This article is a translation of an article published on Swedish collective blog Det enda alternativet in June 2020. At some places, notes from the translator have been placed in brackets, in order to clarify some of the more specifically Swedish concepts to the international reader while remaining faithful to the original text.
The term “classical Marxist” is used tongue-in-cheek, referring to a tendency among right-wing media pundits in Sweden to celebrate any ex-Leftist that embraces the political Right as proponents of a “true” or “classical” form of Marxism.
You’ve probably seen and heard the names already: the Örebro Party, the Malmö List, Malcom Kyeyune, sections of the Communist Party … These days, the list can be made (at least relatively) long of the so-called “classical Marxists”, who distance themselves from a Left which — in their eyes — has abandoned the working class in order to shift the focus toward feminism, anti-racism and LGBT issues.
Against what they view as a turn toward identity politics of the Left, these classical Marxists claim to present a “material analysis” of the Swedish class relations. In articles and interviews, their analyses (which almost invariably lead to conclusions identical with those of the op-eds in [the liberal daily] Svenska Dagbladet) tend to be generously peppered with a vaguely Marxist linguistic seasoning, where terms such as “lumpenproletariat” and “bourgeoisie” replace “immigrants” and “people with a college debt”, respectively.
The Right, as Det enda alternativet has shown before, of course swallow the act sooner than you can say “reduction of the employment tax” [a reform instituted by the neoliberal government 2006–2014] — there is obviously a large market for serving back Moderate [the Swedish run-of-the-mill neoliberal party] home-owners their own views in a marinade of Marxist vocabulary. By this point, some of the classical Marxists have had rather big successes in the media of the Right, and are proclaimed — with a suspiciously large amount of good will — as the future of the Left by liberal writers, pundits and lobbyists, from the Swedish Employers’ Association to the Sweden Democrats.
For the classical Marxists, the point of departure is that classes and their material interests trump all other social categories. So far, this doesn’t depart too far from other left-wing perspectives. But it’s not a matter of the standard division between an owning and profiteering upper class and a working class defined as those who need to sell their labor. Instead, the classical Marxists see a plethora of different, small classes whose interests are in conflict with one another. The working class they claim to represent is a small category which limits itself to the “productive workers” — those who on the one hand are not dependent on government funds and on the other those whose jobs aren’t financed through the tax bill.
To describe those groups which count as neither capitalists or productive laborers, Markus Allard [leader of the Örebro Party and co-host of a podcast together with Malcom Kyeyune] has introduced the notion of the transferiat. The term is used as a catch-all for everyone who is dependent on “economical transfers” from the public sector — that is to say, those who either are receiving welfare checks or who work within the welfare sector.
In this way, a nurse who works in a private hospital belongs to the working class, while a nurse within the welfare belongs to the transferiat. A factory worker might one day be a part of the working class, while the next day he is fired and descends into the transferiat. A well-salaried producer at SVT [the Swedish public service TV company] is admittedly a part of the transferiat, but when he is headhunted to a private production company, he is suddenly a productive worker and thus a part of the working class. And so forth.
“Neither capital or the working class has an interest in maintaining a transferiat”, Allard writes, and the idea that capital and wage-laborers might have a common enemy in the welfare is far from new. The clearest parallel we’ll find might be the idea of the [neoliberal prime minister] Fredrik Reinfeldt and [his party] the New Moderates’ idea about “the core of the welfare”, where only the most important and most indispensable functions of the welfare (health care, school, defense and police) should be financed through the welfare system.
Even the idea of the classical Marxists of the worker as such — defined as the one who is currently working rather than as one who in accordance with the capitalist system is compelled to sell his labor power to survive — is similar to the one of Reinfeldt. A 2006 article [in Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet] on the New Moderates mirrors the view of the classical Marxists on the working class in an eerily pertinent way.
“The Moderates are not talking at all talking about protecting the interest of the “workers” when these come into conflict with other social groups, for example capital owners. So topsy-turvy, politics has not become. However, they want to be a party for ‘those who work’. They don’t call themselves a ‘Worker’s Party’, but a ‘Working Party’. The small difference between the words is important.
