Introduction: Organizing Care in Sweden's Crisis

Sweden's self-image has long been deeply invested in care—the state's care for citizens through well-funded welfare structures and care for others through humanitarian programs. According to this lasting national ideological formation, all Swedish acts are, almost by definition, acts of care. Today, however, despite the persistence of this national image, the state structures and practices of care have been radically reduced or completely destroyed. And yet some groups on the Swedish radical left manage to create new and innovative practices of care.

The dismantling of the state structures of care has coincided in part with a growing militarization. After two years of delays and negotiations, on March 7, 2024, Sweden joined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), ending decades of official—although always illusory (Hertog and Kruizinga 2011)—neutrality. One day previously, the war sirens were yet again tested in central Stockholm, the dramatic sound of suspended invasion ringing throughout the city. On the streets of the capital, meanwhile, advertising boards had been replaced with the gently flowing image of an Israeli flag, an unmediated sign of the government's Zionist U-turn since being the first European Union member state to recognize Palestinian statehood in 2014, a recognition the government is now considering withdrawing. Two days later, Sweden resumed aid to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which it had suspended since October 2023 in response to unsupported Israeli claims of the organization's infiltration by Hamas.

Two days before joining NATO, on March 5, the traveling exhibition of military propaganda curated by the Armed Forces (Försvarsmakten) had moved to a high school in Gothenburg. In the exhibition, students are invited into a shipping container designed to resemble a dorm room. The walls shake. Stock family photos are knocked off the shelves.

After the bomb simulation, traumatized students are asked to watch a video titled “What Do Your Neighbors Think?” Four actors calmly explain the ways in which they would proudly offer themselves to their country. In huge yellow letters on the outside of the container a threat is printed: “A mobile exhibition on the importance of being prepared. Who are you if war comes and in which way can you contribute?” (Försvarsmakten n.d.). Young, good-looking soldiers stand at the doors of the container, opening the threat of imminent death to Sweden's peculiar brand of aggressively wholesome sex appeal.

On the Armed Forces’ website, a brochure wastes no ambiguity in explaining the background of the exhibition. After a dozen pages celebrating NATO and the selfless heroism of fighting for one's country, a chapter detailing “Sweden's focus regarding military threats” is simply titled “Russia” (Försvarsmakten n.d.).

In all these hyper-militarized contortions of Swedish politics there is an appeal to care, but a form of care that precisely inverts the famous Swedish model. While the general program of social welfare that obtained until the 1980s was focused on the state's obligation to care for its inhabitants and others around the world, the directly inverted version ceaselessly appeals to the obligation of Swedish citizens to care for their state against the invasive terror of racialized migrants (Mulinari and Neergaard 2017).

From the anxious air-raid siren tested in central Stockholm four times a year—and its cute name, Hesa Fredrik, that hides the violence of impending panic—to the explicit militarization of universities, schools, and socioeconomically deprived suburbs, the exposure of the Swedish state's demand for care is ubiquitous. It is this form of compromised military care that complicates radical discourses of care as the exposure of a constitutive social vulnerability.

For Judith Butler, the body is universally a site of potential vulnerability, not so much because of its position as because of its constitutive relations. Regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, Butler (2022: 25) writes that both life and death are literally passed through air from body to body, exposing bodies to both the permanent threat and the social survival that reside in the constant transfer of space—of life—between and among themselves: “If potential and actual grief is in the air we breathe, then the breath is now the means of passage for the virus and for the grief that sometimes follows, as well as the life that survives.” The passage of life between bodies, their porousness and the environment constituting them, is the fundamental relationality of being, and there is no way out of this constitutive relation of vulnerability in which “the world sticks to me and saturates me” (35).

The body is always given over both to other bodies as a relation of survival and to the regulatory norms of power as potential threat and grief. It is through this double relationality that bodies become subjects. The body is given over to a sociality that is always primary. At the level of the body, this is one's founding vulnerability to others, while at the level of subjection, of becoming recognizable as a subject, this sociality is the dispossession of the subject's claim to self-possession: “One is dependent on this ‘outside’ [i.e., social norms] to lay claim to what is one's own. The self must, in this way, be dispossessed in sociality in order to take possession of itself” (Butler 2004: 7). One's claim to subjecthood is always subtended by a sociality in which bodies are vulnerable to others; to claim a subjective place in an environment, one must already be vulnerably exposed to, and exist within and as, that environment. The formation of civic subjects, then, is reliant on a temporality of care in which vulnerability precedes its appropriation by (neo)liberal authorities.

In Sweden today, the “outside” of social norms maintains an extraordinarily prominent position as the authority of care, with Swedish welfare exceptionalism placing itself always as first among equals (Habel 2011). However, this gentle mask hides the directly inverted temporality of the intense privatization of health care and public services, undermining the care on which the “internal” vulnerability of social lives is reliant: the vulnerability of the Swedish population is occasioned and maintained by the state through its failure to care. Economically and ideologically, this hidden temporality is obsessively masked by the demand for Swedes to care for their country against the threat of uncaring outsiders. In its pathological demand to students—“Who are you if war comes and in which way can you contribute?”—the Armed Forces reveals a repressed underside to its impulse: both its own vulnerability to its population and its inability to expose itself to that population's own vulnerability.

