THE STATE AND WOMEN’S LIBERATION
8 mars 2026
”[…]
That way the Marxist classics developed the thesis about the
historically variable social condition of woman and her place in
society; pointing out how the feminine condition is intimately linked
with private property, the family and the State, which is the apparatus
that legalizes such relations and imposes and sustains them by force.”
– CC, Communist Party of Peru, Marxism, Mariategui, and the Women’s Movement, 1973.
”In
opposing the legal and sacred church marriage contract, the feminists
are fighting a fetish. The proletarian women, on the other hand, are
waging war against the factors that are behind the modern form of
marriage and family. In striving to change fundamentally the conditions
of life, they know that they are also helping to reform relationships
between the sexes. Here we have the main difference between the
bourgeois and proletarian approach to the difficult problem of the
family.”
– Alexandra Kollontai, The Social Basis of the Woman Question, 1909.
”The
political authority of the landlords is the backbone of all the other
systems of authority. With that overturned, the clan authority, the
religious authority and the authority of the husband all begin to
totter.”
– Mao Zedong, Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, 1927.
1. Introduction: The bourgeois state is the backbone of patriarchy.
The
vast majority of women in Sweden are part of the proletariat, the
propertyless working class. At the same time, they differ to some extent
from male workers. Women face distinct gender-based oppression in the
home, on the streets, and in the workplace. We refer to the sum of these
forms of oppression as patriarchal. This particular power over
women has its origins in the first primitive forms of property, when
village farms began producing a surplus for barter and accumulation. The
need for clearly defined and legally recognized families arose to
secure ownership of the new property, regulate the division of labor on
the farm, and organize the inheritance of the farm for future
generations. In this process, women were assigned a subordinate role.
Engels calls this “the original defeat of women.” The family as an
institution—linked to property—has since been passed down from era to
era. It has transformed to the same extent that forms of property have
shifted (slave agriculture, feudal estates, townhouses, capitalist
factories, etc.) but has always found its role. The family, the
patriarch, and the woman have been “preserved” by the new masters, who have organized the superstructure to serve their particular form of exploitation.
The
emergence of the nuclear family as a basic unit of society is not a
natural phenomenon. It develops as an institution, defended and reshaped
in accordance with the political needs of the ruling class. They
formulate their laws, their cities, their propaganda, and their
educational systems to constantly reproduce the family as a suitable
apparatus. The decision-making and armed center of this reproduction is
the state. Against this backbone, every single pathetic domestic
patriarch, every rapist, every priest, and so on, can lean their power
over the individual woman. Without the state’s involvement in the
patriarchal system as a whole, the family, the church, the
boss, etc., would quickly crumble, or at least “totter,” as Mao writes
in the quote above. The political power of the Swedish bourgeoisie is
the backbone of all the other systems of domination.
This
text will analyze the role of the Swedish state in the oppression of
women. We begin in the early 1900s, when industrial capitalism began to
take root in earnest. Sweden’s political, social, and cultural landscape
underwent profound changes driven by the new economy, including the
family. During the 1920s and 1930s, the old norms and patterns had
become obsolete, and new bourgeois relationships needed to be
constructed. The responsibility for resolving this crisis naturally fell
on the bourgeois state. The Social Democratic faction of the state
bureaucracy was able to provide the right answers and lead the necessary
restructuring of gender roles and the family.
2. The population crisis of 1934: The state and the reproduction of the workforce.
At
the turn of the century, the agriculture-based mode of production gave
way to the rising industrial sector. This process forced the
displacement of the workforce. The old villages were uprooted, and
workers were drawn into the new factories. The modern conflict between
capital and labor took definitive shape in Swedish cities. The
population in urban areas rose from approximately 1.4 to 3 million
between 1900 and 1930. The old, largely self-sufficient households were
replaced by overcrowded industrial towns and subjected to capitalism’s
law of worker impoverishment. Wages were driven down to an absolute
subsistence level for working-class families to survive. To support the
household, it became increasingly necessary for women to take paid work
alongside their husbands. This gave rise to a serious contradiction
between women’s reproductive labor (household chores, cooking,
childcare, and child-rearing) and their participation in production. The
individual family simply could not afford to reproduce as before. Birth
rates stagnated.
Reformist
social democracy, which had thrived on the increasingly critical
contradiction between workers’ lives and capital’s unregulated pursuit
of profit, recognized this dangerous trend during the first half of the
20th century. Unbridled exploitation led, on the one hand, to an
intensification of the class struggle (reflected in the SKP and the
strike movement) and, on the other hand, to a situation where workers’
living conditions undermined the prospects for new, healthy generations
of workers. Disease, poverty, and women’s wage labor weakened the
workforce and forced families to choose not to have children to a
greater extent.
In 1934, two prominent Social Democrats sounded the alarm in a book entitled Crisis in the Population Question.
Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, a married couple, wrote in their book—which
became the Social Democrats’ “social policy” manifesto—that:
”However,
it is impossible to ignore the fact that there is currently a fateful
conflict between women’s paid employment and their inclination to have
children. (…) We cannot accept the conditions that are now increasingly
driving women toward sterility in order to be able to work. (…) For
childlessness is undeniably a certain form of ‘adaptation’ to the
changed social conditions of family life, and especially of women’s
lives. (…) We are compelled to seek to influence the interplay of
motives through social policy reforms that are profound enough to enable
a sociological reorganization of the family.”
The
reforms mentioned primarily involved “the collectivization of
child-rearing” and other household tasks under state control, in order
to enable women and families to both work and have children.
This frees up the female reserve army for work and takes over the
family’s former responsibilities to ensure the survival of the working
class and, by extension, the system.
