The Swedish social welfare system has become unrecognizable, writes Niklas Altermark Phronesis. The last decades of rule, based on solidarity between the working and middle classes, have fragmented the once progressive order.
“The result of this transformation is a social welfare system designed to serve the interests of the economic elite,” says Altermark.
The corruption began in the 1990s, when the Social Democratic Party government began prioritizing reducing the national debt, in the name of “cleansing” this economy. In the 2000s, the political offensive against Social Security fraud paved the way for the conservative Liberal government's punitive campaign to maintain unemployment while cutting the wealth tax.
The forces that built the Swedish welfare state viewed the population as a whole and aimed to make unemployment bearable for all. “Vulnerability is not just a basic condition in human life, but very much what separates us from each other,” Altermark says.
As public spending declined, the quality of health care deteriorated. The solution was to commercialize health care to historic levels – one example of how class solidarity is undermined. As the economic elite that imposes market solutions forms a new alliance with the middle class, the idea of shared responsibility for social weakness is gradually disappearing.
Limits of democracy
Jesper Westermark Cooper writes about the rise of liberal conservatism in Denmark at the end of the twentieth century. At the heart of this development were three thinkers: Søren Krarup, Bertil Harder, and Henning Funsmarck. All shared the goal of limiting the scope of government and reducing social subordination, and viewed themselves as anti-elite, rejecting social democratic rule as the “cultural upper class” that owned the political narrative. Their portrayal of the left as authoritarian led to a conservative renaissance.
But what distinguished Krarup, Harder, and Funsmark was not only their anti-establishment stance, but also their criticism of post-war democracy. In 1977, Harder wrote: “In our soulless age, democracy has become a substitute religion, an idol, a slogan, an oppressive ideology that is not content with democratic rules and votes but demands the submission of the spirit.” According to Westermark Cooper, “The liberal-conservative renaissance must be understood as a struggle against the left's desire to transform society, including a specific critique of the view of democracy that characterized post-war social debate.”
PMC Revisited
In 1977, socialist thinkers Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined the concept of the “professional and managerial class” (PMC), a group that operates with heads rather than bodies, exercising authority over the work of others without having the authority themselves. Means of production. Lovisa Broström revisits this concept, describing the emergence of today's “professional and managerial group”, its social status and its role in the political scene.
In her book Keepers of virtue (2020), Catherine Liu has argued that PMC, while trying hard to present a politically correct façade, actually remains unconcerned with society. Brostrom believes that Liu's words reflect a leftist perception, which sees private military companies as synonymous with the educated middle class. Lacking class consciousness, it struggles to establish real solidarity with the working class. In return, mutual resentment arises.
There were several reasons why PMCs became the epicenter of a culture war. The first is the disappearance of criticism of capitalism. The United States is the clearest example, where working-class resistance has historically lacked solidarity with the middle class, and today is mobilized by reactionary and racist sentiments. We have already lost the war against capitalism, and now the only real war left is against private military corporations.
Another factor is the decline in manufacturing. As industries moved away from the West, education was the only answer to the decline in jobs. The expanding educational system was intended to include women and other marginalized groups, which were later included in the PMC. While women's lives improved, working-class men experienced deindustrialization as a loss, giving rise to a new power struggle. Brostrom says the decline in appetite for public goods is another factor in the growing hostility between the middle and working classes and the emergence of a culture war over private military companies.
