SINCE THE war, Sweden has become an almost
mythological country. Suitably remote and out
of the way, it has come to be an entity rather like
the Americas in the 18th century, or China in the
Middle Ages—not so much a normal object of
real knowledge as a didactic political fable. A
contemporary equivalent of the myth of the
Happy Savage has flowered: that of the Suicidal
Swede. In Sweden, so the legend goes, un-
precedented thousands jump out of the window
to escape too much social insurance, while in the
background, abortion, divorce and alcoholism
ravage national morality and transform the
remainder of Swedish society into a macabre,
demented saturnalia. President Eisenhower him-
self recently retold the story to an audience of
Republican politicians in Chicago. The intended
moral of the tale is plain: the more welfare
people have, the worse they in fact end up by
faring. Too much cosseting leads to boredom,
immorality and unhappiness. Suicide becomes
the dramatic index of these discontents.
The only thing missing from this picturesque
image is any basis in fact. The figures speak for
themselves. Sweden came 6th among European
nations for frequency of suicide in the last year
for which there are full comparative statistics, and
the rate has declined since then; 6th again among
these countries for alcoholism, and 4th for
divorce.
But there is an argument “from the Swedish
experience” of quite another and entirely serious
kind. This comes from Right-wing intellectuals
in the Labour Party, who see Sweden as an
exemplary model of an existing socialist society,
4
and one from which we have much to learn
Readers of Crosland’s Future of Socialism will
remember how ubiquitously he quotes Swedish
experience. Only America gets an equal number
of mentions, but of the two he gives the palm to
Sweden as coming nearest “the socialist’s ideal
of the ‘good’ society”. The full Right-wing argu-
ment goes roughly like this: Sweden is the living
example of a society which combines a very high
degree of social welfare and equality with a very
limited degree of common ownership. The
Swedish Social-Democratic Party has been
phenomenally successful electorally. The connec-
tion isn’t hard to see: it is the Party’s coolness to
nationalisation and concentration on welfare and
equality measures instead which have been
responsible for its success. The lesson for us is
clear. The Swedish Party shows us the only kind
of programme that will get us back into power—
while Sweden as a country shows us the pre-
eminently desirable kind of society we would
create once we were in power and could im-
plement that programme. In other words,
Sweden represents the only possible type of
socialism for us, but at the same time this is—
fortunately—the best of all types. There is only
one alternative—the optimum. Electoral realism
and social idealism sublimely coincide.
If Sweden is not a caution, is it a mandate? Is
it this Valhalla of revisionism? Crosland is right
in saying that the British Left has usually tended
to be insular, and we should welcome the
challenge to broaden the field of discussion
beyond a purely national framework. We
certainly do have much to learn from Sweden and
 The first part of a study of the Swedish Model by Perry Anderson
other countries. This article will be an attempt to
carry the war into Crosland’s own favourite
territory. The question then, is: To what
extent is Sweden a viable model of a socialist
society? And to what extent is it a society which
in its essentials is repeatable elsewhere?
Telephones are beige and shaped like drooping
tulips—all in one feather-weight plastic piece.
Newspapers are 30 pages thick. Private airfields
are constructed for their distribution; their
journalists confide that the only limit to their size
is aircraft freight capacity. Surburban automats
blaze with geometric groceries, from chicken to
cucumbers. Railway cafeterias have slot-machine
radios at each table. The fact is surprisingly little
known, but it is the first one that needs to be
grasped: drawing its wealth from massive
resources of timber and water-power, copious
high-grade iron ore and a superlative engineering
industry (rock drills, office machinery, ball-
bearings, tankers, steam-turbines), Sweden is now
the richest country in Europe. It is considerably
richer than Great Britain. In 1957, Swedish net
national income per capita was about £460. In
the same year British net national income per
capita was about £350. Sweden has more of the
sovereign consumer durable, the motor car, per
head of population than any other country in
Europe (13 per 100). It has more telephones per
capita than any other country in the world but
the U.S.A.; its electrified railroad network is the
most extensive in the world absolutely. Sweden is
thus not just one out of many more or less well-
off societies, it marks thehigh zenith of European
affluence. The first question, then, that suggests
itself is Galbraith’s. With all its wealth, does
Sweden match a public generosity to its private
abundance, or is there a gaping discrepancy
between the two ?
In our present political context, the answer to
this question may be of critical theoretical
importance. The New Left has recently been
massing its fire-power more and more on this
one main front of the “social imbalance”.
