Abstract
This chapter outlines how certain repertoires of contention became regenerated and enacted in the Swedish 1980s when anarchism met punk. It shows how the meeting between the Swedish anarchist movement, and the subcultural punk scene, fostered a breeding ground for new forms of activism, a hotbed that regenerated political repertoires buried in the social soil—like pyrophile plants sprouting through a wildfire. The chapter exhibits how the anarchist periodical Brand, published on a regular basis since the late 1800s, was rebranded through anarcho-punk aesthetics and increasingly synchronized with the repertoires of contention signatory to the broader autonomous movement in Europe. Hence, the anarchist politics of direct action prompted in the Swedish 1980s a revived struggle accompanied by the disorderly rebelliousness of punk and the disobedient temporality of prefiguration. When anarchism met punk, the radical struggle against hierarchy and for freedom was not primarily a political goal located at the horizon of time, but rather a politics to enact, to prefigure, a desirable future already in the present.
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Keywords
Anarchism in Sweden had been around for nearly a century when the turbulent 1980s arrived. As shown throughout this anthology, the decade was marked by social marginalization, political tension, and cultural exploration. It was a hotbed for social movements, a breeding ground for new forms of activism, perennial growth of recurring contention—and regeneration of politics buried in the social soil, like pyrophile plants sprouting through a wildfire. When anarchism met punk in the Swedish 1980s, certain repertoires of contention became revived and enacted, exhibiting how remembered actions from the past can give life to collective action in the present and revive the struggle for a desirable future. In the vein of social movement literature concerned with the interplay between cultural and political mobilizations,Footnote 1 this chapter outlines how anarchist repertoires of contention, as “inherited forms of collective action”,Footnote 2 became regenerated in Sweden when anarchism met punk.
When Anarchism Met Punk
Anarchism in Sweden grew out of the Social Democrats’ youth organization that, in May 1898, began publishing its own periodical. The name Brand underlined its cultural sensibility by paraphrasing a play by Henrik Ibsen.Footnote 3 Brand has been published regularly ever since and is thereby one of the most long-standing anarchist periodicals in the world.Footnote 4 The early anarchist movement was more numerous in Sweden than in the other Nordic countries,Footnote 5 and prominent figures like Emma Goldman, Peter Kropotkin, and Rudolf Rocker visited and were part of their international network.Footnote 6 Brand frequently published translations of international anarchist thinkers, and these inclinations alarmed and finally prompted the Social Democrats to break with its youth organization in 1908.Footnote 7 Subsequently, in the aftermath of the Swedish general strike in 1909, the anarcho-syndicalist branch of the labour movement created its own union.Footnote 8 Whereas workplace struggles were naturally the prime focus of this syndicalist union,Footnote 9 Brand now became more explicitly anarchist.Footnote 10 In 1934, with the birth of Sweden’s first anarchist organization,Footnote 11 Brand accordingly changed its subtitle to become an “anarchist paper” that complemented and struggled “alongside” syndicalism.Footnote 12
In the 1980s, however, the anarchist periodical went through a series of editorial shifts and relaunches. Brand closed down in 1979, after having published nearly 1700 issues since its inauguration in 1898,Footnote 13 and continued under the name Basta for two issues (1980). It was then reinstalled as Brand (1982), Brandfaran (1983–1984), Brand once again (1985), and then merged with a local anarcho-zine named Total and became published under the name Total Brand (1986–1988). The title eventually changed back to Brand (1988–) and is at the time of writing still being published under that name.
The durability of Brand, as the main vehicle for anarchism in Sweden, makes it a most viable historical source.Footnote 14 As I will show, Brand’s editorial turbulence in the 1980s reflects anarchism’s reorientation towards certain repertoires of contention during this decade. But whereas the broader autonomous movement had grown militant in other European countries already in the early 1980s,Footnote 15 anarchism in Sweden took this route later into the decade. Previous research has pointed out the relatively stable economic situation in Sweden, the predominance of social-democratic consensus ideals of democratic dialogue, cooperation, and formal organizing, and the anarchist movement’s dedication to non-violence and alternative living, as possible explanations for this comparable delay in militancy.Footnote 16 Here scholars have noted, though only in passing, that anarchist repertoires of contention were revivified by the politicized branches of the punk scene.Footnote 17
Punk came to Sweden in the spring of 1977. The ignition was a one-day festival lined up with Sex Pistols, The Clash, Ramones, and Television.Footnote 18 In the years that followed, a flood of punk bands developed a subcultural expression that challenged authorities of every stripe.Footnote 19 They energetically produced records and fanzines; bands like Ebba Grön began to make the Swedish headlines and soon became an influential part of the international scene.Footnote 20 Punk had originated a few years earlier in UK and USA, spearheaded by the very same bands that made the tour to Stockholm in May 1977,Footnote 21 where it immediately became recognized as a youth-driven subculture, characterized by its rebellious defiance of established customs and institutions.Footnote 22
The anarchist course of the Swedish punk scene was set by the pioneering band Ebba Grön’s explicit defiance of economic, political, and social hierarchies. Ebba Grön attacked economic exploitation by “refusing to be a machine that works for them”.Footnote 23 They made a hit by targeting the entanglement between “state and capital”.Footnote 24 The epitome of hierarchy was by Ebba Grön cynically portrayed as the skill to “lick upwards and kick downwards”,Footnote 25 a theme typically explored in Brand,Footnote 26 especially through the periodical’s anarcho-punk rebrand in the 1980s.
Anarcho-Punk
Although the pioneering punk bands in Sweden were politically informed by the antecedent progg culture of the 1970s extra-parliamentarian left,Footnote 27 the connections between punk and anarchism became more formalized towards the middle of the 1980s. This political orientation was headed by foreign bands like Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, Poison Girls, Discharge, and Crass.Footnote 28 The British band Crass (1977–1984) is generally considered to be the most influential band of anarcho-punk, this political subgenre of 1980s punk that aligned with the ideas and actions of anarchism.Footnote 29 Crass was not only a punk band but also a farmhouse collective vested in various forms of political art. From this cultural-political position, Crass rampaged against the pop star culture they associated with punk in the late 1970s.Footnote 30 It was Crass that would, according to Lohman and Worley, “transform punk’s rhetorical anarchy into a viable political and cultural opposition” by devising a design for life best summarized in their slogan “there is no authority but yourself”.Footnote 31
In the Swedish 1980s, Crass became an ideological catalyst for the disobedient and rebellious stances that had been broadcasted by the pioneering punk band Ebba Grön. Brand published in 1987 an article stating that “today’s young anarchists have directly or indirectly been formed by the attitudes of the punk attitudes in general, and the ideas of the band Crass in particular. […] It was Crass that gave anarchism in Europe new life in the early 1980s”.Footnote 32 A notable example is MOB 47, which along with Anti-Cimex was Sweden’s most influential, and internationally recognized, anarcho-punk band of the 1980s.Footnote 33 With lyrics like “rise against authority / dare think for yourself / don’t let yourself be oppressed by the system”,Footnote 34 MOB 47 manifested the increasingly formalized connections between anarchism and punk.
