Martin Hägglund, who should have been here today, was spontaneously incredibly happy when he heard that Andreas Malm would receive this year’s Lenin Award. No one, he said, could be a more natural laureate. It turned out that Martin had not only read all of Andreas’s books, but he said that in his American left-wing environment it would have been strange if he hadn’t. The books Andreas has written in the last ten years have taken the international environmental movement by storm and he has in a short time become one of the most cited researchers in the climate debate. The fact that Naomi Klein and Sally Rooney have habitually referred to his research reflects that, as Martin said, he is at least ten times as famous internationally as he is in Sweden. While waiting for Martin’s text in next year’s Myrdaliana, you will have to endure the story of how I got hung up on this now 48-year-old man whom I stumbled upon in 2002 when he was 25!

It should be said that his position as a syndicalist who started writing in Arbetaren early on and then eight years and a few books later converting to the Trotskyist International did not make it easier for him to reach an old square Maoist like me, but he did reach me somehow!

In 2002, his shocking report from Palestine Bulldozers against a people – about the occupation of Palestine and the Swedish betrayal, where you can follow how this activist with his own body as a shield against the Israeli oppression sees, feels and reports with his own eyes. As the organizer he is, he had also been a driving force and started the Swedish section of the International Solidarity Movement.

Two years later, in 2004, at the age of 27, he published the completely independent analysis When Capital Takes Up Arms – about imperialism in our time, an astute Marxist essay of a kind rarely seen, written outside of academia and which gave a foretaste of what was to come. During these years, the interest in what would later become his great life’s work, the fight against fossil capital’s destruction of our planet, was founded. He became involved in the action group Klimax in civil disobedience actions similar to those that have now made Palestine Action in the UK classified as a terrorist organization, and already in 2007 his equally scholarly and educationally easy-to-read It is our firm belief that if nothing is done now it will be too late came out in Sweden, and I am forced to admit that this was the book that for the first time made me deeply understand the seriousness of the planet’s situation. At the same time, he also published the first international overview in English of Iran’s modern labour movement and a 500-page award-winning overview of the growing Islamophobia in Europe and Sweden.

In 2009, Andreas entered the academy in Lund under the leadership of Professor Alf Hornborg and then began his work on the emergence and history of fossil capital, where he was able to combine his broad knowledge of the environment with his Marxist method, a work that was published in 2016 by the leading international left-wing publisher Verso under the name Fossil Capital and which immediately made Naomi Klein, for example, understand that it was the internal mechanisms of capitalism that had forced the entire climate crisis. In it, Andreas shows, contrary to previously established beliefs, that the steam from fossil fuels did not offer cheaper or more abundant energy, it offered superior control over subordinate labour. It thus made it possible to concentrate production in the most profitable places during the most convenient time for the employer, which still makes the fossil power industry the most profitable form of production today and therefore also the most tenacious and difficult to defeat, despite all its obvious disadvantages that are hostile to life for all of humanity. Fossil Capital immediately became a modern classic for the international environmental movement.

The year after, 2017, The Progress of This Storm came with the subtitle Nature and Society in a Warming World, which not only describes how capital’s profit interests control the accelerating effects of the climate crisis, but also makes short work of all the postmodernist international theories that have until then dominated academia worldwide and thus delayed the necessary ideological resistance. It was an intellectual clean-up effort and a polemic that in its commitment and brutality reminded me of Karl Marx wildly swinging in the debate in the 1850s. I have rarely had so much fun as during the re-reading of this book just a few weeks ago. This became his second classic for the international environmental movement.

Four years later, the pamphlet came out that was quickly translated from English into several languages, but never into Swedish, even though it was quickly ready for publication on Modernista. There was something about its title How to Blow Up a Pipeline that not only got it read by all of Greta Thunberg’s friends around the world, but it also gave opponents the creeps with its passionate advice to international environmental activism to move from words to action in the face of ecological collapse. We must, the book preached, with our bodies as an input, begin to disarm and destroy the tools of fossil capital. We must create strategic acceptance for property destruction, this rabble-rouser believes, and that, as is well known, is the absolute red line of all capitalists! Anything but don’t touch my property! After the book was found in the pockets of French environmental activists suspected of sabotage in this spirit, Andreas has become something of an international intellectual environmental terrorist and has attracted the attention of all the world’s security services, while at the same time it became his third classic for the international environmental movement. The book’s publication in Swedish has been cancelled for some strange reason!

