If you read material from the Swedish labour movement at the beginning of the 20th century, you can see that Russia is a very big issue. The Tsarist Russian Empire persecuted minorities, cracked down on opposition, and attacked other countries. In Sweden, Russia was used as an insult. If, for example, police or soldiers were deployed against workers, the labour press called it “Russia in Sweden” (Brand 4–5/1902) or said it was reminiscent of Petersburg (Social-Demokraten 1 May 1905). Of course, it didn’t mean that you were against ordinary Russians, or even Russia as a country. On the contrary. The Swedish labour movement actively supported the Russian opposition and also helped political refugees who came here from Russia.

I think it is very good that attention is paid to the Russians who protest Russia’s attack on Ukraine. It must take tremendous courage to do that. In this country we have a long and fine tradition of international solidarity and of protesting against superpowers that attack other countries. In part of course, the protests against the US war in Vietnam. But also, the protests against the Soviet invasions of Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan.

It is important that we continue that tradition, stand up for an independent foreign policy, for peace and solidarity, for the right of all peoples to decide for themselves. We must never stop criticizing superpowers that try to control other countries and that try to build empires, be it Russia, the United States or China. Or the EU. It doesn’t matter what justifications they use; superpowers will always come up with a bunch of excuses.

During the Swedish great power period in the 17th and 18th centuries, there were always excuses when attacking other countries. Often it was God and religion that were used. When Sweden was to join the Thirty Years’ War, it was said that it was to defend the religious freedom of the German Protestants. The Thirty Years’ War devastated large parts of Europe, it also devastated Sweden, even though the war did not take place here.

There were approximately 100,000 Swedish men and boys who died as soldiers in the Thirty Years’ War. We should remember them, but we can also remember all those who refused. It has often been forgotten in the history books, but there were actually thousands who escaped, they hid in the forests for example, because they did not want to be part of the war.

The Swedes who escaped from the Thirty Years’ War, they were not cowards. They were incredibly brave. They probably didn’t mind defending their homeland if we had been attacked, but they weren’t going to be sent away, far away to a foreign land to be slaughtered in some war that it was extremely unclear what it was about.

There is only one solution to the war in Ukraine and that is for Russia to immediately call off its invasion, withdraw its troops and leave Ukraine alone. The Russians who protest the war do so because they care about their people and love their country. They love it so much that they are prepared to take great personal risks to defend it. They deserve our solidarity.

The holy feeling of revolt

This text “The holy feeling of revolt” is written as an attempt to somehow reciprocate the magnificent award that I received today through Lasse Diding.

Among Muslims there is a word “sakha” which means selfless generosity. It is unusual. It is considered to pave the way for a happy future. Jan Myrdal’s big prize manifests the generosity of man. In Persia, newlyweds usually invite strangers to their home for dinner to prove to heaven that they have “sakha”, the generosity. My family was thus invited to the home of an unfamiliar newlywed couple in Kermanshah. The wife’s female relatives sat on the floor and watched as we celebrated with the bride and groom. – It was solemn – you got a glimpse of a human trait that belongs to eternity. It slams the door on avidity and greed.

The most famous anarchist of the 19th century was Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876). Here in Sweden, he became famous. Charles XV received him in audience. Ever since the field marshal’s time under Napoleon, the Bernadottes have had a soft spot for left-wing radicals. The German philosopher Fichte’s portrait decked the field marshal’s wall – Fichte who asked the question “What are academics for?” By implication if they don’t want to abolish society’s injustices. Fichte – one of the revolutionary spirit’s finest!

It is Bakunin who declared man’s “feeling of revolt” to be “holy”. Vilhelm Ekelund quotes it warmly. And of course, a “no” is more holy than a “yes”, because a “yes” is a concession, offers no resistance. Lets everything remain as it is.

A “no”, a “revolt” – so much riskier. And yet, given the vulnerability of humans to animal instincts on the one hand and remorse on the other, how necessary a “no” must be. That explains its holiness. The feeling of revolt is unassailable because it is man’s strongest protection.

Sometimes you hear that it is during puberty that the feeling of revolt first rears its head. – In my case, the feeling of revolt hit me hard when I was five years old!

It was Christmas 1928. We rented four rooms and a kitchen upstairs from the farmer Erik Sundkvist in Änge in Offerdal’s parish. – Offerdal in Jämtland on the border to Norway.

The Christmas tree is decorated. In the ceiling garlands of red crepe paper. The Christmas smorgasbord is dished up, the ham is breaded. Mum and I are walking around and waiting for Dad, who is down at Sundkvist’s to wish a merry Christmas with a litre of schnapps.