As an anarchist periodical, Brand had long elaborated a profound critique of hierarchy.Footnote 35 With the rebranding into Total Brand, in 1986, the periodical’s content and aesthetics were spiced up with the zest of anarcho-punk. As if to underline this positioning, Brand launched a three-issue series, called “counterculture”, fully dedicated to the genre.Footnote 36 This fusion between punk and anarchism in Sweden is distinguishable from the UK context, where the leading anarchist periodicals frequently ridiculed and eschewed the political aspects of punk.Footnote 37 What also happened through this rebranding was that Brand henceforth began to self-identify with the “autonomous movement” that now stirred in other parts of Europe and translated the punk rebellion into politics. In 1987, Brand published an article describing domestic and international autonomous groups as a “political tendency”, united by “a political tradition [cultivating a] decentralised and non-hierarchical group structure”.Footnote 38 Echoing the hit song by Ebba Grön released a decade earlier,Footnote 39 Brand stated in 1988: “Away with all private property. Away with all hierarchical institutions, the state, the parliament, the political parties”.Footnote 40 These anarchist expressions of anti-hierarchy, along with punk’s overall uprising against authority, readily translated into the politics of direct action.
Direct-Action Repertoires
Renouncing the state entails politics without intermediaries—direct action—a political repertoire to acquire freedom from hierarchy by, in the words of David Graeber, “acting as if one is already free”.Footnote 41 Direct action differs from indirect actions such as lobbying, rallying, or voting; whereas indirect action demands state-led social change, direct action bypasses the state to implement change directly.Footnote 42 A 1986 Brand article trademarked this repertoire of contention with a punkish straightforwardness: “Direct action is a cornerstone to anarchy, don’t fucking forget that!”Footnote 43 Hence, when anarchism in Sweden forged its connections with the politicized punk scene and the international autonomous movement, direct actions were forcefully enacted through squatting and sabotage actions.
Squatting became increasingly notable in the direct-action repertoires. The Swedish punk scene had from its very start been resisting territorial stigmatization of the metropolitan periphery; the pioneering bands Ebba Grön and KSMB cynically depicted their disadvantaged position of living in marginalized urban areas.Footnote 44 They also engaged in occupying the legendary punk hub Oasen when threatened with eviction by the Swedish authorities.Footnote 45 While the squatting tradition in Sweden dates back at least to the 1960s,Footnote 46 the punk movement complemented the squatting-for-residence orientation as they began to claim a cultural space of their own.Footnote 47 Hence, when the whirlwind of squatting swept through Sweden in the mid-1980s, the anarchist periodical Brand had already reported about such struggles for nearly a decade.Footnote 48 But with the punk-influenced remake of Brand, in 1986, the anarchist movement increasingly self-identified with the broader autonomous movement and its signatory practice of squatting. Inspired by the West German and Danish BZ movement, which was carefully covered in the journalism of Total Brand (1986–1988),Footnote 49 around twenty different squats appeared across Sweden during these three years.Footnote 50 Squatting was here framed as a political alternative to that of skyrocketing inner-city rents and subsequent displacement of poor people to stigmatized areas in the city periphery. It was a politics to secure the right to housing but also independent cultural development.Footnote 51 A notable example was the occupation of Ultrahuset in 1988, which resisted the municipal closure of a facility that since the early 1980s had been a focal point for Swedish punk music.Footnote 52
The direct-action repertoires also included sabotage of multinational corporations that directly or indirectly supported Apartheid in South Africa. One particular target was Shell, a company that sidestepped the international oil embargo to profit from the racist regime.Footnote 53 In 1988–1989, several anarchist groups joined forces with the BZ movement in Holland, West Germany, and Denmark, in a transnational direct action campaign against Shell to force the company to withdraw from its collaboration with Apartheid South Africa.Footnote 54 Brand had in the preceding year begun reporting positively about sabotage against Shell stations in Denmark,Footnote 55 and soon it reported about the first action in Sweden.Footnote 56 In 1989, Brand published a list of nearly two hundred sabotaged Shell stations across the country and presented this phenomenon in terms of a “new social movement”.Footnote 57 This flood of direct actions now synchronized the repertoires of contention with the broader autonomous movement of the time,Footnote 58 but also with the political tradition of anarchism. A 1987 Brand article explained that “what links different autonomous groups together is to some extent a political tradition, a decentralised and non-hierarchical group structure based on legal and ‘open’ customs but with preparedness for illegal actions”.Footnote 59
The commitment to direct action was furthermore propelled by an anarchist denouncement of parliamentary democracy and disbelief in voting. The first relaunch of Brand, in 1982, came as a special issue dedicated to the parliamentary election. It had the sarcastic subtitle “Vote on All Parties” and elaborated the classical anarchist argument about the ballot as an illusion of popular power.Footnote 60 Later on, in the election year of 1988, Brand’s front cover of the September issue had the bolded title “We do not vote!”Footnote 61 Punk made the soundtrack to this political stance. The band MOB 47 released in 1985 their provocative song “Refuse to Vote”.Footnote 62 The straightforward anti-parliamentarism was accompanied by a fervent call for direct action, an empowering declaration that “we can change the system”, followed by the imperative to “disobey the government’s laws”.Footnote 63 This political tradition of vote refusal had long been a signatory to Brand.Footnote 64 Even before the breakthrough of universal suffrage, Albert Jensen, a long-term editor of Brand with notable connections to the international anarchist movement, including the suffrage-critic Emma Goldman, stated in an anti-voting pamphlet that “those who consciously refuse to vote are revolutionaries”.Footnote 65 At the historical moment of the first democratic election in Sweden, in the 1920s, Brand feverously promoted the anti-parliamentary action of refusing to vote.Footnote 66 Six decades later, in the election year of 1988, Brand would once again call for that precise politics: “The election is an illusion. Our answer: direct action”.Footnote 67
Struggles for Freedom
Defiance of hierarchy, and its entailed direct-action repertoire, is in anarchism intimately linked to political struggles for freedom.Footnote 68 When anarchism met punk in the Swedish 1980s, the concept of freedom had many layers: freedom from authority, repression, and imprisonment; freedom to self-fulfilment and self-determination; freedom for others—including freedom for animal others. In 1984, the Swedish anarcho-punk band MOB 47 released the song “Animal Liberation”. It raged against scientific vivisection along with an imperative question mark: “how can we stand by and watch as they murder the animals?”Footnote 69 In the following summer of 1985, Animal Liberation Front made its first appearance in Sweden: two Beagle dogs were liberated from periodontitis experiments conducted by Malmö University.Footnote 70 In October 1987, Brand provided instructions about how to perform animal liberation actions, along with a call for reporting these activities to the periodical.Footnote 71 Soon thereafter, Brand published a three-page article on Animal Liberation Front in Sweden, along with payment instructions to support the struggle.Footnote 72 Brand henceforth continued to advocate direct action for animal freedom.Footnote 73