To understand both how Swedish state welfare institutions historically arose and how they have been deployed as the ideological forefront of Sweden's international reputation as the middle way between capitalism and socialism—a complex nexus spanning the last two centuries that the essays in this dossier examine and criticize—it is necessary to take a step back.

For more than a century up to World War I, Sweden had been a hub for processing raw materials, largely owing to its vast iron ore reserves and cheap energy from hydropower. For a comparatively large country, densely filled with forests and lakes, however, the greatest social effects of industrialization were concentrated in the productive centers, while more peripheral urbanization and industrialization to a large extent circled the mines and paper mills of Småland, Värmland, Västmanland, and the huge but sparsely populated Norrland, which includes Sápmi, the unceded land of the Indigenous Sami.

In the rest of the country, life was still mostly rural and agrarian. Several harsh winters and droughts led to famine in the 1860s, after which 25 percent of the country emigrated, with about one million settling in the United States (Lauesen 2021: 23). By the 1890s, with a shrinking reserve labor force and the increasing demand of industrial production, laborers were gaining stability. Wages doubled in that decade alone. The first calls for a general welfare program emerged out of this collective stability (44–47).

The culmination of these demands—and the turning point to welfare—came on December 18, 1918, when Sweden's parliament voted in favor of universal suffrage, albeit with some limitations. With a firm monarchy and a German-leaning, staunchly conservative right, the suffrage resolution was passed unwillingly, under pressure from huge demonstrations and food riots, which arose as a result of Sweden's very precarious neutrality during World War I. Swedish politicians had decided to maintain prewar quantities of iron ore exports to Germany. With its relatively small labor force and often frozen ground, though, Sweden was reliant on the importation of food from the Allied countries, which was severely reduced in response to its collaboration with Germany, resulting in a hunger crisis that undermined the organized labor gains of the previous decades.

With revolutions underway around the world—in Germany, Finland, Spain, Mexico, Russia, and elsewhere—these political conflicts came to a fever pitch in 1917, when protests spread throughout Sweden. That same year, the Social Democrats (Socialdemokraterna) formed a government with the Liberals, although disagreement on cooperation with the Liberals and on support for armaments resulted in a split of the party, with the revolutionary side forming the Swedish Social Democratic Left Party (now called the Left Party [Vänsterpartiet]), and the reformist side—which would hold power for most of the next century—remaining as the Social Democrats.

The Social Democratic government was under enormous pressure to find a solution to the protests and make its mark as the new governing party, but its proposals on unemployment benefits, health care, maternity insurance, and pension rights were consistently met with strong opposition from the right. This stasis led to frequent changes of government and a deep skepticism of power. The consecutive elections of 1920, 1921, and 1924 had the lowest ever voter turnout, at just over 50 percent.

In the face of continuing protests and strikes, the reforms eventually enacted from the 1920s onward were radical by current standards, although reactionary resistance to them never ended. Some of the most radical reforms were attempted during Olof Palme's first term as prime minister (1969–76), when a series of wildcat strikes starting in the northern mining region resulted in the strengthening of trade unions. Palme reluctantly accepted parts of a proposal from trade unions for a policy of wage earner funds that would shift ownership of the means of production from capitalists to workers. This was the third phase of “the democratization of economic power,” as Torkil Lauesen (2021: 111) writes, which began with the struggle for suffrage at the beginning of the century and continued, in its second phase, with the establishment of the welfare state.

Over a few decades, a small percentage of the shares of each company would be transferred to trade unions, through which workers would manage the ownership of the companies where they work. However, Palme lost the 1976 elections, putting the Social Democrats in the opposition for the first time in over four decades.

But again, as during the protests after World War I, the demands from the Swedish population persisted, until eventually the government was forced to listen. In Palme's second term as prime minister (1982–86), these “third phase” plans were passed in parliament in a modified and less radical form. The reaction from the forces of capital was immediate: Sweden's largest private companies—IKEA, H&M, and Tetra Pak—relocated their headquarters to tax havens abroad (as Spotify also would decades later). The right-wing hatred of Palme became immense, bringing huge demonstrations onto the streets. In 1986 he was murdered in central Stockholm. The assailant has never been caught. In 1991 the Moderate Party (Moderaterna) and the Liberals won the election and abolished the bill, affirming the private ownership of the means of production and marking the beginning of the demise of the Swedish social welfare state.

