On 14 May, it will be exactly 90 years since a demonstration in Ådalen, the area along the Ångerman river on Sweden’s High Coast marched from Frånö towards Lunde. The demonstration was long, and thousands walked on small roads in the fine spring weather. But once in Lunde, the military was waiting with live ammunition — before the clock struck three, five workers had been killed. The shots in Ådalen changed Sweden and the following year, the Social Democrats began their more than 40 years of reign in government.
The military, which acted on behalf of provocative employers, had been ordered to Lunde to protect armed strikebreakers — scabs. The government, led by the Liberal, C.G. Ekman, and capitalism bear the ultimate responsibility for the shots in Ådalen 90 years ago. The fatal shootings had their origin in the deep global capitalist crisis that followed the stock market crash in the US in October 1929. World trade collapsed and Ådalen’s forest industries — lumber, pulp and paper mills — were hit hard.
In the early 1930s, mass unemployment prevailed, and the employers wanted to use the crisis to push back Ådalen’s strong labour movement, which had a long history of struggle behind it. During the years 1917–18, revolutionary storms had swept over Ådalen, and the Communist Party had a strong foothold here.
“For the victory of the Marma workers!”, it said on a banner at the front of a demonstration in Ådalen the day before the fatal shots were fired. The banner expressed support for the workers’ fight against wage cuts at Marma-Långrör’s pulp mill outside Söderhamn, a coastal town 226 km north of Sweden’s capital Stockholm and close to 200 km south of Ådalen.
The battle and the strike at Marma-Långrör’s pulp mill already begun during the summer of 1930 and after management arbitrarily cut the pay of the workers who performed repair work, the workplace was put under a blockade in October that same year. The pulp mill was part of the Marma-Långrör Group, which was owned by the Versteegh family, one of the richest families of the time. In Ådalen, the Versteegh-Graninge Group owned forests, saw-mills and factories.
The strike by the paper and pulp workers was gradually escalated with transport blockades and sympathy strikes. In January 1931, sympathy strikes began at Graningverken’s sawmills and factories in Ådalen. "Due to a labour dispute which has been going since the summer of 1930 at Långrör’s sulphate factory, sympathy strikes broke out in January 1931 at the sulphate factory in Sandviken and the sulphate factory in Utansjö, both located by the Ångerman river in Västernorrland County”, an official report would later state.
Sympathy strikes in Ådalen would help to break the Versteeghs who had the full support of the employers’ association SAF, today the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, even though not actually belonging to SAF.
The aim of the employers was to force the Marma workers into submission, thereby paving the way for widespread pay cuts.
When the ice had thawed, the forest industry products that awaited loading would be loaded on the boats “whatever happens,” as a representative of the employers’ strikebreaker organisation for the docks put it. In the weeks before the fatal shootings in Ådalen, the employers had used the same tactics against striking workers in Halmstad. Armed strikebreakers were called in to crush the strike, which in turn provoked what was almost a local uprising in Halmstad. After the attack was repulsed and an agreement concluded in early May, many of the Halmstad strikebreakers were recruited to Ådalen.
On 12 May, just over 60 strikebreakers were transported to Ådalen, where they were allowed to live in the Stuveribolaget’s (the loading company) barracks — “The Villa”. There they were welcomed by the manager of Sandviken’s sulphate factory and the county police chief, Sune Påhlman. “Both the authorities and the Stuveribolaget knew that the strikebreakers were armed,” writes Birger Norman in his ground-breaking book, Ådalen 31.
As soon as the news came that the strikebreakers had arrived, the atmosphere became electrified. The Social Democratic newspaper — Nya Norrland [The New Norrland] — wrote in its editorial that: “The filling of the notorious strikebreaker villa in Lunde is a clarion call to all workers in Ådalen”.
The Communist Party (SKP), who were also known as “the Silléners” and who had a strong position in Ådalen called for a general strike and demonstration on the morning of 13 May with a gathering in Kramfors at 12. After the SKP split in 1929 and until 1934, there were two parties with the same name and initials. One was led by Karl Kilbom who had been expelled by the Stalin-controlled Communist International (Comintern) and the second SKP, the Comintern party, was called the “Silléners” after the party leader, Hugo Sillén.
The leaflets that were distributed before the demonstration on 13 May "would have under other circumstances hardly attracted any interest, let alone gotten the masses into motion. But the situation in Ådalen was such that the stencilled piece of paper seemed to mobilise the workers. The population and especially the senses of working people were in uproar in the face of the immense challenge that the strikebreaker invasion meant”, wrote SKP’s (Comintern) party secretary, Fritjof Lager, in his booklet, “Ådalen 1931”.