Charles Taylor has even gone so far as to write:
“Before us stand the inhuman priorities of
capitalism: the only political question is how to
understand and change them . .”. Of course, the
more alert younger men of the Right and Centre
have also criticised these priorities in our society.
The pivotal point at dispute is the New Left’s
insistence that only a significant extension of
common ownership can reverse the present order
of priorities, and put social needs squarely before
private gains.
Now the Swedish economy is only 13 per cent
publicly owned (mainly railroads, utilities, water
power and iron resources). At the same time it
has been “managed” by the Social-Democratic
Party since the 1930’s. Sweden can thus be taken
as a test-case of whether, in Stuart Hall’s words,
“A capitalist economy can be managed and
directed towards targets radically different from
those which the surviving capitalist economies of
the world—the U.S., Germany, Britain and
France—are steadily moving towards.”
“This is the biggest social reform of the last
50 years” was how the new Pension scheme was
first described to us in Stockholm. Pensions have
had an absolutely dominating importance in
5
recent Swedish politics. As an issue, they literally
monopolised the last two elections (1957, 1958);
in 1959 the present Social-Democratic scheme
finally became law. There is now almost no chance
whatsoever of its being reversed, but even so we
were told by SAP (i.e. Social-Democratic)
officials that one of the key slogans in the coming
elections this autumn will be: “Defend the
Pensions”. The famous scheme, which came into
operation on January 1st this year, must be one
of the most spectacular pieces of welfare legis-
lation ever enacted anywhere. The basic pension
(from 67 onwards) is now about £175 a year for
The scheme thus outlined is perhaps the
crowning achievement of the Swedish Welfare
State. It gives some idea of the distance which
separates what is still so largely social salvage in
Britain from social security in Sweden. Olaf
Palme, formerly secretary to the Prime Minister
Erlander and now one of the most prominent of
younger Senators, emphasised to us that it is a
Party principle that “Social welfare is not merely
the prevention of poverty, it is the positive guaran-
tee of a good standard of living.” Erlander himself
wrote a pamphlet in 1954 on these lines, with sub-
headings like: “Increasing standards of living—
Increasing demands of society”. The results are
reflected not only in the cornucopia of Pensions
but in most of the other ramifications of the wel-
fare system as well. Child allowances are £27 a year,
widows’ pensions (from 55 onwards) are £140 and
will rise to about £257 by 1968. Maternity grants
£18, maternity allowances and sickness benefits
vary according to income from £1 10s. a week to
£10. Unemployment benefits are voluntary, but
average benefits for 1957 were £8 10s. a week.
Medical treatment is not as free as ours is: the
patient must pay 14- of the cost of his doctor’s bills
and about 1-2 the cost of medicines—but hospital
care is free. Against this the service itself is of a
very fine standard, markedly higher than ours.
Finally, there are a row of benefits with no real
equivalent here at all: 10 day or more holidays
for housewives under a certain income with 2
children of 15 or under, for a nominal fee of 14s.
or so; free holiday transportation for children up
to 14 anywhere in Sweden and back; free or fee-
paid (according to income) domestic help; home-
furnishing loans up to £200 for the newly married
(normal sums granted are a good deal less than
this), which are taken advantage of by over a
quarter of the eligible couples; removal allowances
6
a single person, and this figure will rise to about
£250 by 1968; a married couple now gets about
£280, which will have increased to about £390 by
1968. In addition to this the new Supplementary
scheme stipulates that 60 per cent of the average
income in excess of about £300 for the 15 best
years of the pensioner’s work-career is to fee paid
him as a supplementary pension, up to a maximum
of about £1,170 benefit a year. All this is geared
by means of still further supplements to the cost-
of-living index, as our pensions notoriously are
not.
for the unemployed taking up work in new areas
Not all these benefits are anything like equally
extensive in their coverage, but they show how
far beyond the “safety-net” ideology Swedish
social welfare has progressed. Even given the
discrepancy in wealth between the Swedes and
ourselves, it is, I think, plain that they spare and
care more for the old, the ill and the harassed
than we do.
The welfare services are, of course, not the
only social area where evident human priorities
risk being elbowed aside. In Britain the pattern
is only too familiar. Exiguous roads, obsolete
hospitals, leprous slums, a pauperised education
—all at the feet of a gigantic, glittering consumer-
goods industry luxuriating in ever more prestige
business H.Q.s and record advertising campaigns.