I am full of expectation. The Christmas presents are under the tree. It was today that Jesus was born and laid in a manger. I had seen the manger in Sundkvist’s stable and hoped that Jesus had avoided the tongue from a horse or mule.

We are waiting for dad. Mum lights the candles on the table. And then he comes. Finally.

A child immediately sees if either parent is under the influence of alcohol. It cannot be hidden. The essence of the parent has been greatly changed by the liquor – cooler, more metallic. The child suddenly sees this transformation. Dad has become estranged.

On the Christmas smorgasbord, beer and schnapps are poured into glasses. I get soda in my glass.

Now the party will begin. But I already have a nasty feeling of my dad’s estrangement. Why isn’t he as usual? He talks a little slurred and loudly and laughing about his visit to the bottom floor. Of course, the Christmas schnapps had to be sampled.

Now dad is going to cut the Christmas ham. He fumbles with the large slicer and suddenly it slides out of his hand and onto the floor.

And now it comes.

I can’t stand this. This does not suit me. Enough is enough. And this on the long-awaited Christmas Eve itself!

I get down from the chair and put the bib on the table and go on my way.

As I write this, I am soon to be 99 years old. The memory from the age of five is still almost physically perceptible today.

This revolt of the child was completely spontaneous. Unpremeditated. It was not the mind that revolted, it was the reflex of the conscience or “soul”. It is here – lo and behold! – the “taste” that decides. This situation is so unpleasant to be present in – now I’m leaving. It is anarchistic. No consideration is given to the consequences.

When Vilhelm Ekelund once had a beer in the restaurant on the ferry to Helsingör, there was someone playing the accordion. A couple got up and danced. They were probably a little drunk and both danced “lewdly” in a way that was offensive to everyone. What works in private becomes provocative in public. After a while, Ekelund had enough of this dance. He took an ashtray and threw it at them, whereupon the dancing ceased.

My revolt was short-lived. Dad stood up, took me harshly by the arm and led me back to the table. The mood gradually lightened up. As a Christmas present, I got a tin car. I drove around with it.

In the evening when I was going to bed, mum said; “That you dared to do that to dad! You have to be careful.”

Ever since this childish revolt, I have noticed the holy revolts of others, Vilhelm Tell, Olaus Petri, Engelbrekt, Voltaire, right up to Gramsci and Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof.

But it is a Russian nobleman of Jewish birth that I am particularly attached to. I had been five, he sixteen, a high school student at the grammar school in Kazan in 1887. The Tsar had his brother Alexander, who had been involved in a plot against the government, hanged. And now the sixteen-year-old swore an oath that he would not give up until he had taken revenge on the Tsar family and raised the blood-red banner on every town hall in Russia.

Vladimir Ulyanov, who took the name “Lenin”, is a fabulous example of the element of surprise in the course of history. A young high school student turned one of the world’s largest empires, Russia, upside down. It took its time. Lenin was 47 when he moved into Smolny and began to rule the Soviet Union.

– O –

The tsar’s authoritarian violent regime that does not hesitate to use physical violence – and even does so with some pleasure through mock executions (Dostoevsky!) – what revolt is victorious in the face of such an opponent?

The answer is the rebel who emanates from conscience, soul, and love. All this “which physically does not exist” crushes the autocracy and those in power.

It is Paul who in First Corinthians 1:28 formulates this fortunate order here on earth: “God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are.”

Quoting the Bible in this political context is natural because Lenin was inspired by the Bible reader Leo Tolstoy. And it is Georg Lukacs – the communist – who states: “Die Bibel ist eine Fibel des Aufstands … The Bible is the ABC book of the revolution.”

Is there a need for examples? In Mark 11:15: “Jesus entered the temple courts and began driving out those who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.”

Cf. Andreas Baader who was so disgusted by the consumerism of the wealthy that he set fire to Frankfurt’s largest department store in 1969.

The Russian Tsar’s counterpart in Israel – the Jewish upper class – explicitly declared: “He stirs up the people all over Judea by his teaching. He started in Galilee and has come all the way here.” (Luk.23:5) The word “incite”, “commoveo”, “anaseiå” is the word the authorities use for the rebel’s agitation. It must be stopped before “the whole nation perish” (High Priest Caiaphas, John 11:50).

The rebel’s response is to revile the authority: “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received your comfort. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will mourn and weep.” (Luke 6:24-6:25).

The rebel Jesus sent out 72 disciples to go from village to village and enlighten the people about the utter futility of asking the clergy and authorities (“elders”) for advice, because these serve only their own interests. And here it comes to conscience.

The disciples, the 72, would not go around as well-paid consultants. No, they would go barefoot, always without money or food. Jesus promised them much beating. They would be flogged and killed – but remain jubilantly happy because they served their neighbour in the best possible way. They would “bring down rulers from their thrones but lift up the humble”. (Mary’s song of joy, Luke 1:46). Before the court, never speak prepared – but from the heart.