The struggles for freedom also targeted human imprisonment. In the most literary sense, Brand agitated for prison abolition to liberate people from spending their life behind bars.Footnote 74 This struggle included solidarity with “political prisoners” like anti-militarist conscientious objectors and militant Shell-saboteurs.Footnote 75 In the early 1980s, Brand incorporated a recurrent article section entitled “Letters From the Other Side of the Bars”, which functioned as a communication channel between imprisoned people and the Brand-readers.Footnote 76 The prison-abolitionist position was later embodied in the 1987 startup of a Swedish chapter of the international prisoner support network Anarchist Black Cross.Footnote 77
Freedom from imprisonment also encompassed more subtle forms of restraint. The early issues of Brand recurrently challenged the capitalist dictum to work for a living—the wage-labour structure—and argued instead for work refusal as freedom and resistance to capitalist exploitation.Footnote 78 Brand published in 1983 “The Workshy Manifesto” which, by paraphrasing The Communist Manifesto, agitated for liberation from work and elaborated the understanding that “unemployment is freedom”.Footnote 79 This anti-work attitude distinguished anarchism from the overall labour movement, including the Swedish anarcho-syndicalist union’s focus on workplace resistance. The anarchist struggle for collective freedom was complemented by a call for individual freedom. This anti-authoritarian exploration of individuality became noticeably embraced by the punks that went against the mainstream towards new cultural expressions. In the vein of the UK band Crass’ catchphrase “Anarchy, Peace, and Freedom”,Footnote 80 Swedish punks explored a plethora of symbolic combinations and fashion outfits,Footnote 81 expressing what Erik Hannerz calls “punk as individual freedom from rules”.Footnote 82
In Sweden as well as internationally, the do-it-yourself dictum characterized the agency of the punk scene.Footnote 83 For Crass, as noted by Lohman and Worley, “anarchism was presented as self-taught, drawing from a range of ideas and practices – a DIY anarchism for a DIY culture”,Footnote 84 With the arrival of punk to Sweden in 1977, this subculture came to acquire administrative and technical skills to record and distribute music, arrange concerts and festivals, and broadcast radio shows; punks educated themselves in photography and painting to create posters, fanzines, and album covers; they advanced their art of writing to create lyrics, poetry, and journalistic articles.Footnote 85 The DIY culture established during these initial years became most vital from 1982 onwards when the established media and music industry had lost its initial fascination with punk. In this context, experiential know-how and collective capability for cultural self-sufficiency became a necessity.Footnote 86 Brand accordingly paid tribute to Crass as the architects of a politically replenished DIY culture; contrasted against the mere rebellious attitude of previous punk bands, Crass had offered a prefigurative politics that represented “a concrete alternative to status quo”.Footnote 87
Prefigurative Politics
The repertoires of contention deployed by Swedish anarcho-punks were fuelled by a profound belief in self-determination and in the capability to create political, economic, and social alternatives. For the contemporary anarchist movement, punk is indeed a past that continues to shape the present. One illustrative example, as I detail elsewhere, is how anarchist community kitchens today accentuate a striving to develop a vegan cuisine that would, as one of these participants puts it, “show people something different than the classic punk stew”.Footnote 88 The reference here is the generic dish that was born out of the cook-what-you-have cuisine characterizing the punk scene in the 1980s.Footnote 89 The punk stew was part of a “subcultural food system”,Footnote 90 one that later travelled into the mobile activist kitchens that became a significant infrastructure of the alter-globalization movement at the turn of the millennium.Footnote 91 Anarchist community kitchens in Sweden are now headed by a new generation of vegan gastronomists transgressing “the classic punk stew” to offer delightful food as a pull factor for political veganism.
This oral history example illustrates that the cooking practices developed by the early anarcho-punks are not dead but alive. It shows how past political practices can become a breeding ground for new forms of activism. The punk stew is not only a vivid historical reference but also a politico-culinary memorial, one that anarchists now revisit by asserting an ancestral relation to the 1980s anarcho-punks, albeit with a prefigurative aim of exceeding the tradition’s culinary boundaries. The collective memory of these ancestors shapes present-day mobilization, just as anarchists in the 1980s regenerated political repertoires of the preceding tradition while, at the same time, deploying a future-oriented temporality of prefiguration.
Prefigurative politics refer to practices that seek to bring a desired future into a desolate present, creating a new world in the shell of the old.Footnote 92 Social movement scholars have defined prefigurative politics as “an embodied process of reimagining all of society”,Footnote 93 which entails a “future-oriented construction of political alternatives”.Footnote 94 The DIY culture is but one example of the temporally disobedient operation in that repertoire of contention.
The notion of prefigurative politics complicates the resource mobilization of collective memories and the punk temporality of breaking with preceding generations while declaring, like Sex Pistols, a no-future.Footnote 95 The punk youth forwarded a sharp critique against their parents’ generation, which they held responsible for a tedious and miserable situation.Footnote 96 The punks rebelled against how the future had been stolen from them. They defied the temporality of short-term employment and residence that characterized their socioeconomic marginalization. They fought to break free from a dragged-out present of boredom and meaninglessness. In 1977, Ebba Grön portrayed a desperate entrapment in a circular time order: “get up – go to work – work – work – eat lunch / same thing tomorrow / work – take the tube back home and do nothing / that’s not a life / that’s slavery / so keep on being a rebel”.Footnote 97
The punk rebellion was an attempt to reclaim the future. The disorderly youth cultivated a subculture that readily made it into the mainstream—and it was fuelled by pure defiance against the no-future assigned to them. The anarcho-punk struggle, against hierarchy and for freedom, was not only about creating an alternative future, not merely a political goal located at the horizon of time, but rather a politics to enact, to prefigure, that future already in the present. This is the disobedient temporality of prefiguration.
