In the last decade and particularly after 11 September 2001, the left in Sweden has revealed a new and somewhat surprising side. With increasing frequency, various leftist groups have become affiliated in campaigns and demonstrations with movements that represent highly reactionary ideas and regimes or embrace authoritarian and in many cases explicitly anti-Semitic tendencies. In July 2006, for instance, representatives of both the Swedish Left Party and Revolutionary Communist Youth took part in a demonstration for Hezbollah in Malmö, Sweden, where participants shouted ”Death to Tel Aviv”. Support for anti-Jewish terrorist organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah and the defence of regimes like Iran’s – and the earlier Saddam dictatorship in Iraq – against sanctions or criticism from the left have become permanent features in the actions of the Swedish left. Just as often, it is possible to observe leftist debaters call into question fundamental rights and freedoms like the freedom of expression, on the grounds that they allow room for criticism – of religious and other ideas. Most recently, it was Stefan Jonsson in Dagens Nyheter’s cultural section (22 September 2006 and 24 January 2000) who complained that the freedom of expression allows statements and criticism against the values that government powers prioritize. The list of examples could easily be extended, especially when it comes to many leftist groups’ understanding of and sympathy for movements that to some degree hate the US and Israel in particular and the West in general, to whom no methods – not even indiscriminate violence – are foreign. Such examples would include DN contributor Andreas Malm’s homage to Hezbollah, or Åsa Linderborg’s and Erik Wijk’s repeated declarations of solidarity with terrorist acts against civilians in Iraq (Arbetaren 31/2006 and Aftonbladet 27 January 2005). This is the same Wijk who sees in this terror an ”act of resistance” against the occupation who has been crying crocodile tears for years over the vandalizing hooligans charged and sentenced by court authorities after the June 2001 riots in Göteborg.

How should these tendencies in the left – the array of parties, groups and individuals that lie politically and ideologically to the left of the Social Democrats – be interpreted? Why is there at least indirect support among these groups for clerical rightist dictatorships, for religious terrorist organizations and for ideologies attacking secular society’s liberal rights and freedoms? Certainly, far from everyone on the left maintains these attitudes, but it is clear that they are very widespread and also have support in established leftist organizations. Some critics argue that the left, or parts of it, have shifted toward fascism or the extreme right. If so, it would not be the first time. Italian fascism emanated from the country’s socialist movement, and in Sweden in the 1930s the Nils Flyg socialists, who were originally communists, gave their support to national socialism. And in recent years, researcher Heléne Lööw argues, it has become increasingly common for extremists from different camps to demonstrate side by side. This is particularly true on the issue of Israel, where today it can be almost impossible to distinguish leftist stances from neo-Nazi views.

While it is an insidious thought that fascism could return in a leftist guise, I am convinced that looking for an explanation here will come to nothing. On the contrary, I think that the reasons that the left has exhibited a number of tendencies that were previously only found on the extreme right are to be sought in its own development and particularly in the radical transformation of the socialist landscape over the last few decades.

A critical point in this context is the fact that the left has changed its view of modernity. For anyone who has followed the post-communist left, with its perpetual fight, for instance, against genetic technology, medical experiments on animals, bridges, roads, chemicals and nuclear energy, it may seem strange that the left that debuted in the Russian Revolution of 1917 was not only revolutionary but also progressive. In actuality, one of the most important objections to capitalism at that time was its lack of efficiency and development potential. The fact is that the Marxist theory espoused by both communism and social democracy was founded on the thesis that Western capitalism had resulted in extraordinary progress in the history of humanity but that its continued development was hampered by private ownership. This was the backdrop to the Marxist argument that citizenship had played out its role in history and that only the proletariat could carry the torch of human progress forward – progress that would free the industrial and agricultural masses from material want by stimulating science and technology. With the October Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union, the vision of an alternative modernity was established. It was precisely this notion of socialism as a more advanced society than a capitalist one that attracted enormous attention and was one of the left’s great assets. In other words, one could say that the revolutionary left was a movement that drew its ideological sustenance from a rationalist, progressive, optimistically-minded theoretical framework.

There is also another important aspect to the October Revolution. In his book Le passé d´une illusion (1995), the French historian Francois Furet formulated the thesis that the 1917 Russian Revolution assumed the role as standard bearer of universal values like liberty, equality and fraternity that the French Revolution had established in 1789. Today the Bolshevik Revolution may seem like a curious phenomenon, but at the end of the First World War it attracted hundreds of thousands of young people and was gradually transformed into an international movement of many millions that saw itself as the avant-garde of modern society. Communism not only gave the hope of a society in which poverty was eradicated – by virtue of the very model of a planned economy introduced in the Soviet Union – but also of a world where peace and mutual understanding superseded war and conflict, where cooperation and solidarity replaced competition and individualism.