William Butler Yeats summarizes the task of the 72 disciples. It was to overthrow those in power, both religious and political, in order to introduce a social order conditioned by everyone’s personal conscience – that is, everyone’s relationship with God – He who does not exist physically but only as “spirit”. –

What Jesus preached was that “the kingdom of God is near” – so near that it is within every human being. “Go into yourself” – there you will learn everything you need for this earthly life (Luke 11:52).

Jesus’ message to the Israeli authorities was decisive: “The prevailing legal order in the country is detestable. Away with it! And away with religion! It is only human inventions and impositions.”

That Jesus was executed cannot be surprising when viewed from the point of view of the Roman governor or authorities. Power wants peace in the country.

As for religious laws and rites – Judaism invokes the patriarch Abraham, Jesus’ own ancestor, it is the “God of Abraham” that Paul worships. – Then it is worth noting: Abraham lived 500 years before the Law of Moses – the Ten Commandments – and 2000 years before the Gospels. Abraham was a “hanif”, that means a “friend” of God. Abraham lacked religion in the sense we put into the word.

– O –

Lenin’s strange and powerful revolt is inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s pamphlets. The very spirit of these widespread texts is found in compressed form in Tolstoy’s diaries. It is not Marxism – but anarchism!

If you go to 1890, when Lenin was twenty years old, Tolstoy writes explicitly: “The anarchists are right in everything! Private property must be banned. Everything must be owned collectively.” (1890 5/8, 4/13, 11/16)

The battle between the lower class and the upper class must go on. Endeavour to raise capital – look at the ugly snout of greed. People who live on what others have slaved away in hard work – they live a shameful life. The church is an institution that misleads people away from conscience. (8/19 1890) Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Holy Synod.

These diary entries form the basis of the pamphlets. Tolstoy is indeed an instigator, on behalf of his irrepressible feeling of revolt.

That the Swedish Academy did not give Tolstoy the Nobel Prize, despite objections from both Selma Lagerlöf and Strindberg, can be understood considering Tolstoy’s explicit sympathy for the anarchists. For the bourgeoisie, this was a moral faux pas – it must fail! – The Soviet Union is Lenin’s answer.

– O –

When Finland asked for an armistice in September 1944, it was Finland’s ambassador to Sweden, Georg Achates Gripenberg, who negotiated with Madame Kollontai in Saltsjöbaden – Stalin’s representative. He succeeded after the Finnish government made communist leader Yrjö Leino minister of the interior and head of the police. When the agreement was concluded, two Finnish communists came to Gripenberg and asked him to arrange for them to meet Stalin. Through Kollontai’s mediation, the two were invited to the Kremlin.

They met with Stalin, and he wondered what they wanted to know. They asked; “What is the very essence of communism?”

Stalin replied: “It is to make man better!”

He gives the answer that Lenin would also have given. It is the message from Tolstoy and from the “ABC book” of the revolution.

The meaning has a religious connotation. The Russians were not secular. The message from Lenin received a response.

But when Gorky tried to persuade Lenin to cooperate openly with the Orthodox Church because there was basically an ideological kinship, Lenin refused and on the same grounds as Tolstoy stated: The Church takes people away from the core of the rebellious spirit – the conscience.

Gramsci says that all politics have a private background. Lenin had private reasons for overthrowing the Tsarist family. And he has the ideal contract between thought and feeling that Lukacs¹ praises: live as you think. Nina Björk’s texts are examples of this ideal contract between reason and emotion.

No dreams of an empire were part of Lenin’s thinking. He unconcernedly gave Finland, Estonia, Latvia, and Ukraine the freedom to decide their own destinies. His last letter to Stalin: “Don’t use coercion alone – try voluntariness too!”

Finally, we disapprove of male excessive violence. How then did Lenin behave? Lukacs? Karl Marx? Sartre? Should they be ashamed. I think Lukacs answers for all of them when he says: “Everything I did was done so that I would be approved by Gertrud” (his wife, the doctor Gertrud Bortstiber.) None of them would have published a text that the beloved disliked, Jenny, Krupskaja, Gertrude, Simone.

¹ Regarding the Lenin-Lukacs connection: Lenin demanded daily radio contact with Bela Kun’s communist-led government in Budapest in 1919 – Lukacs was one of Bela Kun’s closest associates in the Politburo.

I am going to give a speech to Carl-Göran Ekerwald – a speech that sounds. But I’ll start with a pantomime. The pantomime is called: “To read Carl-Göran Ekerwald” and it looks like this: (bounce, smile, frown, shake head, nod in confirmation). It doesn’t look like this: (just pretend to read without facial expressions).