In the past year, Andreas has released a renewed report on the genocide in Gaza, which is also a full-scale environmental disaster that he places in its historical context, which also provides perspective on the campaign he has personally been subjected to in the name of political correctness after insisting on seeing all parts of the Palestinian resistance in the light of the century-long colonial oppression this tormented people have been subjected to.

Finally, there have been two more doorstoppers in English that I am ashamed to say I have not yet had time to read, but in which I have been able to sense Lenin’s great question about what should be done in a world where the unacceptable has become reality, a phase of capitalism’s climate crisis that will likely last for the rest of our lives. The increasing warming of the earth now officially seems acceptable to the politically ruling circles, while the resistance struggle against this annihilation does not. The responsibility to prevent this destructive order falls on all of us together.

Welcome on stage Andreas Malm and receive your well-deserved 2025 Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award.

When we are to present the 2025 Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award to Andreas Malm today, it is the 17th time we have given out this award, and we can look back on its history with pride and some wonder. When Jan Myrdal himself gave the speeches to the laureates during the first 10 years, he returned time and again to the image of a handfan that each year represented an increasingly broader spectrum of intellectual and artistic experiences that nevertheless represented in a concentrated form what he himself wanted to achieve with his life’s work.

One summer day in 2008, in order to present some ideas, I had taken Jan on a forest walk in the area of ​​Skinnskatteberg, where he had moved with his life partner Gun Kessle 10 years earlier. He was immediately positive about my first proposal to create a literary society in his name with the task of passing on both his intellectual works and the material in the form of his enormous library to future generations. He was also positive about the second proposal for a prize in his name, and he also wanted the name of the prize to include the decisive figure in the enormous 20th century attempt to abolish war and class injustice, symbolized by the name Lenin.

Jan had been shaped by the experiences of the French Revolution as analysed by Karl Marx and the workers’ movement that subsequently strove to abolish the contemporary system that Jan came to see as unnecessary. He believed that another world was actually possible.

In his 75-year writing deed, which many of us 68ers greedily absorbed, he not only analysed the background to the then rapidly escalating resistance struggle in Indochina and Palestine, but he always strived to provide the broad historical picture of the history of class societies, with particular emphasis on the anti-colonial struggle of the last 400 years across our globe, directed against the West’s dreams of empire and attempts at civilization. Anti-imperialism had merged with anti-capitalism and anti-fascism, which during Jan’s childhood and youth found its focus in the great anti-fascist war, where the Soviet Union, at the cost of enormous sacrifices, managed to defeat evil itself and give the continued anti-colonial struggle new courage and a sense of victory. At the age of 22, he was able to witness Mao’s decisive work of liberation in China, and for Jan the right to rebel remained a cornerstone throughout his life.

At the age of 30, he received from his American writer friend Richard Wright the prediction that the great class conflicts of the future would be hidden in race and religion, which the aging Jan believed had proven all too true. This would also characterize Jan’s studies and writing for the rest of his life, as racism and, above all, Islamophobia became fundamental elements in the ideological class war against the people of the world. In this way, education and humanism also became a crucial foundation for Jan with his constant striving to go to the newspaper files and read the classics in order to wrest power over the laws of thought from the hands of his opponents.

In this lifelong political writing of Jan’s, he came to use all the means available to him and the decisive thing for him was in every situation the political effect and power he believed he could achieve. As a fiction writer, he advocated a fabulating realism where all artistic tricks were permitted when reality was to be twisted into fiction and all the characters of class society were to be portrayed and stripped down in satire and burlesque but also in everyday objectifying realism and in the most deeply personal first-person books with himself as the primary human object of study, a genre he carried on from Strindberg and which has today become one of our foremost. With travelogues, but also in report books with sociological perspectives from rarely seriously depicted Asian cultures, he opened the world to his Western readers and in profound literary historical exposés he demonstrated to us younger people other often forgotten literary traditions than those prevailing and dominant among us. His dialectical view of the surrounding reality meant that he preferred to clarify contradictions in polemical debate and dramatized form and both his radio plays and short essays in the form of “writing positions” came to form their own genres when he had these later published in 21 volumes throughout his life.

