I want to say a few words about my personal relationship to three men here today: Jan Myrdal, Lenin and Lasse Diding. Jan Myrdal is the easiest, because unfortunately I have no relation to him – I will be completely honest: I have never related to Jan Myrdal and have never read him, and I am painfully aware that it is a big gap, one of many I have. Lenin is a more complicated story. I became politically aware in the years just after the fall of the Soviet Union. Under the influence of my dear uncle Fred Nilsson, who is here today, I started collecting stamps in the late 80s, and around the fall of the wall I came to specialize in Soviet stamps for some reason – if Lasse Diding has one of Sweden’s foremost collections of Lenin busts and statues, then I probably have one of the largest collections of Lenin stamps – and this contributed to my curiosity about what really happened and what was buried between 1989 and 1991.

During the latter year, when I was 14 and in eighth grade, I did an internship at a supermarket in the small industrial town of Vårgårda, where I attended high school. The internship only lasted a week, but during those days, while I was packing up and down groceries on the shelves and in the warehouse, I had time to develop a feeling that I was a proletarian. I went to the library in Vårgårda and borrowed four books: The Communist Manifesto, How to Read Karl Marx by Ernst Fischer, Marx for Beginners, a wonderful little comic book by a cartoonist who called himself Rius, and then Lenin for Beginners, also a little comic book – this was 1991, when libraries in small towns like Vårgårda still had shelves full of books from publishers like Workers’ Literature and The Barricade, a completely different era.

I went home and read and began a lifelong relationship with Marxism, but I understood nothing of Lenin for Beginners; I didn’t understand what all the fuss at the 1902 party congress was about, I didn’t get the point of Bolshevism. Instead, I entered the 90s with the general feeling that the Soviet Union and everything bad that happened there had been caused in some vague way by Lenin. In other words, I fell victim to the zeitgeist. I joined the Young Left just after it stopped being called the Communist Youth. I grew up in a left that fought in the streets against a party that called itself the Sweden Democrats and consisted of skinheads with bomber jackets and steel toe-caps, and like so many others who participated in those battles, I drifted towards anarchism: we concluded that the collapse of the Soviet Union was due to socialists appropriating state power; we believed that the lesson was that the state as such must be fought and abolished, and it was in that belief that I committed the greatest crime of my political life.

Sometime in 1996, I and a close confidant managed to convince at least half of the section of the Young Left in Alingsås to convert to anarchism. After a meeting in the Left Party’s premises, we decided to demonstrate our new faith. We went to the innermost part of the party premises and opened a wardrobe where the older comrades had hidden a bust of Lenin. We took out the bust, wrote “crush the state” on Lenin’s forehead, found a rope and tied a noose around Lenin’s neck and hung him from the window of the party office facing the street and left. You can imagine the despair and sense of humiliation with which the party veterans came to the office the next day and discovered what we, their own youths, had done. I have never forgiven myself for that act, but I want to believe that Lasse Diding’s decision to give me the Lenin Award means that Lenin in heaven has forgiven me.

The 90s were coming to an end and I became deeply disillusioned with anarchism and syndicalism and have since defined myself as a sober anarchist in much the same way that one can be a sober alcoholic and instead, I ended up in the Fourth International. After a period of journalism in Swedish, I became a doctoral student in Lund and gradually began to publish books in English. Lenin figures in most of them. I don’t know about other Lenin Award winners, but I know that I am a professed, or as they say in English, card-carrying Leninist – I am proud to stand in the Leninist tradition, even if my loyalty to the Fourth International has thinned somewhat in recent years.

My books have mostly been about various aspects of the climate crisis, and in that context, I have argued that we need not only ecological Marxism, but also ecological Leninism. What does that mean? To begin with, as Wim Carton and I show in The Long Heat: Climate Politics When It’s Too Late, which Verso released last month – to begin with, Lenin was the first Marxist theorist and practitioner to focus on the category of catastrophe. His work came to be completely shaped by what happened in 1914: the ruling classes of Europe dumped their populations into the primeval catastrophe of the century, a senseless slaughter of millions and millions of people. In the autumn of 1914, tormented by the world war in general and the betrayal of solidarity by the social democratic parties in particular, Lenin locked himself in the library in Zurich and read Hegel, understanding that society develops by sudden leaps or collapses: revolution or catastrophe.

