Tag: Sweden

Nuclear powers are continuing to modernize their weapons, says Swedish think tank / by Morning Star

A U.S. nuclear weapons test in Nevada in 1953. | International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons / Creative Commons

Reposted from the Morning Star

The world’s nine nuclear-armed states continue to modernize their nuclear weapons as the countries deepened their reliance on such deterrence in 2023, a Swedish think tank said today.

Wilfred Wan, director of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s (SIPRI) weapons of mass destruction program, said: “We have not seen nuclear weapons playing such a prominent role in international relations since the Cold War.”

Earlier this month, Russia and its ally Belarus launched a second stage of drills intended to train their troops in tactical nuclear weapons, part of the Kremlin’s response to aggressive overtones from the members of the NATO military alliance.

In a separate report, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017, said that the nine nuclear-armed states spent a combined total of $91.4 billion on their arsenals in 2023.

The group said that figures show a $10.7 billion increase in global spending on nuclear weapons in 2023 compared to 2022, with the United States accounting for 80 percent of that increase.

The U.S. share of total spending, $51.5 billion, is more than all the other nuclear-armed countries put together.

ICAN policy and research coordinator Alicia Sanders-Zakre said: “There has been a notable upward trend in the amount of money devoted to developing these most inhumane and destructive weapons over the past five years.”

She said: “All this money is not improving global security, in fact, it’s threatening people wherever they live.”

SIPRI estimated that some 2,100 of the deployed warheads were kept in a state of high operational alert on ballistic missiles and nearly all belong to the U.S. or Russia.

SIPRI’s director Dan Smith described the upward trend of warheads as “extremely concerning.”

The U.S. and Russia together have almost 90 percent of all nuclear weapons, SIPRI said.

In its SIPRI Yearbook 2024, the institute said that transparency regarding nuclear forces has declined in both countries in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and debates around nuclear-sharing arrangements have increased in importance.

Washington suspended its bilateral strategic stability dialogue with Russia, and last year Moscow announced that it was suspending its participation in the New Start nuclear treaty.

In Asia, India, Pakistan, and North Korea are all pursuing the capability to deploy multiple warheads on ballistic missiles, the institute said. The U.S., Russia, France, Britain, and China already have that capacity.

Morning Star

Morning Star is the socialist daily newspaper published in Great Britain. Morning Star es el diario socialista publicado en Gran Bretaña.

Sweden’s Welfare State Was a Product of Class Struggle / by Kjell Ostberg

Social Democratic prime minister of Sweden Olof Palme in Salzburg, Austria, 1971. (Imagno / Getty Images)

Swedish Social Democracy is often idealized as a benign reformist force that delivered welfare to the grateful masses. Yet the Swedish social model was the product of conflict — and a working-class radicalism that the Social Democrats have now turned against.

Reposted from Jacobin

For almost a century, many on the international left took Swedish Social Democracy for a model — hoping that it offered a democratic means to achieve a fully socialist society. This was a project built on a mass labor movement, strong welfare guarantees and, in the 1970s, even ideas like the Meidner Plan, promising a gradual socialization of the economy.

Yet this future did not come to pass. Instead, Social Democracy adapted to the neoliberal world order, and dismantled many of its own past achievements. Not only has it dropped its former ambitions, but considerable parts of the working class have turned to the far-right Sweden Democrats. The idea that Sweden is inherently “progressive” lies in the past.

In a new English-language book The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy, historian Kjell Östberg explains how this came to pass. His work questions idealized notions of benign reformism and highlights the social conflicts behind decades of working-class gains — and their eventual erosion. Here we present an extract from the book.

Swedish Social Democracy occupies a special place in the political history of the twentieth century. The Swedish model has long stood as a successful model between the communist planned economy and free-market capitalism. Sweden has had a Social Democratic prime minister for more than seventy-five years over the last century. Sweden would be a paradise if only there was a little more sunshine, the bourgeois French president George Pompidou is reputed to have said.

But above all it is socialists of various stripes who have turned to Sweden as the country that has gone the furthest in terms of welfare, equality, social consensus, and gender equality. The focus has been on the Social Democratic Party, whose strong organization, dominant political position, capacity for ideological innovation, and not least ability to implement a program for the strong welfare state has attracted attention and often admiration. The ideologue and minister of finance Ernst Wigforss, the social engineers Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, the trade union economist Rudolf Meidner, and the politician Olof Palme all symbolized, each in their own way, a Social Democracy that appeared a little more radical than others. [. . .]