This
brings us to the heart of the Swedish corporatist state—and of the
bourgeois state in general: a “confession that this society has become
entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, split into
irreconcilable oppositions that it is incapable of resolving” (Engels),
that is, “a product and an expression of the irreconcilability of class
antagonisms” (Lenin). Through its own mechanisms, capitalism creates its
gravediggers, the working class, and renders the conditions for its own
survival impossible. It destroys its workers and drives them to
uncompromising revolutionary struggle. With the help of the state,
however, they can slow down this process and postpone their inevitable
downfall. Essentially, this involves reactionary—ultimately
military—control over revolutionary expressions. But as a necessary
complement, the state assumes a growing responsibility for reproduction.
”Capital
is (…) utterly ruthless toward the worker’s health and life expectancy,
unless compelled to show consideration by measures taken by society”
(Marx). This contradiction between capital’s short-term and individual
interests (“I want to make the maximum profit as quickly as possible
before the next financial statement”) and its long-term and collective
interests (“I want the conditions for stable profit for the foreseeable
future”) is the basis for nearly all contradictions within the big
bourgeoisie, between the right and the left in the Riksdag, and between
the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise and the state. The eternal
debate over taxes is its concentrated expression. The total value
created—the gross domestic product—is divided into three flexible parts:
wages for the value-creating workers, profit for the capitalists, and
taxes (primarily via income tax, capital gains tax, and VAT) for the
state apparatus. The state then divides its expenditures into equally
flexible parts: pure expenditures such as the military and surveillance;
pure investments in state-owned value-creating companies; and
reproductive costs for raising, caring for, and shaping the working
class.
Reproduction,
which was previously funded entirely by the individual family’s wages,
is thus taken over and centralized by the state. In other words, wages
can be lowered below the cost of the worker’s survival because
part of his surplus value has already been channeled through the state,
which has purchased healthcare, education, and public transportation for
her. This strategy makes reproduction cheaper, more efficient, more
equitable across the country, and more predictable. The Myrdals
summarize:
”The
aim is to redistribute available income in such a way that the
financial burdens directly associated with raising and educating
children under modern industrial conditions are reduced for individual
families. This is a blunt formulation of the program that follows as a
natural conclusion from any positive and thorough study of our
population issue. If one prefers a more idealistic formulation, one
might express the matter as follows: the entire nation must, to a
greater extent than hitherto, reflect on its shared responsibility for
the children who will form its next generation.”
The
Social Democrats became the heroes of the bourgeoisie who could
guarantee such a postponement of the collapse during capitalism’s deep
economic and political crisis. Their political strategy was able, among
other things, to (1) stabilize the reproduction of a constant influx of
new and skilled labor, (2) stabilize the planned consumption of
industrial goods through growing government purchases, and (3) pacify
the working class and incorporate it into the “national” interest of
steady growth. Women played (and still play) a central role in all three
of these state strategies for the survival of capitalism. From the
1930s onward, large segments of the female masses became pawns in the
Swedish state’s restructuring efforts, from the emergence of the welfare
state and the million-strong welfare proletariat to the cutbacks of the
1980s and beyond. Their liberation is thus intertwined with the
smashing of the bourgeois state.
The Myrdals also highlight another role of the state in saving capitalism from the devastating general crisis: crises of overproduction.
These cyclical crises—escalating production combined with depressed
purchasing power among the masses, where goods suddenly cannot be
consumed by households, leading to corporate collapses—create
unemployment, “social unrest,” and unpredictable markets. The British
bourgeois economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) had recently put
forward his proposals to bridge these capitalist crises by shifting
consumption from households to the state, which, through expansive
investment and expansion, could plan its consumption and halt an
economic downturn. These methods formed the basis of the Social
Democrats’ economic program, particularly in the postwar era, and
provided an economic rationale for the largely female-staffed welfare
state and the “People’s Home”:
”“The
major economic and organizational task facing the rising generation is
to maintain the division of labor—which industrialization has made
possible and which increases productivity—while transforming production
into a system of social resource management, in which maximum production
serves as the basis for maximum consumption, and vice versa.”
The
Social Democratic transformation of Sweden is thus not at odds with the
long-term interests of capital. This applies to (1) the centralization
of reproduction from households to institutions, (2) women’s entry into
the workforce, and (3) the welfare state’s expansive consumption. At the
same time, these measures—just like all “solutions” from the side of
capital—lead to the undermining of capitalism as a system and pave the
way for socialism, in this case by creating a vast interconnected
collective of working women with a single enemy in the form of the
bourgeois state itself. The spark that ignites the potential
revolutionary power in this relationship—between the patriarchal state
and its approximately 1,000,000 female wage slaves—will set Swedish
capitalism ablaze.
3. The bourgeois state buys labor: On non-productive female labor.
There
is thus good reason to transfer reproductive tasks to state
institutions, and at the same time, a large female reserve army to put
to work. With the state as the employer, women’s traditional roles as
mothers and domestic servants can be passed down in a controlled manner
from the feudal world without disrupting the social structure or
childbirth rates. In other words, the conditions for modern
public-sector jobs for women were created during the 1930s, 1940s, and
1950s. The enabler—or driving force—that turned these conditions into
reality was the postwar economic boom. The masses of working women built
the so-called welfare state.
The new sector is service-based and non-productive.
By the former, Marxism means that its goal is not to produce or sell
(i.e., store, transport, and sell) goods. By the latter, it is meant
that labor power is not purchased to generate a profit (surplus value)
for a capitalist, but rather to indirectly enable and serve the
productive (value-creating) sector.
The sector’s post-war boom can be illustrated with a few statistics.
Women’s
participation in the labor force followed a U-shaped curve from the
mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. As described above, this major shift was
driven by the replacement of rural women by women in public-sector jobs.