He emerged from his studies with an insight that formed the basis of a simple political program: if we want to put an end to the apocalyptic catastrophe that this world war is developing into, we cannot just fight the symptoms – the trenches as such – we must go to the root of the problem and shut down the driving forces that have brought us here and that will create the same hell again if they are allowed to continue spinning: we must transform the war into a revolutionary crisis and overthrow the ruling classes that started and maintained and exacerbated the war: we must go from symptoms to causes. In this, Lenin was of course united with Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht and the rest of the revolutionary anti-war left. But after February 1917, Lenin was also able to develop a theory and practice that revolved around the fight against catastrophe within Russia itself – one of his most fantastic texts from that year is called “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It” – and it was to stop the spiral that was spiralling Russia ever deeper into collapse that, Lenin argued, the Provisional Government had to be overthrown.

Ecological Leninism means different things to different comrades. I have the privilege of belonging to a very un-Swedish environment of Marxist intellectuals where it is legitimate to discuss what Leninism teaches us today, and other activists and thinkers like Kai Heron and Jodi Dean emphasize other components of the legacy, but for me ecological Leninism means first and foremost just this: we must shift the focus from symptoms to causes, otherwise we will only sink deeper and deeper into the disaster. To make it a little more concrete: take the example of Valencia. Almost exactly a year ago, Valencia was hit by the worst flood in the city’s history, entire neighbourhoods were destroyed, more than 200 people died. Shortly afterwards, 100,000 marched through the streets of Valencia and clashed with police, venting their anger at the conservative regional government that had not warned and evacuated residents in time, and which had also closed a disaster management agency in the months before the flood. The anger was directed at the inability to deal with the symptoms. That anger was justified, of course, but it had something short-sighted about it.

No one in Spain seemed to want to discuss Repsol – the second largest capitalist company headquartered in that country: an oil and gas company, which, like all other such companies, is pouring ever more capital into the extraction of fossil fuels. The largest company by far is the bank Santander, which is pouring its capital into Repsol and other fossil fuel companies. In other words: the drivers of the catastrophe spin at the centre of the Spanish social formation, in the accumulation of capital through the production of fossil fuels – and we know, everyone knows, even if many deny it, that the extraction of fossil fuels gives us higher temperatures and more extreme floods like in Pakistan in August and stronger hurricanes like in Jamaica the other week and longer droughts like in Iran and a thousand other disasters large and small that will only get worse the more fossil fuels are taken out of the ground, and this is the fundamental Leninist turn that alone can save humanity: shut down the drivers, kick out the fossil companies, let the fossil fuels stay underground – or else we will drown in an ever-rising sea of ​​misery – turn the warming into a revolutionary crisis for fossil capital. Pure logic and science allow no other path to survival.

Lenin was also a politician of impatience and stress and time pressure: he acted with the feeling that it was almost too late, that we had to act now; his two great battles in the party – the one about seizing power in the fall of 1917 and the one about the separate peace with Germany in the winter of 1918 – were about taking the necessary steps before time ran out and the catastrophe was too far gone. And Lenin understood what I did not understand during the innocent 90s: that state power is an indispensable instrument for defeating the class enemy in catastrophic times. What does that mean today? Is there anyone pursuing Leninist politics in our world in 2025? Do we have any examples to point to? I would like to highlight one, namely Colombia under President Gustavo Petro. When he won the presidential election in 2022, he was the first leftist leader to take power in the history of Colombia.

He was politically trained as a member of the M-19, one of the Leninist guerrilla groups, to which he is still proud to have belonged. His electoral victory emerged from decades of social mobilization – of guerrillas and indigenous peoples, environmental movements and unions, students and slum dwellers who, in the years surrounding the pandemic, went out in wave after wave of mass struggle, demonstrations, blockades, riots: Gustavo Petro was the president of the movements. Colombia’s social formation has come to be dominated by the production of fossil fuels – oil and coal are the two largest exports – but when Petro campaigned, he promised to shut down the fossil fuel industry in the country. He said: under my rule, not a single new permit will be issued for the extraction of oil or coal or gas. It is not unusual for a politician to make high-flying campaign promises and then break them, but Petro has now been president for almost four years, and in that time the Colombian state has not granted a single new permit to explore for oil or build a pipeline or open a coal mine – fossil fuel companies from Exxon to Glencore have done everything to get business-as-usual back on track, but Petro and his government have resisted; they have done what is necessary that no one else does; they have gone against global trends from Trump’s USA to Salman’s Saudi Arabia: oil and coal production in Colombia has plummeted.

