Revolution, Eschatology, and Myth. Religious and Nature Metaphors of Temporality in Swedish Socialist Press in the Years of the Russian Revolutions

This article studies religious and nature metaphors of temporality in Swedish socialist press in the years of the Russian Revolutions. News reports as well as theoretical and agitational texts on the inevitability of the socialist revolution filled the Swedish socialist press, from young socialist/syndicalist to left social democratic and social democratic, in the years following the revolutionary years 1917–1918. The aim of the article is to study how the deterministic and voluntaristic aspects of the concept of revolution were harmonized, contrasted, and expressed through a metaphorical language in Swedish socialist press, ranging from reformist to revolutionary. Theoretical inspiration comes from Benjamin, Eliade, Koselleck, Löwith, and, not least, Löwy and their reflections on temporal relations between myth and eschatology as well as linear and cyclical time in modernity. The study shows that reactions of Swedish socialists to the Russian Revolution and the concept of revolution formulated in response to these paradigmatic events were imbued with a teleology of necessity. While the young socialist and left social democratic concept of revolution was largely influenced by a romantic revolutionary current of ideas, entailing that cyclical temporality was a guarantee that the revolution would almost necessarily come in the future, cyclical time often took on a negative quality in the social democratic press. Neither the February nor the October Revolution were seen as meaningful events in themselves. Instead, they were defined in relation to notions of the world revolution, the social revolution, the history of social progress, and the relation between the present, the past, and the future. The philosophy of history expressed in the writings of Swedish socialists also amounts to a kind of resistance against history not unlike the one-sidedly mythic understanding of history. This was achieved by reintroducing a kind of myth of eternal return into a teleological and eschatological conception of history.