In addition, he created film history with The Grafter and together with Gun Kessle he saw classical art, photography and caricature with his own very special class struggle eyes. That he also wanted to live fully he showed by combining political activism with an almost immoderate love for food, wine, music and love life, all carefully reported and analysed in his written works. He always courageously and refractorily followed his own path against the power and just as obviously he sometimes got lost and sometimes put his foot in it because otherwise he would not be a human being. We have always been looking for laureates who in different ways reflected these Jan’s aspirations and when we now look back at the 16 chosen so far and Andreas Malm who will today receive Jan Myrdal’s big prize – the Lenin Award, we can probably conclude that many of them have had different opinions and taken different positions than Jan on many issues, but that they have nevertheless somehow been on the same path and largely had the same direction. That is probably why they have all been so chastised in unison by the megaphones of power.

Let us take a rhapsodic look at Jan’s fan of laureates and how each of them has in different ways made the path towards a different, better future a little wider and stronger without ever forgetting where they are headed.

2009 Mattias Gardell

This professor of religious studies with an anti-colonial focus on racism and Islamophobia is also a political activist and one of the initiators of Ship to Gaza and a very present voice in public discourse with roots in a completely different part of the left than Jan. He immediately showed great courage as the first recipient of the Lenin Award, as this could have directly hindered his academic career in a number of different ways. This first prize gave rise to a media shitstorm that Mattias handled with supreme coolness and scientific calm.

2010 Roy Andersson

Our second laureate immediately set the standard for this award through his ever-growing world fame as a film-making critic of civilization and society in his depictions of the destroyed people’s home. As a lettered humanist, he, like Jan, emphasized the deeply personal moral responsibility we all have in the face of all the evils of the world. When I came to Stockholm to ask if he wanted to accept the award, he smiled and said that he had always admired Jan and quickly pulled me upstairs at his studio on Sibyllegatan and pointed to the wall above the door. There hung a large portrait of Lenin. It was also Roy who later donated our large Soviet emblem in Styrofoam that was featured in the film Gorky Park. Despite being a social democrat, in an interview he not only defended Lenin’s role in world history but when asked about Stalin he asked to think about it in order to weigh everything up. Stalin had, however, saved us from fascism in the Second World War, he then concluded thoughtfully in response to Hallands Nyheter’s question.

2011 Maj Wechselmann

With an indomitable energy equal to Jan’s, she has produced and directed one film a year for more than 50 years, except for the years she made two. Against war, injustice and the manipulations of power, she has remained not only a filmmaker but also a barricade fighter and activist. She accepted the award despite deep disagreements with Jan on many issues. Once in place in Varberg that time, for some reason she came to live at my house and made an indelible impression on my then 18-year-old son Albin by immediately sitting down with him and carefully penetrating his French homework.

2012 Sven Lindqvist

Of all the award winners, Sven Lindqvist is the one who has followed Jan’s footsteps most closely throughout his life and has often been the one who has made the tracks himself, and then from his stable social democratic vantage point. He has reported from the many corners of the world and written decisive criticisms of civilization that have been read far beyond Sweden’s borders. His texts on racism, the anatomy of war and colonialism were decisive, and, like Jan, he always claimed the right to rebel. As a scientist and essayist, he has dug deep into the history of literature and his digging into his own life and identity was as ruthless as Jan’s. In field after field, he competed with Jan, so it was no wonder that his first question to me after the announcement of the award was: Does Myrdal know about this? Then he gave an acceptance speech against Leninism and in the evening, he surprised me by declaring to my direct question that, although he had read almost everything, he had never had time to get through the three parts of Capital. His fantastic little book of thought, An Underground Starry Sky, I have quoted from both before and after at almost every award ceremony. Finally, as the only laureate so far, he brought nudist culture with him to the Lenin Spa in a completely obvious way, in front of the other slightly surprised bathers.

2013 Maj Sjöwall

With her fablelike realism and socialist social criticism, she took the Swedish detective story to a whole new level and inspired the writers who later stood for the international Swedish detective story wonder in the genre that Jan liked the most. In an iconic photo where she was surrounded by all her children and grandchildren on her 80th birthday, everyone except herself was wearing a Lenin mask.

