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"The Battle Raged in Malmö". The Möllevången Riots of 1926. A Study of Violent Political Conflict in Inter-War Sweden
| During a few days at the end of November 1926, the Möllevången neighbourhood in Malmö was the scene of violent confrontations between thousands of demonstrators and a large part of the city police force. Behind these demonstrations lay an industrial conflict, begun early in July that year at A W Nilsson perambulator and wicker furniture factory. The strike at A W Nilsson factories was not the only conflict in Malmö at this time where the employer used strike-breakers, the encounters between these and the striking workers causing violent demonstrations. Nor did such confrontations occur only in Malmö during the interwar period. The year before, there had been violent confrontations between the police and people demonstrating against strike-breakers in Sundsvall and in Kalmar, and there were to be similar confrontations in Halmstad and in Ådalen (1931) and in Sandarne and Clemensnäs (1932). What happened in Malmö in connection with the conflict at the A. W. Nilsson factories may be considered to be part of a protracted period of escalating, and at least to some extent violent, labour disputes between the employed and the employer on the Swedish labour-market, lasting between 1925 and 1932. A similar period, characterized by escalating social and political conflicts and collective violence on the Swedish labour-market, may also be said to have occurred between 1908 and 1917. This violence, however, has only seldom been emphasized in Swedish research on industrial conflict. On the contrary, the research on working-class history in particular, has stressed the absence of violence. Still, violence occurs in Sweden as well. True, it is small-scale, but also obviously collective, like the violent confrontations between the strike-breakers and the striking workers, taking place almost every day at the A W Nilsson factories.This violence is collective as well, the workers and the strike-breakers being more or less equally responsible for the acts of violence. The workers used to harass the strike-breakers, a form of collective violence in connection with labour disputes, more or less tolerated by the union as well as by the political leadership within the Social Democratic labour movement. We are talking about acts of collective violence, which, though they occurred openly in those days, have been more or less forgotten in Swedish research on industrial conflict. In latter years this has been explained by the fact that this research remarkably often has been focused on explaining ”the Swedish Model” with its spirit of mutual understanding and willingness to compromise, as well as by its historical roots, thus giving Swedish historical research a teleological tendency, conflicts having been played down, while putting stress on and emphasizing mutual understanding. The aim of this article is to draw attention to the influence of this teleologically characterized research on the understanding of social and political collective violence in Swedish history.
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