Swedish Proletarians towards Freedom: Ideals of Participation as Propaganda in the Communist Children’s Press of the 1920s
Alfred Andersson witnessed as a young boy the social and economic downside of Swedish class society during the mid-1920s. He was one of capitalism’s victims, doomed to a life of hard labour under unequal conditions. But Alfred refused to remain a victim: he fought back by organizing himself. This is, of course, if you believe his testimony in a two-piece letter published in the Swedish communist children’s periodical The Young Comrade (Den unge kamraten) in the beginning of 1924. In the letter he describes why he became a communist and how he successfully organized a local revolutionary children’s club.1 His is a model letter in the radical paper that targeted children between the ages of nine and 14. Young Alfred’s story touches upon several themes promoted by the editors. For instance, he doesn’t stay silent or accept things as they are. Rather he depicts himself in the position of an opponent to the current societal regime. In that position he opposes, for example, the inherited poverty that is most likely to make his a hard life as it had done his father’s. Furthermore, he opposes bourgeois children’s organizations such as the Scout movement or the Christian Sunday school. He turns to communism, therefore, as a way of liberating himself from oppression. From the editors’ point of view, his letter served as an inspirational didactic example depicting the need for class struggle.
Exporting the Nordic Children’s ’68: The global publishing scandal of The Little Red Schoolbook
The Little Red Schoolbook (1969) was one of the most well-travelled media products for children from ’68 aimed at children, and it was certainly the most notorious. Over the course of a few years (1970–2) it was translated and published in Belgium, Finland, France, Great Britain, the Federal Republic of Germany, Greece, Iceland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland, it also circulated freely in Austria and Luxembourg, and reached beyond Europe to countries including Australia, Japan and Mexico. It led to an obscenity trial in Great Britain, nearly toppled the Australian government, and caused a global publishing scandal. This essay therefore looks at the Scandinavian children’s ’68 in its international context, via a transnational, comparative analysis of the reception of the LRSB, in order to examine how ‘68 counterculture and ideas of childhood clashed and converged in the West around 1970. It asks: what can the publishing history of the LRSB tell us about the distinctive features of children’s media in Scandinavia at this time?
FROM CONDUITS TO COMMANDERS: SHIFTING VIEWS OF WORKER CORRESPONDENTS, 1924–26
In the period 1923–25, the worker and peasant correspondent movement (rabsel′korovskoe′ dvizhenie) marked a partial exception to Bolshevik denigration of the informational function of the press. Through an analysis of contemporary debates, especially the statements of key figures such as Bukharin and Stalin, this article charts the evolution of the movement in a period when it was neither the neutral conduit for grassroots views that Bukharin hoped for nor the simple instrument of Party influence that Stalin intended. Instead, the movement briefly fulfilled both functions before a combination of internal and external factors caused opinion to veer towards Stalin’s position.