That is to say: You get many feelings and thoughts from reading Ekerwald. You don’t get comfy. You never know what will come. It’s exciting and very good for the mood.

The first time I met Carl-Göran Ekerwald was on the bathroom floor in my childhood home. It was in the shape of an open book lying on the floor with the cover facing upwards. I had just learned to read so I was probably 7-8 years old, and I remember spelling my way through the author’s name, I never got to the title. I read Carl-Göran EkerWald (why should we have double-u if it was pronounced the same way as v?)

Now, many years later, I think it was an appropriate way to meet Ekerwald. The low, the bodily needs, the concrete – and at the same time the high, the large spaces, the freedom of thought. Quite simply: a writer spirit on a bathroom floor. And I could read his name!

It felt strange to discover that you were from Änge in Offerdal, Carl-Göran Ekerwald – because I am too! Two Lenin Award winners born in Änge! In relation to the number of inhabitants, it must be the place from which Lasse has picked the most people here to Varberg. When I found you on the bathroom floor, however, my family had moved to Halland a few years earlier. So maybe it wasn’t the lofty literary heights my parents were looking for when they read that book, but maybe they wanted to read someone from a now abandoned hometown. I know you would have approved of both reasons.

Carl-Göran Ekerwald made his debut in 1959 with a collection of short stories titled “The fire and the chick”. His latest book was the essay collection “That which does not exist” from 2021. In between, he has written novels, juvenile books, love poems, memoirs, made translations, worked as a literary critic. So, he has been a writer for six decades. It is a long period of time, and no man stands still in his head for so many years. Topics have changed as have attitudes.

But I still sense an Ekerwald-esque original question, one that follows him wherever he turns in the world – and it is the greatest of questions, namely “How shall we live?”. We have been given our time on earth, how to manage it?

It seems to me that Ekerwald himself needs that question. He needs to have it alive in his own life – not primarily to give his readers an answer. And he keeps the question alive by consorting with people – and he consorts with people by reading books. There he consorts with all people; it doesn’t matter if they live today or if they lived hundreds of years ago and it doesn’t matter if they lived at all or if they are people in novels. Everyone is equal and everyone gets the same question: “You who are human, how do you act? How do you act in your life; how do you act in your work?” Through literature, he gets what he calls a “comparison material”.

All of this is based on a view of human beings that says that I am not that original. You’re not that original either. That is based on the fact that we have something to say to each other. Across time and space, across gender, beyond power and status. The individual is not a unique psychological puzzle, but we are all doppelgangers of each other.

This does not mean that we can ignore the circumstances of the individual person. In a wonderfully concise analysis of Gustave Flaubert’s classic novel Madame Bovary, Ekerwald believes that what Flaubert does in this novel is that he says of his main character, “Let’s see how she was. This is how she was! Fini! It is literature of the great kind.”

How was she? All people are worthy of that question, from the smallest to the largest, from the one with the finest values to the one with the most horrible. The question “how was she?” is also at the same time the question “how could she live? What opportunities did she have to live how?” Here is the connection between society, politics – circumstances – and the life of the individual.

We meet so many people in Ekerwald’s books! That’s like what we do. On one page, we meet someone who makes a revolution. On the next page, we meet someone visiting a farm, looking at a sculpture and reading a book. We meet happy people, crazy people, playing, loving, working people. Although the meetings with all these people are sometimes short, the people are not reduced to constituting Examples of a Type. Yet we learn something from the totality of everyone we meet: we learn about the eternally human. We learn humanism.

Now I suspect, at least in the context in which we find ourselves here today, that some mutter: Oh, all this talk about the Human, about Humanism, this talk about Let’s stop polarizing and instead unite – isn’t there soon a risk that I suggest that we should all start singing “We shall overcome”?

Oh no – I won’t do that. Because it is important to distinguish between a watered-down humanism and a blood-filled one. The watered-down, non-committal humanism, it ignores circumstances and injustices. Instead, it likes to talk about tolerance. Ekerwald writes about this word of honour of our time in the book “Diogenes’ lantern” from 1983, the decade when neoliberalism really broke through in Sweden, where he writes like this: “There is a tolerance of condescension. Let them keep going… soon they get tired. Or – just keep talking… it will still be the way we want it to be. Tolerance – as a safety valve in society. Institutionalized by the indifferent.”

The keynote of tolerance is “you don’t concern me; I do not care. Take care of your own business and don’t mind others”. Tolerant is someone who says “my children and other people’s kids” – for them, completely different things apply indirectly. And sure, they may have completely different conditions, but some conditions are better, and others are worse for a person to be able to enjoy life.

