Swedish Social Democracy Has Always Been Contradictory
Over the last century, Sweden’s Social Democrats built a world-leading welfare state. But the party’s role in undoing some of its own past achievements also shows the contradictions in its project of democratizing capitalism.
Swedish Social Democratic prime minister Olof Palme, photographed in Stockholm in September 1973. (Daniel Simon / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
To say that social democracy was the dominant force of Swedish public life during the last century is an understatement. It’s often said here that “everyone is a social democrat — they just vote for different parties.”
There are good material reasons for this. From the cradle to the grave, a person could be submerged in social democracy. They might be helped by the various institutions that the party built, have their daily bread working for and consuming from the organizations it led, and even be buried by the movement’s own funeral home. The Social Democrats have been in power for more than seventy-five of the last hundred years.
The party’s domination was so strong that when it weakened, from the 1970s and onward, from near-total unstoppability to “only” being the strongest party, the Swedish political field had its center of gravity thrown off course. Whether, and when, a new equilibrium will be achieved is still uncertain.
Kjell Östberg’s new book, The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy, should be read as part of this debate. It aims to explain how and why all of this happened, and what this means for the party’s future. But as a historian, Östberg does a thorough job, and starts with the equally important question of how the Social Democrats become the dominant force to begin with. It doesn’t just come from the soil. Without this insight into the Social Democrats’ earlier strength, it is impossible to understand why the party has weakened over the last forty years.
This volume is perhaps the most comprehensive historical primer on Swedish Social Democracy. This is true not only for a non-Swedish audience — it is unparalleled even within the Swedish context. Still this does not mean that this is the definitive book on Swedish Social Democracy. Östberg provides a good portion of analysis, but the brevity of the book (150 years in under 300 pages!) means that the avid reader who wants to dig in on specific developments needs to look into other sources. The vast list of references makes for a good starting point.
But there is also an important first comment to make about how we frame its history. The death, fall, or final defeat of Swedish Social Democracy is quite often, if not declared to have arrived already, at least predicted to be imminent. Östberg’s own view is revealed already in his choice of title. However, we might ask: Is it really accurate to describe a party polling over 30-percent support as “fallen?”
Today’s Social Democrats play a different role and get qualitatively different electoral results from those of decades past. Those days seem to be gone, or at least out of sight. It has quite clearly been a fall, but the party seems to have landed on a relatively stable plateau. The Swedish Social Democrats are still the country’s undisputedly biggest parliamentary and political force. Reports of their death seem greatly exaggerated.
The Myths
Throughout the book, Östberg dispels many of the myths within Swedish Social Democracy. Some of these legends are designed to explain why it’s supposedly not possible or suitable to take a more conflict-oriented path, while some fulfill a romanticizing function of giving a radical socialist shimmer to what is at its core a grayer realpolitik. An example of the former is the question of wage-earner funds: the party promised to set out a proposal for economic democracy, but never actually took up the fight for it (see below). An example of the latter kind of myths are the famous quotes from Swedish Social Democratic leaders from over the years, presented as supposed proof of a genuinely radical party with concrete ambitions of transcending capitalism.
Ernst Wigforss is often used in such cases. He was finance minister in different Social Democratic governments between 1925 and 1949 and a (even the) driving ideological force of the party from the late 1920s up until the late ’50s. This was the period when social democracy became the ruling force in Swedish society.
One of Wigforss’s most frequently quoted remarks is: “If the goal of societal development were that all of us should work maximally, we would be mad. The goal is to liberate man to create maximally. Dance. Paint. Sing. Whatever you want. Freedom.” Östberg shows that however beautiful this and other quotes of Wigforss’s are, he was still a key proponent of the Social Democratic economic thinking that social development was possible only through first increasing production and then distributing the proceeds.
Given this, it is interesting that Östberg refers to Wigforss as a kind of historical socialist consciousness, which the party ignored when making the neoliberal turn. In the later parts of his career, Wigforss was a staunch proponent of Keynesian economic policies. At the same time, however, he was an equally staunch proponent of class collaboration. In the earlier parts of Wigforss’s career, he supported neoclassical economic policies that led to higher unemployment. He even led a government commission that rendered toothless previous election-program promises of steps toward industrial democracy.
During the 1930s, Wigforss changed his views of the economy according to international economic currents, although his Keynesian turn was early (influenced by the Stockholm School, he actually anticipated John Maynard Keynes’s magnum opus of 1936).
This leads us to another at times rhetorically radical Social Democrat: Olof Palme, party leader (1969–1986) and prime minister. During the 1980s, Olof Palme and the Social Democratic leadership changed their views in accordance with the global neoliberal turn. In some strange way, Palme followed in Wigforss’s footsteps, even though Palme’s hunt for economic growth took him, the party, and Sweden into the neoliberal desert instead of thirty years of growth.
Östberg thoroughly describes Palme’s radical positioning, speeches, and quotes. In the early days of his leadership, Palme took a clear stance against the American actions in the Vietnam War and on other international issues. As sincere as these statements were, Östberg shows how they shouldn’t be seen as an unequivocal opposition to interventionist American foreign policy, but rather a sign that he believed that the United States betrayed what he saw as its core liberal and anticolonial values. Palme was a firm anti-communist and supported Sweden’s secret military cooperation with the US and NATO.