There was also a significant influx of women into the simultaneously
growing service and trade sectors. This pattern is known as the Goldin
Curve, named after a bourgeois economist, and has been confirmed by
Swedish research. In the category of “married women,” the trend is most
pronounced. Unmarried women have generally been more flexible and often
found jobs in industry throughout the entire period.
From
1920 to 1950, the number of women employed in the public sector grew
from 59,000 to 164,000, and the number of women in the commercial sector
from 73,000 to 196,000 (International Labour Review). The figure then
continued to grow at the same rate into the 1980s, after which the curve
leveled off. The same trend is reflected in the share of government
spending in GDP, which rose from less than 10 percent in the 1910s to a
peak of around 60–70 percent in the 1980s and 1990s. Since then, the
curve has stagnated and declined slightly.
If
we take Gävleborg as an example, we can see today (2024) that a
majority of working women are employed in the public sector. Of the
56,000 women registered in the Swedish Statistics Agency’s occupational
register, just over 34,000—or 60 percent—are employed by the government.
Among these, nursing assistants and healthcare aides constitute the largest group (13,000), followed by teachers and childcare workers (9,700). The four major private-sector occupational groups are roughly equal in size (4,000–5,000 each) and consist of industrial and transportation workers, secretaries and receptionists, kitchen and cleaning staff, and retail workers, respectively.
The
sharp increase in the number of female workers in the public sector was
supported by a growing infrastructure of vocational schools, campaigns,
and new laws regarding pregnancy, parental leave, and discrimination.
New unions (see below) were formed. By virtue of its complete monopoly
as an employer, the government was able to strictly control wages and
steer them according to the state’s economic and political interests.
Wages have thus consistently been lower than in industry and commerce,
which drives overall wage inequality, which in turn fuels part
of the misogynistic ideology that prevails in society and in households.
Some women in more specialized public sector professions (doctors,
nurses, etc.) have tried to seek employment through staffing agencies in
order to demand market-rate wages, but these efforts are
fiercely opposed by the state, which, through its monopoly, controls
nearly all job opportunities.
4. The state protects the role of women from disintegration and revitalizes it.
As
we have already noted, the bourgeois social engineers of the 20th
century took a particular interest in women’s role in society. The shift
from the household to industry as the center of production thrust
hundreds of thousands of Swedish women into modern, urban, and
precarious environments. Birth rates and childcare came into conflict
with the new capitalist conditions and demanded the steady hand of the
state. Industry had not yet absorbed the female workforce, and
unemployment among women reached its peak in the 1930s and 1940s, when
only 28 percent of women had jobs. Prostitution spread in the cities.
“The disorganization and maladjustment inherent in the dissolution of
the old family can be remedied, but only through far-reaching social
policy reforms,” write the Myrdals. The family as a unit of consumption
(i.e., reproduction) and the female gender role must be carried over
into the new era and modernized.
In
this way, the state could integrate women into the workforce by taking
over parts of the reproductive process and creating the modern nuclear
family with two incomes and two to three children. Women who were deemed
unwilling to fit into this new model family were to be re-educated,
monitored, or forcibly sterilized. Behind new concepts such as “public
health,” “the people’s home,” “anti-social“, and “racial hygiene” lie
the state’s new interventionist functions throughout all of social life,
designed to control the masses’ behavior, reproduction, and work
capacity. Working-class women, who gave birth to new working-class
babies and had not yet been fully assigned their role in production,
were hit the hardest. The state broke into previously private spheres in
a way the old church could only dream of. Many of the norms that still
control our behavior arose from these state interventions: She must be
maternal, “diligent,” and balance her socially useful household with her
socially useful job, “subordinate” herself to the interests of
“society” without complaint, give birth to and raise “healthy” and
“capable” children, and harmonize the family of the new era.
The
most common mechanism used to control mothers and women today is
through Social Services. Every year, around 400,000 so-called reports of
concern are filed regarding child abuse, the vast majority of which
involve mothers. In 2024, 26,300 children were “taken into custody” by
Social Services. These children are typically taken from poor households
(four times as common) and are often placed in “foster homes.” A
pregnant woman visits prenatal care 6–10 times during a normal pregnancy
to screen for health and social issues. For many, this leads to home
visits by social workers, with the risk of the child being taken into
care. The most common reason for this is “deficiencies in care.” All of
this is done with the stated aim of supporting families and “children at
risk of harm.” Another significant form of control comes from the
school system, where teachers and counselors account for a large portion
of the reports of concern and work closely with other government
agencies to correct parental care through threats to take the children
or other measures. This system is designed with the sole purpose of
controlling reproduction within households and, ultimately, ensuring
that families (typically women) conform to state-subsidized models. This
leads to justified and fair reactions, primarily from poor mothers in
the suburbs, who have gathered to protest against the Social Services’
control mechanisms.
As
an aside, the issue of physical violence must be addressed. It is
likely that all of the aforementioned mechanisms of control play a role
in how women’s bodies are abused, exploited, and scrutinized in both
“public” and “private” settings today. Never before has the female body
been so closely monitored and controlled by various political and
economic interests. These include, in addition to the state, the rotten
and misogynistic imperialist cultural apparatuses, advertising,
prostitution, and human trafficking, which are permitted to take place
within the framework of the bourgeois state. Collectively, these
capitalist institutions erode respect for women and the individual
woman’s right to self-determination over her own body. This is
reflected, through the power of culture and wage disparities, in the
mind of the individual man, husband, or boyfriend, where the dream of
the ancient patriarch is awakened: to be a little king in the home and
to have dominion over “his” wife and the bodies of other women. In 2025,
33,043 cases of domestic violence against adult women were reported to
the police.
