On September 13, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party (SAP) narrowly won the national elections by three seats. After a summer of discontent that saw right-wing parties win by similar margins in elections across Europe and Latin America, many on the left celebrated. Magdalena Andersson is expected to become the new Swedish prime minister.
Indeed, the SAP is no ordinary party. It is the name assumed by Sweden’s socialist party. This is not just any socialist party. It is Swedish socialism—the model of all socialisms that many leftists worldwide have claimed to be their goal for decades.
Even today, some members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and similar movements point to the “Swedish model” as the path to victory. Swedish socialism is a mantra repeated everywhere when normal socialism does not work.
A Victory in Appearance
The September Swedish socialist victory, however, was underwhelming. The SAP garnered a mere 28 percent of the vote, its worst showing in 110 years!
Thus, the far-left website Jacobin is not celebrating the elections and sees no future in the SAP or similar socialist parties. Jacobin’s founding editor, Bhaskar Sunkara, has written a scathing evaluation of what went wrong with the Swedish model from the beginning to the present. He says the model has no future… or even a present.
“The Swedish ‘model’ can only be described in the past tense,” Sunkara claims. “How that happened is not a story of betrayal. It is a story about what a strategy for reforming capitalism can achieve and about the point where it runs into the structure of capitalism itself.”
A History Working Within the System
The SAP was founded in 1889. At that time, Sweden was a monarchy with a strong economy, a healthy work ethic and a very orderly, well-established working class. Its goal was to establish a radically egalitarian society based on socialist principles.
According to Sunkara, the party’s tactics called not for overthrowing capitalism, but reforming it from within. Its program consisted of diluting private property rights, promoting social egalitarianism, eroding morals and providing massive welfare safety nets.
Economically, the Social Democrats created significant tension between owners and workers as they attempted to apply socialist principles and worker participation in industry. However, the socialists never attacked capital and ownership directly.
In fact, the socialists lived off the riches of the industrial owners by imposing huge taxes on them so that they could pay for their vast welfare state. Since Sweden was a very prosperous nation, the Swedish model of socialism also prospered. The socialists won elections, formed coalitions and led governments. They dominated the culture, introduced immorality and a sexual revolution. During its more or less fifty years in power (1932–1976), Swedish social democracy built the most egalitarian society in history and an extremely permissive culture.
The Breakdown of the Social Democrats
In the seventies, the world economy started to stagnate. Sweden prospered less, as did its socialist model. The worldwide economic downturn affected socialism everywhere.
The SAP began losing votes because the government could not afford to continue its welfare programs. With Olof Palme’s rise to prime minister (1969–1976), the socialists also began to radicalize, calling for democratizing the economy through the Meidner Plan (or “wage-earner funds”), which would gradually transfer corporate ownership to workers. The owners also pushed back with a political movement that defeated the socialists in 1976, after roughly 44 years in power.
Grasping for Solutions: French Self-Managing Socialism
With the economy in crisis, socialism grasped for a solution outside the reforming-from-within box. Even under Palme, things went very badly for the Swedish socialists.
Sunkara explains that socialism everywhere was in crisis as social experiments “sputtered and failed.” There was, however, one bright spot on the horizon that showed much promise: French self-managing socialism—“the most radical [program] from a mainstream party in decades.” In 1981, French President François Mitterrand’s socialist government proposed a solution by replacing ownership with “self-management” across everything from industrial production to schools to housing. Everyone would run everything. It promised to take this radical step gradually, expressing this incremental approach symbolically through its party label, the communist clenched fist holding a delicate rose.
“You can be a manager of a capitalist society or a founder of a socialist society,” Mitterrand said. “As far as we’re concerned, we want to be the second.”
Mitterrand’s “110 Propositions for France” unleashed its plans for public works, social housing, daycare and clinics. It proposed a more radical form of communism disguised as socialism that would invade every aspect of life. The party passed laws that expanded workers’ rights in companies, raised the minimum wage and cut the work week to thirty-nine hours.
Its most radical achievement was a 1982 law that nationalized five industrial groups, two steel companies, some forty banks and a good portion of the aerospace and arms industries. The business press reacted by rightly calling the confiscatory move an exercise of Bolshevism. At the beginning, Mitterrand’s program was winning.
The Great Retreat
The honeymoon was short-lived as resistance to the radical program grew. At all levels, people began to see the program as a straitjacket that would force people to adopt a socialist way of life in radical new ways. Sunkara narrates what he calls “the great retreat.”
Mitterrand once revealed his intentions by telling an aide that “In economics, there are two solutions—either you are a Leninist, or you won’t change anything.”
As his situation grew worse, he tried to placate French business leaders by assuring them that “We are not revolutionary Marxists-Leninists.”
Unable to convince the public to adopt his bold “110 Propositions,” Mitterrand and his socialists were forced not only to halt their march toward self-management but to make a “dramatic U-turn” toward a more market-oriented plan. The self-management system failed and returned to the socialist narrative of addressing the abuses of capitalism, but not the system itself.
Against Self-Managing Socialism
The abrupt turnaround vindicated the efforts of the Societies for the Defense of Tradition, Family, Property (TFP), which opposed self-managing socialism when it was introduced in France in 1981. At the time, few realized the importance of this French initiative for socialism worldwide.
In 1981, the TFPs in thirteen countries published a six-page advertisement against self-managing socialism in dozens of major newspapers worldwide. The message was written by Prof. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira and was titled “What Does Self-Managing Socialism Mean for Communism? A Barrier? Or a Bridgehead?”
The massive TFP effort contributed greatly to the spectacular failure of self-managing socialism.
Socialism in Norway Also Failed
After Olof Palme’s 1986 assassination, socialism also failed in Sweden. Sunkara notes that “both state socialism and social democracy were widely pronounced dead,” even though many social democrats still held office. Opposition parties have continued to gain influence in Sweden’s twenty-first-century political scene and have significantly rolled back many of the socialist reforms from the seventies and eighties.
Indeed, the Swedish socialist model is dead, as it cannot survive outside the prosperous capitalist system on which it feeds. The title of the Jacobin author’s article summarizes the situation well: “Social Democracy Won the Century and Lost the Future.”
Sunkara thinks that the same fate awaits the new “democratic” socialist, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, and other movements appearing on the horizon. They will follow in the footsteps of Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and others who take a reformist approach within capitalism, even though they share the same radical egalitarian goals as the revolutionaries.
The Sisyphus Complex
Sunkara cites the analogy of the communist revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919), who likened reform socialism to the figure of Sisyphus, the king in Greek mythology condemned to push a boulder uphill for eternity, only to see it slide down again when it nears the top, after which he would begin the process again.
Reform socialism makes some advances, but it slides back down when out of power and never accomplishes its radical goals. At some point, the present socialists will have to choose between reform and revolutionary socialism as a means toward their evil ends.
Thus, both the reformists and the revolutionary radicals are dangerous. One facilitates the other. However, the radicals are more dangerous because they seek a more immediate revolution and the destruction of the present order and any remnants of Christian civilization. They want to replace it with a hellish egalitarian society and economy. That is why the movement must be taken seriously and defeated.
Every socialist model, including the now failed “Swedish model,” must be resisted and overcome at all costs.
Photo Credit: © Kirk Fisher – stock.adobe.com