There was, however, a conflict between the prefigurative exploration of alternative lifestyles and attempts to organize a broader class struggle for systemic change. For example, the articles in Brand sometimes contrasted the explicit anarcho-pacifism of the band Crass with the confrontational politics emphasized by the British anarchist group Class War.Footnote 98 This tension highlights a discord in the anarchist repertoires of contention regarding the use of violence, a dissonance propelled by the diverse temporalities of prefiguration and revolution. Whereas prefigurative politics draw a desired future into the desolate present, revolutionary politics aim for a future where alternative lifestyles would be obsolete. These diverse means-end orientations have different implications for the place of violence in the anarchist repertoires of contention.
Violence
The issue of violence has rendered an immense discussion throughout the anarchist periodical Brand. In the broadest sense, it contains three different positions: non-use of violence through anti-militarism; momentary use of violence in self-defence, and strategic use of revolutionary violence in the struggle for a less violent future.
Anti-militarism is the political imperative that state violence must be broken and left unsupported. This categorical renouncement of violence has been something of a leitmotif to Brand since its inception. In the early 1900s, when military conscription became compulsory in Sweden, anarchists and peace activists who refused to partake in state violence were considered a threat by the Swedish authorities. The Brand editors repeatedly faced charges of disloyalty to the state.Footnote 99 Security forces saw anarchists as particularly menacing during the interwar and war periods, precisely due to their fierce resistance to military conscription.Footnote 100 Even with the impending threat of the ideologically antagonistic National Socialist Germany, anarchistic anti-militarism persisted; Brand published in 1939 a radical-pacifist book by the journal’s editor, Carl-Johan Björklund, entitled “I Do Not Believe in Violence”.Footnote 101
The 1980s unfolded in the tracks of that legacy. Brand regularly published calls for “total refusal” of military conscription,Footnote 102 a political statement that is still criminalized in Sweden and in the 1980s frequently resulted in imprisonment. In this anti-militaristic vein, Brand agitated for total refusal, rather than the legal option of the conscious objection, and actively supported the anti-militaristic “political prisoners” held captive by the Swedish state.Footnote 103 Refusal of military conscription was also a recurrent theme in the early punk entries,Footnote 104 and this position continued with anarcho-punk and especially with the band Anti-Cimex’s double call for “pacifism” and “anarchy”.Footnote 105 To the secret police in Sweden, however, the anti-militarism expressed by punks and anarchists was, in the 1980s, no longer considered a threat.Footnote 106 The security alarm was re-activated when anarchism became linked to a series of more confrontational direct actions,Footnote 107 in which Total Brand was pointed out as a lead voice of this “new and militant anarchist movement”.Footnote 108
Violence as self-defence means that physical force cannot be used proactively, but only as a temporary means to defend an individual or a group that is under attack. In the first half of the 1980s, the police considered anarchists to be fully dedicated to non-violence.Footnote 109 But towards the middle of the 1980s, collective self-defence became an increasingly important part of the anarchist repertoires of contention. Squatters began to fight back during police-led evictions. For instance, when the police intervened to break up a squat in the summer of 1986, police officers declared in court to have been attacked with eggs, paint-filled balloons, stones, and smoke grenades.Footnote 110 Although the charged squatters claimed that to be misunderstandings and exaggerations,Footnote 111 the security police nonetheless started to intensify their surveillance of the anarchist movement.Footnote 112 Hence, the anarchist spectre transmuted in the 1980s; the threat was no longer anarchists refusing state violence but that anarchists themselves were using violence against the state.
However, a full-hearted embrace of revolutionary violence was quite a marginal position in Brand, used primarily for rhetorical reasons. The weaponized imagery of the social revolution was nonetheless broadcasted through punk, perhaps most notably in Ebba Grön’s songs “Shoot a Cop” and “Arm Yourselves”.Footnote 113 Ebba Grön was originally a code name for a police operation that, in the spring of 1977, targeted a revolutionary group of self-identified anarchists planning to take a Swedish politician hostage to enable freedom for persecuted members of the German Red Army Faction (RAF).Footnote 114 The band’s name was purposefully chosen to provoke and mock the authorities.Footnote 115 The violent-revolutionary prose of Ebba Grön readily found fertile ground in Brand. As with the punks, RAF references in Brand were mainly rhetorical; depictions of armed violence spiced up the artwork of revolution. But some articles in Brand also articulated real support for the RAF’s tactics.Footnote 116 Vindication of the Marxist-Leninist organization RAF—despite the anarchist movement’s emblematic hostility to authoritarian socialism—was propelled by the crackdown against Swedish anarchists in the wake of the Ebba Grön operation in 1977, which led the police to link anarchism with terrorism.Footnote 117 The repression triggered solidarity with imprisoned anarchists and defence of their violent tactics.Footnote 118 It also prompted rebellion against the state monopoly on violence: “we ourselves decide when we will fight”.Footnote 119
At the other end of the spectrum was the anti-militaristic standpoint that had been the leitmotif of Brand since the late 1800s. This positioning was closely related to that of non-violence, not only through the politized refusal to join the military but also by elaborating prefigurative politics that, by inverting the means-end causality, makes violence counterproductive. Disregarding ideological and tactical commitments to non-violence, Swedish authorities have from the late 1980s onwards seen a threat in the anarchist repertoires of squatting, corporate sabotage, and escalating confrontations with the police.Footnote 120 The 1980s was the decade that brought the spectre of anarchism back to life.
Punk Is Dead
The anarchist repertoires of contention were revitalized in the Swedish 1980s when anarchism met punk. Direct action came to inform the politics of squatting, sabotage actions, and struggles for freedom for humans and animals alike. The repertoire heritage also brought re-negotiations of violence, where energetic opinions about non-violence, self-defence, and occasionally also armed revolution, clashed against each other; violence was rendered obsolete in prefigurative politics, the enactment of anarchy in the present, but violence was also reclaimed from the state monopoly through a diversity of tactics outlined by the international autonomous and anarchist movements’ self-defence against the police.
The punk-regeneration of anarchism in the 1980s spotlights how past political repertoires came to life, like pyrophile plants sprouting through a wildfire. By reviving remnants of the preceding movement, anarchist ancestors were, in an existential-political sense, kept alive.