5. The working woman is represented: The unions.
Once
women had been integrated into the new nuclear family, they were to be
properly and systematically integrated into the labor market. By that
point, the state had learned what effect the industrialization of the
working class had had on the intensification of the class struggle. They
felt, just like the Marxists, that “by incorporating women into
production, capitalism increases exploitation and simultaneously creates
the material basis for women’s struggle and demands” (PKP). The
pacification and control of this new category of wage slaves required a
renewed use of old tools: the bought-off union and state repression. The
development of a consciously militant female proletariat faced new,
specific obstacles, which still shape the particular oppression of
working-class women.
In
the early years of the 20th century, the new wave of female workers
created a need for union organization. The Swedish Trade Union
Confederation’s (LO) reluctance to admit them into existing
male-dominated unions forced female pioneers such as seamstress Anna
Sterky to establish the Women’s Trade Union (1902) and the Stockholm
Domestic Workers’ Association (1904). In the years that followed, up
until the explosive growth of public sector jobs in the 1960s, women in
industry were incorporated into the labor force at the same pace as they
entered the workforce.
In
the postwar period, labor unions for public sector employees began to
emerge. The Swedish Municipal Workers’ Union (Kommunal), which today
represents 500,000 childcare workers, cleaners, nursing assistants,
kitchen staff, and healthcare aides, grew from a very marginal member
organization within the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) to its
largest: from 86,000 members in 1950 to 515,000 in 1980. The Swedish
Union of Health and Medical Care Employees (today Vårdförbundet) was
formed in 1965 as a coalition between nurses and other, often female,
county council professions, and subsequently became a dominant part of
TCO. The same development is taking place in what is now Vision
(formerly the Swedish Municipal Employees’ Union), where 200,000 social
workers, administrators, medical secretaries, and dental assistants are
striving to have their union’s class interests met.
The
historical differences between women’s and men’s labor unions have
shaped the traditions and level of awareness in the Swedish labor
movement.
First,
the “women’s” unions developed considerably later than the “men’s”
unions, during a period when corporatization and the Saltsjöbaden spirit
had achieved complete victory within the unions. The major struggles
prior to the 1938 agreement, or prior to the expulsion of the communists
from the unions in 1945, live on to a lesser extent in the traditions
and in the consciousness of the members. The women’s unions are, so to
speak, built on a yellow labor aristocratic foundation.
Second,
women generally negotiate with SKR (Swedish Association of Local
Authorities and Regions) rather than with the member organizations of
the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise. SKR is a highly centralized
employers’ association and functions, to some extent, as a
government-incorporated agency within the structure of the welfare
state.
Third,
various political tactics are increasingly being used against
industrial actions by female workers. The notorious practice of “essential work”
forces workers (usually public employees) to act as strike breakers in
order to “ensure that society’s basic functions are protected.” This
most often affects healthcare workers. In the same vein, regions and
municipalities typically make a fuss about “socially dangerous”
industrial actions to divide striking workers from the rest of the
workforce. This category also includes the myth of the female “angel” in
a nurse’s uniform, who, full of love, is “called” to her caring
profession and therefore should not engage in “disruptive” and “selfish”
struggles for interests.
All
three of these specific conditions for women’s union activity make it
harder to win battles over wages and working conditions. This leads not
only to women’s wages falling behind, but also to a sense of frustration
and bitterness among members. They feel more acutely the severe
limitations that constrain the union struggle in Sweden. At the same
time, this is a great strength. If we analyze the flip side of the three
respective historical differences above, we see (1) that women’s
unions, as a result of their late emergence, are also free from certain
old reformist prejudices and traditions, (2) that they have the
advantage of acting together in concerted action against a single paper
tiger as an enemy, the Swedish state, and not against any of the 60,000
member companies of the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise, and (3)
that women in the “basic functions” are directly confronted with the
contradiction between legal and illegal union struggle, that for every
step forward they must be classified as “dangerous to society” and thus
challenge the foundations of the state.
The
“women’s” trade union is thus a fierce battleground between the right
and the left—between the interests of labor and capital. This is
embodied through strong ties between the aristocrats of the union
leadership, the semi-governmental employer organizations, and the
anti-union reactionary state, which form a dark triangle surrounding the
proletarian woman’s class struggle, both within the union and in
general.
Another
aspect is the particularly strenuous and physically demanding nature of
female-dominated professions. We will later examine the high rates of
sick leave and burnout among women in the service sector. This, just
like the characteristics already mentioned, is a source of extreme
oppression and difficulties in engaging politically for their
liberation, but at the same time a source of great revolutionary
potential and explosive power when working women stand up and break
free.
The anti-people myths about “female nature” have undoubtedly been shaped on the basis of her social function. From the housewife and domestic slave of the peasant household, to the breeding machine, whore, and hospital slave
of the modern imperialist “welfare state”: The ruling class has
always—in more or less collusion with the proletarian man—found a new
form of specifically patriarchal oppression. They generate myths and
prejudices to normalize this oppression and keep working women on a
tight leash at the feet of the patriarchal state.
6. The Soviet Union’s collectivization of domestic work.
As we have seen, the Swedish state has organized the socialization
of women’s labor. The private sphere was shattered, and family members
were drawn in various ways into the interests of society at large. This
has been done entirely in the service of capitalist exploitation and
growth. In the mouths of the reformists, this has been called
“emancipation” and the prerequisite for a transformation of the role of
women toward gender equality. To a certain extent, they are right.
Engels writes in his already cited book that:
”The
democratic republic does not do away with the opposition of the two
classes; on the contrary, it provides the clear field on which the fight
can be fought out. And in the same way, the peculiar character of the
supremacy of the husband over the wife in the modern family, the
necessity of creating real social equality between them, and the way to
do it, will only be seen in the clear light of day when both possess
legally complete equality of rights. Then it will be plain that the
first condition for the liberation of the wife is to bring the whole
female sex back into public industry, and that this in turn demands the
abolition of the monogamous family as the economic unit of society.”