I was there in April and travelled through the oil districts and coal provinces, talking to activists and ministers and with the president himself, and like all leftist projects, this is of course fraught with its share of problems and internal struggles and external challenges, but the impression remains: Colombia has shown what the left can do if it has state power. No head of state in our world is as deeply committed to the fight against the climate catastrophe as Gustavo Petro, and the same applies to the fight against another parallel catastrophe: the genocide in Gaza. Colombia has been the largest source of coal for the occupying power for decades. The electricity used to colonize Palestine and run the weapons factories and data centres and other installations that carry out the genocide comes largely from Colombian coal. In the summer of 2024, Petro declared that this export must end: no more fuel should be sent to the genocide.

The decision was welcomed by both the Palestinian resistance – Hamas, PFLP – and the international solidarity movement: it was the biggest step towards a real boycott that any country had taken up to that point. Two multinational companies mined coal in Colombia and transported it to the Zionist entity: the Swiss Glencore and the American Drummond. Glencore obeyed the presidential decree and stopped sending coal. But Drummond continued. When we were there in April, activists were bursting with frustration that Drummond was ignoring the decree, or rather exploiting a loophole that allowed companies to complete deliveries contracted before it went into effect: at its port in northern Colombia, Drummond filled boats with coal and sent them to Israeli ports as if nothing had happened. This spring and summer, indigenous peoples and Palestinian movements and unions in Colombia took to the streets again, demanding an end to the exports, and in June, Petro spoke out again and said: I am the elected president of this country; we have made a democratic decision to stop coal exports; how can private companies undermine popular rule and ignore my decree – it must end – from now on, not a single ton of coal from our land will end up in Israeli power plants.

The day after that speech, Drummond sent another boat full of coal to the occupation, a boat symbolically named the Fortune. Then Petro lost his patience and proclaimed: I command the armed forces of this country, and I will deploy the fleet against Drummond’s coal boats. He followed up with another decree that closed the previous loophole and banned all coal deliveries to Israeli targets, even within the framework of contracts that had been concluded previously. Since then, not a single coal boat has been seen sailing from Colombian waters towards Palestine. The embargo is now total. The occupation has been cut off from its main source of coal. I don’t know if it has ever happened before that a president threatens to deploy the fleet against multinational companies that extract the country’s raw materials, I can’t recall anything like it, but this is what the left can do if it possesses executive state power: we can shut down the sources of disasters. If we take over the state, and only then, can we overcome the class enemy who insists on pouring fuel on the fire – fuel for the warming, fuel for the genocide.

We could say much more about Lenin today and the disasters of our time and how they should be fought, but I have already spoken long enough, so let me instead conclude by saying a few words about Lasse Diding. I first met him more than 20 years ago, but it was when I was a scholarship holder at Leninland for a few days a little over two years ago that I got the chance to get to know him a little better. One of the nicest perks of being a scholarship holder there is the opportunity to have conversations with Lasse Diding. I must admit that I had prejudices: I thought that if you have what he has and do what he does, you must be self-absorbed. I expected a narcissist. But the person I met was open and curious and innovative and humble and genuinely interested in other people – a person who, in the best sense of the words, doesn’t take himself too seriously and who does not hide his weaknesses and slip-ups in life: what constitutes us as human beings. In addition to his purely personal qualities, he has built up what is perhaps the coolest thing we have in this country – at least what I, apart from nature far up north, talk a lot about when I talk about Sweden and what I use to try to attract comrades from other countries to come here.

With the Lenin Spa and Leninland and the Lenin Award and everything else he is doing, Lasse Diding is expanding the political and intellectual space. He is opening a breathing hole. He is watering an oasis in the desert of reactionary domination called Sweden. He is working in a truly Leninist spirit against all the disasters that constitute our time in this country. Now he has decided to give his Lenin Award to me, and I can only say that I do not know how to express my gratitude – this is the only truly honourable prize awarded in Sweden – I will do what I can to live up to the honour in the years to come, and in the meantime I will come to Varberg and visit the Lenin Spa and talk to comrade Diding as often as I can, and I urge you all to do the same. So, join me in giving Lasse Diding a big round of applause.