For the generations of socialists who worked during the first period after the October Revolution – between 1917 and 1956 – the Soviet Union was not just a political fulcrum, it was also a historical point of reference embodying the idea that technological and material progress could be combined with a free and egalitarian society. How extensively this view was held is shown by how many politicians and researchers as late as the 1980s believed that the Soviet Union and its satellite states had succeeded in organizing a modern, highly productive social system. To take just one example, the Social Democrat Ingvar Carlsson argued as late as 1983 that, ”The Soviet Union and the countries in East Europe have brought about rapid industrialization and have a high gross domestic product. There is much to object to in the system in these countries, but they demonstrate irrefutably that capitalism does not have a monopoly on creating material well-being” (Vad är socialdemokrati? [‘What is a Social Democrat?’], the Social Democrats, 1983).

The left not only identified with modernity and progress; it also embraced the idea that this progress could only be achieved through violence and dictatorship. It even claimed that the ”proletarian dictatorship” was a freer form of government than ”bourgeois” democracy. Certainly, this line of argument was to be revised with the popular front policy in the mid-1930s, when ”anti-fascism” and the fight for liberal democracy, which had recently been repudiated, became the top priority – a policy that really reached its peak with the alliance between the US and Britain and the victory over Nazi Germany. However, this did not prevent the left from experiencing a series of disappointments and retreats decade after decade that were to be defended and justified at any cost: the recurring party schisms in the 1920s, the forced collectivization, the persecutions and mass liquidations under Stalin, the pact with Hitler, the repression in East Europe after the war, and to crown it off Khrushchev’s revelation that violence, lies and betrayal had been rampant in the communist Soviet Union. It was during these dark years that the left developed a (bad) habit of denying and also justifying the most obvious injustices and mistakes by socialism’s own activists, and to instead attack its opponents in relentless, inflamed and often mendacious rhetoric – a (bad) habit that lives on in fine form in today’s rather different left.

However, a new, second phase began in the left’s view of modernity and dictatorship in the 1960s. For young sixties radicals, the Soviet Union did not come across as a positive example. It was considered bureaucratic, authoritarian and conservative, so the new left sought out other gods. They found them in China, Cuba and the national liberation movements in the Third World. The new role models were still, of course, socialist and Marxist, but they represented a different kind of socialism than the Soviet Union. The ambition to develop an alternative society based on advanced science and technology held no attraction for these young radicals. The new left instead saw the people or the masses as the most productive force in history, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution’s supposed anti-bureaucratism and support for the masses held enormous appeal for radicals the world over.

A typical example in this era of bourgeois intellectuals also letting themselves get carried away by the idealized picture of socialist dictatorships in the Third World is Dagens Nyheter’s then editor-in-chief Olof Lagercrantz. He visited China in 1971 and returned with a series of enthusiastic articles about Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. However, the now classic example of a deeply dishonest picture of China is Jan Myrdal’s Rapport från en kinesisk by [‘Report from a Chinese Village’] (1963), which describes life in a people’s commune there. Not a word is mentioned in the account of the disastrous famine that struck China, which claimed close to 40 million lives and which was a direct result of the collectivization policy lauded in Myrdal’s book. The English journalist Jasper Becker has written a penetrating study of this disaster in his book Hungry Ghosts: China’s Secret Famine (1996).

This view of socialism was gradually repudiated in these years. After having been viewed as a theory on the material emancipation of the poor, socialism in its new left version became an ideology of national liberation. Solidarity was gradually shifted from the domestic working class – which had completely ignored the new left’s inflamed rhetoric of class struggle and thus considered bribed by ”the surplus profits of imperialism” – to liberation struggles in the Third World. While the new left had its roots in the peace and anti-nuclear weapons movements, it quickly came to idealize ”revolutionary violence” and ”the liberation war” as a way to free the masses in developing countries. Guerrillas like Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh became romantic heroic figures for an entire generation of leftist radicals in the West. An even worse and more compromising example of this fascination with violence was the new left’s almost unanimous support for one of the most bizarre terrorist movements in modern history, the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Just as the Communist Party in its time disputed Stalin’s purges, the left denied the Khmer’s mass murder of its own people. Social Democratic intellectuals, too, were enthused that the mass murder was carried out by the Khmer in the name of anti-imperialism and social revolution. The author P O Enquist wrote in Expressen on 15 May 1975: ”But the people rose up, set themselves free, threw out the intruders, found that their fine city had to be restored. People cleared out the house and started cleaning up. They started cleaning the floors and walls, because people should not live in degradation here, but in peace and kindness. Yet in the West, crocodile tears are flowing. The whore house has been cleared out, there is cleaning going on. Only pimps can lament this. Still, all this teaches us is that the struggle is not a historical marker, a lifeless monument; it is ongoing”.