As
is well known, the Swedish government’s efforts during the second half
of the 20th century have developed this “field” to a very great extent.
With an enormous public sector, the state has taken over much of the
responsibility for reproduction while simultaneously shifting millions
of women from the home to wage slavery. The Swedish bourgeoisie is
unique in the world in the extent to which they have succeeded in this.
In bourgeois index rankings, Sweden is always ranked in the top five
regarding economic equality between the sexes. Does this mean we are
marching forward toward women’s liberation? No.
Let’s
illustrate this with a fascinating example. On March 8, 1917, Russian
women took to the streets, which served as a catalyst for the socialist
revolution. This event etched that date into the consciousness of the
international working class.
In
the years following the October Revolution, formal legal equality
between the sexes was proclaimed. Schools were opened to female
students, and a large-scale, systematic integration of women into the
workforce was launched. Abortion and divorce were legalized. Paid
parental leave and major investments in state-run childcare relieved
families of much of the burden. During the 1920s, there was no doubt
that women in the Soviet Union lived in the world’s most advanced system
of equality. Under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin, the ground was
radically prepared for women’s complete liberation from the gender
order. The mobilization of women in the battalions of the revolution and
then at the forefront of the socialist transformation contributed to
the emergence of new proletarian gender roles, but it is clear that the
process was limited for various reasons.
Alexandra
Kollontai (1872–1952) is often cited as a champion of the new socialist
gender relations. In her articles and novels, she described the new
ideals in which men and women could meet as equals in love, as comrades,
with no room for jealousy, servility, or control. However, the struggle
against the old order, just like many other contentious issues in the
ideological superstructure, had to be postponed to the future so that
the “ground” could first be prepared through women’s incorporation into
production. The radical political break with the old gender norms—the
proletarian cultural revolution—became, for the vast majority, an
indefinable mirage in the future. In her important work on The Labour of Women in the Evolution of the Economy, she describes the timeline for women’s liberation in rural areas:
”The
more work the peasant woman, as an independent worker and an elected
member of the council, puts into public service for the district,
village, or uyezd, the more natural and inevitable it is that the old
view of women’s inferiority will fade away, and the easier it will be to
achieve women’s emancipation in the countryside. This development will
be further strengthened as agriculture transitions to mechanized
labor—the electrification plan—and cooperation expands. Then the Russian
countryside, too, will be able to develop the conditions necessary for
the revolution in lifestyle, and the process of women’s complete
emancipation can begin.” (unofficial translation)
The conditions must be laid for the eventual onset of political emancipation. In Communism and the Family, she comments on the state’s assumption of women’s former reproductive duties in the home:
”The
working woman will not have to slave over the washtub any longer, or
ruin her eyes in darning her stockings and mending her linen; she will
simply take these things to the central laundries each week and collect
the washed and ironed garments later. That will be another job less to
do. Special clothes-mending centres will free the working woman from the
hours spent on mending and give her the opportunity to devote her
evenings to reading, attending meetings and concerts. Thus the four
categories of housework are doomed to extinction with the victory of
communism. And the working woman will surely have no cause to regret
this. Communism liberates worm from her domestic slavery and makes her
life richer and happier.”
This
management of women’s liberation “from above” created serious
constraints on the revolution’s continuation under socialism. This
approach, which was reinforced and cemented by the rising bureaucracy,
became an obstacle to the politicization of the masses and their
conscious mobilization against the class enemy and the culture of the
class enemy.
Women
were freed from domestic work, but largely ended up in so-called
female-dominated professions within the new, streamlined reproductive
apparatus. They became nurses, secretaries, childcare workers, etc.—arbeterskor
(women workers). A blind faith in mechanization and the streamlining of
productive forces overshadowed the ideological education in
Marxism-Leninism among the broad masses. The counterrevolutionary coup
by the revisionist bureaucracy in the 1950s and 1960s quickly hurled
women back 40 years in time, to the subjugation, violence, and housewife
ideal of the old, dark bourgeois society. The only thing that could
have resisted—the armed sea of ideologically steeled proletarian
women—was not strong enough.
7. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution shakes the foundations of patriarchy.
The
nationalization of productive and reproductive activities is not in
itself a step toward socialism. What is decisive is the political
content of the transformation, which is reflected in the ideological
level of the vanguard and the masses. Thus, the direction of social
development is determined by the communists, politically rooted in the
working masses, taking a firm and revolutionary grip on the process.
This has been the principle of the proletarian revolution since Marx. In
his Critique of the Gotha Programme, he attacks the plan to reconcile
the party with Ferdinand Lasalle (1825–1864), who advocated a kind of
“socialism” through legal cooperatives under the leadership of the
bourgeois state. Marx attacked these reactionary cooperatives:
”That
the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative
production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in
their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the
present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the
foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the
present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only
insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not
protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeoisie.”
The
nationalization of industries, mines, health clinics, etc. can thus be
filled with either dark reactionary content (which is, moreover, a
general tendency of monopoly capitalism) or red revolutionary content,
provided that they (1) remain in the independent hands of the
proletariat and (2) work toward (or serve) the total overthrow
of the entire social system. The same applies to the non-productive
branches of labor, whose “privatization” is so loudly lamented by all of
Sweden’s reformists. Regarding the state’s takeover of education (i.e.,
the school), Marx writes as follows:
””Elementary
education by the state” is altogether objectionable. (…) Government and
church should rather be equally excluded from any influence on the
school. Particularly, indeed, in the Prusso-German Empire (…) the state
has need, on the contrary, of a very stern education by the people.”
