Vänstersocialistiska Partiet (English: Left Socialist Party) was a political party in Sweden that existed between 1940 and 1963.
Albin Ström was a leftwing Social Democrat from Göteborg that broke out of the Social Democratic Party in 1934. With him followed thousands of other Social Democrats from the West Coast-region. The tendency of Ström founded the daily Arbetarposten (Workers' Mail) and quickly unified itself with the "SKP" of Karl Kilbom and Nils Flyg. Together they formed Socialistiska Partiet. When SP, under the leadership of Nils Flyg, gradually orientated itself towards nazism, many of its members left the party. The tendency of Ström broke away in 1940 and formed Vänstersocialistiska Partiet, after that Flyg had promoted that the SKP were to be suppressed by the state. VSP became very much centered on Ström and his group in Göteborg.
Arbetarposten was the main organ of VSP, with Ström as its editor. The paper had been founded in 1934. During the war it suffered from several persecutions from the government and the paper was confiscated 24 times. During the war it had an edition of around 1000. After the war the edition rose to around 1500. The paper was mainly distributed in Göteborg, and to a lesser degree in Borås. Arbetarposten ceased publication in 1961. When Ström died in 1963 the party was dissolved.
In 1945 a group of VSP militants, includning Evald Höglund (who later formed the trotskyist RSP) and Anton Nilson, broke out as they thought that the party had slipped in a pro-Western Bloc direction.
Famous quotes containing the words left, socialist and/or party:
“Why should the generations overlap one another at all? Why cannot we be buried as eggs in neat little cells with ten or twenty thousand pounds each wrapped round us in Bank of England notes, and wake up, as the Sphinx wasp does, to find that its papa and mamma have not only left ample provision at its elbow but have been eaten by sparrows some weeks before we began to live consciously on our own accounts?”
—Samuel Butler (1835–1902)
“Democracy is the wholesome and pure air without which a socialist public organization cannot live a full-blooded life.”
—Mikhail Gorbachev (b. 1931)
“We are in a period when old questions are settled and the new are not yet brought forward. Extreme party action, if continued in such a time, would ruin the party. Moderation is its only chance. The party out of power gains by all partisan conduct of those in power.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)