After a brief meeting, the demonstration started out with the aim of confronting the strikebreakers who were about to unload the steamer, Milos. Around 500 took part and they managed to get into the factory area and scare away most of the scabs. They did, however, get hold of some of them, who had tried to hide in the Milos. They were released after promising to return home again, but that promise was worth nothing. “At the same time as the demonstration, led by a 14-man horn orchestra, set off from the factory area, where the strikebreakers were confronted, those who had been frightened away from Sandvik’s factory area arrived in Lunde,” says Konrad Östberg, then editor of Nya Norrland, in "Ådalshändelserna — en ögonvittnesskildring” [The Ådalen Events — an eyewitness report].
On the same day, the military was called in. About 60 soldiers and officers were sent to protect the strikebreakers. These were not ordinary conscripts but came mainly from an officer training corps under the command of Captain Nils Mesterton. Before they were sent to Lunde, they had been urged to: “Remember one thing — no new Seskarö”. On Seskarö island outside Haparanda up in the north, the workers had, in 1917, disarmed the military sent to stop protests against food shortages.
First strikebreakers and then the military, including a machine gun platoon — it is difficult to find a more challenging provocation against workers’ struggle. When the military arrived in the evening towards midnight, they were met by demonstrations and appeals to show solidarity with the workers’ struggle.
On 14 May (Ascension Day — a public holiday in Sweden), thousands gathered for a meeting in Frånö announced by the Transport Union to discuss how to respond to the provocations. At the meeting Axel Nordström, one of the Silléners’ foremost figures in Ådalen, proposed a general strike to demand the withdrawal of the strikebreakers. The meeting supported the call for a strike, and also elected an action committee led by Axel Nordström to co-ordinate the struggle. Then the meeting turned into a spontaneous march towards Lunde and the strikebreakers. While the bulk of the meeting participants departed, the elected union representatives and others, among them Axel Nordström, remained behind to discuss how the general strike was going to be organised.
It was thus in many ways a spontaneous demonstration that began its way towards Lunde. Perhaps as many as 8,000 — some say 10,000 — joined the nearly two-kilometre-long demonstration.
Around the same time as the demonstration started, the governor decided, against the express wishes of the SAF, that the activities of the strikebreakers must cease. But the police chief and the military took no notice.
In Lunde, the demonstration was stopped and soon the first shots were fired. Then Captain Mesterton commanded “Open fire!”.
“In a few minutes it was over. Five people were shot dead and as many were wounded, on the gravel road, down towards the docks, there in Lunde ”, begins Roger Johansson in his incisive book, “Ådalen 1931 och kampen om historien” [Ådalen 1931 and the struggle for history].
One of the dead was Eira Söderberg, who had not participated in the demonstration, but was on a plot of land nearby. A total of 37 shots were fired. The military, who had medical equipment, did nothing to help the wounded.
The news of these few minutes of death immediately created a “completely revolutionary atmosphere” in Ådalen", according to the county governor. When the news reached the rest of the country, workers began to stop working.
“Already on the morning of 15 May, all work among the construction workers in Stockholm was shutdown. Reports of work stoppages around the country flowed in during the day to LO, one of the Swedish Trade Union Confederations and the various union offices. Ny Dag [New Day — the SKP’s newspaper] had the same morning published a manifesto which ‘called for protest strikes against the murder of workers in Ådalen’. It was a “call that echoed the mood among large parts of the trade union movement,” writes Roger Johansson. The attempts by the right to blame the shootings on the workers only added to the anger.
On the evening of 15 May, 150,000 demonstrated in Stockholm in the largest workers’ march ever. The number of participants was almost as many as the number of union members in Stockholm. The demonstration was, according to the newspaper Social-Demokraten [the Social-Democrat], “the people’s judgement on capitalism and militarism.”
In Ådalen, the general strike was complete, and for a few days, it was the workers who ruled the area. When four of the victims were buried on 21 May — those from Ådalen — 25,000 people gathered to say a final farewell. The fifth victim was buried in his hometown, Västervik.
The minutes of death in Ådalen 90 years ago threw society into what can be described as a pre-revolutionary crisis. The shootings had brutally shown how far the capitalist class and the state were prepared to go to impose their diktats and wage reduction policies on the workers.