Tolerance, indifference, is based on the fact that we know nothing about what is better and what is worse. That I can’t know anything about what you need or you anything about what I need. Everything goes!

In an essay on the Marxist Lukács, Ekerwald writes about that attitude within traditional literary research. This is how he writes: “Do you think that Konstanze is behaving properly? – What a question? Everyone lives their life, isolated from others, enclosed in the lead sheath of subjectivity – who can then take a stand on what Konstanze or anyone else is doing. Everything is ultimately incomprehensible, and powerlessness is the word that comes closest to the truth about man. It is against such a resigned, anti-life attitude that Lukács rises up with all his knowledge and with all his experience.”

And in this Lukács has a comrade in Ekerwald. He says that things can be understood, that man can be understood.

The opposite of tolerance is not punishment and prohibition against, or cancellation of, those who hold different views than us, against those who have different customs than us, those who deal with life in different ways than us. The opposite is commitment and struggle to convince, to get people on our side. Blood-filled humanism says that there are circumstances that enable people to flourish. And there are circumstances that make it difficult, if not impossible.

It requires us to be honest and open with our worldview, our view of human beings and what we believe constitutes a good life. That we don’t hide behind the tolerance that borders on indifference, and that says I can’t know anything about you and what you need.

In the book “Diogenes’ lantern”, Ekerwald also writes about when this 4th-century Greek philosopher went out with his lighted lantern even though it was broad daylight. He writes that he believes that what Diogenes was looking for was not a tolerant but a sincere human being. An undisguised one.

And then you can say: how lucky Diogenes found Carl-Göran Ekerwald! It is true that it took 2400 years, and perhaps it was Ekerwald who found Diogenes and not the other way around. But still – good meeting.

To me, Ekerwald appears as a sincere person. It is noticeable both in what he writes about; he really wants to know something himself about Horace or about Jämtar¹ or about Goethe. And it shows in the way he writes, his style. Ekerwald does not use the words as if they were flags that should signal something. Signal “I keep up with the times”, or “I belong to this camp”. At one time, perhaps such signal words were “production conditions” and “surplus value”. Today they are “brown bodies”, “tolerance”, “inclusion”.

But the words Ekerwald uses don’t work that way. The words he uses he uses because he needs them; they come from within. It can be big words, abstract, solemn, existential. Heavenly words. But they are combined with the concrete earth words.

There is no showmanship in his texts – even though I find it hard to believe that there are many people in Sweden who are as cultivated and as skilled in languages and as well-read as he is. It’s as if he, “man of culture” as he is, has a very small ego.

In Johan Lovén’s interview book with Ekerwald, The Time Witness in Svindalen, Lovén gives him an offer to be what he calls a “time witness” (Ekerwald himself does not want to claim to be this). Lovén suggests that Ekerwald is the kind of honourable person who “dares to say what is uncomfortable when others remain silent for one reason or another?” Ekerwald answers: “The honourable thing lies primarily in the fact that you say something that your fellow human beings take to heart as a stimulus to intellectual vitality. It does not mean that you, as a reader, are in favour of a certain opinion that the time witness argued, but that your thinking has been put in motion. You have been vitalized in your mindset.”

He, this cultivated man, also dares to be childishly amazed, as when he writes in an essay: “That which for man is such an immensely pleasant condition, namely, to inhale air after exhaling, must for a whale that has held its breath perhaps a little over half an hour be extremely pleasant.” You haven’t thought of that, have you? What is it like to breathe in if you are a whale?

Ekerwald is not, it seems to me, that fond of writing theory or making generalizations. But I am, and since I am, I will end here by making a reducing generalization of something that I think I have glimpsed in Ekerwald’s always concrete embodiments of the question of life and meaning.

Like this: In relation to what makes life meaningful, people can take two different positions. Some think that what puts life in a flashlight and makes us understand what it’s all about, what the meaning is – it’s the exceptions, the unusual. It is the ecstasy, death, the party, the battle, the speed. Others think that it is the everyday life, the plod, that gives life meaning. The sun that rises every morning, the daily bread, the daily work, the still and small. The blade of grass. Maybe it has a dewdrop on it this morning?

It is probably not any conscious, intellectual decisions that lie behind which of these two positions a person takes. It’s probably a matter of temperament.

My temperament is such that I like to give answers. So, how should we live? We must existentially try to live so that we create “a love relationship with life”, which is a formulation Ekerwald uses in his essay on Nietzsche. We must live politically so that we give all people at least an opportunity to create a love relationship with life.

Ekerwald is a great help in both cases. Congratulations Carl-Göran!

¹ Inhabitants of the Swedish province Jämtland.

