Speaking for the Young Socialists at a public meeting October 26, Kristoffer Schultz said young people play a big role in the struggle against the imperialist system. The Congress of the Communist League held over that same weekend, he said, "shows a way forward in becoming more deeply connected to the working class and its resistance to the offensive by the wealthy rulers at home and abroad. The steps we are discussing this weekend will help us become more a part of the only class that from a historical point of view can take on the imperialists and win: the working class."

In a pre-congress discussion period, and at the meetings held over the weekend, members of the communist movement here made several decisions that will put them more in the middle of the working-class resistance in Sweden; strengthen their ability to reach workers, farmers, and youth with the working-class perspectives and program contained in Pathfinder books, the Militant, and Perspectiva Mundial; and recruit to the two organizations.

All members of the Communist League and Young Socialists decided to work together to build two new industrial union fractions in sections of the working class they are currently not in contact with. Another move to widen the CL's contact with layers of workers and farmers is establishing an organizing committee in a city outside of Stockholm.

Building on their common experiences over the past year and the discussions at the congress, members of the Communist League and Young Socialists also decided to hold a second session of the meeting in early December in assess these moves and consider a fusion of the two revolutionary organizations.

Some 40 people attended the public meeting in a community center near the local Pathfinder bookstore. The meeting was entitled, "The imperialist war against Afghanistan and the building of the international communist movement in an accelerating war drive." Many in attendance were in their late teens or early 20s. The meeting had a wealth of international participation, and many supporters of the communist movement in Sweden joined in, including by preparing food for the participants.

In addition to Schultz, speakers at the meeting included Mary-Alice Waters, editor of New International and a leader of the Socialist Workers Party, and Olympia Newton, a member of the Young Socialists National Executive Committee, both from the United States; Michel Prairie, the editor of Nouvelle Internationale and a leader of the Communist League in Canada; and Catharina Tirsén, of the Central Committee of the Communist League in Sweden.  
 
'Sharpening class struggle'
The remarks by Waters, who was the featured speaker, focused on the "sharpening class struggle in virtually every country around the globe as the pace of politics rapidly accelerates in response to the imperialist war against the Afghan people."

Catharina Tirsén noted the outspoken support for the imperialist war in Afghanistan by the social democratic Swedish prime minister, Göran Persson. She also took up the demand being raised by various radical forces that the United Nations play a bigger role in "the war against terrorism."

"That demand simply recognizes the imperialists, including the Swedish imperialists, have a right to intervene in politics around the world," Tirsén said.

She pointed out the real role of the United Nations "peacekeeping missions" as advancing the interests of the imperialists, including the disarming of the newly independent government of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo in the 1960s and how Swedish UN troops stood by when Lumumba was captured and eventually murdered by counterrevolutionary forces.

The Congress of the Communist League took place amidst a deepening economic crisis of capitalism in Sweden, with tens of thousands already thrown out of work. Attacks on health care, protests against racist violence, a growth in fascist organizations, and attempts to squeeze concessions from workers on the job are aspects of this crisis and growing political polarization that mark politics in Sweden today.

The acceleration of trends in world politics and the class struggle with the launching of the U.S. war drive against Afghanistan means "there are even bigger opportunities now than in late August to build the communist movement," Carl-Erik Isacsson said at the congress.

Soon after the U.S. initiated its war moves in early September, CL and YS members helped organize a booth of Pathfinder literature at a large book fair in Gothenburg, located in the south of Sweden. The capitalist rulers of Sweden had quickly moved to use the war drive to bolster their own assault on working people at home. Both of these developments helped make the display of revolutionary literature published and distributed by Pathfinder a pole of attraction for workers and many young people.

Over the weekend the team of socialist workers and Young Socialists, including one from the United Kingdom who joined the effort, set up literature tables in downtown Gothenburg that became a real hot spot of discussion. Sales at the book fair reached an all-time high this year, with the newly published pamphlet in Swedish, The Working Class and the Transformation of Learning, topping the list.