In a frontal attack against the commercialization and mainstreaming of a once rebellious youth movement, the UK band Crass polemically declared, in 1978, that “punk is dead”.Footnote 121 This premature deadness then revived the punk scene, as it now sought out a political ideology that also had been declared dead: anarchism was crushed under the Franco-regime in late 1930s Spain and then silenced by the ideological polarization of the Cold war.Footnote 122 In the Swedish 1980s, however, the anarchist repertoires of contention did not only align with the broader autonomous movement in Europe. They also enacted existential-political means of “being with the dead”, a Heideggerian notion that philosopher Hans Ruin uses to capture how the past “continues to be constituted in and through the involvement of the living with the dead and how the dead shape the space of the living”.Footnote 123
The ubiquitous postulate that “punk is dead” becomes rather telling here. Even if political or cultural ancestry is rendered dead—like classical anarchism and early punk—the heritage lives on by reviving repertoires of contention into the present. In Sweden, the pioneering punk bands set the tone for anarcho-punk and the anarchist periodical Brand. Towards the end of the Swedish 1980s, anarchism and punk had become regenerated, I would argue, precisely through this existential being with the dead.
Notes
- 1.
See for instance Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, Music and Social Movements: Mobilizing Traditions in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Ryan Moore and Michael Roberts, “Do-It-Yourself Mobilization: Punk and Social Movements,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly 14, no. 3 (2009); William Danaher, “Music and Social Movements,” Sociology Compass 4, no. 9 (2010).
- 2.
Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, Contentious Politics (Boulder: Paradigm, 2015), 7.
- 3.
Henrik Lång, Drömmen om det ouppnåeliga: Anarkistiska tankelinjer hos Hinke Bergegren, Gustaf Henriksson-Holmberg och Einar Håkansson (Umeå: Umeå universitet, 2007), 236; Emma Hilborn, Världar i Brand: Fiktion, politik och romantik i det tidiga 1900-talets ungsocialistiska press (Höör: Agering, 2014), 37; Karl Fernström, Ungsocialismen: En krönika (Stockholm: Federativ, 1950), 40–42.
- 4.
Internationally, only a handful of anarchist periodicals have been published since the heyday of anarchism until the present day: Solidaridad Obrera in Spain, La Protesta in Argentina, Umanità Nova in Italy, and Freedom in the UK. For studies on the latter, see Rob Ray, A Beautiful Idea: History of the Freedom Press Anarchists (London: Freedom Press, 2018); John Quail, Slow Burning Fuse: The Lost History of the British Anarchists (Oakland: PM Press, 2019).
- 5.
Gabriel Kuhn, “The Nordic Countries: Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden,” in The Bloomsbury Companion to Anarchism, ed. Ruth Kinna (Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2012), 442.
- 6.
Arbetaren, “Den ryska revolutionen belyses av ryska revolutionärer: Fackföreningsrörelsen och syndikalismen och dess framtida problem,” January 7, 1922: 1, 3; Fernström, Ungsocialismen, 336–338, 435, 456, 474; Markus Lundström, “Demokrati eller anarki?” Demokrati100 (2019). www.demokrati100.se/demokrati-eller-anarki/.
- 7.
Åsa Linderborg, Socialdemokraterna skriver historia: Historieskrivning som ideologisk maktresurs 1892–2000 (Stockholm: Atlas, 2014), 113–116, 171–173; Lång, Drömmen om det ouppnåeliga, 122–123; Hilborn, Världar i Brand, 69.
- 8.
The Swedish Workers Central Organization [Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation] has maintained its political voice in Swedish society up to the present, first though the periodical Syndikalisten (1911–1921) and then its sequel The Labourer [Arbetaren] (1922–). See Maria Karlsson and Rikard Warlenius, “Ett sekel av syndikalism: Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation 1910–2010,” in Ett sekel av syndikalism: Sveriges arbetares centralorganisation 1910–2010, ed. SAC (Stockholm: Federativ, 2012); Lennart Persson, “Syndikalisten: SAC:s tidning 1911–1921,” in Ett sekel av syndikalism: Sveriges arbetares centralorganisation 1910–2010, ed. SAC (Stockholm: Federativ, 2012); Johan Pries, “PJ Welinder and “American Syndicalism” in Interwar Sweden,” in Wobblies of the World: A Global History of the IWW, eds. Peter Cole, David Struthers, and Kenyon Zimmer (London: Pluto Press, 2018), 262; Kuhn, “The Nordic Countries,” 445.
- 9.
Lennart Persson, Syndikalismen i Sverige: 1903–1922 (Göteborg: Göteborgs offsettryckeri, 1975), 154–155, 232–234; Martin Nilsson, “Hundraåringen behöver mer idédebatt!: Anarkism och syndikalism i rörelsen,” in Ett sekel av syndikalism: Sveriges arbetares centralorganisation 1910–2010, ed. SAC (Stockholm: Federativ, 2012); Lång, Drömmen om det ouppnåeliga, 8.
- 10.
Gabriel Kuhn, “Anarchism, Sweden,” in The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest (Wiley Online Library: Wiley, 2009).
- 11.
Fernström, Ungsocialismen, 479–450.
- 12.
Brand no. 1, “Vi vilja: Ingen herre, ingen slav!” (1934): 1.
- 13.
Brand also had a significant publishing break between 1967 and 1972, but the reasons and implications of this intermission fall outside the scope of this chapter.
- 14.
The will to cultivate the Brand-tradition can be noted for instance in the republications of early history entries, continued aesthetic, and reusage of the recurrent brief-report section “Gnistor” [Sparks]. However, two other possible candidates to study Swedish anarchism in the 1980s would be the periodical Praxis (1980–1982) and April (1982–1987), but these had a more anarcho-syndicalist focus on workplace struggles, quite similar to that of Arbetaren (1922–), which makes them less relevant for analyzing anarchism per se.
- 15.
Knud Andresen and Bart van der Steen, “Introduction: The Last Insurrection? Youth, Revolts and Social Movements in the 1980s,” in A European Youth Revolt: European Perspectives on Youth Protest and Social Movements in the 1980s, eds. Knud Andresen and Bart van der Steen (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016); George Katsiaficas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements and the Decolonization of Everyday Life (London: Humanities Press, 1997).
- 16.