Many thanks. It is truly an honour to be here and to receive this award, whose past recipients include so many writers and thinkers who have inspired my own work. I want to begin my reflections with a quote from Lenin, which was the first thing I thought of when I received the news that I had been awarded the prize. In a famous passage, Lenin emphasizes that it is impossible to understand Marx’s analysis of capitalism without first studying and thoroughly grasping the greatest book by the philosopher Hegel. It is a book entitled Science of Logic and which, according to Lenin, we must understand in its entirety in order to understand Marx.

Lenin himself worked for a time on writing what he called a summary – a conspectus – of Hegel’s Logic. But both his summary of the book and his understanding of dialectical logic remained fragmentary. Within Marxism, in turn, only a few have tried to follow Lenin’s advice concerning the necessity of seriously studying Hegel’s Logic. Instead, Hegel has largely been reduced to an outdated idealist, whom Marx certainly read and appreciated but supposedly left behind when he became a true materialist. Thus, Marxists have generally treated Hegel’s Logic as dispensable reading, which can be skimmed or skipped while going straight to Marx.

For me it was exactly the other way around. Before I even started reading Marx for real – and without being aware of Lenin’s advice – I had already spent several years studying Hegel’s Logic in depth. The Logic is still the only book that I think about every day, and it is always a source of new philosophical insights for me. Indeed, every time I think I have achieved a new philosophical insight, I soon realize that what has actually happened is that I now understand another aspect of Hegel’s logic. It was also from my work with Hegel’s Logic that the decisive insights in This Life emerged.

In an astonishing way, Hegel demonstrates that the ideal and the material, the theoretical and the practical, cannot be separated but are aspects of one another. What I, with Hegel, call our spiritual freedom – our Geist – is therefore not something immaterial or immortal that can be separated from our embodied lives. We are not spiritually free because we have some supernatural power or because we can soar in harmony with the universe. We are spiritually free because we are social, historical beings who can question and change our way of living. This revolutionary ability constitutes our spiritual freedom, which is always dependent on material conditions.

In This Life I seek to pursue the Hegelian insight by showing how existential questions– what we live for, what makes our lives worth living – cannot be separated from economic questions concerning how we organize our society. Our economy is not a separate sphere. Our economy is an expression of what we collectively prioritize and value in our form of life. Existential, spiritual questions – questions of what we value, of what is truly valuable, of what is worth doing with our lives – are therefore inseparable from economic, material questions of how we produce and consume in our society.

Hegel himself paves the way for such an approach, since his idea of ​​freedom articulates the most revolutionary demand one can imagine. No one is free until all are free, as he puts it in his philosophy of history. This idea of ​​freedom is radical, since Hegel emphasizes that it cannot be separated from material and social conditions. His idea of ​​freedom is not abstract but must be embodied in institutional forms that are concrete and rational in the sense that they enable everyone to live self-determining lives as social individuals in mutual recognition of their dependence on one another. Yet Hegel does not follow through on the implications of his own idea of ​​freedom, which can only be fully actualized through the overcoming of capitalism as a form of life. As I show in This Life, our inability to maintain rational, democratic institutions under capitalism is no accident. On the contrary, the fatal deficiency in our democratic institutions is due to what Hegel himself admits is a “deep defect” in the production of wealth under capitalism – a mode of production that is incompatible with the realization of our social freedom. Only the radicalization of Hegel’s idea of ​​freedom through Marx’s critique of capitalism can lead us to the democratic form of socialism that is the prerequisite for a truly free society.

Marx himself expresses it beautifully in his critique of Hegel’s philosophy of right. “The lightning of thought” – which is Marx’s metaphor for Hegel’s thinking – the lightning of thought, says Marx, must strike all the way into the soil of the people for our emancipation to become actual. This means, as Marx underlines, that our emancipation “is only possible in practice if one adopts the point of view of the theory according to which the highest being for human being is human being.” The proletariat must find what Marx calls its “spiritual weapons in philosophy,” while philosophy must find its “material weapons in the proletariat.” “Philosophy,” Marx writes, “is the head of this emancipation and the proletariat is its heart. Philosophy can only be realized by the abolition of the proletariat, and the proletariat can only be abolished by the realization of philosophy.” This is why the lightning of thought must strike all the way into the soil of the people.