One of Lenin’s greatest and most decisive historical contributions was his uncompromising opposition to Russia’s continued participation in the First World War, which he saw as an imperialist war of redistribution in which soldiers and war victims had to pay for the masters’ rival struggle for territories, markets, and world domination. In a similar way, wars are waged today between great powers without regard to the interests of the people. Russia’s attack on Ukraine has been preceded by vicious attacks against not only Lenin’s peace policy in general, but in the Putin worldview, Lenin has been repeatedly attacked in particular for his equally uncompromising support for the Ukrainian nation, culture, and language. At the same time, an even bigger and more extensive war- and refugee disaster is going on in Yemen, a war that could be ended at any time if the USA, NATO, and the Western countries had seriously demanded this. These wars show the total hypocrisy and lack of interest in the suffering of the peoples of both the US and Russia and make it especially important this year to oppose these wars in every way and support their many victims.

Speech to the 2020 Lenin Award laureate, Kajsa Ekis Ekman

This is the twelfth time the prize has been awarded. It has rewarded socially and culturally critical efforts in a wide range of fields of activity, film, music, science, theatre, and literature. But the award has so far been a memorial to a generation of critics and insurgents, the “’68 generation”. They were all defined by the Vietnam War and anti-imperialism, and they all – except the baby Mikael Nyberg, born in 1953 and subsequently the executioner of late capitalist working life, – had their critical breakthrough in the 1960s-1970s. Nine of the first eleven laureates fit that description.

The very first laureate, the historian of religion and expert on Islam Mattias Gardell (born in 1959), was a bit odd. While the rest of us fought against imperialism and its accomplices, Mattias wrestled with God, according to his own account. By all accounts, he was more successful than the rest of us. It was a well-deserved choice, continuing the tradition of the Soviet Lenin Peace Prize, out of respect for cultural and social engagement and creation outside Marxist-Leninist party lines.

“’68”, in symbolic quotes for a decade (at least), was a creative period of transition, so it is natural that the subsequent awards were directed to that generation. After 1980, the world went downhill, finance capital took power, and social divides widened again. The political dreams of the left were crushed, while cultural achievements were partly preserved, sex and gender relations, anti-racism. But around 2000, neoliberal post-1980 capitalism began to crash, in East Asia 1997-98, in Latin America in the early 2000s, in the United States and Europe in 2008. With the stepchildren of failed neoliberalism, a new, international left-wing generation grew up.

In sluggish Sweden, its growth so far has not had the same breaking power as in England or the United States with the large youthful support for radical movements and anti-systemic politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders.

But it exists here, and today we celebrate the new left-wing generation’s foremost intellectual representative, Kajsa Ekis Ekman. Kajsa has a combination of empirical overview and intellectual sharpness and depth that I think is unique in Sweden today. The only comparisons I can think of are the slightly older international sisters Naomi Klein and Arundhati Roy. Internationally, one could call the new generation the Jacobin generation, after the wise and challenging radical American left-wing magazine Jacobin. As a former Robespierre prize recipient, Kajsa is a highly qualified representative.

With a quote from Peps Persson, Kajsa herself has called it the “the deceived generation”: “We thought we had all the opportunities… but… we did not get any first-hand contracts and we did not get any permanent jobs. The years go by, and we continue to be loose. Half of all people in Sweden between the ages of 20-27 do not have their own home and half of all employees under the age of 26 have a fixed-term job.” It is the generation of neoliberal exclusion, the one that reintroduced socialism into the political debate in Spain, Greece, England, and the United States.

Kajsa’s most common writing form is the catchy article, also the building block in her books. The articles can be about most things in life and society. Many are fortunately collected in a large volume, Texts 1998-2015, grouped by different genres; debate, essay, literary criticism, economics, foreign affairs, portraits, activism and youthful sins. Such is good advice for stealing from the capital, together with big sister warnings about the risks.

She has also written three brilliant, acclaimed and translated books, Being and Being Bought (2010), Stolen Spring (2013) and the prize posthumous On the Existence of Gender from 2021. All are driven by a fiery personal commitment turned into exhaustive and in-depth critical studies.

Being and Being Bought is Ekis’ examination for the master. A brilliant Marxian – more than Marxist in the traditional sense – analysis of the commodification and reification of the female gender during late capitalism in far-reaching and penetrating studies of the basically similar social ecosystems of sex trafficking and uterus trade, surrogacy. The contemporary sex and uterus industry is analysed from many different points of view on both actual conditions and ideological draperies, and with different methods, with an almost totalitarian reading of all relevant material and with revealing key interviews in several countries. “Our goal is to teach them to become better prostitutes”, said a representative of an EU-funded organization in Amsterdam. The surveys are delivered with a sharp thoroughness that required 456 footnotes, to research reports, testimonies, slimy pimps and to apologetic sayings from both philosophical scatterbrains and slick PR types, as well as to an intellectual framework from Aeschylus’ Oresteia to Marx’ Paris Manuscripts and Sartre’s L’Être et le Néant.

