Review of Sara Kristofersson’s “Paradise Lost”

I admit I still say Konsum. It’s not about nostalgia, it’s more of a little bow to those who came before me.

My grandmother, from a small farm in northern Bohuslän, became a cooperatist in 1920, built her own home and when she turned 50 in 1951, she received a green vase from the Gustavsberg Cooperative Association. My father, born in 1925, enjoyed the possibilities of the full-class traveler embedded in cooperatives and their utopian impulses. In time, I also became a member of the consumer association Solidar in Malmö.

It is with those eyes that I open Sara Kristoffersson’s book “The Lost Paradise”. The story of the rise and fall of Konsum”.

The cover, in blue and white of course, with the small text at the bottom: Best before November 2001. The endowment: Now we’re going to hear about how something impossible failed and became unusable. The word paradise – and the wink at a known utopia – may well be considered to place the movement in the unreasonable and at the same time slightly religious swarming.

But if it was a utopia, it was very concrete and useful. The early collaborations are a symbiosis between something fundamentally progressive – which wants to give more ownership over their lives – and something that could be scaled up and driven to be able to grow. Class rhetoric and entrepreneurship.

The early collaborations are a symbiosis between something fundamentally progressive – which wants to give more ownership over their lives – and something that could be scaled up and driven to be able to grow

In the lack of a society’s self-evident institutions and safety nets, one almost begins to build states within the state. Not unlike the old mill society’s combination of care and control. And the cooperators take, in the same way, the power over the means of production. Kooperativa Förbundet acquires margarine factories, mills, rubber factories, light bulb factories, oil and porcelain factories, breweries and factories that produce paper and cans.

There is a casual criticism of the social engineers of the early people’s home, who also became active within these co-operative enterprises. Kristoffersson’s early historiography is no exception.

The story of these, to a certain extent, controlling social reformers has been allowed to overshadow the class question and the resistance. It is not primarily because, as Kristoffersson writes, you want to “look good to the population” because “dirt does not belong in the new Sweden” that you seek new ideas about a society that shows care for more people.

The modern kitchen, the bathrooms and the access to housing and food are about placing the person at the center of society, building it around them, recognizing that the building of society consists of relationships where the vast majority do not get to share the very best.

When the cooperation is to accelerate, when the foundations are laid for the great growth, the book becomes more interesting and eye-opening. As when, in one of the book’s more interesting chapters, Kristofferson elegantly puts his finger on one of the cores of these cooperative movements: pragmatism. There is now market share to be won here. Scaling up over distribution policy. Or upscaling camouflaged as caring for customers: “If ads encourage consumers to choose a specific product, it’s because it’s a particularly laudable product.”

Kristoffersson’s text is most profound in the parts that deal with signs and visual expressions, in the view of advertising and fashion, for example.

There is a clear breaking point that Kristoffersson highlights where the society-changing KF turns into something else, more large-scale and self-sufficient. She puts her finger on an exciting pain point. In 1957 KF organizes the exhibition “Without borders” in Stockholm. The theme is the world as a boundless whole, and on the inside of a globe, Sven X:et Erixson draws a picture of this possible world in the contradictions of the dawning Cold War.

This happens simultaneously as the whole people’s home idea is also ready to be scaled up. The big exhibition H55 in Helsingborg is the manifesto that the folk home is now, with Expressen Olle Bengtzon’s interpretation of Tage Erlander’s speech, “completed”. In that home, you can now devote yourself to consuming more.

It is therefore symptomatic that what the cooperation takes with it from this boundless thought of a world without borders is a trademark: the Infinity Sign, which was part of the exhibition. The world and society fall away and a brand emerges.

From this spirit was born in 1979 the blue-and-white brand that came to symbolize unusually smart marketing – OATS, RICE, COCOA – but also Sweden as a GDR outside the wall

The brand that will become the blue Möbius strip that will symbolize KF, and is launched in 1967 with an advertising campaign “on a scale that has hardly occurred in Scandinavia”. In this context, the infinity sign can be interpreted as mute and even cold, notes Kristoffersson, not least in relation to the jovial Ica front figures IAnder and MonICA. A cold blue Möbius strip vs a smiling round Sune Mangs figure.

Now the cooperation is growing with the methods of the time: fashion and advertising. From this spirit was born in 1979 the blue-and-white brand that came to symbolize unusually smart marketing – OATS, RICE, COCOA – but also Sweden as a GDR outside the wall.

One wish would have been for the book to be provided with more pictures, because the story of Konsum is, to say the least, a visual story.

The book’s expiration date is set for November 2001. There won’t be much time left for the last 25 years. Notorious, and unfortunately overlooked here, is advertising agency Paradise’s (!) transformation of marketing around the graphic expression when Obs! in Fittja was to become the Coop Forum in 1999 because “Dieseljeans should be in the suburbs too”. The Obs! stores disappeared just before big discount stores started opening everywhere.

This lost time would have been exciting to follow into boardrooms and at general meetings. Like the total sell-off of real estate in recent years to save the sinking commercial ship that has been grocery stores.

Kristoffersson’s book sheds a much-needed new light on, above all, the time from the people’s home’s completion in 1955, to its possible fall around 1985. When clever advertisers and old circular coffee idealists collided at the advertising agency Svea and tried to point the way forward for a movement that once wanted to change the world.

It’s a nice picture that for a moment they were allowed to exist at the same time.

Sara Kristoffersson works at DN Kultur. Her book is therefore reviewed by Dan Hallemar, who is a publisher, culture writer and runs the Staden podcast.