How much of all this is re-enacted in Sweden?
To begin with education: the estimates voted
by the Riksdag for 1959/1960 amounted to just
about £120,000,000. Multiplied by the difference
in population (there are 71-2 million Swedes), this
works out at almost exactly £800,000,000 in our
terms. Our education budget for the same year
was £670,000,000. The Swedish figure, in fact, is in
relative terms a good 19 per cent higher than our
own. On what is the money spent ? The educational
system is at the minute in full transition: a
streaming system very much like our own, with
secondary modern, technical and grammar-type
schools, is being gradually replaced by single-
type comprehensive schools, into which all
existing schools are to be incorporated. The only
exceptions will be the handful of private schools,
negligible in number (2–3 per cent of pupils) and
social importance. The eventual aim is a 9–year
school, with differentiation beginning in a very
mild form in the 6th year, and only taking shape
in 3 different 9th classes (preparation for higher
education; general finishing class with mainly
theoretical bent; and preparatory vocational
training with some theoretical courses).
This educational reform will be complete
by 1970; beginning from that year, the system
will be universal. Swedish education is thus
patently better placed than our own. It is supplied
with more money by an acutely education-
conscious government, it is handled more sensi-
tively, and it has a much more egalitarian future.
Its position as a focus of political concern and
outlay was summed up by one official spokesman
with the slogan: “The 60’s will be the decade of
education. Both quantitatively and qualitatively.”
Up till now, housing hasn’t received the same
kind of bonanza attention as pensions and
education. But it was one of the big electoral
issues, and this year’s government allocations
have been higher than ever before. There has
been a housing shortage running at somewhere
over 60,000 dwelling units a year. In 1956 an
extended effort to boost construction was begun,
and yearly output has now reached about
65,000 new units a year, an all-time Swedish
high. Comparative figures for 1956 show that we
were building 6 new units per 1,000 population,
while the Swedes were building 7.9—i.e. nearly a
third as many again. The next year, 1957, the
Swedish figure was a cool 37.8 per cent higher
than our own. Since then our construction rate
has been plunging downwards, whereas the
Swedish one is still rising.
Roads and hospitals round out the picture and
reveal how consistent it is. Hospitals are numerous
and modern: beds number 14.7 per 1,000 popula-
tion, doctors 7.9 and nurses 22.5. There is still a
serious inadequacy of facilities for mental
patients and alcoholics, who together with
prisoners are now called in Swedish political
terminology the “minorities” and are a much-
discussed future object of alleviating measures.
A crash programme—£40,000,000 earmarked for,
building costs—is now underway to bring mental
hospitals up to the general level, and an Under-
Secretary of State for Social Welfare told us that
the “problem should be solved” within 5 years,
provided there were enough doctors to staff the
new buildings. As for roads, voted allocations
were £60,000,000 for 1959/60.
Schools—roads—hospitals—houses, these are
the specifically social architecture of a society.
An architecture, however, involves more than
just a choice and style of constructions, it includes
their disposition as well. Town and country plan-
ning is all of a piece with the other social priori-
ties. In fact, neglect of it causes damage of a
particularly lasting kind. Once a society has
inscribed itself physically across a natural
environment, the imprint is hard to revoke. It
isn’t easy to see how a discarded Green Belt could
become green again, or a city-centre choked with
office-buildings is going to be prised free from
them. At the same time, the state of planning is
an evidence, it visibly resumes the condition of the
social needs as a whole. The way a society becomes
matter in soot and stone, glass and wood and neon,
offers an immediate image of its stature. The
visual field in the rough centre of a British town
would often do as a device for the social régime
itself: in its blind combinations of ostentation and
squalor, in its gorged, paralysed disorder, and in
the unremitting presence, on all four sides and
above, of the advertisement tent we live our lives
in.
By and large, one only has to walk down a few
streets in Sweden to sense that one is in a society
different in type from our own. The glazed,
hysterical look of our business and entertainments
centres isn’t there; we never saw silenced, derelict
areas; the visual pressure from hoardings is much
milder. Above all, human transcendence, not a
senseless facticity, can be seen everywhere in the
relationship of the buildings to each other.
Together they look intelligible: like a freely
created human habitat, not a monstrous, brute
geological formation. Planning in Sweden is one
of the points at which the far shore of a socialist
community is most evidently almost touched by
existing society.