Stolen Spring is a hard-hitting and unbeatable, well-woven combination of versatile report, multicultural diary, national economical information (about the financial crisis) and accurate, devastating critique of the northern European, including right-wing Swedish, myth of the “lazy” and overpaid Greeks.

In the first sentences of the preface, the reader gets the situation in Greece summarized in a flash: “Imagine that one day your salary will stop coming. The months go by. The boss says keep working or you will be fired. At the same time, imagine that everyone you know gets their wages halved or becomes unemployed. That public broadcasting is shut down overnight and that the private radio stations have replaced the employees with a playlist. That DN, SvD, Sydsvenskan and Aftonbladet go bankrupt within six months. That the archipelago is sold to speculators. That the health care is cut down so much that you are encouraged to bring syringes and bandages to the hospital yourself. That one day you will see your friend’s grandmother lying outside the supermarket.”

With its wingspan from domestic and international media coverage and penetrating medical journalism to history of ideas and dialectical materialism and with its 625 footnotes, On the Existence of Gender is a typical, masterful Ekis Ekman work. It dissects the so-called trans issue, a mined field of debate on sex change and the importance of gender, from above all two sides. One is the rapidly emerging market for children’s gender reassignment, mainly among girls just before or just at the beginning of puberty. It is a market that for its profitability is very dependent on taxpayers paying, and Kajsa brings to light the postmodernist ecosystem that has developed, internationally and in Sweden, similar to what she found around prostitution and surrogacy: an ecosystem of very small, articulated personal interest groups, healthcare professionals, idealists, liberal ideologues, specialized media sites, for-profit companies and government money.

Like the target women in Being and Being Bought, the gender insecure young girls, often with other mental problems, are vulnerable and exposed. They are tempted to block their puberty and then move on to hormone treatment and operations, with the risk of severe side effects to an unexplored extent, e.g. sterility. Like prostitution and surrogacy, gender reassignment is presented as increased freedom of choice for children, who should not be hindered by parents’ fears.

The ideological basis for this activity is a new definition of gender, which has gained official status in several countries: a person’s gender is what the person wants it to be. If you feel insecure or uncomfortable with the gender you were born in, you can and should change gender, as early as possible. This is where the market for gender reassignment of children comes from. But freedom of choice of gender also provides another opportunity, more exploited after puberty and by men. You can simply say that from now on I am a woman. Gender is in the head and not in the genitals. That right is now sanctioned in several countries.

What this trans possibility includes is Kajsa’s second perspective. She points to problems with female spaces opened to male trans women, such as locker rooms, women’s classes in elite sports, women’s prisons, and above all to how the logical consequence of gender idealism makes the oppression and discrimination of women invisible and impossible to talk about. The material existence of sex is dissolved. “Avoid the word woman”, it says in the Swedish Care Guide “to describe that bodies look in certain ways.” The book’s critical sharpness ends in a minor chord from a feminist nightmare: “When we try to fight for our rights, we notice that our group no longer exists. The number you have dialled has expired.”

As a reporter, Kajsa has her own distinctive style. She is fearless and both participatory and observant. In Barcelona, she lives in a house where prostitutes live. In Caracas, she lives with a Chavista militant in an “abandoned warehouse occupied by poor people and being converted into housing”. She takes part in the climate demonstrations in Copenhagen and on Ship to Gaza, where a Mossad officer informs her that the Israeli police know which school her son goes to. “Are you not worried that something will happen to him when you are away?”

She flows into all environments, in Athens she has friends along the entire social ladder, from the precariat to the upper class. Both in Athens and in 2019 in Caracas, she interviews businessmen and right-wing politicians as well as left-wing activists. Commitment and involvement are regularly joined with gazes far away and deep into documentary sources.

She is a writer with a linguistic ear, who, for example, unravels the concepts of the personal, the private and their relation to politics, and of the new confusing turns between sex and gender, and the conceptual shifts that unite “homophobic traditionalists and ultraliberal progressive postmodernists”.

The fervent commitment that drives Kajsa’s writing is feminist and humanistic. “What worries me,” she writes of surrogacy, “is the commodification of the human, woman and child.” “Isn’t that the very principle of feminism itself – that women should not be tools for others…?” As she is very aware, it is also the basic principle of Marxist humanism and anti-capitalism. That is why she is on the left in a broad and belligerent sense without joining any of the left’s different political variants.