The
only collective school that truly matters for the revolution is the
people’s own school, which trains the masses for a ruthless struggle
against the old state. The purely technical nationalization of schools
is merely a streamlining of the relevant operations and does not
automatically liberate the working class, the schoolchildren, or the
thousands of women forced to submit to their new state-sanctioned
patriarch. It hardly needs mentioning that the Swedish Social Democrats’
first program (1882) was a direct copy of the Germans’ Gotha Programme
(1875).
The
mere mechanization, nationalization, or mobilization of the female
workforce means nothing unless it is carried out under immense pressure
from the politically conscious masses working in those enterprises. This
was the great insight that gave the Chinese Revolution, under the
leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong, the power to shatter all constraints,
including rigid gender norms. That was the message of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Chen Yonggui, the leader of the famous Dazhai People’s Commune, described the developments in the countryside:
”The
mechanization of agriculture can only lead to progress on the socialist
path if it is the result of an ideological revolution. (…) If one does
not understand and does not apply Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line,
mechanization will not bring about socialism but will, on the contrary,
lead to the return of capitalism. (…) Mechanization is not merely a
technical issue. The mechanization of agriculture will go down the wrong
path if the aim is solely mechanization, if it is placed in the wrong
context, and if the ideological revolution of the people is not
ensured.” (unofficial translation)
The Chinese experience thus highlights the question of how
this new form of women’s labor takes place. Is it linked to increasing
participation in political life, in the revolution? Is the dialectic
between participation in production and growing influence over it being
addressed? Is women’s new social position being used as leverage to
radically break with old gender patterns? This means putting politics in
the driver’s seat and not passively allowing ideology to lag behind
economic development.
There
is a long line of testimonies from the socialist construction and the
continuation of the revolution from the perspective of women: from the
rural women’s associations of the 1950s and the All-China Women’s
Federation to the Red Guards and female model work teams of the 1960s
and 1970s. They all took the lead in challenging and shattering existing
gender norms, through struggle and education, and in realizing Chairman
Mao’s slogan that “what a man can do, a woman can do too” and that
“women hold up half the sky.” War was declared on the old theory of
“female nature” and the wall that had been built between “male” and
“female” spheres of activity. Work teams composed of female workers were
established in heavy industry, advanced agriculture, aviation and
shipping, and the energy and mining sectors. This was combined with
political campaigns to explain the development of a new division of
labor and a “new woman,” who is breaking new ground in socialist
construction.
From
the aforementioned Dazhai People’s Commune, news spread of the “Iron
Girls,” who defied all difficulties—both physical and ideological—to
boost regional production. The work team consisted of Red Guards, women
in their 20s, who, in the spirit of Chairman Mao, went out among the
workers, successfully took on physically demanding tasks, fought against
all doubts and prejudices, and thereby shook up the prevailing
patriarchal theory of female nature. Soon, similar work teams emerged in
the oil sector, in factories, and in agriculture. One team grew to 460,
and the idea subsequently spread throughout China. They were based on
the principles of serving the people and relying on one’s own strength. The book New Women in New China (Foreign Languages Press, 1972) describes these pioneering work teams:
”Energetic
young women throughout China’s countryside have formed shock forces
which have become known among the people as Iron Girls teams. Guided by
Mao Tsetung Thought, they take an active part in class struggle, the
struggle for production and scientific experiment. (…) In the course of
socialist revolution and construction, they are rapidly growing into a
new generation of women armed with Mao Tsetung Thought. (…) A group of
skilled women workers is taking shape — carpenters, welders, forgers,
cement workers, electricians, machine operators. With the guidance of
veteran workers, they can now work from blueprints on their own.”
They
did not shy away from the toughest tasks and set an example through
their selfless work. At the same time, they fought against all
resistance to gender-based wage disparities and demanded men’s full
participation in the formerly “female” reproductive sector in the form
of male childcare workers, cleaners, kitchen staff, etc., in both
professional and domestic life. The leader of the Beijing Women’s
Federation, Hsu Kwang, summarizes the progress of the Cultural
Revolution as follows:
”What
makes such a fundamental change in the status of Chinese women in New
China possible? I feel deeply that the basic reason is because we
Chinese women, under the leadership of Chairman Mao and the Communist
Party, have taken part together with men in the long revolutionary
struggles, set up the dictatorship of the proletariat and persisted in
continuing the revolution under this dictatorship. (…)
Precisely
because hundreds of millions’ of Chinese women took an active part in
the revolutionary struggles together with the rest of the people, the
dark rule of imperialism, feudalism and bureaucrat-capitalism was
overthrown in 1949 and the Chinese people were liberated. The liberation
of the broad masses of women thus entered a new stage. (…)
The
swift development [of the Cultural Revolution] has provided a wide
range of opportunities for women to take part in social productive
labour. (…) [The women] studied Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and
their consciousness in class struggle and the two-line struggle was
greatly enhanced. (…) Ordinary women textile workers have become Party
and state leaders and former women serfs in Tibet are now leading cadres
respected by everyone. (…) Every advance in the revolution brought the
women’s liberation movement a step further.”
The
women’s own participation and political consciousness—which results in
more women leading the struggle at various levels—is thus the key that
can provide a political direction for women’s work in the new socialist
economy. This conscious mass of women will stubbornly push through and
defend the revolution. They are the guarantee that the revolution will
advance in the realm of women’s oppression and that the liberated women,
in turn, will lead the revolution, and so on. The two sides are
inseparable. Hsu Kwang continues:
”The
establishment of the socialist system has opened up boundless vistas
for their complete liberation. However, the reactionary forces scheming
to turn back the wheel of history still remain. We must smash their
plots for retrogression and restoration of the old order. Remnants of
the old concept that “men are superior and women are inferior” and old
habits and customs left over from the old society have still to be
thoroughly eliminated.”
