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!
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