For me, it is an honour and a great joy to, as perhaps the last laureate of the ’68 generation, be involved in presenting the Lenin Award to a brilliant social and cultural critic from a new international generation, of the rebellious stepchildren of neoliberalism. A critic who is always broadly and deeply prepared, with an analytical hawk eye, and a razor in the computer. Therefore, as in Aftonbladet’s left-wing series a couple of years ago, she can see capitalism as a beard.

Thanks a lot! It’s always fun when history is noticed. It does not always get noticed. The culture pages are often about, for example, what was on Twitter the other day or something like that. But it can be useful to have a slightly longer perspective sometimes.

To me, Swedish history is a man named Dick. It is very possible that Dick was not his real name, but that was what he was called. Dick was a slave in the Swedish colony of Saint-Barthélemy in the early 1800s. We really only know one thing about him and that is that he tried to escape, or rather – he managed to escape. It says in a notice in the local newspaper. The notice is included in a book called Slave Trade and Slavery Under the Swedish Flag, by Holger Weiss.

There have always been people who resist. When I was writing the War of the Gods, which is a children’s book about slaves in the Viking Age, I did not want to write about slaves that you feel pity for. You could indeed fell pity for the slaves, but I wanted to write about slaves who escape. It’s really one of the few things we truly know about the slaves in the Viking Age – that they escaped sometimes. Among other places, this can be seen in old legal texts.

There have always been people who have accepted to be oppressed. But there have also always been people who refuse. There are those who immediately when they have got the chain around their feet start planning for how they will be able to escape and one day be free. It is those people who have built this country.

As a matter of principle, I have no idols or role models. But there are three people who have meant a lot for my writing:

One is Jan Myrdal. Sometimes people get upset when you mention Jan Myrdal. Maybe not right here, but in other contexts, and then you get the question what you think about what Myrdal has said about different things. It’s not something I reflect on. Jan Myrdal must take responsibility for what he wrote, I only take responsibility for what I write myself. But I stand for the fact that Jan Myrdal has been of great importance. His books were my high school and my university. Above all, the collection volumes Skriftställning 1–19. When he wrote things, whether he was right or wrong, I personally think he was right many times and wrong many times, it was always properly accounted for, so you could form your own opinion. You should investigate the matter and go to the sources. It taught me not to trust authorities, to investigate things myself and not to believe everything people say. And to not believe everything Jan Myrdal says either.

When it comes to language, there is no one who has meant as much as Sven Wernström. Sven Wernström was initially a typographer and the typographers of the time worked hard to proofread and edit the journalists’ texts. This meant that he had a very straightforward, simple, and correct language.

Another author who has influenced me a lot, not least my children’s books, is Maria Sandel, who wrote books in the early 20th century. Especially about working women in the big cities. She wrote about how difficult it was for them, but also about what they did to have a more dignified life in the midst of all the misery. She wrote about people who help their neighbours, who put potted plants in the window – almost all good people in her books have potted plants, they read books instead of drinking and go to union meetings.

So, I have no idols, but if I were to mention any source of inspiration for what I am doing, it is partly the slaves who tried to escape, but also the anti-imperialist movement of the 1970s, which changed Sweden’s foreign policy through grassroot organization. And last but not least, the Swedish organized working class, the labour movement and the other popular movements. I have learned a lot by being a part of it, among other things by having been union active in Kommunal.

The bourgeoisie usually describes the Swedish working class as stupid and undiversified. That is absolutely not true, everyone who has been out in the workplaces knows that. The Swedish working class is much more multifaceted than the editorial writers are, or for that matter than what the cultural writers are. The working class are Sami, Jews, gays, dikes, and transgender people. They are different on the surface but are united by common interests. Everything we have, all rights, including the right to write what we want in the newspapers without the police coming, we have got it because these people have organized and fought together.

I like to write novels sometimes, especially for children. But there are some things that are not as suitable for fiction. The witch trials are one such thing, it really happened but simply seems too unrealistic. The same is true with the heroes of history.

I do not think anyone would have taken me seriously if I had written a novel about two men, two workers in the late 19th century who had a relationship with each other and stood for it and who seem to have been quite accepted by their neighbours and their families. No one would have believed it. But it has really happened, so it was possible to write the documentary book Frans and Lars about them.

Same with the grey coats. It was a religious revival movement in the 1730s on Södermalm in Stockholm. They were people who sat at home and studied and realized that the priests of the state church were wrong. They stood up in the church and told the priests. This has also happened for real and the book The Grey Coats is based on real protocols.

I’m glad if you like my books, but the only thing I’ve tried to do is describe reality as it is, the working people as it is, and history as it is. Thanks!