2014 Jan Guillou

Another anti-imperialist veteran from both the Vietnam and Palestine demonstrations of the 60s, who became a fiction novelist in the spirit of Sjöwall/Wahlöö, a journalistic legend and the only one who, with his left-wing perspective, has been able to compete with Jan Myrdal in polemics and public impact in the social debate for more than 50 years. The award ceremony itself was a shocker as it coincided with Expressen’s 22-day long campaign where he was identified as a KGB agent and when he therefore saw Roy Andersson’s fine Soviet emblem hanging as a backdrop on this stage, he initially refused to enter the theatre as he knew that the image of him under this emblem could then follow him for the rest of his life in Expressen’s hate campaigns. In the end, he still gave his acceptance speech during the ten-tag moose I also adorned the stage with, even though he considered himself to be the 20-tag Expressen had always wanted to shoot.

2015 Mikael Wiehe

Already in his first major interview in Aftonbladet, he declared that he wanted to be progressive music’s answer to Jan Myrdal. And so, he became that with his intellectual texts in the fight against racism, imperialism and the irrationality of the capitalist world order. Also, the happiest recipient of the Lenin Award ever, who enthusiastically stated in response to the Cultural New’s provocatively critical question about Lenin that he had longed for this prize! Congratulations again Mikael!

2016 Mikael Nyberg

This Marxist critic has analysed and exposed the irrationality of capitalism more harshly and more persistently than anyone else and mapped the dismantling of the people’s home. For 40 years editor of Clarté, who during this time has introduced the most important international debates on the most important contemporary issues. As an old FNL activist and anti-imperialist, he is one of the few writers who still makes Aftonbladet worth reading. On this stage, he has also sung the Internationale at the finale of the award ceremony every year since 2016! Thank you Mikael!

2017 Stefan Jarl

This ever-curious documentary filmmaker has not only given us our most iconic image of the 60s but has also delved deeply into what capitalism has done to nature and the climate, helped create Folkets Bio (the people’s cinema), given us unforgettable scenes from everyday Sweden and astutely showed what would happen if war came.

2018 Sven Wollter

As a divinely gifted dramatic artist, he has portrayed all the great roles of classical drama, humanism and culture. At the same time, as a revolutionary activist, he has always made his inimitable anti-capitalist voice heard against all the world’s class injustices and has given the longest acceptance speech of the Lenin Award by far.

2019 Göran Therborn

This world-famous sociologist who, with encyclopaedic erudition and overview, has revealed the galloping injustices of our time, as well as shown what and how the ruling class does to rule, has returned to the Swedish debate as an 80+ with an energy and cogency like few others.

2020 Kajsa Ekis Ekman

The first Robespierre Prize laureate to also receive the Lenin Award. Totally fearless and courageous Marxist social analyst and activist with extreme integrity and international reach. Essays and journalism that everyone reads and everyone listens to. Always.

2021 Nina Björk

Already a classic feminist and Marxist self-thinker who has dissected the fundamental existential conditions of our neoliberal civilization. With razor-sharp logic, she argues with crushing weight against all the darkest sides of capitalism.

2022 Carl-Göran Ekerwald

This headstrong one-man encyclopaedia, public educator and cultural giant who, with a consistent underdog perspective, always discovered new sides of our history and the basic conditions of existence, constantly amazed for 101 years. No other Lenin Award laureate has in interviews particularly emphasized Lenin’s relationship with cats and his wife as a weighty argument for accepting the award. Nor has any other laureate welcomed the line of his retired children into the audience or begun a speech by singing the first two verses of Gläns över sjö och strand acapella. Thanks for everything Carl-Göran!

2023 Karl Ove Knausgård

The international giant of autofiction who said he had Jan Myrdal to thank for everything when he highlighted him as his greatest predecessor by far and who, with his acceptance speech for the Lenin Award published in DN, completely rehabilitated Jan Myrdal’s literary greatness after all the hateful attacks on him after the publication of the infamous calumnious book The Secret Letters. Three years after his death, Jan Myrdal once again found himself in the absolute focus of the cultural debate and Knausgård set the standard.

2024 Martin Hägglund

The Marxist and Hegelian with a moral pathos befitting a contemporary European intellectual who, like Jan Myrdal, preaches a secular faith where everything you do every second is with your life at stake and here and now and then we are truly worthy of something better than the growing misery of capitalism. Another world is always possible.