The distinction is made against those who live on ‘welfare’. Everyone who has a job should get it better at the expense of those lower down on the social ladder; unemployed, early retirees, recipients of welfare checks. Under the rallying cry ‘it must pay off to work’, the Moderates want to make it harder to subsist on welfare and grants. On the other hands, those who work will get lower taxes — 1 000 kronor a month, it is promised.
The factory worker who loses his job and who has to subsist on unemployment assistance will get his living standard lowered. The colleague who got to keep his job, on the other hand, will get it better (even if the lowered tax is to a large part eaten up by higher union dues). In this way, the gap between people is widened from both sides.
The well-behaved worker is juxtaposed against the lazy welfare recipient. It is a classical way to try and smash the solidarity in society and within the working class. It works for the Right in other countries, although there the edge is usually turned toward immigrants”.
The idea of a “transferiat” is not a new idea, but merely the most recent attempt to make a division between positive and negative contributors to society — with the difference that it now has been updated with a Marxist vocabulary.
Neither is the view of the economy as a zero-sum game, where different interest groups fight about the resources, anything new; rather, it is similar to the idea in neoclassical economics of the homo economicus: man as a utility-maximizing market actor, in all circumstances aware of his own best, and therefore also alone to blame for all his possible failings.
The fact is that not even the main selling point of the classical Marxists, their “material analysis” of the political goals of individuals and groups, is particularly “Marxist”. The similarities are bigger with the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand, where the striving of people to maximize their own gains is viewed both as a law of nature and as a virtue. For a classical Marxist, the plot of the 2003 movie Kopps — where the policemen in a small Swedish town start committing crimes in order to prevent their department from getting defunded — appears as rational. The policemen are simply acting in their own material self-interest, and who can blame them for it?
Since the classical Marxists, like Reinfeldt and Rand, do not have any interest in critiquing and abolishing capitalist society as such — but merely to slightly change the distribution of resources and the balance of power within the existing society — they cannot, despite their vocabulary, in any substantial way be regarded as “Marxists”. A better label would be social democrats, or more specifically, right-wing social democrats [Swedish: högersossar, usually used for social democrats with a positive relationship to the employers’ associations and a negative view of unions].
The end goal for the classical Marxists is hard to gauge. Most of the time, they appear more interested in complaining about the Left they themselves used to be a part of, than to actually offer any concrete vision of the future. If there is any end goal, it appears to be a re-erection of the welfare capitalism of the 20th century by way of different political reforms; they often talk about how it is time for the parasitic middle class to get a “real job” and “contribute to society”. But the question remains: as the welfare gets cut down to save a few more bucks for the tax payers, which new jobs are the welfare employees supposed to take? Where will all the industrial workers go when the companies flee to low-wage countries?
When advancement in communication technology helps capital globalize and production to move abroad, the only ways to get the companies to stay either through state subsidies and economic grants to the industries (that is to say, workers being taxed to finance their own wages) or the race to the bottom we’ve started to see in countries like Hungary and Poland — held up by Malcom Kyeyune as positive examples! — where wages and working conditions continuously get worsened in order to appease capital and keep production within the national borders. For those interested in strengthening the position of workers towards capital, neither alternative appears particularly attractive.
The reason that the material basis of the welfare state is slowly crumbling isn’t the “material interest” of welfare workers to keep their jobs in the public sector or the dependence of the “lumpenproletariat” on welfare checks to survive in a society where more and more jobs are disappearing through outsourcing or automation. Rather, the problem lies in how capital, through automation and increases in productivity increasingly pushes living labor away from itself, turning a growing number of people into a “relative surplus population” according to its own criteria.
But who can blame the classical Marxists for not addressing these questions? After all, they have a large material interest in keeping getting invited to the podcasts, the opinion pages and the think-tanks of the Right; and, in order to obfuscate the true reasons for the crisis of the welfare, their labor is — to say the least — of a quite productive nature.