Jan Jämte and Adrienne Sörbom, “Why Did It Not Happen Here? The Gradual Radicalization of the Anarchist Movement in Sweden 1980–90,” in A European Youth Revolt: European Perspectives on Youth Protest and Social Movements in the 1980s, eds. Knud Andresen and Bart van der Steen (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 101–105. See also Fredrik Egefur’s contribution to this volume.
- 17.
Jan Jämte, Måns Lundstedt and Magnus Wennerhag, “From Radical Counterculture to Pragmatic Radicalism? The Collective Identity of Contemporary Radical Left-Libertarian Activism in Sweden,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 14, no. 1 (2020): 9–10; Jämte and Sörbom, “Why Did It Not Happen Here?” 105.
- 18.
Benke Carlsson, Peter Johansson and Pär Wickholm, Svensk punk 1977–81: Varför tror du vi låter som vi låter… (Stockholm: Atlas, 2004), 19; Erik Hannerz, Performing Punk: Subcultural Authentications and the Positioning of the Mainstream (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2013), 164–165.
- 19.
Per Dannefjord and Magnus Eriksson, “Punk, klass och karriär,” Arkiv: Tidskrift för samhällsanalys, no. 1 (2013): 97–100; Hannerz, Performing Punk, 40–43, 193–195.
- 20.
Erik Hannerz and Mattias Persson, “Punk in Sweden,” in Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Volume XI, eds. Paolo Prato and David Horn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017); Peter Kagerland, Ny våg: Svensk punk / new wave / synth 1977–1982 (Stockholm: Premium Publishing, 2012), 202–207.
- 21.
Matthew Worley, No Future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture, 1976–1984 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 3–5; Hannerz, Performing Punk, 163–164.
- 22.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Routledge, 1979), 26, 102, 116–117.
- 23.
Ebba Grön, “Sno från de rika,” We’re Only in It for the Drugs! (Mistlur, 1979).
- 24.
Ebba Grön, “Staten och kapitalet,” Ung & kåt / Staten & kapitalet (Mistlur, 1980).
- 25.
Ebba Grön, “Slicka uppåt, sparka neråt!,” Kärlek & uppror (Mistlur, 1981).
- 26.
Brand no. 19, “Våldet i skolan” (1988).
- 27.
Sverker Hyltén-Cavallius, “Progg: Utopia and Chronotope,” in Made in Sweden (London: Routledge, 2016).
- 28.
Philip Lalander and Jonas Qvarsebo, Punk i Peking: Motstånd, attityd och mening (Malmö: Peking studio, 2014), 98, 102; David Andersson, Du har inte en chans. Ta den!: Råpunk – en narrativ studie av ett annorlunda svenskt 1980-tal (Linköping: Linköping Univeristy (Master’s thesis), 2021), 12–15.
- 29.
Ian Glasper, The Day the Country Died: A History of Anarcho Punk (London: PM Press, 2007), 11–31; Richard Cross, “‘The Hippies Now Wear Black’: Crass and the Anarcho-Punk Movement, 1977–1984,” Socialist History 26 (2004).
- 30.
Brian Cogan, “‘Do They Owe Us a Living? Of Course They Do!’ Crass, Throbbing Gristle, and Anarchy and Radicalism in Early English Punk Rock,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 1, no. 2 (2007): 80–81.
- 31.
Kirsty Lohman and Matthew Worley, “Bloody Revolutions, Fascist Dreams, Anarchy and Peace: Crass, Rondos and the Politics of Punk, 1977–84,” Britain and the World 11, no. 1 (2018): 53.
- 32.
Total Brand no. 18, “Tunga Prylar: Class War” (1988): 9.
- 33.
I here focus on MOB 47 and Anti-Cimex since they were frequently mentioned in Brand, although the Swedish anarcho-punk scene also included notable bands like Svart Parad, Shitlickers, Asocial, and Moderat likvidation. See Glasper, The Day the Country Died, 682; Daniel Ekeroth, Swedish Death Metal (New York: Bazillion Points Books, 2008), 19–21; Kagerland, Ny våg, 94–96; Hannerz and Persson, “Punk in Sweden”.
- 34.
MOB 47, “Res dig mot överheten,” Kärnvapenattack (Röj Records, 1984).
- 35.
Lång, Drömmen om det ouppnåeliga, 233–236.
- 36.
Total Brand no. 4, “Motkultur” (1986); Total Brand no. 5 (1986); Total Brand no. 6, “Motkultur: Punk Is dead” (1986).
- 37.
See Jim Donaghey, Will Boisseau and Caroline Kaltefleiter, “Introduction: Smash the System!,” in Smash the System! Punk Anarchism as a Culture of Resistance, eds. Jim Donaghey, Will Boisseau and Caroline Kaltefleiter (Active Distribution, 2022).
- 38.
Total Brand no. 16, “De autonoma: En politisk tendens” (1987): 11.
- 39.
Ebba Grön, “Staten och kapitalet.”
- 40.
Brand no. 20, “Rösta för fan inte på miljöpartiet” (1988): 5.
- 41.
David Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009), 203.
- 42.
Lorenzo Bosi and Lorenzo Zamponi, “Paths Toward the Same Form of Collective Action: Direct Social Action in Times of Crisis in Italy,” Social Forces 99, no. 2 (2020); Vicente Ordóñez, “Direct action,” in Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach, eds. Benjamin Franks, Nathan Jun and Leonard Williams (New York: Routledge, 2018), 115–116; Markus Lundström, The Making of Resistance: Brazil’s Landless Movement and Narrative Enactment (Cham: Springer, 2017), 115–116.
- 43.
Total Brand no. 6, “Apati!” (1986).
- 44.
Kagerland, Ny våg, 203, 324. See also lyrics to the songs Ebba Grön, “We’re Only in It for the Drugs no. 1,” We’re Only in It for the Drugs! (Mistlur, 1979); KSMB, “Förortsbarn,” Bakverk 80 (MNW, 1979); KSMB, “Tidens tempo,” Aktion (MNW, 1980).
- 45.
Basta no. 16–17, “Den sanna historien om Oasen” (1980); See also Dominika Polanska and Mathias Wåg, “De svenska husockupationernas 50-åriga historia,” in Ockuperat!: Svenska husockupationer 1968–2018, eds. Dominika Polanska and Mathias Wåg (Stockholm: Verbal, 2019), 22–24.
- 46.
Dominika Polanska, Contentious Politics and the Welfare State: Squatting in Sweden (New York: Routledge, 2019), 10–16.
- 47.