As the centre of socialism moved to the Third World, there was another and more profound shift in perspectives within the left. Where capitalism had once been criticized for its inefficiency and material shortcomings or for impoverishing the working class, it was now attacked for its incredible productivity and excess. The growth of capitalism was still seen as a problem, but not because it resulted in underconsumption but rather in overconsumption, not because its level of technology was too low but because it was viewed as too high. Modern society no longer represented a promise of liberty and equality, but a danger to the survival of humanity. Development and progress were thought to threaten genuine values, destroy nature and restrict people’s opportunities to lead an authentic life. The capitalism developed in the West was described as both counterproductive and destructive.

This complete reversal on the view of modern society goes hand in hand with a shift in philosophical paradigms on the left. During the 1980s, postmodernist thinking emerged on a broad front; Marxism was pushed aside in favour of a theoretical structure that constituted a frontal attack on rationalism and the Western notion of the Enlightenment. Reason and the great narratives were declared dead and buried, and it was thought that the very concept of truth had been played out. Collective projects were superseded by fragmented, individualized texts or programmes. This 1980s postmodernism should be seen in light of the gradual collapse of the dream of a socialist society. When the extreme left philosopher Michel Foucault lost faith that reason and history stood on the side of socialism, he declared reason as such dead. When the hope of a revolutionary takeover of power evaporated, he argued that the problem was power as such. The idea that reason and truth turned out to be on the side of Western capitalism in the dispute with communism was harder for Foucault and the likes of him to bear than the notion that reason and the proletariat had reached a final end. By denying reason in itself and rejecting power as such, he disputed that science and democracy under capitalism were in any way capable of bringing about improvements for citizens. It is true that parts of the new left dismissed postmodernism, but its ideas nonetheless had an exceptional influence, particularly among young radical researchers and students at universities in the West.

The shifts in ideological positions that I have described – the repudiation of modernism and the critique of reason – were accentuated by the collapse of communism in East Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989-91. It was not just regimes and states that crumpled during this dramatic period. A historical symbol of an alternative modernity was also being sent to its grave; a theoretical tradition based on the philosophy of the Enlightenment was being thrown onto the rubbish dump of history. On one level, this change of scenery was a setback for the West, but at the same time it was a defeat that was easy to endure because for a long time the left had been moving away from everything that Soviet Communism represented. It was more of a disillusion when China embarked on the capitalist road in the 1980s and the heroized liberation movements in Africa and Latin America either degenerated into corrupt regimes like in Zimbabwe or drug gangs like FARC in Colombia. The fact is that at the start of the 1990s, the Swedish left – like the European left in general – was without any international models for the first time since 1917.

It might seem that this situation should have led to self-searching and innovation in the left. For the European Social Democrats, there was also a reorientation and adaptation to the new international situation, with its focus on democracy, European integration and human rights. Among leftist groups and leftist debaters in Sweden, however, the mistakes of the past were simply pushed aside as if they did not concern them. So the 1990s, at least the first half, was also an interregnum for the left. It was pressured by all the new revelations about the crimes of communism and was split by the war in the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, there was a generational shift which gradually established an agenda with new focuses: anti-globalization, multiculturalism, feminism and repudiation of the US and the EU.

These different tendencies came together in a new, third change of direction after 9/11 and the Bush administration’s decision to intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the confrontation between the US and Europe, on the one hand, and Islamic fundamentalism, on the other, the left saw an opportunity to regain lost territory. For the first time since the fall of communism, there emerged an anti-West, anti-liberal force with the same ambition as the left – that is, destroying advanced capitalism, its institutions and values. It would be wrong to claim that the left embraced Islamism ideologically. There are few if any advocates on the left hailing Iran’s clerics, the Saddam regime and the Taliban as progressive and emancipatory. But because they are viewed as adversaries of the left’s enemies, they are not simply tolerated; every criticism of Islamic fundamentalism is labelled ”Islamophobia” and not just unilateral American actions. Sanctions agreed internationally against Saddam’s Iraq and the regime in Iran are also considered expressions of ”imperialism” and postcolonial ”racism”. Every form of opposition to ”US imperialism”, even if it means random liquidation of its own civilians in Iraq, is considered legitimate and desirable. Sweden’s Youth League of the Left characterizes the American intervention in Iraq in terms that the Nuremberg Court used for Nazi abuses – ”our era’s greatest felonies and crimes against humanity” – and sees Islamic terrorists as legitimate resistance to these ”crimes”. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are considered ”racist occupations” and the American administration is seen as ”the terrorists of our age” (Young Left’s website 11 September 2007).