The late 1960s and ’70s also brought a radical turn on domestic issues. Calls for socialism, economic democracy, and equality grew enormously. Östberg convincingly describes how Palme also got swept away with this radical turn. At the same time, he paradoxically kept his views on the need to achieve economic growth through class collaboration. Palme spoke of the risk of climate change and the idiocy of the gadget society but maintained his views on the only way forward being increased production (without any mention of environmentally oriented decoupling). He spoke of a planned economy and economic democracy as something inevitable. At the same time, he strategically maneuvered to water down the radical and hugely popular (among the party members and unions) proposal for wage-earner funds. In this way, he tried to make it less threatening to the interests of capital.
The idea of the wage-earner funds came from the trade union movement, which managed to make this the party line in the early 1970s. The funds were intended as a way toward workers fully owning and controlling the private companies. The implemented reform, which was voted through parliament in 1983, however, ended up meaning that the funds, financed through an extra company tax, were to buy shares in companies (a maximum 8 percent of each company) and then use a maximum of half their shares to influence each company. But the funds were scrapped within a decade.
Perhaps the most tiresome myth is that of a single radical and consistent social democracy that supposedly existed in the past, but which was at some moment suddenly abandoned for good. In this simultaneously shimmering and blurry past, the wage-earner funds, the building of the welfare state, and so on all get blended into one thought-out plan toward the socialist tomorrow. In this story, the party’s socialist project was broken in the 1980s by the evil finance minister Kjell-Olof Feldt, the main Swedish proponent of the third way, who led Olof Palme and the party astray down the neoliberal road with cutbacks and the so-called November revolution where they suddenly deregulated the credit market. Without Feldt, it is claimed, the party might well have continued on a reformist road to socialism. An almost-as-tedious myth is the one of an equally consistent but right-wing and politically renegade force scheming to undermine this very objective. In this narrative, the Social Democrats never intended to implement the wage-earner funds and only built the welfare state to serve the interests of capital.
One of the biggest strengths of the book is that it clearly shows both myths to be false. It isn’t possible to establish one single and consistent path that Swedish Social Democracy took. If anything, the party has been an undulating force carried by often-conflicting streams. The direction and velocity of the undulations has depended on the various levels of radicalization and power of the popular movements that the party has been deeply connected to and made up of. The struggle for, and against, the wage-earner funds is a perfect example of this. Often — as in the case of the funds — key proposals even had different meanings to different parts of the movement. So both criticism and praise of Swedish Social Democracy needs to be specific about which periods and tendencies we are talking about.
Östberg argues that popular movements were the driving factor of periods of radicalization, and the party leadership and the parliamentary groups and bureaucrats the driving force behind periods of deradicalization. I fully agree with this view, but I find myself wanting more explanation of how this actually played out. How was the party’s right wing able to maintain its grip on the parliamentary groups and party bureaucracy for so long if the membership was consistently to the left? From where did the different parts of the movement get their forces in that moment, and where did they go? These are urgent questions for anyone who is interested in building and maintaining left-wing political power in our day.
Lessons
One of the main lessons going forward is the importance of close ties between popular movements and political parties. Their collaboration was a key feature in building and maintaining broad social support for radical reforms. However, when the party (especially the parliamentary group) controls the movements — instead of the other way around — this leads to parliamentary shortsightedness.
According to Östberg, one economic dogma seems to have been constant: it was only through increased production that social reforms could be made possible. This was not a rejection of redistribution, but it meant that economic growth was the party’s highest priority and that it often prioritized cutbacks over redistribution. This has been proven time and time again, since the first occasion the party formed cabinets and onward. This has key lessons.
The importance of convincing the electorate that you are indeed good managers of the economy is a lesson well needed for parts of the Left. People know that the system is unjust but tend to vote for an unjust system that they believe will put food on the table rather than for a just system that they don’t believe can achieve this.
However, the way in which Social Democratic economic “responsibility” manifested itself has had a major downside. Since economic downturns generally affect the working class the hardest, these are the times where redistribution is most needed. They also often coincide with popular radicalization. A party that consistently turns to cutbacks during such times misses out on the opportunity to turn radicalization into organizing.
Östberg shows that the Swedish Social Democrats didn’t have a clear economic horizon of their own, beyond the need for growth. This meant that they were especially exposed to the risk of changing economic currents turning them away from their other goals. This can be seen by how easily the leadership adjusted to the neoliberal turn, which not only temporarily paused its expansive reform agenda but made it turn in the other direction. A movement needs to prioritize building a stable economic framework of its own and to combine this with its other strategic goals.
A Road to Socialism?
What was the real Swedish Social Democracy? The rhetorical figures of Wigforss and Palme, or their actual politics? Östberg poses this as a question of whether Sweden was on the road to socialism. His answer, however, seems to be less clear than his question and gets lost amid Palme’s own ideological and political turns.
On the one hand, he describes the party’s ambitions to fundamentally transform society. On the other, he describes the party’s reformism as being unable to transcend capitalism. Should we understand Östberg’s view as that Swedish Social Democracy was a movement that wanted to transform society beyond capitalism, but was inherently unable to do so?
From the book, it is clear that much of the party thought that it was on the path to socialism — by which they meant democratizing the power of capital. The leadership seems — no matter what nice words they used — to have continuously been on another path.
After the neoliberal turn, the leadership step-by-step swayed the membership behind this perspective. Where Swedish Social Democracy is currently heading is unclear, but it isn’t toward socialism. The greater ideological goal of the last forty years could perhaps be described as “making the economy work, and after that has been done, hopefully redistributing some of the increased wealth.”
This impressive book should be both an ending and a start: First, an ending to the strange myth-building that Swedish Social Democracy was ever just one thing. Second, a start for a sober discussion on what the Left (including the Social Democrats themselves) can learn from the ups and downs in this history.