The contradictions of Sweden have defined both the revolutionary demand for care and its reactionary refusal by organized capital. This is a country famed for its punctuality, where public transport is mostly privatized and trains are constantly delayed owing to staff shortages or the shocking surprise, for six months a year, of snow on the tracks. In Sweden, tolerance, inclusivity, and universal welfare are the pillars of the national identity, in a country obsessively pursuing the withdrawal of asylum rights, with the requirement of labor market participation as the only condition for residence (Philipson Isaac 2024: 2), and the pathological repression of any mention of its own colonial history. (Its sudden official turn to military and ideological support for Israel's genocide in Gaza has recently made this clear.) This is the renowned land of institutional feminism, where gender equality is inscribed in public discourse everywhere; here, where the Sweden Democrats—a party that only one generation ago was openly neo-Nazi, whose support since 2022 gives the ruling right-wing coalition its majority—demand the ethnonationalist protection of the heterosexual nuclear family, in which women stay at home and look after blond babies, where every day the media pumps out an explicitly racialized specter of criminal gangs running wild on a murderous rampage. This is the famed welfare utopia, where many public schools are funded by the state but owned and managed by private companies for profit; where privatized, for-profit health care subtends the claims to an ideal welfare state; where the famously neutral country buys weapons from the Israeli military's supplier Elbit Systems (PGS 2022); where military jets are made and sold by Saab; and where the Armed Forces tours schools and universities on propaganda campaigns.

The problem confronted in contemporary Swedish struggles for care is that the surface narrative disguises a contorted secret, which is the exact inverse of the surface: the state demands to be cared for in order to continue its practice of refusing to care, which is practiced through the claim to being the archetypal state of care. In this sense, Butler's ([2010] 2016) universalization of vulnerability—albeit careful to differentiate between forms and degrees of vulnerability in different contexts, according to different accumulations of history—is hard to situate in Swedish struggles because vulnerability is not removed and appropriated as a function of an extractive authority but rather assigned to subjects as their national identification. What makes a student Swedish, as the roaming exhibition of the Armed Forces shows in brutal clarity, is their contribution to the defense of Sweden's vulnerability to the permanent specter of a Russian attack.

For Stefano Harney and Fred Moten (2021), the politics of care is an insufficient rubric because it cannot separate itself from a presumption of prior individuation: care is expressed as two subjects inclining toward each other in a relation of care, which temporally assumes those subjects were previously divisible and uninclined. “What if,” they ask, “what's always being taken care of is not this or that self but the very idea of the self that lies at the core of anti-socially reproductive carelessness?” (126). What if discourses of critical care actually affirm the individuation against which they organize?

For Harney and Moten, radical sociality always works the other way around: when we witness what appears to be a discrete and finite act of care, what is happening is the enforced separation of sociality, disguising the care that is already ongoing as sociality itself. The optics of care appears as a way of understanding mutual and constitutive acts of survival, but what is in fact occurring is the continued survival of sociality. The frame of care separates sociality into divisible subjects who care, but surpassing that frame—in the excess of that appearance of individuation—is the sociality of care itself as a form that precedes and exceeds the individuals who enact care.

This “undercommon” (Harney and Moten 2013) sociality of care as the grounding of social life in excess of its state foreclosure and privatization is particularly present in Sweden. Despite the complex contradictions of a country famed for a welfare state that is now severely undermined, and where criticism of the renowned Swedish model is received as baffling and unspeakable sacrilege, there is still a generalized practice of social care that provides the conditions of survival, which the state either passively ignores or actively seeks to prohibit.

The peculiar temporality of care in Sweden is that each act of care is not a refusal of the a priori demand of individuation. In Sweden, one does not act against a presupposed refusal of care. Instead, each act of care is an implicit affirmation of a stance that instantiates the symbolic core of Sweden: all Swedish acts are acts of care.

With this presupposition of care as the groundwork of every act, deviations from total care are not seen as ruinous to the general caring project. The ideological mechanics of this groundwork are insidious and perverse in the Freudian sense: the state's narcissistic prescription of all Swedish acts as acts of care demands that all acts ultimately realize themselves in the state. Any generosity only confirms the generous authority of the state, subsuming the radical practices of activists and appropriating them as confirmations of bourgeois authority. The primacy of sociality is withdrawn, and the state establishes itself as temporally prior. This is the profound brutality and ideological violation that the Swedish radical left organizes against. The essays in this dossier show both the immense challenge of this task for activists and their astounding perseverance in attempting it.

When we struggle against power, when we assemble in strike and in protest, when we cry in response to lives lost in genocide or pandemic, we are opening into a social vulnerability that Cedric Robinson might call the caring totality. What he calls “the ontological totality” ([1983] 2000: 171) is those (Black) forms of life that survive through social, political, and artistic practices despite the racializing project of ontology. The caring totality is the survival of our fundamental impulse to care and our need to be cared for, which is satisfied by an exposure to sociality so profound that it entirely disrupts the presupposition of two homeostatic bodies arriving separately at a scene of care.

Sweden is a unique challenge in the radical politics of care because the state's mouthpieces operate precisely through an ideological claim to care, albeit deeply entrenched in exclusionary conditions based on the normatively cisgendered nuclear family, ideal Swedish Lutheran secularism, and whiteness, among other demands. The intention of this “Against the Day” dossier is to investigate the historical causes of this challenge, providing the groundwork for organizing toward a caring totality that exceeds the projects of privatization, militarization, and racialization that define Sweden's current welfare crisis.

The author thanks John Hörnquist for his invaluable help with the historical background of Swedish welfare discussed here.

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