While I was writing This Life, these lines were constantly resonating in me as a call of conscience: how can I, how can little I, contribute to letting the lightning of thought strike the soil of the people? To answer that call of conscience, I adopted the motto of writing with minimal alibis and maximal ambitions. What I meant by the motto was that I sought to write in a way that was as accessible to the reader as possible – without hiding behind academic alibis or academic jargon – while also wanting my book to be as deep, as wide-ranging, and as systematic as possible, as I set out to connect fundamental existential questions of life and death with fundamental political questions.

The response to the book has exceeded anything I ever expected, with everything from in-depth analyses of the book by Hegel and Marx scholars, to concrete engagements by political activists, and a flood of letters from readers with many different backgrounds and from all parts of the world. What has meant the most to me is hearing from readers who have grasped the stakes of the book on both a personal and a political level, such as Lasse Diding and his friend Björn Boring. When Björn summarized my book, he did so with the phrase freedom for real, freedom for all. The more I have learned about Björn and the life he lived, the more I have been gripped by his fate and his commitment. Therefore, I am especially honoured to receive the award this year, when it is awarded in memory of Björn.

During my days here in Varberg, it has also been a privilege to see how Lasse Diding works in practice to create social and material conditions that can allow the lightning of thought to strike the soil of the people. As Engels spent his capital to give Marx the opportunity to write, Lasse draws on his wealth to give persons time to think and write, with a unique understanding of how to build institutional spaces that enable genuine creativity. Hence, I cannot think of a more inspiring environment in which to receive an award. From the bottom of my heart, I want to thank Lasse, thank Björn, thank Anton, thank everyone who are working behind the scenes to make this day possible, and thank all of you who have taken the time to be here today. Your presence gives me strength and courage to keep thinking and writing. Thank you!

My friend Björn Boring – an ordinary guy from Hisingen, as Björn’s sister Monica thought I should call this little reflection.

In my life, I have been largely spared from the intrusive relentlessness of death in my family and among those closest to me. Those who have died have followed the normal course of life and thus have not created immediate and agonising emptiness. The exception is he who was my best friend for over 40 years, Björn Boring. It was also he who led me to Martin Hägglund’s philosophy long before Martin’s book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom ended up on all the country’s cultural pages.

Björn had then not only somehow found the book but also been captured by the book’s message and despite the fact that it was only available in English at the time and Björn was about as bad as I am at reading books at a relatively high level of abstraction in a language other than Swedish, he became almost obsessed with the book’s message about life’s inexorable limitation and the invincibility of death. That at the same time he was personally grimly reminded of the finitude of life, by the return of the cancer he thought he had defeated, was a decisive factor.

He immediately contacted me, and nothing was more natural than for us to start reading the book together, as we had done so many times before with texts by Marx and Plato and books about the most important issues of destiny in our time. Reading together and continuously discussing the text was in this case extra rewarding and necessary for us to be able to make the effort to understand this rather extensive philosophical basic text. I too was directly affected by the compelling logic and existential seriousness of the book. Ten years earlier I had suffered a life crisis that was decisive for me when in my life I suddenly became more aware of the constant presence of death in life and in an interview book about my life the author had therefore chosen to begin my story with Confucius’ words that all people have two lives and that the second begins when we realize that we only have one.

Our reading of Hägglund then came during this last year of Björn’s life to run parallel to death and when the book was to be published in Swedish in 2020 and Martin Hägglund was to come from New York for the launch in Sweden, I contacted him and told him about the book’s significance to Björn. We quickly agreed that in connection with this visit to Sweden we would try to arrange a meeting with Björn, and it was decided and planned, but three days before Martin’s arrival Björn’s life ended.

Björn’s parents met at sea where his father Kalle worked as a cook and his mother Randi as a cold-buffet manageress. Kalle was from Småland and lived a long and eventful life while Randi died of cancer at the age of 49. She was an illegitimate child from Northern Norway and Björn told me with his usual inimitable humour that when Björn had claimed his right to his mother’s share of the inheritance, his mother’s half-sister had stood up and said indignantly in front of everyone: “Well, that’s the thanks to being born within wedlock!”

