators who wanted to drive them to crude and riotous protest, but he also demanded from them the composure and discipline that he had been forced to learn, punctuated by the terrifying nocturnal experience of hanging high above in the crow’s nest, of plummeting into the depths. He who had been subjected to constant pressure in order to prove himself strong enough to manage the inheritance of his class, was now using this toughness to cleanse the great movement of the people, to make it respectable, presentable. The image of the masses on the streets and squares of the city would not leave him alone; he had to seek relaxation every so often on his estate in Dalarna, enjoying the beauty of the forests and Lake Siljan. Rejuvenated after his hikes, he took up the fight against the leftists, who had founded their own alliance within the Party. No longer from outside the worker’s party but from within, a position that promised greater impact, he went on the attack against the antimilitarists, advocating the expansion of the defense budget, declaring the extirpation of Bolshevism his first concern, revealing what had motivated his move into the field of power politics. His willingness to make sacrifices corresponded to his inner nature; he had to accept being spat upon by the nobility, on whom he had turned his back, had to put up with vilification from the right-wing press, with threats to his family from the haute bourgeoisie, but he knew that he had dedicated himself to a just cause. And even if the masses of workers didn’t want to pay him any mind, he kept struggling for their benefit, he could see his mission clearly, standing alongside the mustachioed Branting, gazing out over Europe with his dark eyes, the great mission of his time: the constitutional establishment of solidarity between labor and capital.
