It has become something of a harbinger of spring when the Left Party holds its biennial congress, which always sparks major debates within the party. While the last two congresses have focused on whether the party should demand the complete abolition of capitalism or continue down the path of watering down its call for socialism even further, this year’s debate was centered on the demand for the party to be included in the next government.
The Left Party has never been in government since its founding in 1917. Now, after decades of playing a supporting role to Social Democratic governments, the Left Party leadership has decided to demand a seat at the table, just in time for the election which will be held on September 13 this year. The party leader, Nooshi Dadgostar, has stated that “The Left Party will vote for a government that we will be included in. We will reorganize our party in order to win the election.” Grassroots members and local branches have questioned his assertion that the election platform should include language stating that the Left Party won’t support or allow the formation of a government that they are excluded from. The local branch in Malmö has rightly argued that this stance will require the party to compromise too much on its policies.
However, the snowball is already in motion, and has been for many years. The goal is to be a part of the government coalition with the Social Democrats, the Green Party, and the neoliberal Center Party. Collaboration with an ideological enemy like the Center Party was explained by EU parliamentarian and former Left party leader Jonas Sjöstedt last year in an article: “The fact is that even those parties that sit the furthest away from each other on issues like privatization and economic policy, as with the Left Party and the Center Party, can have other issues that unite them.”
How can this never-before-seen constellation of government parties function together? What is the Left Party aiming to achieve together with three parties based on different shades of right-wing politics? Sjöstedt illustrates how the process might look:
“The Left Party will have to accept the NATO membership, but we can still influence foreign policy to stand up for international laws, not just with regards to Ukraine but also to Palestine. The Social Democrats will stand their ground on maintaining a strict migration policy, but together with the Green Party and Center Party, we on the left can make other small improvements. Simultaneously, the Left Party will be able to win a long list of necessary reforms for welfare and equality in Sweden, as we have done before in state budget collaborations.”
Last year, the Left Party launched an internal “intensive course in the art of governing” to prepare selected leading members before taking on ministerial positions in a future government. Keynote speakers included former finance minister Anders Borg and former prime minister Carl Bildt, both from the Conservatives (Moderaterna), as well as capitalist billionaire Jacob Wallenberg.
In February 2022, the Left Party was the only party in parliament to vote against sending arms to feed the war in Ukraine. However, the party leadership revoked the decision after internal debates and criticism from the bourgeois media. Since then, the party has voted in tandem with the other seven parties in parliament, approving a total of 21 “care packages” including arms worth 103 billion SEK (9.5 billion euro) as of February 2026. They also voted for the “Total Defense Resolution for a Stronger Sweden” bill in 2024, which included boosting the “deterrence and defense capabilities” of the Swedish Armed Forces by 170 billion SEK by 2030. The Left Party has abandoned all previous resistance to Swedish NATO membership.
The Left Party, desperate to become part of the next government in coalition with the Social Democrats, is prepared to sacrifice its (limited) political program, and more, to reach that goal. This has included expelling several of its own MPs for their uncompromising activism and support for the Palestine solidarity movement. Some of those expelled have resolved to create new political parties, such as the newly formed Future Left, led by two former Left Party MPs.
The Role of a Program
As this year’s election campaigns begin, parties are discussing the sorts of policies they will be calling for. Naturally, this has sparked a discussion about the role of the program. Should the program only include demands that are easily achievable within today’s existing frameworks—such as within a municipality’s operations—or should it aim for more? Isn’t it precisely the role of socialists to challenge the rules of the game that have been set—rules so skewed that the game can only end one way: the rich win. What does it mean to be a revolutionary, and what does revolutionary thinking entail today?
In Stockholm, the Stockholm Left Alliance (Stockholms Vänsterallians, SVA) has been established as an alternative to the left of the Left Party in the upcoming municipal elections. The alliance consists of Socialist Alternative (ISA), the Feminists, and the Future Left. In developing a common election platform, Socialist Alternative has argued that we should not fixate on the established “rules of engagement” in municipal politics today. We need to start from the needs of Stockholmers and create a program that breaks free from overly narrow budget constraints. The Left Alliance needs to stand apart from the Left Party leadership—which is willing to abandon its policies just to hold a seat in power. Instead, its political program must serve as an inspiration and organizer of grassroots mass struggle, making reforms that currently seem “impossible” a reality.
One example is the “re-municipalization” (bringing back into public ownership) of large rental properties previously sold off to venture capitalists. These housing sharks have often owned the properties for only a few years, neglecting them and charging exorbitant rents, before reselling them. They use people’s homes purely for their speculative activity. We should not accept that these swindlers be compensated yet again and walk away with even more profit, as was the case when Stockholm bought back the Hjulsta apartment buildings from Einar Mattsson for 1.4 billion Swedish kronor (around 130 million euro) this December. Instead, the rental properties should be returned to public ownership through expropriation, without compensation to the capitalists. Is this possible? Yes, if tenants mobilize in a mass movement and this gains a foothold, as happened in Berlin in 2021. Just as a mass movement would be needed, along with a collective rent strike, to enforce the Left Alliance’s demand for lower rents.
In her debate with Eduard Bernstein in the book Social Reform or Revolution? Rosa Luxemburg refutes the revisionist’s pretext that the program should not be revolutionary because this could provoke “a premature” workers’ revolution. Luxemburg responds that one can never speak of a premature seizure of power by the working class, given the social conditions workers face.
World wars, Nazism, climate catastrophe—today’s chaos and crises have, on the contrary, occurred precisely because capitalism has been allowed to persist for too long. “The class-conscious masses are themselves merely the product of the incipient collapse of bourgeois society and therefore carry within themselves the economic and political legitimacy of their time,” writes Luxemburg, highlighting how workers’ uprisings arise from the social situations created by capitalism.
