At some point in my political journey of discovery, I came across the phrase “the working class hunger for education.” It was not just in the Social Democrats’ party platform pamphlets but also in their actions. I found the clearest expression of this conviction that there was a hunger at ABF, the Swedish Workers’ Educational Association, but also in efforts like the funding for municipal and school libraries; the cultural magazine Folket i Bild; the publishing company Tidens förlag, which was linked to the workers’ movement; folk high schools (especially Brunnsvik) and of course the cultural policies of Social Democratic governments – including payment to authors for library loans and the low-price quality books available through En Bok för Alla [‘A book for everyone’] (as well as, much later, the VAT cut).

The hunger for books that people sought to satisfy thus mainly involved the education available in books. (Certainly there was, and is, a desire to encourage the consumption of films, plays, music, dance. But books long had the advantage.) And then it meant not just books necessary for educating oneself or improving one’s understanding of politics but books that were read for the sake of pleasure and personal experience, that is, literature. Naturally, there were instructions to members about what kind of literature was especially valuable, that is, the kind that described the human condition in the struggle against injustice or in the destruction stemming from such injustice. But the most important thing seems to be actually reading, not what a person read, in any event as long as it involved books.

I was strongly sympathetic to this point of view. In the world I spent the first dozen years of my life in (the sawmill community of Holmsund), reading in itself had no value, since people had no doubt acquired the basics of education from elementary school. The knowledge needed to survive was obtained orally and in practical activities – fishing, hunting, planting potatoes, repairing nets, handling boats and chopping wood. Reading books was simply a waste of time and gave no income or other benefit. As for me, I did not heed such decrees. Before I began school, I had already learnt to read; the problem was getting access to any readable material other than hymn books or elementary school readers. In the houses I lived in or visited, there were no books (apart from a yellowed volume about the Hero King), and I owned only one book, Guffars sagor, a collection of fairy tales.

The lion’s share of my reading for pleasure came to consist of weekly magazines (they were called pink magazines) that two older relatives saved for me and a number of thin paperbacks that went by the name of “25 öre detective books” that a neighbouring boy lent out for 5 öre each. But then there was the local library in Holmsund. I rejected the children’s section – they only had fairy tales – so already by the precocious age of seven, I had an older cousin who borrowed books for me from the library’s adult section. There was a lot in them I did not understand; other things frightened me. I read for the simple reason that it was fun to read.

No one in my immediate circle encouraged me in these activities. But no one prevented me either – a clear difference from what my relatives did with my mother, who was outright forbidden to read anything apart from her schoolbooks and (possibly) the Bible. People were just not interested. My reading horizons expanded significantly when my mother remarried and we moved to Skellefteå. A goldmine opened up to me: the city library. My stepfather also read; he even bought books. But those purchases consisted solely of crime novels that were then passed on to me. I became an early fan of writers like Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler. The city library provided me with another kind of literature. This of course included working-class authors – Fridegård, Lo-Johansson, Moberg and so on – but also Steinbeck, Dickens, Faulkner and many others. I was probably most moved by Fridegård’s Lars Hård. It attacked the class society I recognised.

Most of the children who constituted Skellefteå’s middle class went to the secondary school I now attended. A smaller percent came from working-class homes. Obviously, people read – and had to read – to keep up with the lessons. But I do not recall anyone who shared my interest in literature, who wanted to spend time and effort ploughing through thick novels. In any case, I cannot remember any conversation about those kinds of books and what was in them; that was also true of the detective novels. I could certainly find men and women from the working class who hungered for learning or who at least wanted their children to have it. But in the Västerbotten region in the 1930s and 1940s when I lived there, I did not see them. In my age group, I was just about the only one with my passion, it seemed.