The 1947 Building Act required municipalities
to work out “master” plans allocating land for
key purposes—public areas, residential ones, traffic
fairways and so on; and in addition a detailed
town plan or rural-development plan to fix the
specific regulations controlling buildings, blocks,
squares, roads, etc. This plan is worked out by
the municipal building committee, and then
published for public inspection; objections are
considered, after which the plan goes all the way
up to the central authority, the Royal Building
Board, before finally going into effect. Once it is
in force, no new development is allowed which
doesn’t conform to it. The municipality has the
right to expropriate land (with compensation)
if the plan so requires it, and the further possi-
bility of buying in extensive areas of built-up land
for full-scale zonal redevelopment. Much of
Stockholm is currently being rebuilt in areas of
“zonal expropriation”. However, as a rule,
municipalities buy up land systematically rather
than expropriate it outright. Our public authori-
ties, however, must pay market-value for land;
they have no choice in the matter since the Town
and Country Planning Act of 1959. And since
1958 the block grants which enabled the buying
7
up of “comprehensive areas” have been abolished.
The crux of the differences between the Swedish
system and our own lies, in fact, not so much in
the abstract, formal powers of the public
authorities—though these are different—as in
their, real, concrete possibilities of expenditure.
Planning is a difficult field to summarise, but
two features of Swedish practice can and should
be indicated because of their immediate bearing
on our own problems. The Swedes have pioneered
the autarchic sub-community, as an alternative
to the pattern of segregated residential and
occupational areas, with traffic brought to a
standstill between the two, which is the curse of
the contemporary big city. Vällingby, 10 miles
west of Stockholm, is a showplace, equipped with
shops, theatres, cinemas, social agencies and
office-buildings and with half the working
population at work in the neighbourhood unit.
This ‘living’ suburb is being reproduced to the
south of the city at Högdalen and Farsta, so that
a multi-core city is gradually taking shape. At
the same time, the traffic problem within each
area is being tackled as well. Nearly all current
town plans take great pains to shut off road
traffic from pedestrian circulation. Typically,
distributor roads circle built-up areas, with
pedestrian walkways leading direct to shopping
precincts. The centres of the two capitals,
London and Stockholm, are neatly symbolic.
While we were in Sweden the battle to stave off
the Monico building was still in doubt; but even
with its success, Piccadilly remains a vicious,
clotted abscess from every point of view, practical
and aesthetic—perhaps the most cluttered and
meanly sordid centre of a capital city in Europe.
The Hötorget in Stockholm is now being entirely
redeveloped on a zonal basis, and will be com-
plete in the early 60’s. Vehicular and pedestrian
circulation are segregated. There is a multi-story
underground garage, and pedestrians can walk
unmolestedly over the entire area, which com-
prises a public square, a theatre, department
stores, ordinary specialised shops, offices, cinemas,
an open below-ground level grocery with esca-
lator access, a terraced restaurant on top of a low
bank of glass-built shops. The ensemble is a
model of cool, elegant, convenient construction,
around which one can wander as free and un-
disturbed as on a village green.
The conclusion is irresistible. Sweden, with
even less public ownership than ourselves, has
succeeded in realising a relatively fair balance
between social goods and individual ones. A
capitalist economy can, it appears, be directed
towards different targets from those we are being
driven willy-nilly towards here. Swedish Social-
Democratic governments have been able to yoke
8
a privately-owned industry to the service of at
least those immediate needs of community to
which British capitalism has remained impervious
to this day. It has been done very consciously.
Time and time again party officials told us “We
were Galbraithian before Galbraith”. “In 1954
we were already Galbraithian”.
There is only one catch. But it is a very big one.
The SAP has achieved this admirable equilibrium
not in one administration of 5 years, or even two
or three intermittent administrations, but over a
period of nearly three decades of uninterrupted
rule. Apart from a brief interregnum of 100 days
or so, it has been in power alone or in coalition
for 28 years—ever since 1932. This is far longer
than even the Democrats enjoyed in their golden
days under Roosevelt and Truman. More than
this, the SAP has consistently won between 45–50
per cent of the total vote, while its nearest oppon-
ent has usually won only a maximum of about 25
per cent, for the opposition has always been frag-
mented into at least 3 sharply different and dis-
united parties—Conservatives, Liberals and
Farmers. Its supremacy has been so lasting and
entire that an SAP electoral victory is clearly a
phenomenon of a different order from a Labour
one. The total social context is obviously in some
way profoundly different in the two countries.