Sales at the book fair were also confirmation that the efforts of the communist movement in Sweden over the past decade to translate and publish a growing number of Marxist titles published by Pathfinder on the evolution of world politics and the possibilities for building proletarian parties is increasingly bearing fruit among workers and young people in the country.

Isacsson described the response in the week before the congress to a team selling the Militant door-to-door in the workers district surrounding the newly established Pathfinder bookstore. In less than an hour, six workers bought single copies of the paper and two subscribed. These are examples, Isacsson said, of the interest in a working-class explanation of what is going on in the world "as the pace of the class struggle accelerates, as imperialism's war against Afghanistan unfolds, and as the rulers in Sweden go after working people here."  
 
Young Socialists
A real strength of the meetings over the weekend was the participation of members of the Young Socialists. The YS has become a more cohesive and politically self-confident organization over the past year, joining protest actions, selling Pathfinder books and the Militant, relating to strikes and other working-class struggles, and building and participating in a delegation from Sweden to the 15th World Festival of Youth and Students, held in Algiers, Algeria, this past August.

Building a communist party within the working class in imperialist Sweden, several pointed out, was something they could, and needed to, start to take responsibility for and help to lead.

Members of the CL and YS have joined a range of struggles that are at the center of the resistance of working people to the employers' offensive in Sweden. These include:

• A march and rally of some 7,000 people August 26 to protest the closing of Stainless, a part of Avesta Polaroit, a manufacturer of stainless steel. The company said 330 jobs will be eliminated in this community of 12,000 people, located in the midwestern part of Sweden. Production will be moved to a plant in the United Kingdom.
• A rally of 600 people March 31 to protest the layoff of 1,500 workers out of 3,200 employed at Ericsson's mobile phone factory. Several days earlier the telecommunication company said it will lay off 2,600 workers from its factories in Kumla and Linköping.

  The layoffs highlight the vulnerability of entire communities in Sweden to plant closings and cutbacks by even a single important company.

• A strike by more than 4,000 construction workers across Sweden April 23 to gain a national contract. The strike is estimated to have cost the employers 80 to 100 million Swedish kronas (US$8–10 million).
• A campaign against increased cop and security guard violence. Adonis Hocheimy, 27, has been at the center of this fight ever since he was nearly beaten to death in the subway by two private security guards.

  Over the past few years the increasing use by the Stockholm local government of several security companies in the subway has coincided with a significant rise in attacks by guards against working people. In 1999, for example, 813 people, overwhelmingly Blacks and immigrants, were charged by subway guards with "violent resistance," a method the cops use to counter assault charges by victims.

• Two ultrarightist skinheads carried out a savage beating of a 41-year-old Hungarian-born worker, in a northern suburb of Stockholm last December. A public meeting was held December 15 outside the Hallonbergen subway station to condemn the assault.

  The action, called by the Network against Racism and Local 20 of the Service and Communications Union (SEKO), attracted some 100 people, many of them workers and youth who joined the demonstration on their way home.

• In another case involving skinheads, some 1,000 ultrarightists marched December 16 through Salem, a mainly working-class suburb southwest of here. The killing of a nazi skinhead there the week before led the rightists to mobilize for this action.
• Seventy young people rallied in front of the Södermalm police station March 15 to protest the police killing of Idris Demir, a 25-year-old Kurdish immigrant from Turkey. Participants carried banners saying, "Disarm the police" and "No human being is illegal." Protests were also held in Jönköping, Malmö, and other towns.

There have been three demonstrations of up to 4,000 people in Stockholm over the past two months, with the theme of opposing "war and terrorism." CL and YS members have met young people and workers at the actions attracted to the Militant's stand opposing the imperialist war and to revolutionary books published by Pathfinder.

Participants in the congress discussed how they can more effectively present revolutionary working-class politics and demands at these actions, which tend to be dominated by either pacifist or anti-American slogans and chants.

CL and YS members planned on taking placards in defense of workers' rights and opposing Swedish imperialism to upcoming protests, and to distribute the statement on the role of Swedish imperialism in the world today.
 
 
Related article:
'No' to Swedish imperialism's complicity in Afghan war!  
 
 
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