The philosophy of Marxism—dialectical materialism—starts precisely from the material. “Being determines consciousness.” But it doesn’t stop there. Everything is changeable, as dialectics shows. Marx criticized mechanical materialists like Feuerbach who failed to see that humans are not merely a product of their environment but also influence their environment and themselves. “The coincidence of changed circumstances and human activity, or humanity’s self-transformation, can only be grasped and rationally understood as revolutionary practice.” (Marx, Theses on Feuerbach)
We are not merely products of society; we also possess a consciousness and a will that we can put to use, rather than merely observing the state of affairs. To be revolutionary is to not accept the present, and to resist the destructive force that humanity has created through capitalism. It is only when we think beyond these boundaries that we can see a way to move forward.
Connecting to the Struggles of Today
So, we have a red sunset on the horizon as a socialist goal and a vision of another world of peace, equality, and freedom—but what is the path to get there? How do we anchor the goal in today’s context?
Though such an approach existed long before, Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky coined the term “transitional program” or “transitional method” for the development of a program that starts from the demands of current struggles and extends a bridge which connects them to a socialist transformation of society.
“In the course of the daily struggle, we must help the masses find the bridge between current demands and the socialist program of the revolution. This bridge should comprise a system of transitional demands based on today’s conditions and the current consciousness of broad sections of the working class, and which invariably leads to the decisive conclusion: the seizure of power by the proletariat.” (The Transitional Program)
Trotsky also emphasizes that whether demands are unfeasible or feasible is always a question of the balance of forces and the state of the class struggle.
The program is meant to be used. We do not make demands for the sake of it, but to immediately “lend them” to all groups that wish to fight (and who, in turn, develop new demands that a socialist party’s program can borrow back). As an example, for many people who get involved in a protest movement against deportations, the main demand revolves around stopping the deportation of a specific person, rallying around slogans like “Let Sarah stay!” Socialist Alternative has, for the past 20 years, added to this by demanding “Reinstate the right to asylum,” since, despite formally existing, this right has not functioned in practice. Papers for the undocumented—i.e., amnesty—is also an important demand for all those who, due to asylum application rejections, end up in the “shadow society” of exploited labour, living underground in fear of the authorities.
Now, attacks on refugees—as well as on the fundamental democratic rights of everyone whose parents once immigrated—have become so numerous that a movement has once again sprung up in protest and collectively formulated the demand “for a humane refugee policy” to take a comprehensive approach to these issues. Socialist Alternative adds that migration policy must “be based on the equal value of all people” and that “laws and welfare must be equal for all.” This also means we must fight for the redistribution of resources from the rich to society, as everyone has the right to housing, work, and welfare.
Avoiding the Traps of Ultra-Leftism and Opportunism
Trotsky also offers some practical tips on how to avoid classic programmatic errors. If a program remains at an overly general level without any connection to, for example, the actual situation and consciousness of trade unionists today, then the mistake of sectarian abstraction is made. For example, consider the radical groups that show up at every demonstration shouting “one solution—revolution” regardless of the issue the demonstration is about.
“The second danger is the opposite: that the program is adapted too much to local conditions, to specific peculiarities, and loses the revolutionary main line,” writes Trotsky. It is possible to be drowned in demands about everything that needs to be improved immediately, and allow general solutions to fade into the background. In our municipal election program, Socialist Alternative includes the demand for a municipal uprising to secure more funding for the municipalities.
It is not possible to implement all necessary reforms—such as abolishing minute-by-minute micromanagement in home care, eliminating inhumane working hours and schedules in elder care, and a six-hour workday with full pay—within the municipal budget constraints. The municipalities of Luleå and Stockholm (where Socialist Alternative is running this year) must therefore take the lead in a municipal uprising that spreads to all other municipalities and puts pressure on the state. This can be linked to the demand “Build up welfare—not the military.”
As already pointed out, a program should not be put forward in the abstract but must be firmly grounded. The same applies to the demand for a municipal uprising. As an example of this, we in Socialist Alternative often cite the example of the British city of Liverpool in the 1980s, which was governed by socialists like ourselves, and broke through municipal budget constraints, initiating three citywide general strikes to successfully demand more funding from Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.
This year also saw the emergence of a new resistance movement—namely the “Jokkmokk rebellion”—which began with Jokkmokk municipality’s public refusal to “freely collaborate” with the government’s “remigration policy” which would have deported its residents. The Jokkmokk rebellion spread to at least 136 municipalities out of 290 nationally, showing that it is both possible and correct to revolt against injustice.
Rosa Luxemburg already touched on how the working class must engage in struggle and rebellion to learn the lessons needed in order to strengthen itself. A “failed” uprising, or a struggle that only goes halfway, has value in itself through all the knowledge gained for next time. But who gathers all these lessons, and who safeguards the program? This is where the party comes in. In short, the program would quickly fade away and the lessons from past struggles be forgotten if there were no organizations working to preserve and develop them. That is why we build revolutionary parties. Parties that aren’t isolated and confined to the parliamentary bubble, but that root themselves in the greater struggle.
The electoral collaboration that Socialist Alternative is now building for the Stockholm municipal elections is not the beginning of a new mass workers’ party, which the situation is crying out for. With the strong desire among large parts of the population to vote out the extreme right-wing government, in favour of a “lesser evil” Social Democrat-led government, there is no immediate possibility of setting up such a radical mass force to the left of the Left Party at the national level. Socialist Alternative has joined the local left-wing alliance to demonstrate what is needed on a larger scale, while at the same time warning that a social democratic government, which will probably still be formed in coalition with other bourgeois parties, will not mean a clear turn away from right-wing politics.