The SAP vote appears to be what might be
called a sociological majority, whereas the inter-
mittent Labour majorities have never been more
than political ones. A full discussion of this point
must be left to the end of the article, where an
attempt will be made to assess the general per-
tinence of the Swedish experience to us. All that
need be said at the minute is this: the enforcement
of a humane scale of priorities in Sweden has been
the work of decades of continuous SAP power.
Any argument that Swedish achievements are
reproducible here would have to show how their
exceptional pre-conditions are also going to be
reproduced. Yet even in the first years of the
Attlee government the prospect of indefinite
political paramountcy was very remote. Within
the assumptions of Right-wing thinking, it must
appear far more so today.
There is thus little excuse for simply extra-
polating the Swedish handling of the priorities
problem from the Swedish context, and announ-
cing that this is the solution for what are clearly
different British conditions. The formal possi-
bility of a rational order of priorities without
common ownership is proved by the Swedish
example. But is this possibility a real and concrete
one in the British context? Could we do what the
Swedes have done? The answer will depend on
how far the total Swedish situation in fact
deviates from our own, and from that which is
the rule in capitalist countries. And before this
can be decided, a whole range of other factors
must be taken into account.
It is, however, worth considering at this point
whether this formal, and perhaps for us only
formal, possibility of decent priorities without
common ownership doesn’t all the same raise
some questions as to how appropriate our
formulations of these two problems on the New
Left have been.
The first point that might be made is this. The
main argument Charles Taylor uses to rebut the
idea that considerably increased taxation could
redress our priorities is that such taxation would
rapidly bring on a refusal to invest and ultimately
a flight of capital abroad, while the economy
ground to a standstill. Now it is certainly
possible that this is what would happen in
Britain. But does this mean it would necessarily
happen everywhere capitalists were taxed in this
way ? The evidence indicates not. For one thing,
flight of capital in a situation of high taxation to
satisfy crying community needs would be such
an openly anti-social line of action that it is
The whole case for common ownership as so
far posed by the New Left (and by Crossman)
rests on the hypothesis of the inadequacy of
taxation. Now although this may well be justified
specifically here in Britain, this crucial stage in
the argument has been treated in an extra-
ordinarily casual and careless way so far—neither
Taylor nor Crossman even mentions the possi-
bility of currency controls, for instance. Further-
more, the discussion has so far always been
phrased in such a way as to imply that the pro-
positions put forward are universally true of
capitalist societies—i.e. that they are concerned
with the pure, irreducible essence of capitalism.
This is what is inacceptable. What Charles
Taylor has done, it seems, is to confuse necessary,
universal characteristics of a capitalist economy
with contingent and local ones. Certainly the
profit motive tends inexorably to the sacrifice
of social goods to the production of individual
ones. But does profit have to emigrate when under
pressure? And if it tries, does it have to succeed?
It may do both these, and in Britain it would
perhaps be likely to do so, but Sweden surely
shows that there is no evidence it must do so, by
the law of its own nature.
The second point concerns the exact way in
which our priorities are currently being set.
surely possible to imagine a social context where
it would be politically inconceivable. An implicit
social consensus against this kind of tactic might,
for instance, have been one of the reasons why
Swedish business never attempted to export
capital in this way. Swedish Conservatives, for
instance, react angrily to indiscriminate attacks
on the Swedish Welfare State and go out of their
way to emphasise to foreigners that they care as
much as any of the other parties about welfare;
it isn’t unusual to hear them claiming the moral
credit for many of the welfare measures passed,
as having first proposed them.
Another more severely practical obstacle is
that Swedish business does not by and large have
the overseas companies which it could transfer
its assets to, should it wish to get its money out
of the country. Finally, there is the whole ques-
tion of currency controls to block a flight of
capital: in certain countries, and Britain may be
one of them, these might not be viable or effec-
tive. But can it be said a priori that they always,
everywhere, must fail?
Everyone agrees that the main arbiter of priorities
in Britain is the profit motive. This means,
obviously, that private profit opts for private
benefits over public ones where the two conflict.
So much is clear. But this isn’t a complete
account of how this arbiter works. For at the
same time, because the arbiter is private, and so
dispersed in a hundred different privacies (the
firms), it is often incapable of making any option
at all in a realm which is purely public—even
when an option would actually bring about
private benefits. The importance of this second
aspect is evident if one looks at the singular
contradictions the two in juncture lead to. The
dynamic of corporation gain can ensure that more
and more cars get made at the expense of new
rolling-stock and cheap public transport; but not
that the purely social complementary goods—
roads—are built at the same time. The resultant
situation of traffic immobility turns back on the
original private pursuit which has produced it,
and threatens to negate it—the car market con-
tracts as the joy goes out of motoring.