My name is Fanny Klang and I am the author of the novel Closed Institution. For it I was awarded last year’s Robespierre Prize. Today I have the great honour of giving a speech to the recipient of the 2025 Robespierre Prize, which goes to Andi Olluri, writer, author and activist.

Andi, you were born in 2002 and are already behind a solid collection of texts with a very wide range. At 21, you wrote the book Beyond Ukraine, you have published several extremely readable texts in the magazine Parabol and you contribute a well-written essay to Myrdaliana volume two, which comes out today. You do not shy away from any subject and can seemingly write about most things that are relevant to our time – everything from how the fast-food industry and the pharmaceutical industry affect public health, to Sweden’s entry into NATO, which you so aptly describe as an offensive alliance.

A recurring theme in your texts is the double standards of the West and the mass media. The most prominent example, which you have addressed in several of your texts, is how the war in Ukraine has been treated and portrayed, compared to Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians.

You have written a very clarifying essay in Parabol, with a sharp analysis of Dagens Nyheter’s double standards when it comes to reporting on Ukraine and Palestine. You explain that this apparent double standard is due to a simple fact: Russia is the enemy while Israel is an ally.

You also write about the student protests in May 2024, a topic that is particularly close to my heart, since I myself was involved in the tent protests at Stockholm University, while you were at Gothenburg University. This is also a clear example of double standards, this time from the universities – they were very quick to end all academic collaborations with Russia, but when it comes to boycotting Israel, it is suddenly not the task of the universities to be political, something that in itself may seem deeply political.

In your texts you demonstrate clarity, insight and overall understanding of the system. One of your most thorough works to date is your contribution to Myrdaliana volume two. There we find your initiated review of the Swedish media’s complicity in Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Everyone who reads the newspaper knows that the mantra that “Israel has the right to defend itself” has been repeated day in and day out on the editorial pages of the major newspapers in recent years. But the question of whether occupiers have the right to self-defence against those they illegally occupy is conspicuous by its absence. In your review it appears that the Palestinians’ right to self-defence, the Palestinians’ right to armed resistance, is only mentioned in a single one of 19,000 reviewed articles from the national media. These are breathtaking figures. If you want to read the essay in its entirety, which I highly recommend, it can be found in Myrdaliana volume two, as I said.

A few weeks ago, I read an article in the Norwegian Klassekampen, by Ali Esbati. Esbati writes that the five richest men in the world are involved in controlling the media, from X to Facebook and the Washington Post, and he formulates it as: “The super-rich are buying control over the dominant narrative about society”. In Sweden, we can see in parallel that media support is decreasing sharply, and overall, the result is that the perspectives that can be taken into account are becoming fewer and fewer.

You, Andi Olluri, are a refreshing and necessary counterbalance to this development. The present is in great need of your scrutinizing gaze, and it is more important than ever to have people who dare to question the angles, methods and rhetoric of the established media.

The fact that you are not very old is actually irrelevant: the texts you have written would have been absolutely excellent regardless of who had given rise to them, but I must admit that it feels very promising that at twenty-three you already have such a sharp intellect, such a refreshing social criticism and the great courage required to position yourself outside the comfortable confines of the editorial pages.

Andi Olluri – big congratulations on the 2025 Robespierre Prize. A worthy laureate.

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.

Thank you very much. I would like to thank Diding and his colleagues for the fine prize.

There are now endless examples, from all regions of the world, illustrating how state Western propaganda is accepted almost without exception across the media spectrum.

There is no space here to describe the system in detail, so let us just take a few of the current issues.

The issue of the Middle East is a brilliant illustration of the effectiveness of this propaganda system, with massive tactical debate, but where everyone accepts the state’s principled defensive assumptions.

Take Gaza, for example. From day one, Israel made it perfectly clear that its aim was to “wage war on Gaza as a state”, and to “occupy” it. This explains why civilians – not Hamas – were the specific targets (160 civilians : 1 combatant killed according to Western military intelligence) with daily massacres on the same scale and style as Pol Pot.

A fitting saga has been created in the media: it was a just war from the start, but which degenerated into “excessive violence” to quote the highest leadership of the Social Democrats. That an occupier has the right to defend itself, roughly speaking that the Kremlin has the right to defend itself against Ukraine, is thus a dominant view in the Swedish press, with a level of discipline that no respectable intellectual would dare to defy.

