The Swedish Maoist 1968 (the American Maoist 2018: politics without vessel / socialism without solidarity, bedroom fascism) (not yet clear)
THESWEDISHMAOIST1968 (POLITICS OF SOLIDARITY)#######
» » » Let us start with the Swedish Maoists because this is a group that might seem ridiculous—certainly more ridiculous than the revolutionary movements funded by the Communist Party of China in Central Asia or the Middle East or Africa, and probably even more ridiculous than the French Maoists, who produced a peculiar Gallic reimagining of the philosophy in art and theory. So, they are a punchline. We imagine young Swedish men shouting denunciations of Lin Biao and Confucius in a square in Stockholm. We imagine passionate meetings over red wine and meatballs in a Gothenburg dormitory. But, still, all of this is premised on taking them seriously.
→ The reasons that young Swedes came to have sympathy for the Chinese experiment in socialism are similar to those of their leftist peers elsewhere in Europe.1 When the split between the Soviet Union and China, simmering since the middle 1950s but made official in 1962, broke the socialist world into two spheres, more radical Western leftists saw an opportunity. Their mainline communist parties were linked, if not financially, then at least doctrinally, to the Soviet Union, so, Chinese socialism became a legitimate, muscular creed with which to push out the old order.2
In 1965,3 the sprouts of a Maoist movement began to poke out of the Sveriges Kommunistiska Parti (SKP),4 and it was not long before a faction departed to lead their own splinter party.5 Headed by Bo Gustafsson, Frank Baude, and Nils Holmberg, who had been publishing translations and interpretations of Maoist texts in the years prior to the split, the Kommunistiska Förbundet Marxist-Leninisterna (KFML), charged with visions of the Cultural Revolution filtered back from China and French interpretations of Mao, began propagandizing for their rival leftist vision. They were at the forefront of the movement against the war in Vietnam, attracting thousands of middle class radicals and students.
Unity within Swedish Maoism was shortlived. The main body of the KFML became the SKP (the original SKP had already changed its name to the Vänsterpartiet Kommunisterna) and another faction became the KFML(r), with the parenthetical letter standing for revolutionärerna.
But Swedish Maoism did not lose relevance. It commanded a large proportion of radical students, or had influence on them, through sympathetic groups, including Svenska Clartéförbundet. The passionate disseminators of Maoist thought, including the writer Jan Myrdal, who had published a book about spending several months in Yan'an in 1962, filtered into the Sweden China Association, which had outsized influence on Sweden’s already quite friendly foreign policy toward China. The Maoists entered academia and battled the area studies experts funded by Rockefeller grant. The Maoists took part in strikes. The Maoists ran in local politics.
» » » Although the Maoists were a fringe movement within Swedish politics, they did manage to exert some influence. Energy put toward Maoist causes was not wasted. It provided an umbrella under which to have discussions or advance ideas that were not tolerated in other contexts. And, if nothing else, it provided a community to political outcasts.
(THEAMERICANMAOIST2018 [POLITICS OF ATOMIZATION] ####### I have long been fascinated by a certain type of radical leftist on the internet. There is a name for these people. I won’t say it. They are fans of postsocialist regimes. They post on the internet about the Communist Party of China bringing secular values to Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang. They post about railways. [And they might also post in positive terms about the political parties leading the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, and maybe even about the Russian Federation.] The members of this group tend to be racialized sexual minorities. They tend to be young. They tend to be Americans that live far from the coasts. They tend to be poor. ########## Their opinions cannot matter. Cut off from political engagement or even elementary social interaction, beliefs have no weight. ########## For the Swedish Maoists, however genuine their adoption of revolutionary Maoist politics, they were saying things disconnected from the core theory. It could be an expression of anti-Americanism. It could express disgust with the American bombing of Vietnam. It could express a distrust of the Soviet Union and also European liberalism. But in the end, their pro-China stance mattered because it helped to build Sweden-China links. For the online radical at present, there is no way that these ideas could possibly matter: there are no longer any politics that they could participate in, and they are engaged in propagating the a vision of utopia presented in advertising material from foreign countries. ########## What is left is a curation of radical esthetics that require frictionless network culture. The celebration of—vital, authentic, but more complicated than presented in social media posts—poverty alleviation in the Chinese countryside is anti-American counter-esthetics. This is good. But it doesn’t mean much. These are politics only possible without politics. Their networks are only possible without social connections. This is socialism without solidarity. ########## And in the same way we have socialism without not only mass politics but also friendship, authentic human connection, and red wine and meatballs, we also have bedroom fascism. Post-political fascism. Hobbyist fascism. Politics as the attempt to build a social club beyond the network. ########## Everything is tuned by the algorithm, in the end. If you make connections, it is the product of the algorithm. If you fail to make connections, it is the fault of the algorithm. In the absence of politics and social connections, there is no movement, unless life is breathed into it by algorithmic chance, at which point it can be safely isolated. ########## Like sexual desire is captured by the algorithm, so is political desire. ########## Our memory is uploaded to the cloud. The machine does not allow memory of radical action. ########## The lesson is to emulate Swedish Maoists.)
» » » We promise to take you seriously.
There were Japanese Maoists. There were American Maoists. But they are not quite the same as European Maoists, who are also not the same as revolutionary movements outside of the developed world.
It is hard to fathom this but I would say that, at least at this time, the Soviet Union was seen as willing to compromise on American imperialism, while the Communist Party of China was the clear anti-American option. Adopting the Maoist position said a lot about one’s commitment to the anti-imperialist struggle in Indochina.
An article by Kjell Östberg for the Verso blog notes Göran Therborn's argument that it was 1965 and not 1968 that was more important for Sweden: “Sweden and the Long 1968.”
I am far from an expert on Swedish Maoism. This account is drawn from the one in Saluting the Yellow Emperor: A Case of Swedish Sinography by Perry Johansson.
As with any leftist organization, the list of contemporary and earlier schisms seems endless. There were earlier instances of quasi-Maoist dissidence within the Swedish left, including from the Stalinist Sveriges Kommunistiska Arbetarförbund, who departed from the SKP over disagreement with the policies of Nikita Khrushchev.