However, even this picture—profit asserting
the primacy of private interests over public ones
in areas where the two conflict, and simply
abdicating in purely public areas—is in an
9
important way misleading. It makes a contrast
which is more apparent than real. For the
primacy of private interests over public ones is
almost never “asserted” in this way. It simply
materialises. Stuart Hall writes in Out of Apathy:
“These ‘social’ decisions (i.e. which are to have
priority, advertising or hospitals, office-blocks
or council-houses—P.A.) are fixed elsewhere,
beyond the reach of the consumer. They have
been taken away from the direct intervention
and control of the ordinary citizen, into those sec-
luded places where the market in fact operates:
in the board-room and the bank-manager’s suite
of offices.” This implies that these things are
flatly decided by directors and bank-managers.
But how many business-men resolutely decide
that they must leave schools and hospitals to rot,
and press on with doubling their TV commercials
and lacquering their reception-rooms with the
money saved? Do any at all? On the contrary,
how many mightn’t even feel a stealthy susurrus
of dismay if they learnt that this was the end
outcome of their harmless, familiar routines ?
Stuart Hall’s account of the profit arbiter,
otherwise so telling, is misleading in this, that it
is too anthropomorphic. It suggests that actual
individual men consciously decide to sacrifice
social needs for private lucre. But what finally
defines the whole system is that it utterly expunges
men from the place of its essential working.
These decisions are not taken in the board-room
or the bank-manager’s suite or even the exclusive
club or the pleasure yacht. They are taken
nowhere. They are not taken, they are not decisions:
fatalities. Nobody calculates them and enacts
them, they happen unmeant. Our callous and
malformed priorities are the prodigious obverse
of a thousand discreet, blameless gestures.
Charles Taylor remarks of these priorities: “No
one would go out of their way to defend them”.
This is exactly so, because no one has really
positively fashioned them. Omniverous private
decisions to build new plants, face-lift new models,
circulate new public-relations ‘services’, do
devour the bulk of the total national resources
and leave social needs almost destitute on what
is left. But the executives who make these
decisions don’t make these connections. Not
even a Conservative Chancellor consciously
decides that less money must be spent on educa-
tion than on advertising and packaging—any
more than the Conservative voter decides this,
or the Labour voter the opposite. The whole
option is outside his or their mental universe.
The most “conscious” forms this kind of option
ever takes are probably relatively minor ones,
decisions to cut income tax or lop some more off
the health budget, and these are not seen as
10
specifically related within a general complex of
social events, the outcome of which is tumble-
down out-patient wards in Bermondsey and
reach-for-the-sky corporation chateaux on the
South Bank. One of the key characteristics of our
priorities is just this way they emerge beyond and
outside the political arena proper. As Charles
Taylor has pointed out in What’s Wrong with
Capitalism?, profit is anodyne if purely social (a
society must have an investment fund) or purely
individual (more effort, more reward). It is when
it assumes massively institutionalised intermediate
forms (the firms) that it becomes so disastrous.
For it is then that the normal system of social
decisions (in Parliament) articulating individual
choices (in elections) becomes disrupted, with
the result that crucial decisions are often not
made at all (the roads), or rather they are made
meaninglessly, by default.
If this analysis is right, there are two implica-
tions, one theoretical and one practical. From
the standpoint of theory, attributing our present
priorities primarily either to the lucid, ruthless
selfishness of capitalists or to a system in which
decisions about these things escape everyone
including the capitalists (although they benefit
by these decisions), may seem only a difference of
emphasis. But it ultimately involves two funda-
mentally different ways of looking at capitalism:
either as a more or less straightforward bipolar
system of exploitation, or as a social praxis in
alienation from all its agents, at all its levels. The
first idea explains some facts, but has no direct
purchase on whole other areas of experience, and
is becoming increasingly short in the wind as
time proceeds and societies complicate. The
second one includes the first (in a less simple
version), but is not exhausted by it. It alone
appears able to operate the unification of all our
discrete criticisms of the different areas of our
society. The priorities are one of these areas.
What has happened in Sweden would have to be
redescribed in this perspective: the priorities
there are one segment of the social praxis which
has been recovered and is realised in its appro-
priate site—an elected legislature which in full
consciousness decides on which social needs the
aggregate social wealth should be expended.