The tactical issue that is provoking debate – massive debate – in that Israel has not succeeded in subordinating Gaza quickly enough, is that “Israel has every right to defend itself. But the war today is neither proportionate nor legitimate” (Ander Lindberg); too many die, takes too long, damages our image in the global South, etc. “For Israel, it is ultimately about the right to exist”, but “Netanyahu’s government [is] one of the greatest threats to the future of the Jewish state” due to the publicity damage, in Henrik Torehammar’s words. In short: the perhaps most brutal war of aggression and genocide of the decade against a people occupied for decades is OK, but the PR damage and tactical inconvenience it can cause is not. In a culture of terror, it is taken for granted that the only thing that merits debate is the successes and prospects of violence, everything else is secondary.

In Lebanon, the situation is completely different. In the past year, Israel has carried out almost daily terrorist attacks against the civilian population, and UN peacekeepers, and illegally occupied southern Lebanon in violation of its own agreements. Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International have published several reports on what they call brutal “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”, but nothing is reported in Swedish newspapers that are busy praising Israel’s “innovative” operations that “will go down in history” (Magnus Ranstorp, leading “terror specialist”, which he is). Now, under military and financial threat, Washington is forcing its subordinate Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah, the country’s only defence against continued Israeli occupation – something that goes unnoticed in the Swedish press, which simply laments the fact that Lebanon “[cannot] get rid of Hezbollah by military means” (Nathan Shachar, who fails to mention that the country is, after all, under military attack by an illegal aggressor).

It is quite natural, then, that the West’s successes in Lebanon merit zero comments in the media, and that no further tactical debate prevails, since Western terror and violence work well, and do not cause any PR problems. But we can read golden nuggets of happiness that Israel as a “regional dominant is a vital interest for the democratic world” (P M Nilsson). Or the Segerstedt Institute’s Eli Göndör, who rejoices “that respect for Israel’s capacity has been restored … [in] the whole world. This has probably been more important in order to be able to in the future to achieve agreements that lead to both peace and stability” than diplomacy – and here we should understand “peace and stability” as on the terms of the USA and Israel, much as the Nazi press rejoiced over the “peace and stability” that the Führer tried to establish on his terms.

Exactly the same dynamic prevails with Iran. It is superfluous to document the efficiency and enthusiasm with which Swedish intellectuals performed their assigned role when the US and Israel carried out what since WWII is one of the textbook examples of an unprovoked, undisguised war of aggression with pathetic excuses that even the CIA did not believe. Thus, Peter Wolodarski exulted that “something decisive has been achieved”, and that Washington must “put maximum pressure on Iran to return to the negotiating table”. The mafia mentality that is the defining characteristic of the Swedish intelligentsia is displayed here clearly enough and needs no further comment. And it is uniform in the media, with occasional concerns that the attack might have damaged Israel’s security. All of this was preceded by a decade-long illegal sanctions war and countless Israeli American attacks inside Iranian territory – but cannot be mentioned, because it had cleared the scenes, and intellectuals obey the professional secrecy to this day with impressive discipline.

Again, in these cases, principled debate is almost non-existent, because Washington’s plans work: the region is almost completely dominated, and therefore we sit obediently silent – an enormously impressive feat of the culture of terrorism.

The model that we have imposed on the region with violence and terror is also telling. It was well described by Hal Brands Henry: namely, the US “delegates like-minded sheriffs to regions around the world, freeing up American resources on the global stage”. In the Middle East, this means what he called “remarkable” wars of aggression against any opposition, such as Iran. In the region, “Israel has done more” for Western hegemony than anyone else, and “crushed the enemies of the US: Hamas, Hezbollah and now Iran”, and “now Trump wants similar” sheriffs in Europe, and the rest of the world where the US delegates its terrorism to “front states” with the US in full control, Brands concludes.

In the Swedish press, this is hailed as “regional stability” or the “Abraham Accords”, to borrow the clichés that are in fashion. Thus, the government wrote in a joint text in SvD: “if you look at the bigger picture in the Middle East, not everything is as dark as one might think …. There are several openings right now that could sow the seeds of a completely new Middle East”, with the attacks on Gaza, Lebanon and Syria as examples of fresh “morning air” – a statement that aroused zero criticism, as expected.