The Social Democrats, which at the time was still a workers’ party with a bourgeois leadership, were divided. Many Social Democratic workers wanted, like their Communist comrades, the anger against the shootings to be manifested into a general strike against the government and against the capitalist system, which bore ultimate responsibility. But the Social Democratic leadership and, not least the leadership of the LO, feared that the radicalisation and the mood of revolt would create an insurmountable obstacle to working closely with the employers and to future dealings with the bourgeois parties.
“It was clear that the Social Democratic leadership did not want to be involved in a repeat of the campaign against Ekman [the Prime Minister] similar to the one run together with LO against the legislation on collective agreements and Labour Court (in 1928),” points out Roger Johansson.
In the fight against the anti-strike clauses that were included in the law on collective agreements and the establishment of the Labour Court, the LO leadership had been forced to announce a political strike and demonstrate in the afternoon of 22 March against the government’s proposal. It was the same day that the new laws were adopted by the parliament. But after the new laws were pushed through, the opposition of the LO and the Social Democrats ceased. Instead, an increasing institutionalised class co-operation emerged, which was later renamed the “Swedish model”.
The leadership of the LO and the Social Democrats were totally opposed to the demands to declare a general strike in response to the fatal shots. The appeal for “restraint” was increasingly followed by vicious attacks on the Communists who were accused of being complicit in what happened in Ådalen. The Social Democratic and LO leadership limited themselves to demanding a commission of inquiry and announcing five minutes of silence at the time of the funeral on 21 May, which the bourgeois establishment quickly approved.
The SKP would have been able to grow rapidly after 1931, but the party’s sectarianism and its ultra-left politics prevented this and played into the hands of the Social Democratic and LO.
The mood for struggle in 1931, however, forced the LO leadership to temporarily “pause” the class co-operation project that had been initiated. Against the will of the LO leadership, the LO Congress voted in August 1931 to leave the so-called Labour Peace Congress, which was formed in the late 1920s. The fact that LO’s chairman, Edvard Johansson, in his introductory speech at the same congress did not say a word about Ådalen was a telling silence for which he received sharp criticism. Later, in 1933, Johansson claimed that he had always considered the Communists as responsible for the events of 14 May 1931.
When the shots no longer echoed as strongly, the LO and Social Democratic leadership made it clear that they believed that it was actually the Communists who were to blame for the bloodshed. It was not until the left-wave and workers’ struggle of the 1970s that this perception changed.
After Ådalen 1931, workers were also fired upon by police in Sandarne and Klemensnäs in 1932. Those who ordered the shots in Ådalen were never convicted. Captain Mesterton even received damages after the “courts” considered that he had been slandered.
Axel Nordström was, however, sentenced to 2 years and 6 months’ hard labour for leading the demonstration and confrontation with the strikebreakers on 13 May. Other workers were also sentenced to hard labour for protesting against the strikebreaking. Others were convicted of crimes against the freedom of the press — for, among other things, calling Mesterton a murderer.
The demand for amnesty for those convicted was an important demand in the election campaign in 1932. Even the Social Democrats supported that demand. But when the election was over and the Social Democrats had formed a government, partly as a result of Ådalen the year before, the demands for amnesty were abandoned.
Seventy years after Ådalen 1931, the police used live ammunition against protesters in Gothenburg in 2001. During the 2000s and especially in recent years, the state’s hard core — the police and military — has been reinforced. A law from 2006 made it possible for the police to request support from the military in a crisis situation and “since then, the police and the military’s special force have also practiced together regularly” (the Swedish national public television broadcaster SVT, 19 February 2019).
The new repressive laws of the state, including new restrictions on the right to strike, are part of capitalism’s and the state’s preparations for the new bitter class struggles that are imminent.
Despite all attempts to rewrite history and hide the truth about Ådalen 1931, the echo of the fatal shots will never subside.
The Social Democrats’ election victory in 1932 was the beginning of a more than 40-year-long reign in government that changed Sweden. But since the politics of the Social Democrats never challenged capitalism, progress was rolled back when capitalism stagnated and the Social Democrats began introducing cutbacks and privatising the welfare state that had been built up, resulting in the bourgeoisification of the party.
Today’s struggle for the socialist rebirth of the labour movement needs to be permeated by the same will to fight and the solidarity that led the workers to strike and demonstrate in Ådalen in May 1931 for the victory of the striking in workers in Marmaverken. Never forget them.