Complete
gender equality, the dissolution of gender roles, will be realized as
classes and dictatorship crumble, as communism takes shape. The
continuation of the class struggle to uproot the bourgeoisie demands a
high degree of vigilance and activity among the masses. They cannot be
abandoned as passive cogs in the new machine. “The masses make history”
and must be mobilized to set the new machine in motion in the right
direction.
Misconceptions
about the purely technical nationalization of reproduction—or the
purely technical incorporation of women into the workforce—have thus intensified
Swedish reformism’s grip on the state and even halted Soviet women’s
powerful march toward communism. These are two diametrically opposed
examples regarding class dictatorship, but they demonstrate the
tenacious and sometimes diffuse persistence of gender prejudices within
the revolutionary movement. The issue of gender antagonisms and culture
was first resolved in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership. In
practice, they confined women to new, female-dominated, and grueling
sectors, thereby cementing the old gender norms instead of
shattering them. Patriarchal oppression has persisted, beyond the reach
of working women, even as the ruling classes have discussed and
experimented with “feminism” and new gender relations.
8. From welfare to burnout: The restructuring of the welfare state.
Back
to the Swedish “Folkhemmet.” From the late 1970s onward, a nearly
30-year period of economic boom and steady capitalist growth came to an
end. The driving force was the successful expansion of the export
sector, which in the 1950s and 1960s was able to begin trading in an
increasingly globalized market in the wake of U.S. imperialism. The
Social Democrats’ corporatism was able to stabilize the political
situation and pacify the class struggle. The ever-growing surplus value
financed the expansion of public institutions and the Million Program.
These “record years” were the economic enabler for the program the state
imposed on working women: mobilization within the vast
state-monopolistic “household,” social control, and passivization. The
period was, however, interrupted by a sharp downturn. The previously
bombed-out imperialist powers (i.e., Japan and Germany) recovered in the
competition, demand for export products fell, oil prices skyrocketed,
and inflation escalated—with a crash, the economic boom turned into a
deep crisis, and the public sector was forced into a new restructuring.
Voices
began to be raised against the ballooning public spending, which was
seen as diverting valuable capital from the “competitive sector.”
Capital hit the brakes, and bureaucrats soon followed suit. In 1981,
during what is known as “the wonderful night,” agreements were reached
between the Social Democrats (Palme, Feldt, and others) and the
right-wing parties to lower marginal tax rates and curb the public
sector’s share of the economy. The credit market was deregulated, and
the so-called “Allemansfonderna” breathed new life into the financial
sector. The right-wing parties and the Social Democrats took turns
“restructuring” the state budget to channel money toward household
consumption of new goods and services. The “Consolidation Program” of
1994–1998 led to spending reductions (i.e., cuts) of over 120 billion
kronor. The goal of full employment was scrapped, and unemployment rose
from 2 to over 10 percent within a few years. Capitalist profits,
however, gained new momentum, a trend further reinforced by the
emergence of the new IT sector. The new, buoyant private capitalist
sector—partially freed from the burdensome yet stabilizing public
sector—is reverting to old anarchic and volatile patterns. In 2008, the
worst crash since the 1930s occurred; during the Covid-19 pandemic, the
economy crashed again, and so on.
The
cuts were forced through by the “private” faction of the Swedish big
bourgeoisie. In 1976, a new militant leadership took office at SAF (the
Swedish Employers’ Association, now the Confederation of Swedish
Enterprise) under ASEA director Curt Nicolin. They advanced the class
struggle to halt wage increases, demand zero-offer negotiations,
suppress wildcat strikes, and dampen the pressure “from below” in the
unions through propaganda campaigns promoting “crisis awareness” and a
“self-reliance spirit” among the proletariat. They pressured the
bourgeois state (which was now, for the first time in a very long time,
governed by a right-wing party) to cut government spending and lower
taxes so that the new hardline anti-union stance would not lead to real
wage cuts and uprisings. SAF and Nicolin devised a new strategy: to use
large-scale lockouts and an unwillingness to compromise to force the
state to step in and make certain structural changes to free up
resources for the private sector. Among other things, they demanded that
a government delegation, together with SAF, investigate cuts to public
spending.
The SAF’s new hardline stance met with resistance from the trade unions, and the 1980 Great Strike
broke out. 100,000 workers went on strike, and up to 700,000 were
locked out. This was the last strike of such magnitude and stands out
because, for the first time, women in the public sector participated as a
decisive force. The public sector unions were the driving force and
made tougher demands than the LO. Major disruptions occurred in
industry, hospitals, and local governments.
From
the perspective of capital, the struggle was waged to reduce wage
costs. To achieve this, tax cuts were demanded through spending cuts, so
that households’ real wages would not decline. The government forced
through a compromise offer to end the conflict, but a “neoliberal” trend
had already gained momentum. During the 1990s, a quarter of all
emergency hospitals were closed, mental hospitals were shut down, and
everything was streamlined. Public consumption’s share of GDP fell from
nearly 70 to 50 percent of GDP. This occurred without the need for
public services actually decreasing. On the contrary, the sick and
elderly population is growing, mental health issues are escalating, and
school classes are becoming larger. At the same time, the military, the
police, and the judiciary have absorbed an ever-increasing portion of
the state budget.
The
only way for the state to reconcile budget cuts with growing needs is
to force the welfare proletariat to work harder and longer hours. The
state’s offensive against the welfare proletariat over the past 30 years
has been the largest exploitation experiment since industrialization.
Bureaucrats, politicians, and consultants have devised new techniques to
maintain their dominance: “Lean Production,” “patient-centered care,”
“New Public Management,” “deinstitutionalization,” “public-private
partnerships,” and “market-driven governance” are all new “assembly
line” techniques designed to squeeze out more work for the same or lower
pay. The mounting pressure is subjecting all cleaning staff, childcare
workers, nursing assistants, secretaries, and others to enormous stress.
