Först maten, sedan moralen : Kultur- och bildningsideal inom tidningen Social-Demokraten 1886

Sammanfattning: In the autumn of 1886 the editor in chief of the Swedish social democratic newspaper Social-Demokraten August Palm resigns and Hjalmar Branting takes over as editor in chief. This will lead toa shift how the newspaper writes about culture and general education (bildning in Swedish, after theGerman term Bildung which lacks an English equivalent). August Palm’s resignation and the shift inthe content of the newspaper is in many ways the culmination of an internal struggle within the earlysocial democratic labour movement where one side claims that culture and general education shouldbe made available to all, including workers, and that doing so will lead to the eventual transformationof society. The other side claims that the working class should indeed be granted access to culture andgeneral education, but first an economic transformation must occur. The dispute is over causality, thetwo sides in the conflict have different opinions as to whether the economic transformation of societywill happen before or after culture and general education is made available to the working masses. Inthis study I have shown how these two positions were not as clearly defined or as clearly opposed toeach other as they have sometimes been portrayed in earlier research. As I have shown, there was infact agreement on the basic goal that culture and general education ought to be something thateveryone can enjoy despite there being differing opinions as to how society might get there.