So it was with these personal experiences in tow that I came to realise in the 1950s that “book learning for everyone” was perhaps the most important goal of the cultural policy of the main workers’ party. I do not intend to say much about to what extent this was achieved. What interests me is what political proponents were thinking when they wanted to make books into a tool in the fight for liberty, equality and fraternity. The idea that books can be used for political aims is obviously nothing new, nothing discovered by the Swedish Social Democrats. History is filled with stories of books that should be read or not read, books that are compulsory for citizens, and books that are burnt in bonfires. And this has been true not just of literature that agitates and shapes opinions but as much, if not more, of epic literature about periods, social relations and human conditions that regimes want to either conceal from their subjects or get them to long for, or in some cases despise.

So what did my party want? Many great thinkers have examined the question, and it is slightly presumptuous for someone who only dealt with the economic aspects of policies to have their own opinion. But my view is that books, reading, were seen as a means for the upbringing and enlightenment of children. The people who led the party – and especially those in charge of cultural policies – saw themselves as enlightened and modern, free of prejudices and ready for the solidarity and tolerance that a new, equal society required. Good books were not the only tool for raising the working class out of its spiritual and cultural poverty. Yet they gave important insights, not just about the existence of injustice, oppression and suffering, but also, even more importantly, about people’s willingness and ability to change their living conditions and those of their fellow beings. Some assigned books a more concrete significance: reading kept young people away from immoral living and drunkenness.

All of the cultural policy platforms that I took part in supporting (and funding) as an active politician had this mission. With my childhood memories of working class apathy to book learning, it seemed crucial. But on one occasion – I think it was just before the 1982 election – I tried to bring something different and perhaps something more to cultural policies. The Social Democrats’ parliamentary group listened with great reverence to a presentation of the platform we would be using for the election. Serious, heavy, edifying. As far as I recall, no one made the slightest sound until I raised my voice and asked where were the fun, the joy, the escape from reality, for example, in reading. For a few seconds, Olof Palme looked almost hopeful with expectation. But there was no debate; the platform was adopted.

Today, many things are different. Regardless of whether people are looking for experiences or edification, books compete with images, sounds and other revelations in cyberspace – not to mention all the colourful magazines that come and go. (My pink magazines from childhood pale in comparison.) In purely quantitative terms, they are successful, although book reviews are being allotted less and less space and the selection in book shops is becoming thinner and thinner. Never before have so many pages of books been printed and published – and, presumably, read. But reading seems to have retained a good deal of its class structure, even though this is not as prominent as I once experienced it. Surveys have been carried out indicating that many people with working-class occupations, especially young men, never open a book. And a lot of what is being read would probably not qualify as “good” in terms of the goal of education, that is, enlightening and edifying, literature. The bestseller lists confirm this.

How worried should we be about the state of things? For people who see in book learning the development of enlightened and engaged social beings, it should be distressing if, despite all the educational and cultural policies, such learning has not reached large parts of the working-class population. But they can also be consoled by the fact that there are other paths besides literature to both enlightenment and social engagement. Perhaps it can even be admitted that the view that good books could raise the working class from out of its spiritual poverty was highly exaggerated, a far too romantic notion of reading as the moulder of better people.

My view is that there is a clear boundary between reading by force and reading for pleasure. By that, I do not mean that forced reading has to be unpleasurable. On the contrary, it can fill a person with the joy that new knowledge, new understanding about the lives of people and society, can provide. But people do not choose for themselves and people do not read more than they need to in order to complete assigned tasks – get a degree, improve their professional skills, advance in their career. Reading for pleasure comes from a person’s own choice and personal needs. For me, the driving forces have been a mixture of curiosity and longing: curiosity about unknown people and places, far from the people and places I lived with. From time to time, the longing to be far away – the escape from reality – has been more important than curiosity. And many books I chose for the sake of pleasure simply filled me with displeasure or bored me; they were not fun to read.

The worker hungering for an education, does he exist? I think so. But no cultural policy however well-intended can show him the way to a book, where curiosity or longing or some other feeling can be satisfied. He must find the way himself.