Martin Ericsson, “Ockuperat område: Striden om brandstationen i Jönköping 1982,” in Politik underifrån: Kollektiva konfrontationer under Sveriges 1900-tal, eds. Andrés Brink Pinto and Martin Ericsson (Lund: Arkiv förlag, 2016).
- 48.
Brand no., “Labour vrider tiden bakåt” (1976); Brand no. 13–14, “Järnet” (1979); Basta no. 16–17, “Odlad mark ska förbli odlad” (1980); Brand no. 9–10, “Från utopi till direkt aktion” (1978).
- 49.
Total Brand no. 3, “Nyheter från Västtyskland” (1986); Total Brand no. 4, “Enkeltur “Enkehuset”” (1986); Total Brand no. 7, “BZ nytt: Köpenhamn” (1986); Total Brand no. 18, “Haffenstrasse” (1988).
- 50.
Polanska, 12.
- 51.
Total Brand no. 12, “BZ nytt: Tavastgatan Göteborg” (1987); Total Brand no. 17, “BZ nytt: Haga-ockupanter åker ut!!!” (1988).
- 52.
Total Brand no. 22, “Blåsningen” (1988); Total Brand no. 21, “Kampen om Ultra” (1988).
- 53.
See Ishva Minefee and Marcelo Bucheli, “MNC Responses to International NGO Activist Campaigns: Evidence From Royal Dutch/Shell in Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of International Business Studies 52, no. 5 (2021).
- 54.
Flemming Mikkelsen and Rene Karpantschof, “Youth as a Political Movement: Development of the Squatters’ and Autonomous Movement in Copenhagen,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25, no. 3 (2001): 617.
- 55.
Total Brand no. 13, “Solidaritet med Steve Biko: Aktionerna. Reaktionerna. Följderna” (1987).
- 56.
Total Brand no. 14, “Burn Shell to hell” (1987).
- 57.
Brand no. 29, “Den nya folkrörelsen” (1989).
- 58.
George Katsiaficas, “Preface,” in The City Is Ours: Squatting and Autonomous Movements in Europe from the 1970s to the Present, eds. Bart Van Der Steen, Ask Katzeff and Leendert van Hoogenhuijze (Oakland: PM Press, 2014).
- 59.
Total Brand no. 16 (1987): 11.
- 60.
Brand no. Valextra, “Rösta på alla partierna” (1982); For a historical analysis of anarchist perspectives on voting, see Markus Lundström, “‘The Ballot Humbug’: Anarchist Women and Women’s Suffrage,” Moving the Social 66 (2022).
- 61.
Brand no. 19, “Vi röstar inte!” (1988).
- 62.
MOB 47, “Vägra rösta!,” Stockholmsmangel (n/a, 1985).
- 63.
MOB 47, “Vi kan,” Sjuk värld (Ägg Tapes, 1984).
- 64.
See for instance Brand no. 38, “Antiparlamentarismen går segrande fram” (1920); Brand no. 40, “Valmakarna kväka” (1920); Brand no. 3, “Varför jag inte röstar” (1963); Brand no. 3, “Anarkism och parlamentarism” (1966); See also Lång, Drömmen om det ouppnåeliga, 227, 239–240; Fernström, Ungsocialismen 346.
- 65.
Albert Jensen, Politikens orimlighet (Lysekil: Tryckeri för Vestkusten, 1908), 10.
- 66.
Brand no. 40 (1920); Brand no. 40 (1920); Brand no. 38 (1921); Jensen’s vote-refusal was also elaborated in the anarcho-syndicalist journal Red Flags: Röda fanor, “Ungsocialisternas agitation för valstrejk” (1920); Röda fanor, “Böra ungsocialisterna revidera sin åskådning?” (October 1921); Röda fanor, “Antiparlamentarismen” (September 1921).
- 67.
Brand no. 22, “Valet är en illusion” (1988).
- 68.
See Nathan Jun, “Freedom,” in Anarchism: A Conceptual Approach, eds. Benjamin Franks, Nathan Jun and Leonard Williams (New York: Routledge, 2018), 49–56.
- 69.
MOB 47, “Animal Liberation,” Kärnvapenattack (Röj Records, 1984).
- 70.
Kerstin Jacobsson and Jonas Lindblom, Animal Rights Activism: A Moral-Sociological Perspective on Social Movements (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 25–26; Total Brand no. 17, “Djurens befrielsefront: Organisationen vars målsättning är att inte finnas till” (1988).
- 71.
Total Brand no. 15, “ALF: Animal Liberation Front” (1987).
- 72.
Total Brand no. 17 (1988).
- 73.
See for instance Brand no. 26, “Gnistor” (1989); Brand no. 31, “Aktioner” (1989); Brand no. 21, “Gnistor” (1988).
- 74.
Brand no. 24 (1988).
- 75.
Brandfaran no. 4, “Rebell med brutet gevär” (1983); Brandfaran no. 1, “De sanna krigshjältarna…” (1984); Brand no. 14, “Även den hårdaste snäcka går att knäcka” (1988).
- 76.
Basta no. 15, “Brev från andra sidan gallret” (1980).
- 77.
Total Brand no. 10, “A-mötet” (1987).
- 78.
Basta no. 16–17, “Överlevnadssamhället: Från den vilda strejken till den allmäna självförvaltningen” (1980); Brandfaran no. 2, “A-socialen: Vägra arbete, vägra arbetsplikt” (1984); Brandfaran no. 3, “Arbetslösheten och det verkliga eländet” (1984); Brandfaran no. 2, “Levande revolution” (1984).
- 79.
Brandfaran no. 3, “De arbetsskyggas manifest” (1984).
- 80.
Lohman and Worley, Britain and the World, 60.
- 81.
Dannefjord and Eriksson, “Punk, klass och karriär,” 99–100; Lalander and Qvarsebo, Punk i Peking, 33–35, 97–99.
- 82.
Hannerz, Performing Punk, 58.
- 83.
Matthew Worley, “Punk, Politics and British (Fan) Zines, 1976–84: “While the World Was Dying, Did You Wonder Why?”,” History Workshop Journal 79, no. 1 (2015); Ian Moran, “Punk: The Do-It-Yourself Subculture,” Social Sciences Journal 10, no. 1 (2010); Ryan Moore, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Listen to Corporate Rock: Punk as a Field of Cultural Production,” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 36, no. 4 (2007); Steven Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001), 318–329.
- 84.
Lohman and Worley, Britain and the World, 60.
- 85.
Dannefjord and Eriksson, “Punk, klass och karriär,” 106–108; Lalander and Qvarsebo, Punk i Peking, 98–99.
