Published by EH.Net (May 2022).

Jenny Jansson. *Crafting the Movement: Identity Entrepreneurs in the
Swedish Trade Union Movement, 1920–1940.* Ithaca, NY and London: ILR Press,
an imprint of Cornell University Press, 2020. xi + 200 pp. $19.95
(paperback), ISBN 978-1501750014.

Reviewed for EH.net by Erik Bengtsson, Associate Professor of Economic
History, Lund University.



The first sentence of this book is: “The Swedish reformist labor movement
of the twentieth century constitutes a success story.” Jansson, a political
scientist at Uppsala University, says, “A strong Social Democratic
Party–*Socialdemokratiska
arbetarpartiet* (SAP)—and high union density paved the way for an extensive
and comprehensive welfare state and diminishing wage inequality,” and that
a “key component” in this success is “the labor movement\’s extraordinary
ability to mobilize the majority of the working class early on in its
mission.” The purpose of Jansson’s book is to explain why the Swedish trade
union movement chose a reformist way in the interwar period when, after the
radical challenges of the 1910s (Syndicalism, Communism), they had to
handle radical critiques and dissent. The authors suggests that the
reformist way was connected to the success of the Swedish labor movement.

Her argument centers on the actions and strategies of trade union leaders,
who in Jansson’s parlance acted as “identity entrepreneurs.” The trade
union leaders recognized competition from the radical trade union
confederation SAC (founded in 1910) and from communists in their own unions
and acted strategically to reinforce a reformist identity among rank and
file trade unionists.

After an introductory chapter which briefly presents the context and the
argument, chapter 2 gives a more comprehensive context under the headline
of “Problems identified by the LO leadership.” Here we are introduced to
the syndicalist unions and to the communists challenging reformist
leadership within the dominant LO (*Landsorganisationen*, or Trade Union
Confederation) federation of unions. Chapter 3, “A plan for identity
management,” studies the LO leadership in the early 1920s and how they
identified the radical challenges and handled them. The LO leaders
strengthened their control over the Workers’ Educational Association (ABF),
created a new trade union magazine to spread news and ideology to
unionists, reinforced reformist agitation among rank-and-file unionists and
non-unionized workers, and in 1929 started a central school (Brunnsvik) for
trade union education. Chapter 4 analyzes identity construction in the
educational materials spread among LO members through the Workers’
Educational Association. The focus is on the syllabi and literature for the
courses “Trade union studies” and “Organizational studies.” Chapter 5,
“Implementing the education strategy,” which is the longest chapter,
combines the national level with the local level as it presents the
evolution of workers’ education in Sweden in the 1920s and 1930s on the
aggregate level, as well as a local study of workers’ education in the mill
town of Skutskär, dominated by the Stora Kopparberg corporation. Chapter 6,
clocking in at 10 pages, provides the conclusions of the book.

*Crafting the Movement* is a focused, interesting study of the role of
workers’ education in the Swedish labor movement. It is a slim volume which
presents its argument in a lean, efficient way. On the way, we learn much
about the role of workers’ education in the history of Swedish Social
Democracy. However, there is also a problem with the slimness of the
presentation, not on the empirical level but for the overarching argument
to convince. Jansson states, with reference to research in organization
studies, that “the process of identity formation is never completely
top-down because \’organizational members are not reducible to passive
consumers of managerially designed and designated identities\’.” (p. 45)
But in the conclusions to another chapter, she states that “Organizational
members can indeed be controlled through identity formation.” (p. 99) In
practice, the analysis to a high degree follows the latter formulation:
organization leaders are front and center in the analysis, and the rank and
file appear to be an anonymous mass that is molded by the leaders to the
right reformist way of thinking.

Jansson presents the years around 1920 as a “critical juncture” (pp. 43,
157) for the Swedish labor movement, choosing between reformism and
revolutionary ways, but I would argue that a fuller explanation of the
earlier history would show that the revolutionary way was less likely as an
alternative than it seems in Jansson’s account. There were surely
communists and syndicalists in Sweden, but for historical reasons, they
never became as powerful as in, say, Germany, Italy, or Spain. Geoff Eley,
in the classic survey of European labor movements *Forging Democracy *(2002),
discussed why some national labor movements became predominantly
revolutionary and others predominantly reformist. Eley showed how late
extensions of suffrage fostered cooperation between liberal and labor
parties, and the Swedish case, where national suffrage before 1909 was
given only to one fifth of adult men and no women, is a very good example
of this. As Eley points out, in Sweden, Liberals and Socialists
collaborated around the overarching aim of universal suffrage in the 1890s,
1900s and 1910s, and this strengthened the reformist vein in the SAP (Eley,
pp. 67–68). We should remember that it was a Liberal-Social Democratic
coalition government that carried through the reform of universal suffrage
in 1918. Historians like Madeleine Hurd (*Public Spheres, Public Mores, and
Democracy: Hamburg and Stockholm, 1870-1914*, 2000) and Sven Lundkvist
(*Folkrörelserna
i det svenska samhället 1850–1920*, 1977) have also shown how the Swedish
labor movement was colored by its decades of collaboration with Liberals,
and studies of workers’ libraries by Marion Leffler (*Böcker, bildning,
makt: Arbetare, borgare och bildningens roll i klassformeringen i Lund och
Helsingborg 1860-1901*, 1999), Hans Larsson (*Tidstecken : Stockholms
arbetarbibliotek och samhällskroppens utformning, 1892-1927*, 1989) and
others have shown the degree of “bourgeois” influence on workers’ reading
already around the turn of the twentieth century. Against this background,
the choice of a reformist strategy in the early 1920s appears less as the
outcome of a completely open “critical juncture,” and more as the outcome
of a decades-long tradition of politics and workers’ education. This by no
means invalidates Jansson’s emphasis on the strategic use of workers’
education to strengthen the reformist tendency in the trade unions, but her
argument would have been more well-rounded and precise had she positioned
it against this background of popular movements and workers’ libraries,
back to the 1870s.

In the concluding chapter, Jansson discusses the contributions of her study
as: “By constructing an organizational identity based on reformism, the LO
undoubtedly helped mobilize workers to vote for the SAP. By identifying
that dynamic, this study presents one more piece in the puzzle of
understanding the strength of the SAP. However, this book\’s main
contribution to understanding Sweden concerns labor market relations rather
than the political party sphere.” (p. 164) She points to a key finding of
the book: “The novel aspect that this study brings to industrial relations
research in general, and to understanding Swedish industrial relations in
particular, is that the spirit of consensus was established among the
workers before the Basic Agreement was reached.” (p. 165) At least since
the study of Walter Korpi and Michael Shalev (“Strikes, Industrial
Relations and Class Conflict in Capitalist Societies,” 1979) it has been an
accepted stylized fact that the Swedish labor market in the 1920s was one
of the most strike- and lockout-intensive in the industrialized world, in
contrast to the spirit of cooperation after 1938. However, Jansson in her
reconstruction of the reformist ideology of the union leaders in the 1920s
shows how by then the leadership was already propagating a conciliatory
view of the employers and their organization. In this way, Jansson’s study
has presented new evidence both on the reformist road of the Social
Democratic party in Sweden, and on the road to union-employer collaboration
in the Swedish labor market.



Erik Bengtsson is Associate Professor of Economic History at Lund
University. His research focuses on historical income and wealth
distribution, and political history.

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