All of this explains the central dogma that every educated Swede must harbour if they want to be accepted into the warmth and public debate. And that is that we have the right to attack and crush whomever we want, and if someone were to try to defend themselves against a Western attack, it would only arouse hellish anger and uncontrolled rage. Thus, the very idea that Iran, Yemen, Palestine or anyone else is being attacked by the “sheriffs” is literally non-existent in the Swedish mainstream press. Or the suggestion that we should come to the rescue, and send them tens of billions in weapons, as we do in the case of, for example, Ukraine. It’s not that people disagree – instead, the very idea that they have the right to self-defence cannot even be understood psychologically, much like an incomprehensible language, or 1 + 1 = 5. This is often the case with inappropriate ideas in societies where mind control and brainwashing are thriving and vibrant industries.

Therefore, we can unanimously declare that Israel has the right to self-defence and praise the attack on Iran that “seems to have been extremely successful” (DN). Or the countless American and Israeli terrorist attacks against the leadership of the Houthis, Hezbollah, Gaza or Iran that have even killed prime ministers. “There is nothing to mourn” because they are “terrorist organizations,” as DN’s editorial staff explained. “Of course, it is preferable that terrorists are also brought to justice, but in response to the “terrorists’” attacks, the attacks against their respective leaders appear to be strikingly proportionate … The logic is easy to understand and the goal easy to sympathize with.” Very few would understand, or care if they did, that, based on the principle expressed by the country’s leading “free-spirited” and liberal newspaper, Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthi and a long list of others who are subjected to constant Western aggression and terror, would be justified in dropping bombs on Tel Aviv, Stockholm and Washington, killing (proportionally) a few million civilians, and they would execute Kristersson, Trump, von Der Leyen and other terrorist commanders without “mourning” for these “strikingly proportional” attacks with logic that is “easy to understand” and “to sympathize with”.

And like this, one can easily continue to exemplify in a propaganda system of unparalleled ruthlessness and efficiency.

Questioning accepted dogmas is risky and difficult. Refutation and critical thinking literally require daily diligent work to counter the stream of accusations against official Enemies that are renewed every day. Whatever evidence critics of official ideology present, there is always the imminent risk of accusations of trying to “excuse” rogue states, and of being marginalized to small magazines that hardly anyone reads. Joining in public criticism of official enemies carries no risk or burden of proof. It is the path to media access, to awards, professional respect, and influence.

But it is only through honesty, organization, and constant hard work against concentrated power and privilege that we can put an end to the crimes committed in our name here and now, so let’s go ahead and do the best we can.

Thank you.

An abbreviated version of the speech below was given in connection with the award ceremony. This is the unabridged speech.

Dear friends, dear laureates, dear former laureates!

Today is the 25th day of the Month of Fog, year 234. This is according to the French Republican Calendar, and we will be awarding the Robespierre Prize – or, as it is also called, Jan Myrdal’s small prize. The prize will go in the year 234, or 2025 if you like, to an activist and writer who works in the refractory spirit of Myrdal and Robespierre: Andi Olluri!

The justification is as follows:

“The young activist and student Andi Olluri has already at the age of 20 established himself as a sharp media and system critic when it comes to the power over our thoughts. In the spirit of Jan Myrdal, he has systematically gone to the newspaper files and with stunning empirical evidence and logic demonstrated the stupidity, hypocrisy and double standards that regularly govern our public conversation in both Sweden and the rest of the Western world when conflicts in the wake of the ravages of colonialism are presented and discussed before all the people and where the very laws of thought represent the thoughts of the rulers in a one-eyed world.”

Jan Myrdal sometimes spoke of “on our side” and referred to the left that does not consist of constant turncoats. Who does not see a job at Timbro as the best career choice. He did not mean a left where everyone agreed on everything, far from it, but the left that has actively chosen not to adapt to the prevailing political climate. The left that knows fascism by its gait.

Jan Myrdal writes:

“We are shaped by and bound by our time, but we are not necessarily condemned to participate in its great public lies!”

Andi, you belong on our side. And that is where you are now. And you are most welcome! If I understand you correctly, you may have shown more interest in Bakunin than in Marx, preferred Emma Goldman to Rosa Luxemburg, found Britta Gröndahl more interesting than Hilding Hagberg. Maybe that irritates someone, but it doesn’t matter.