Björn grew up on Hisingen, played football with Glenn Hysén and the other boys on the same yard and frivolled his way through school until high school where he had the doctorated lecturer and historian Lars Linge as his history teacher. He somehow got Björn interested in something more than GAIS and in joking his way through life. After a few years as a bus driver where he learned to drink scalding hot coffee during the five-minute breaks at the end stops by drawing cold air under his tongue in a special way while swallowing, he started studying history at Gothenburg University at the same time as me. He had by then also had a lightning-fast career as a sewage worker, which had to be interrupted after he accidentally pressed the reverse flush button while emptying a summer cabin’s septic tank, which was not discovered until the basement was full, and shit started to seep out between the threshold and the front door.

As students, Björn and I quickly became friends, although he took reading the course literature with the same ease as everything else in life and, to my undisguised amazement, did not even excerpt and, like me, wrote compendiums on all the textbooks, but very quickly then a three-grade essay in history about Swedish inequality and the unreasonable power of the fifteen families over the lives of ordinary people. At the same time, he had also, without first consulting me, to my horror, joined the R’s and thus, in my eyes, became the wrong kind of communist and started selling The Proletarian.

With his usual enthusiasm, he had also brought along his father Kalle, who in turn became a legendary propagandist with the specialty of imperceptibly managing to insert leaflets from the Communist Party into each individual copy of Expressen in the newspaper rack at Konsum every week. Despite our somewhat different leftist turns in life, on my initiative we came to read Jan Myrdal together thoroughly, which Björn at that time had some difficulty legitimizing within his party, but for our continued intellectual journey this became crucial.

Instead of driving a bus and emptying septic tanks, Björn, like me, chose teaching, which we both thought was the most honourable work one could pursue. Even if one simultaneously became a cog in the government’s ideology production, one could create some space there to spread the seeds of rebellion and the sweet lure of reason in working-class children, we reasoned. Björn soon started working at Komvux, where he for several decades became an inspiration for many people, who were receptively looking for a new start in life.

Before every course in history, social studies and religion, which were Björn’s subjects throughout his long teaching career, he came out of intellectual curiosity and in order not to freeze in ingrained trains of thought, to always read a few more books on the very subject that was to be conveyed again. Incidentally, it was also here that he found his Maria who sings for us today and during the time of this love’s maturation process I managed to get quite tired of Björn’s long explanations about the character and lustre of the complexion of this strangely unique student.

Well, our meetings and intellectual chats continued, and he always made plenty of time for this. Despite a growing obligation to provide for the two children Ida and Elma, newly produced with Maria, Björn had continued to create for himself what Hägglund calls free time, not to be confused with the leisure time that is used solely to be able to reproduce one’s own labour force and because of that , due to fatigue and laziness, is often neglected and wasted on simpler kinds of entertainment. Our society is infinitely effective when it comes to that type of, according to Björn, empty allurements of consumerism and escapism.

Because of this very longing for truly free time, Björn consciously never worked full-time but always part-time with lower pay in a thus forced but self-chosen war against the unnecessary things of the consumer society. He therefore wanted free time to be able to devote himself to the life Marx believed we humans were actually meant for, to the essentials of life such as love, educational conversations, making music, dancing salsa and reading even demanding, thick books that were sometimes only available in foreign languages.

Björn’s desire to convey this fundamentally very serious view of the meaning of life met with both successes and occasional setbacks. I will never forget Björn’s despairing expression on his face after once, in front of my eyes, he had read aloud to his daughter Ida from Sven Wernström’s strongly didactic appeal against the consumer society, Max Svensson Lurifax and after finishing the reading, he looked expectantly at his beloved five-year-old daughter who then, somewhat suspiciously, summarized what she thought she had heard with the words: “I love shopping”. It was one of the few times I saw Björn become genuinely angry and roar at his then suddenly frightened daughter: “You don’t know what the hell shopping is! We’ve never done it a single damn time!” After this incident, this deeply educational experience was constantly present in our discussions about the ways in which the poison of consumerism creeps into all of our souls.

As an educator, however, Björn succeeded far more often than he failed. When I was preparing this speech and asked my now 49-year-old son Erik how and why Björn came to play such an enormous role in his life from early childhood until their last meeting in Erik’s home, where just a few days before Björn’s death they would sit together in complete common certainty of Björn’s impending death and sometimes cry and sometimes laugh noisily, Erik gave me some examples. He said: If you, like Björn, could sow a seed in a ten-year-old that made him happily embrace the world’s most boring sport for such a ten-year-old, namely long-distance running, then you are in some way a magical educator.

