Pehr Götrek : External source Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Pehr Götrek

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Swedish. (October 2021) Click [show] for important translation instructions.

Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia.
Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article.
You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Swedish Wikipedia article at [[:sv:Per Götrek]]; see its history for attribution.
You may also add the template {{Translated|sv|Per Götrek}} to the talk page.
For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

Pehr Götrek (1798–1876) was an early Swedish Christian communist. He was also a teetotaler and a vegetarian.

Götrek was born in a village in Södermanland. After graduating from high school, he moved to Stockholm in 1818 and became a teacher, a book printer and also kept an antiquarian bookshop in Södermalm. He published books explaining Saint-Simon's "revealed religion" in the 1830s, then turning his focus towards Étienne Cabet in 1846 and in 1847 he wrote a book expounding on Charles Fourier. He was the first to import and translate the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, in 1848, the same year it was published in German. However, Götrek, took the liberty to alter some parts of the Manifesto, including the now famous quote, Workers of the world, unite!, which Götrek, being a religious man, changed to Folkets röst, guds röst! (i.e. Vox populi, vox Dei, or "People's voice is God's voice"). He also wrote several works criticising the developing capitalist society from a Christian perspective.^[1]

He had a small group of intellectual followers and the group became an underground club for political discussions, but never really any practical political work. Even though Götrek read Marx, he was more of a utopian socialist than a revolutionary Marxist.

The Communist Manifesto was later more accurately retranslated by Axel Danielsson, and then Zeth Höglund.