Chapter 1. Communist Concepts in Crisis

This chapter deals roughly with the period from 1956 to 1960, when the communist parties where still the dominating force left of social democracy, before the rise of the New Left. It will give a short overview of the main features and differences concerning the concept of nation in the Danish and Swedish communist parties respectively, particularly the view of the party's role in relation to the nation, and show how these concepts entered a period of crisis.

After de-Stalinisation and the invasion of Hungary, the Soviet Union had lost its credibility as the guarantor of peace and progress on the global level. On the national level, the connection to the Eastern bloc became a liability that hampered the political power of the communist parties.

Chapter 2. Adaption and Innovation

The crisis of communism at around 1960 was a watershed in the history of the left. Within the world communist movement, the Sino-Soviet split and attempts to form a specific Western European communist identity undermined the previous monolithic image of communism. At the same time, decolonisation and the rise of the non-aligned movement provided new perspectives that replaced the bipolarity of the cold war.

In Western Europe and the USA, New Left groups began to emerge in the wake of the invasion of Hungary and the twentieth congress of the CPSU or in connection with the civil rights and peace movements. For the most part, these groups came out of the communist movement, either as splinter parties, like the Danish SF, or as internal reform attempts, like the Swedish communists, or they came out of intellectual milieux connected with the communist movement as more or less devoted 'fellow-travellers.'

Chapter 3. Contesting Pragmatism

At this time, the baby boomers had come of age. The big generation born in the 1940s now entered adult - or semi-adult - society filling the expanding educational systems and providing the market with a large and fairly affluent group of consumers. Cultural phenomena such as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones became signals of a new and distinctively young lifestyle.

Against the background of an ageing political elite and the lifestyle of the parents' generation, the baby boomers appeared not only to have a different aesthetic taste, but also a completely different conception of society and their role in it. They had grown up in a world so politically and technically different from that of the pre-war years that their experience seemed almost incompatible with that of prior generations.1 Contemporaries used the term 'generation gap' to describe this mismatch between the world views of the old and the young.

Chapter 4. Turning Inwards

On the threshold of the 1970s, the left had developed very fixed concepts of capitalism as a system of exploitation and oppression. Whereas the 1960s in many ways had been the culmination of capitalism as it had developed since the Great Depression, the 1970s would see a crisis and transformation of capitalism, which at first seemed to prove its inherent faults, but later would evolve beyond the concepts of the left.

Signs of crisis had been appearing since the late 1960s, not only through the global unrest of 1968; there were also indicators that the global economic system and Keynesian planning did not guarantee a crisis-free capitalism for the future.

Chapter 5. The End of the Road

At the end of the 1970s, the left had lost its hegemony in the public debate. It was no longer the place where the problems of society were being formulated and spread to the rest of the political field.

Also, it was increasingly difficult to recruit new members to the groupuscules; it was even hard to keep the members that were already there.

Chapter 6. Summary, Conclusion, and Outlook

These final remarks are divided into three parts. First there is a thorough summary to recapitulate the history that has been told in the preceding five chapters and emphasise the most important points for the following considerations. The summary will deal with the overarching narrative to separate it from the subplots of the individual chapters, as well as summarising the differences and similarities between Denmark and Sweden.

The second part will be a closer consideration of the theoretical perspective of the research, namely, the relationship between crisis and conceptual change. The third and largest part will present a short outlook on the left after the implosion in the late 1970s.