Erik, who today, 40 years later, runs a marathon in 2:45, also told of the enormous, surprised relief he felt as a child when he first heard Björn react to one of his father’s long and assertive explanations about how one must of course behave in a certain situation. It was an explanation of the kind Erik had always been taught to listen to and accept as if it were God speaking. Björn had let out a loud roar of laughter at my serious sermon that time and after this incident, Erik said, this Björn’s roar of laughter was always with him as a secret companion and friend when he was forced to listen to my assertive morality tales for the rest of his childhood.

When Björn, at the age of 60, chose to step down further from wage slavery in order to have even more free time for truly human life in the sense of Marx and Hägglund, came the illness and with that the accompanying accentuated awareness of life’s inexorable end became even clearer and increasingly impossible for him to turn his gaze away from. This last year of Björn’s life was filled with our close reading of Martin Hägglund’s book This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom which then helped Björn experience an intensity and deepened presence in every second that delighted and lifted him, even though life was constantly and increasingly fluctuating between hope and despair.

I will never forget the death anxiety I encountered in Björn’s gaze in the hospital the day before his death. It has forced me to reread Hägglund’s book every year in the following years and not only sharpen my view of the world but also strengthen my conviction of both the necessity and the possibility of creating a completely different world than the unworthy one we live our lives in today, a world where capitalism’s inherent pursuit of growth controls our lives and risks eradicating humanity as a species in war, climate crisis and the pursuit of profit. Björn always believed that the only possible alternative was resistance, always resistance!

“In a time when the calls for stricter penalties are getting louder and the overcrowded prisons are expanding at record speed, it is more relevant than ever to portray and review the Swedish correctional system, something Fanny Klang, after several years of working on the floor within the agency, does with great insight and clarity in her debut novel Closed Institution, which succeeds with the art of being both a leaded contribution to the debate on a burning social issue and sensationally good literature.”

With this justification, Fanny Klang is today awarded Jan Myrdal’s small prize – the Robespierre Prize.

In the book Closed Institution, she breaks new ground by depicting the Swedish penal system, a workplace depiction from the inside that until now has been absent in Swedish literature.

At the same time, she connects to both a fine tradition of workplace depictions in novel form, where her book joins, for example, the modern classic The Yard by Kristian Lundberg about slave-like conditions in Malmö’s car port or why not 2015 Robespierre Prize laureate Sara Beicher’s I’m Not Really Supposed to Work Here about elderly care, and to a type of investigative journalism in disguise, primarily associated with Günter Wallraff’s reports from the 1970s onwards but which stretches back to Ester Blenda Nordström’s A Maid Among Maids and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss, both early 20th century.

Even though Fanny, as far as I know, did not use a false identity when she worked at various institutions, you can really say that she has made a Wallraff. She has observed and collected information but also witnessed and participated herself.

The result is the novel Closed Institution, where we follow the main character Jonna’s path from the introduction to her new prison job to the offer of permanent employment that is not answered in the book a year later. Through Jonna’s journey during this year, we learn more about the conditions for both staff and clients at the institution against the backdrop of the massive overcrowding of the correctional system and political decisions to increase capacity.

This may not sound like an immediately fun read, but I can still highly recommend the book, which provides a very important perspective on the entire debate about crime and punishment. The fact that the author herself has worked for several years in the field described contributes greatly to the book’s indisputable weight as a debate contribution.

To sum up, I would like to say that Fanny Klang has written an extremely important report book, albeit dressed in elegant novel clothing. And I hope it is true, as Fanny said in an interview, that a fiction book about the correctional system has the potential to reach more readers than a non-fiction book on the subject would have done.

Finally, I would also like to add that it is extra fun that this book was partly written in the Leninland scholarship accommodations here in Varberg, where Fanny has had two rewarding stays. For those who are not familiar with Leninland, I can tell you that it is a kind of cultural free zone for writers with their hearts on the left side and a chance for them to work concentratedly on their projects for a few weeks.

Fanny was one of the first scholarship holders at the beginning of 2023 and this is the first time a Leninland scholarship holder has received an award here at Varberg Theatre. We think that’s fantastic fun!