- 86.
Andersson, Du har inte en chans, 12–13.
- 87.
Total Brand no. 6 (1986): 16.
- 88.
Markus Lundström, “Political Imaginations of Community Kitchens in Sweden,” Critical Sociology 49, no. 2 (2023).
- 89.
See for instance Total Brand no. 7, “Enkelbiljett genom Sverige: Glädjetåget” (1986): 10.
- 90.
Dylan Clark, “The Raw and the Rotten: Punk Cuisine,” Ethnology 43, no. 1 (2004).
- 91.
Sarah Fessenden, “Food Is a Right Not a Privilege: Punk Anarchism, Ephemerality, and Seeding Change in Vancouver,” in Emergent Spaces: Change and Innovation in Small Urban Spaces, ed. Petra Kuppinger (Cham: Springer, 2021).
- 92.
Lara Monticelli, “On the Necessity of Prefigurative Politics,” Thesis Eleven 167, no. 1 (2021).
- 93.
Marianne Maeckelbergh, “The Prefigurative Turn: The Time and Place of Social Movement Practice,” in Social Sciences for an Other Politics: Women Theorizing Without Parachutes, ed. Ana Cecilia Dinerstein (Cham: Springer, 2016), 122.
- 94.
Luke Yates, “Prefigurative Politics and Social Movement Strategy: The Roles of Prefiguration in the Reproduction, Mobilisation and Coordination of Movements,” Political Studies 69, no. 4 (2020): 1.
- 95.
Sex Pistols, “God Save the Queen,” Never Mind the Bollocks. Here’s the Sex Pistols (Virgin Records, 1977).
- 96.
Matthew Worley, “Riotous Assembly: British Punk’s Cultural Diaspora in the Summer of’81,” in A European Youth Revolt: European Perspectives on Youth Protest and Social Movements in the 1980s, eds. Knud Andresen and Bart van der Steen (Cham: Springer, 2016), 220–225.
- 97.
Ebba Grön, “Vad ska du bli?” Vad ska du bli? / Häng Gud (Mistlur, 1979).
- 98.
Total Brand no. 18 (1988); cf. Jim Donaghey, “The “Punk Anarchisms” of Class War and CrimethInc.,” Journal of Political Ideologies 25, no. 2 (2020): 118–119.
- 99.
Karin Jonsson, Fångna i begreppen?: Revolution, tid och politik i svensk socialistisk press 1917–1924 (Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2017), 86–97; Fernström, Ungsocialismen 116–121; Lång, Drömmen om det ouppnåeliga, 7–8.
- 100.
Irene Andersson, “Antimilitaristic Antiwar Committees in Sweden 1934–1936: A Question of Fear and Masculinity,” in Gender, War and Peace: Breaking Up the Borderlines, eds. Anders Ahlbäck and Fia Sundevall (Joensuu: University Press of Eastern Finland, 2014).
- 101.
Carl Johan Björklund, Jag tror inte på våldet: Ett diskussionsinlägg (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Brand, 1939).
- 102.
Brandfaran no. 3, “Aktiv totalvägran” (1984); Brandfaran no. 4 (1983).
- 103.
Total Brand no. 18, “Våga vägra” (1988): 30.
- 104.
Ebba Grön, “Totalvägra,” We’re Only in It for the Drugs! (Mistlur, 1979); KSMB, “Militärlåten,” Bakverk 80 (MNW, 1979).
- 105.
Anti-Cimex, “Anti-Cimex,” Anarkist attack EP (BULLSHIT, 1982).
- 106.
Magnus Hjort, Hotet från vänster: Säkerhetstjänsternas övervakning av kommunister, anarkister m.m. 1965–2002 (Stockholm: Fritzes, 2002), 379–380.
- 107.
Hjort, Hotet från vänster, 324–343; SÄPO, Våldsam politisk extremism: Antidemokratiska grupperingar på yttersta höger- och vänsterkanten (Stockholm: Säkerhetspolisen, 2009), 11, 42–43; Jämte and Sörbom, “Why Did It Not Happen Here?” 105–107.
- 108.
SÄPO, quoted in Hjort, 330–331.
- 109.
Hjort, Hotet från vänster, 379–380.
- 110.
Hjort, Hotet från vänster, 335–336.
- 111.
Total Brand no. 7, “BZ nytt: Luntmakargatan, Stockholm” (1986).
- 112.
SÄPO, quoted in Hjort, Hotet från vänster, 333.
- 113.
Ebba Grön, “Skjut en snut,” Oasen (MNW, 1979); Ebba Grön, “Beväpna er!,” We’re Only in It for the Drugs! (Mistlur, 1979).
- 114.
Dan Hansén and Jens Nordqvist, Kommando Holger Meins: Dramat på västtyska ambassaden och Operation Leo (Stockholm: Ordfront, 2005), 277–285.
- 115.
Staffan Björkman, Thåström – Stå aldrig still. En bok om Joakim Thåström: Samlade reportage, intervjuer, artiklar och recensioner (Göteborg: Reverb, 2010), 10.
- 116.
Total Brand no. 12, “Anarki & våld” (1987): 17; Brand no. 27–28, “Baader-Meinhof komplexet” (1989).
- 117.
Hjort, Hotet från vänster, 324.
- 118.
Total Brand no. 18 (1988): 9.
- 119.
Total Brand no. 8–9, “Vårt motstånd var en seger” (1986): 15.
- 120.
FOI, Den digitala kampen: Autonoma rörelser på nätet (Stockholm: Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut, 2018); Olof Petersson, Demokratins motståndare: Rapport MSB896 (Stockholm: Myndigheten för samhällsskydd och beredskap, 2015); CVE, Den autonoma miljön (Stockholm: Brottsförebyggande rådet / CVE – Center mot våldsbejakande extremism, 2020).
- 121.
Crass, “Punk Is Dead,” The Feeding of the 5000 (Southern Studios, 1978).
- 122.
The anarchist historiographer George Woodcock made this declaration in 1962 but later revised it while watching the 1968-movement arise. See George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1962); Allan Antliff, “George Woodcock on ‘The Anarchist Critic’,” Anarchist Studies 23, no. 1 (2015).
- 123.
Hans Ruin, Being with the Dead: Burial, Ancestral Politics, and the Roots of Historical Consciousness (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2018), 111.
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Lundström, M. (2023). When Anarchism Met Punk. In: Hill, H., Pinto, A.B. (eds) Social Movements in 1980s Sweden. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27370-4_4
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