The practical implication is this. Because our
priorities are not really deliberate human choices
made by anyone at all—even capitalists—so
much as the invisible obverse of a multitude of
quite other choices, they are at once impregnable
and vulnerable. These strange actions without
agents still remain outside the territory of the
average political debate: they are protected by
their diffuseness, their every-day air, by being so
unattributable. Yet the very fact that no one has
really decided them suggests that they might be
very vulnerable to organised and vocal attack.
Once our priorities are seen as such at all, they
almost must be seen as indefensible at the same
stroke. They are not merely wrong, they are, to
quote Charles Taylor again, “so obviously wrong”
(his italics). “No one would go out of their way to
defend them”. Impregnable as yet, isn’t this the
token of their ultimate fragility? And their vul-
nerability to precisely a popularly-supported high
taxation rather than a common ownership so
So far the picture of Swedish Social-Democracy
has been straightforward. It is when one considers
social equality in Sweden, that the regime begins
to reveal ambiguities. The Pension scheme out-
lined above, the last word in SAP welfare measures,
is Janus-faced. Gösta Rehn, a doyen of Swedish
economists and a Government Treasury official
of impeccable political respectability, remarked to
us bitingly: “The Government thought it could
fight the Liberals and the Communists with an
anti-egalitarian social reform.” And indeed there
is no doubt that the redistributive effect of the
Scheme will not be be especially impressive: its
main tendency is clearly in some measure to
prolong differentiation beyond retirement age
(at some points it might even increase it—par-
ticularly with professional groups now being com-
pulsorily insured for pensions in proportion to
their income). And some of the other benefits are
angled in the same way: the adjustable sickness
benefits and maternity allowances, for instance.
The question poses itself, what has Social-
Democracy done to create not merely a socially
secure and publicly well-endowed society, but
also a classless one ?
There is no doubt at all that Sweden is an
infinitely more egalitarian society than we are.
A couple of days in Sweden is enough to realise
that, and personal impressions get solid statistical
backing from the most immediate index available
—tables of income distribution.
Taxation itself is not sensationally redistributive.
Income tax has a ceiling of 65 per cent of taxable
income. There is also a property tax, but only
from 0.5 per cent to 1.8 per cent of property value
over £3,500. In addition there are local com-
munity income taxes. The sum of all these cannot
amount to more than 80 per cent of the taxpayer’s
income. Other features are a flat-rate 50 per cent
corporation tax and, much needed here, a gift tax
widely distrusted and disbelieved in? If enough
people really saw the issue clearly, business might
well prefer not to risk a grand-stand fight over
blatantly wrong priorities. In other words: isn’t
there a contradiction in saying on the one hand
that no one would go out of their way to defend
our present priorities, and at the same time main-
taining that business would go so far out of its
way to defend them that it would stage the full-
scale social and political showdown involved in
a mass flight of capital?
to block death-duty evasion. The change since
the war is mainly attributable to increases in
wages and productivity (Sweden has had one of
the highest rates in Europe) rather than the
taxation itself, though this has played its part.
Setting aside for the minute the historical
premises of this strikingly even spread of income,
an income range is obviously not the same thing
as a class. The concept of class is still one of the
big difficulties of sociological theory; but we
might take as an initial definition that a class is a
collectivity which: (a) plays a distinctive role in
production; (b) is existentially interdependent on
other similar group or groups—i.e. classes only
exist in the plural; (c) is enclosed within a specific
intellectual universe; (d) lives out specific kinds
of internal relationships within its subaltern
groups (families, neighbourhoods, etc.); and
(e) is self-recruiting. Of these characteristics the
first and the last are the most statistically acces-
sible. But the statistics of the first will merely tell
us, for instance, how many industrial workers
there are, which is of limited significance in itself:
it is the last one which will reveal the dense,
enduring existence of a working class or not.
Now the stark fact is that social mobility in
Sweden, after 28 years of Social-Democratic
government, is as limited as in the self-proclaimed
capitalist countries. A “one third—one level”
development is the rule there as elsewhere: that
is, only one third of working-class sons get white-
collar jobs, the rest do the same work as their
fathers. The full scandal of SAP indifference to
social equality appears if one looks at university
recruitment figures; for in our societies univer-
sities are the notorious single draw-bridge to the
fastnesses of managerial and professional position.
