The Twenty-Second Congress of the Swedish Communist Party—since 1967 called Left Party (Communist) or VPK—on September 19th–21st put an end to a period in the history of the party, hitherto unique in the annals of the international movement. A balance-sheet of this period and of the congress which terminated it is now necessary. How should this period be characterized? How was it possible? Why did it end? What are the prospects after the congress?

The October Revolution led to the creation of a wholly new type of politics incarnated in a new type of political organization, the Communist parties of the Third International. A striking aspect of these parties has been the formal continuity and tenacity of their organizational structure, official ideology and international connection. Given the gravamen of the charges of reformism and revisionism levelled against many of them—in other words, a fundamental political discontinuity—the organizational persistence even of the small and largely unsuccessful parties created by the Third International remains a remarkable phenomenon, in clear contrast to the multiple vicissitudes of other leftist formations. Communist Parties have had their influence drastically reduced, have been frequently repressed, have been obliged formally to dissolve—mainly in the so-called progressive Arab countries—but they have kept their distinctive identity. The project of 1944–45 in the Americas to change them into educational organizations —Browderism—failed, as did the enterprize of creating viable non-Comintern parties between the two World Wars.

After the Twentieth Party Congress in January 1964, Sweden witnessed another attempt to change a classical cp into something else. This something else was to be a ‘modernist’ left socialist party, the most typical international example of which is probably the French psu. The project included: complete independence from the ussr and the international Communist movement, internal democracy, loose organization, ‘Marxist’ but explicitly non-Leninist left reformism. The process got under way with the election of C. H. Hermansson as party leader in 1964, and reached its peak at the Twenty-First Congress in 1967 when the name of the party was changed (a compromise between those who wanted to keep the old Communist Party of Sweden and those who wanted to call it Socialist Left Party), Leninism was officially discarded in the new party programme, new completely social-democratic or liberal organizational statutes were adopted, a radical change in the Central Committee occurred, and finally a somewhat tougher line against the Swedish Social-Democratic Party in day-to-day politics was advanced.