Mellan fykt och förändring—Utopiskt platsskapande i 1970-talets alternativa miljö by Kristoffer Ekberg (review)

In comparison with the buoyantly optimistic 1960s, the 1970s are often characterized as a pessimistic decade. The great hopes and ambitious ideas envisioned by the 1960s generation were replaced by a sense of doom and disappointment in modern society, with its unequal distribution of resources, environmental problems, and the threat of nuclear war.¹ Among political radicals, the spontaneous movements of the 1960s grew into more organized and dogmatic forms of leftist political activity. However, as Blake Slonecker has argued, a utopian impulse, reaching from the late 1960s to the communal living experiments of the 1970s, can be traced in the American counterculture movement.² Many of the experiments of the 1960s lived on and continue to influence Western societies up to this day. Counterculture groups continued to engage in consciousness-raising and new ways of life, often within the framework of intentional cohousing communities. Kristoffer Ekberg investigates such a utopian impulse—in the context of Sweden in the 1970s—in his published doctorate thesis in history entitled Mellan fykt och förändring—Utopiskt platsskapande i 1970-talets alternativa miljö (Between estrangement and change—Utopian place-making in Swedish alternative milieus in the 1970s). The objective of the publication is to investigate how members of the Swedish counterculture movement, known as the alternative movement, articulated and put into practice their dreams of a better society.

Alternative movements in the Nordic countries, like their counterparts, the countercultural groups in other Western countries, experimented with new forms of living in new kinds of places, both urban communes and rural collectives. Ekberg argues that a study of specific places, as well as practices enacted in those places, provides new ways of understanding the political significance of the 1970s alternative movement. The social movements of the 1960s, the highly politicized climate of the 1970s, and the growing awareness of the environmental problems caused by modern capitalist societies constitute the context for the investigation. Ekberg bases his study on newspaper articles, newsletters, and, most important, interviews by sociologist Britta Jonsson in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The central places are intentional communes founded in the 1970s such as Moder Jord (Mother Earth) and Skogsnäs, as well as urban squats and the nomadic Karavan project.

Ekberg’s published thesis sheds light on a somewhat neglected aspect of the Swedish political scene in the 1970s. Although the alternative groups have been pointed out as precursors to the environmental movement and the Green Party, their political significance has remained largely unacknowledged. The focus on formal political organizations is one reason for the failure to acknowledge the political aspirations of the alternative movement. Social movements such as the situationists of the 1960s are often mentioned as a backdrop for counterculture collectives. Other sources of inspiration, perhaps more important in Sweden, were the criticists of economic growth and early environmental thinkers (anarchist and situationist groups were fewer in Sweden than in other parts of Europe and North America, partly as a result of a strong Maoist and Leninist Left). Ekberg places the alternative groups in a continuum, leading up to the environmental movement and to the punk scene of the early 1980s.

A further reason for the lack of recognition of the political nature of alternative groups may have to do with the rural ideals of the groups. In addition to being interested in communal living and in producing their own vegetarian food, the groups favored an “authentic,” rural lifestyle, which led to the forming of collectives in the countryside. As a result, the groups were criticized for abandoning the political arena in favor of nostalgic rural dreams, and according to Ekberg, the existing research echoes this view. Ekberg challenges this simplified notion and sets out to problematize the motives for alternative lifestyle choices by analyzing the degree of estrangement and engagement visible in the alternative...