Healthcare
unions report that 80 percent of those affected by stress-related
illnesses are women, the majority of whom work in the social services
sector. Between 2010 and 2023, the rate of sick leave in these groups
increased fivefold. Common causes of sick leave include exhaustion,
depression, anxiety disorders, chronic pain, and sleep and memory
disorders. According to the government’s own Swedish Work Environment
Authority, 15 percent of all women in the working population experience
stress and other psychological strain in their daily lives. The rising
sick leave figures have, in turn, increased pressure on the Swedish
Social Insurance Agency, which, following political directives, has
responded by significantly tightening the criteria for receiving sick
pay, particularly after 180 days. Between 2014 and 2016, the number of
patients whose medical certificates were rejected by the Swedish Social
Insurance Agency doubled. From 2023 to 2024, rejections increased by
29.5 percent, according to statistics from the protest group
”#1160omdagen”. Thousands of women in the state’s slave camps are thus
falling ill from stress and are then forced back to their jobs so that
the machine can keep running and costs can be kept down.
The
frustration and solidarity this creates are currently being channeled
into individual “acts of defiance” (resignations, rent strikes, work
slowdowns, etc.) and into grassroots pressure within the major unions
for action and protests. The leadership within these unions, which is
intensely courted by the SKR and the state, becomes a key player in
containing and neutralizing the discontent. Around this leadership, the
state builds another layer of repression in the form of anti-union
propaganda about industrial actions that are a danger to society. Then
another layer in the form of repressive laws on protective work, wildcat
strikes, and state-controlled mediation between unions and employers.
The major conflict of 1980 led to a much more interventionist role on
the part of the state (the state’s mediation institute was significantly
strengthened during the 1990s, which, together with so-called
“Cooperation Agreements on Development and Wage Formation” between
unions and employers, brought about a new level of “Saltsjöbaden spirit”
and class collaboration) to prevent “wage drift” and “wage inflation”
and thereby safeguard the capitalists’ profits. Behind this legal facade
lies the naked, armed power of the ruling class. Through these
measures, the state has curbed wage growth for the proletariat and
trapped working women in a vicious cycle of cutbacks and acute stress.
Finally,
the cuts also lead to various social crises throughout society:
homelessness, escalating drug addiction, violence and crime, threats,
and spontaneous acts of aggression against government authorities. As a
rule, staff in healthcare, home care, schools, etc., are blamed for this
collapse. If it is not the teachers’ or healthcare workers’ fault, then
it is the families’ (i.e., the mothers’) fault. Public sector workers
are also targeted by various attacks directed at the state: In 2021, the
Swedish Work Environment Authority reported that 35 percent of
healthcare workers had been subjected to violence (primarily blows,
headbutts, choking, and scratching) or threats of violence. Recent
school shootings and ambulance murders are clear examples of this trend.
The state cuts funding and provokes desperate reactions, then forces
overworked female welfare workers onto the front lines. Behind it all
sits the patriarchal bureaucracy, meticulously and cynically
experimenting with budgets and timetables.
These
cuts naturally lead to the state abandoning its reproductive role in
several areas. These responsibilities are shifted back to women in the
household, who are in no way equipped to handle this. The result is a
new “population crisis” as women are forced to choose between work (the
state’s slave) and family (the household’s slave). In the 2020s, the
Swedish Statistics Bureau (SCB) is sounding the alarm over historically
low birth rates. The Social Democrats’ state-led “solutions” thus only
serve to deepen the crisis. Women are hit the hardest. Mothers in the
suburbs, who have toiled and carried the welfare machine and are now
forced into unemployment, part-time work, and stress as the state cuts
the budget, must simultaneously take on greater reproductive
responsibility for the children and the household. Benefits are cut and
prices rise. When young people then go off the rails, they are blamed:
the children are taken into custody or put in prison. At the same time,
they are harassed by the increasingly racist and family-conservative
ideology, which places all the blame on the individual household
(usually the mother), and by the increasingly militarized state’s
surveillance, repression, and xenophobia. This restructuring of the
welfare state is thus, to a large extent, a restructuring of the role of
women and the situation of working women in Sweden.
9. Summary: Death to the patriarchal bureaucracy.
The
bourgeois Swedish state concentrates and manages the common interests
of the Swedish imperialist bourgeoisie. During the 1920s and 1930s, the
bourgeoisie was keenly interested in restructuring reproduction, the
role of women, and the family. The solution was dictated by the
corporatist reformists in the state, the unions, and the capitalists.
The enormously expanding welfare state, the female welfare proletariat,
and the authorities’ intrusion into the private family sphere
temporarily resolved the capitalist crisis. However, the state has grown
at the expense of short-term profits, forcing the capitalists to rebel
against their own state and demand sharp cuts in its expenditures. The
bourgeoisie can no longer afford the welfare state as a weapon in the
class struggle. They are thus unleashing the old contradictions that
had, to some extent, been dormant during the “Sleeping Beauty” slumber
of class collaboration.
The
difference now—and the key to the overthrow of the bourgeois state—is
the enormously concentrated female proletariat. The bourgeoisie has been
forced to mobilize these gravediggers to serve the profits, but now
faces an army of nursing assistants, childcare workers, cleaners, etc.,
who for 100 years have cultivated a hatred and a spirit of struggle
directed against the state itself. They have toiled to build the welfare
state and now bear the heaviest burden of the cuts. They have faced
particularly harsh limits in the legal class struggle. They will become
the revolutionary enemies of the patriarchal bureaucracy, united with
their class brothers, and lead the assault against the old state in the
people’s war.
CRUSH THE PATIARCHAL & CAPITALIST STATE!
LONG LIVE THE WORKING WOMEN’S RIGHTEOUS STRUGGLE!
Kontakta oss via Kommunisten@riseup.net!