Two circumstances have contributed to the left’s moral and ideological genuflecting before the Islamic reaction to the West. First, the postmodern repudiation of modernity and criticism of the Western notion of progress have facilitated the left’s view of the anti-modern, anti-secular form of culture that Islam represents.

So the 1990s, at least the first half, was also an interregnum for the left. It was pressured by all the new revelations about the crimes of communism and was split by the war in the former Yugoslavia. At the same time, there was a generational shift which gradually established an agenda with new focuses: anti-globalization, multiculturalism, feminism and repudiation of the US and the EU.

These different tendencies came together in a new, third change of direction after 9/11 and the Bush administration’s decision to intervene in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the confrontation between the US and Europe, on the one hand, and Islamic fundamentalism, on the other, the left saw an opportunity to regain lost territory. For the first time since the fall of communism, there emerged an anti-West, anti-liberal force with the same ambition as the left – that is, destroying advanced capitalism, its institutions and values. It would be wrong to claim that the left embraced Islamism ideologically. There are few if any advocates on the left hailing Iran’s clerics, the Saddam regime and the Taliban as progressive and emancipatory. But because they are viewed as adversaries of the left’s enemies, they are not simply tolerated; every criticism of Islamic fundamentalism is labelled ”Islamophobia” and not just unilateral American actions. Sanctions agreed internationally against Saddam’s Iraq and the regime in Iran are also considered expressions of ”imperialism” and postcolonial ”racism”. Every form of opposition to ”US imperialism”, even if it means random liquidation of its own civilians in Iraq, is considered legitimate and desirable. Sweden’s Youth League of the Left characterizes the American intervention in Iraq in terms that the Nuremberg Court used for Nazi abuses – ”our era’s greatest felonies and crimes against humanity” – and sees Islamic terrorists as legitimate resistance to these ”crimes”. The interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan are considered ”racist occupations” and the American administration is seen as ”the terrorists of our age” (Young Left’s website 11 September 2007).

Two circumstances have contributed to the left’s moral and ideological genuflecting before the Islamic reaction to the West. First, the postmodern repudiation of modernity and criticism of the Western notion of progress have facilitated the left’s view of the anti-modern, anti-secular form of culture that Islam represents. So religious fundamentalism outside Europe or clerical dictatorships like that in Iran are no longer something that repels the left. On the contrary, they can be seen as part of the opposition to the ”racism” from the West. Second, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict plays a critical role. Because religious fundamentalism, like for instance in Hamas and Hezbollah, has become the dominant ideology in the Palestinian opposition to Israel, tolerance has increased in the left throughout Europe. Today, support and sympathy for the Palestinian terrorist organizations are also completely acceptable positions in newspapers like Aftonbladet and Dagens Nyheter. It obviously does not matter that these movements, as well as anti-Western, anti-liberal Islam in general, were once closely allied with German Nazism and that today they are part of a political trend that denies the Holocaust and wants to obliterate the state of Israel.

The left that was born in the 19th century and experienced its breakthrough and success in the 20th century has its roots in the Enlightenment’s optimistic faith in the future and outlook on life. It believed most fervently that man could liberate himself from the limited forces of nature and break free from the oppression of external circumstances. The key point in this belief was that people had been enslaved to superior social forces but through collective action could become masters of these circumstances. In line with this attitude, it was thought that the radicals of the era could discern a state of freedom and surplus, although admittedly both freedom and wealth ceased to exist once they took power.

Today there is basically none of this left in the left’s philosophy or approach to society. One thing is that the left has not learnt from its abuses – that it even denies its past by ignoring it. What is worse, it has renounced its rationalist, progressive belief and instead been drawn toward one of the most reactionary and hate-filled movements in modern history – Islamic fundamentalism, with its deep-seated anti-Western and anti-liberal ambitions. This ideological and political degenerative process is in essence a democratic problem. That is because every pluralistic public needs a critical, rational left that can challenge and balance liberal and conservative ideas and forces. With its cynical gospel of power and violence, the left in Sweden today has instead allied itself with our era’s reactionary, destructive forces.

Translated by Susan Long