There was a depressing feeling throughout the election campaign, with many people from different national, racial and ethnic backgrounds experiencing an increase in racism as the summer came to an end. “Now we are leaving Sweden” was one comment we encountered during the election campaign. It simply felt too unfair that you have to struggle with the hardest jobs, the longest working days, the lowest wages — and yet you are told every day that you belong to a group in society that is at the root of all the problems.
The day after the election, social media is filled with black boxes or comments that September 11 has for the third time become the day of defeat or disaster.
Another common comment used is “Don’t mourn, organise!”. This motto in the labor movement comes from union fighter and protest singer Joe Hill. They were his last words before he was executed by the US government, almost certainly falsely accused of murder, in 1915.
We need to react, organise and even understand what has happened. Björn Söder could become the first Speaker of the Swedish Parliament. He joined the Sweden Democrats in 1994 when the party was clearly a Nazi party.
Although there is still a Nazi core in the Swedish Democrats, and plenty of Nazis — according to ETC’s review, 214 of the party’s candidates in this year’s elections have links to right-wing extremism — the danger is not just Nazism today but its racism and influence on the entire political establishment.
Linus Bylund, chief of staff for the Swedish Democrats in parliament, told the Financial Times on 13 September: “We are the party that has changed the least in the last 20 years”. This is true in the sense that most other parties have adapted to their rhetoric towards immigrants and refugees.
The Swedish Democrats are now almost as big as the Social Democrats among workers. According to the VALU poll (Sweden’s exit poll surveys), they doubled their support among young people and became the second largest party among first-time voters (the Moderates are the largest).
The premise for the Swedish Democrats’s unprecedented success is that hundreds of thousands of voters have been left in a political vacuum from which they can recruit. Previously, workers and young people had a political voice — social democracy was long seen as the party of the working class. However, the Social Democrats’ bourgeoisisation has been going on for a very long time.
After decades of cuts to welfare and attacks on workers’ rights — accelerated by the recent period’s undermining of the right to strike, the employment protection act (which made it easier and cheaper for bosses to fire workers) and the recent submission to join NATO — hundreds of thousands of voters have been left lost. Ever since the process took off — in the 1990s — Offensive has been saying that the most important anti-racist measure is the formation of a new, large, fighting, socialist workers’ party.
The party of the working class must be anti-capitalist. The working class exists because capitalism as an economic system exploits workers. The link between racism and capitalism is now even clearer as capitalism has entered the nationalist era where nationalism is churned out by the establishment in all countries.
Those of us who were there remember the anti-racist activity before the crucial 30 November demonstration that stopped the Nazis in Kungsan in 1991. The skinheads who were going to march had the Swedish Democrat’s demo permit. Yet a simple slogan — stop racism — was not enough. Offensiv (today’s Rattvisepartiet Socialisterna) argued hard in the Network Against Racism that we should also add resistance to cuts.
It’s the same now. We need to organise, yes! But we need to link anti-racism with the necessary class struggle against the ongoing price rises and the pending cuts that the recession will bring.
There is a real demand for action on these issues. According to VALU, on election day, healthcare and schools were still the most important issues despite the parties talking mostly about crime. We need to build a fighting movement that is also political and in the long run reclaims and fills the political space with workers’ voices for a socialist world based on solidarity and equality.