In the last year for which there are figures,
1956–57, only 14.3 per cent—1 in 7—of all
freshmen came from working-class families. An
11
official classification of the population divides it
into 3 “groups” which are supposed to correspond
to Upper Class (Group I)—about 5 per cent of
the population, Middle Class (Group II)—about
43 per cent of the population, and Working-
Class (Group III)—about 52 per cent of the
population. Of the children of all Group I (Upper
Class) parents, 40 per cent go to a university. Of
the children of all working-class and lower paid
white-collar workers only 4–5 per cent get there.
The disparity is now at last beginning to decrease,
but it is still enormous. It is explained by the
financial position of the university student, who
has no fees to pay, but must support himself.
The scholarship system is now finally being
expanded, but in 1950–55 it still only covered 1
in 4 students. Government loans exist at 5 per
cent interest for students, but it is mainly Group
II children from middle-class homes who use
them and the principle of students having to pay
for their own education in this way is pernicious
in any case: they clearly should have wages or a
salary like anybody else engaged in responsible
and socially valuable work. The contradiction
between a higher education in this state and a
schools system being converted to a comprehen-
sive structure is flagrant, and the government
now at last seems to have woken up to it. For the
first time an effort to democratise the universities
is on the cards. But the present situation points
the existence of deep, congealed social divisions
in Sweden which Social-Democratic policy has
scarcely even begun to disturb.
Turning to our third and fourth criteria of
class—specific intellectual universe and lived
relationships (this last far more important than
the usual glibly listed “life-style”)—these are
things which no one could hope to judge on the
basis of a stay of a few weeks in a country. In the
view of the statistical information just discussed,
one would expect there to be evident and abiding
differences between what appear so clearly to be
classes of the familiar kind. Crosland tells us
buoyantly: “All (in Sweden—P.A.) have shared
broadly the same school education, there are no
sharp differences of accent or style of life, and no
deep consciousness of social inferiority or
superiority.” This may be so, but put like that it
doesn’t mean very much. How little it tells us can
be judged by comparing it with these remarks of
the ultra-distinguished Swedish historian and
Conservative, Gunnar Hekscher: “Movement
from one social group to another is still unusual
. . . . The social groups are fairly well defined and
intercourse between them is not very widespread.
Big firms, particularly in the provinces, build one
set of houses for manual workers and other
houses in other localities for office workers. Each
12
group differs in its attitude to life and the groups
don’t want to mix.” All the evidence, in fact,
points to only one conclusion: the stereotyped
class pattern of Western capitalist countries
subsists in Sweden, in the midst of overflowing
welfare and abundance, almost untouched by
nearly 30 years of ostensibly socialist government.
Having said this, it must also be said that if
classes exist in Sweden, people don’t suffer from
them in anything like the way they do here
The existence of classes doesn’t in itself pre-
scribe the common relationship which links all
the individuals in a country to each other as mem-
bers of a national collectivity. Classlessness isn’t
the same thing as community. The first is an
absence of essential social differentiation—a
negative relationship; the second is a positive
social bond. A real human unity may be super-
imposed on deep class divisions: war-time
Britain is an example. Class relationships as lived
between individuals were considerably modified
by the common solidarity of danger. But when
the war ended, class relationships regained their
routine virulence. Our normal “patriotism” has
no real relation to this war-time experience, and
cannot be counted as anything more than the
most abstract silhouette of an authentic com-
munity. Patriotism is something forged from the
outside; it is the relation of one group to an
external Other, and only institutes a specific
internal relation between its members afterwards,
secondarily. The centripetal pressure from out-
side is the only thing which holds the true
patriotic community together: when this goes, it
collapses and with it the changes it has worked
inside the group. Working-class communities
have been so much more valuable and substantial
than anything the “nation” has ever been, partly
because the centripetal pressure encircling them
has not been something occasional, but normal
and continuous. But even with these communities,
the unique inner relationships invented in face of
blockade tend to disintegrate when the pressure
weakens, as it is doing today.
Sweden—and this applies with extra force to
Norway and probably to all the other Scandi-
navian countries—benefits from something quite
different. This is as simple as the smallness of the
population. The advantages of the “local” com-
munity are up to a point transferred to a whole
country. Collective hatreds depend partly on
remoteness, on a kind of stylised and abstract
image of the enemy. Sweden is a small enough
country for the national link to be something
much more immediate than is the case here.
People are more likely to be aware of members
of an opposite social group as individuals in their
own right; this tempers the whole climate of class.