ABSTRACT
When in the beginning of the 1880s so cialist ideas were spread in Sweden they were, at least if one limits the perspective to written sources, mainly an import from Germany. The emigrant tailor August Palm, who came back from Germany via Denmark in 1881, was the first leading figure in Swedish social democracy. In 1885 he started a weekly journal, Socialdemokraten, soon to be the leading mouthpiece for the movement. There he published the first Swedish party programme, almost literally taken from the German Gotha programme with its famous opening sentence about labour as the only source of wealth.