Your book from 2023 was called Beyond Ukraine – Swedish ideology and propaganda in the new cold war. Göran Therborn, who received the Lenin Award here at the theatre in Varberg in 2019, yes, or in the year 227, writes in the book’s foreword that: “…the main theme is the bottomless self-flattery, hypocrisy and crude ruthlessness of the Western powers and their Swedish servants and ideologists. It is borne of a burning moral commitment, each of us has a moral responsibility for our stance on the world’s oppression, conflicts and wars.”

It’s easy to agree. Your texts really burn, you don’t let anyone get away with it, you’re not afraid of crushing formulations laced with vitriol and if anyone should doubt what you write, the sources are in extensive footnotes. In addition, you choose words with great care and a measure of irony. As a reader, I sometimes have to stop and think, understand your thoughts, it’s stimulating even if it’s probably mostly due to my own squareness. We recognize a Myrdalesque language. The assertive, the substantiated, the polemically straightforward. But it is not a copy of Myrdal’s style that we see in you, your style stands in its own right and is, I dare say, unique in today’s debate.

Your texts constitute a kind of investigative journalism. You find connections, holy and unholy alliances, the adaptability and spinelessness of politicians and the media. The empty sacks of experts, filled more with crap than facts. In your texts, the authorities are stripped naked and made to stand with shame. You point out in an article about NATO that it is not the rapid and poorly anchored accession process that is the big problem. It would not have mattered if it had taken four years to become a member, the problem is NATO, the military group you call an offensive alliance. You show what is not really allowed to be said or at least is never said in the media. Namely, that our rulers, eagerly cheered on by knaves, the media and so-called experts, have simply decided to agree. The will of the people is against it, but for the sake of appearance, a little appropriate bickering about the process itself is offered.

In another article you rob Magnus Ranstorp of his honour and conclude with: “A common feature of Ranstorp’s analyses is that he claims things that have no basis in facts, and that he would not get away with even in the Israeli or American media. Here in Sweden, however, he is allowed to continue.” This is very concrete political and activist gonzo journalism, completely in the spirit of Hunter S Thompson. A part of the journalistic craft that is essentially non-existent in Sweden.

It is clear that you are also joining another important tradition: that of almost constant reading and almost constant writing. If you don’t do one, you have to do the other. It is important to make the best possible use of the time that is given. Myrdal sees the time that is given as Balzac’s magic skin, it is constantly shrinking. You can observe Robespierre. The unassuming lawyer, with well-kept but simple clothes, constantly at work, reading, writing, arguing, out of the necessity that the revolution demanded of him. But that obviously does not mean that writing is an expression of an ascetic life. To treat oneself to wine, women and song, to leave the learned chamber sometimes, to go out and about. Myrdal knew that. Robespierre probably never understood it.

Reading demanding texts, long texts – and writing these texts – are acts of resistance. Largely political acts of resistance. Against linguistic degradation. How do the politicians who themselves demand language tests from others and are neglecting school libraries express themselves? Polarized and stupid! As if the space under the hat parking lot were completely deserted, empty.

In October Poems, Lars Forssell has Lenin exclaim:

“I must use words

when I speak to you.

You must learn words”

The difficult words, in complicated contexts, become urgent in a social climate like the current one. The media simplify, as if they were vassals of power, bound by oaths of allegiance. On our side, it is important to break through the simplifications. Your hammer-like prose is needed in the debate.

The worst thing about being a writer is that there are editors. Most often ignorant, square-headed and generally incomprehensible to the greatness of texts. Pure idiots, simply. Who have difficulty understanding that texts cannot be shortened, that the words chosen are the only possible ones. When I asked you to shorten your text, the one now in Myrdaliana 2025, you did so in good humour and with understanding that sometimes you must shorten. I was a little worried, it must be said, about your response to my request. Peter Himmelstrand, who not only wrote popular song texts but was also a language curator at Expressen, used to say: “A text that is longer than twenty lines is too long.” Sometimes it is actually true. But most of the time it is not. Something to think about sometimes during your many years to come in the service of refractory journalism, where compressed rhetoric also has an important place.

Congratulations on the prize!

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!