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.