The party is undoubtedly one of the most powerful political actors of the twentieth century, internationally as well as domestically. Its position within the working class was hegemonic for a hundred years. The Social Democratic–led trade unions organized 80 to 90 percent of the workers, the vast majority of whom voted Social Democrat. Large sections of the middle classes also supported the party’s policies. The broad Social Democratic movement was extraordinarily well organized. It was, to use [Antonio] Gramsci’s phrase, a party with a great capacity to produce and educate its intellectuals itself. The leadership was recruited mainly from the working class, and it soon acquired extensive experience in leading struggles and movements. [. . .]

But the conquests of the Swedish working class are also linked to waves of radicalization, recurrent periods of strikes, increased social struggles, and the emergence of new social movements and revitalization of existing ones. Virtually all important democratic and social reforms can be linked to such periods of intensified class struggle. The democratic reforms after World War I were a direct consequence of the massive hunger demonstrations initiated by working women, who were largely unorganized either politically or as laborers.

The social reforms initiated in the 1930s came about amid the threat of widespread strike movements, a surge in trade union organization, and women’s struggle for the right to work and for basic social security. The spectacular peak of the solidarity-based welfare state in the 1960s and ’70s coincided with the emergence of a series of new social movements with transformative ambitions, in which the women’s movement played a decisive role, and with a strong radicalization of the traditional labor movement, mainly expressed in a wave of spontaneous strikes.

Certainly, the Social Democratic Party has often played a central role in these processes. The party has harbored dreams of a society free from injustice and class oppression; it has not been a monolithic organization. Conflicting views have constantly been pitted against one another. The party and the Swedish Trade Union Confederation (LO) have often had different views and interests. Women have had to fight against prejudice and patriarchal structures.

Within Social Democracy, there are different layers and interests that are sometimes at odds with each other, as well as subject to external pressures. Swedish Social Democracy has been represented by skilled leaders at all levels, who have been able to translate many of the movement’s demands and dreams into practical policies. But they have, at the same time, imposed constraints, particularly in not challenging capitalism and respecting the established parameters of political intervention.

As a result, the party leadership has often found itself at odds with the dynamics of social mobilizations. After World War I, great efforts were made to persuade workers to abandon the struggle in the streets and squares, and to concentrate their efforts instead on the parliamentary assemblies at local and central levels — in other words, to give up the fight for a deeper democracy. In the 1930s, the party intensified its attempts to isolate the communists and socialists of various shades who had played an important role in the revitalization of the social movements, so as to ensure that their efforts did not interfere with the rapprochement with the business world.

When the force of 1970s radicalization challenged the right of capitalism to decide over work conditions, and raised the question of workers’ power over their jobs, the party leadership retreated, choosing to replace demands for wage-earner funds with the toothless Co-Determination Act. Wildcat strikes were fought against, and social movement activists were monitored. When opposition to the neoliberal turn led to widespread trade union protests, the party leadership went on the counteroffensive.

In short, the Swedish welfare state is the result of a class struggle enacted by currents and movements whose base extended way beyond the confines of the Social Democratic Party.

The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy is available from Verso Books.

Kjell Östberg is a historian. He is author of The Rise and Fall of Swedish Social Democracy.

Dispelling myths about for-profit health care / Pat Armstrong and Hugh Armstrong

Originally published in Canadian Dimension on February 7, 2023

An old friend of ours recently confessed to using a private clinic for her cataract surgery. She said that, while she felt guilty, she nonetheless received wonderful care and paid with her health card. When we asked the name of the clinic, she said the Kensington Eye Institute (located on Toronto’s College Street). It is indeed a private clinic that provides vision surgeries for cases considered non-complicated. It has justly received a good reputation. But a critical piece was missing from the ‘private’ label. Kensington is a non-profit, community-based eye surgery centre.

It is this essential distinction that is too often missing from current debates about Canada’s health care crisis, even among those who are usually on top of the issues (including our friend). Indeed, the term ‘private’ is often used to purposely hide distinctions (and consequences), with proponents arguing that our health care system is already mainly private. All those hospitals named after saints are not public in the sense that they are not owned by the government. But they are public because of the fact that they are responsible to the public and, in Ontario, fall under the Public Hospitals Act. Their books and board meetings are public. They report publicly. They do not seek a profit nor are they allowed to earn a profit on care.

When we argue that the primary objective of for-profit care is profit, this is not an ideological argument, as Premier Doug Ford insists. Indeed, it is factual. Businesses that do not make a profit go out of business. Moreover, the primary responsibility of for-profit companies is to their shareholders, not the public. So it is often hard to tell where the profits are coming from and what this means in terms of care and care work.

Take the case of for-profit long-term care homes. We know they make a profit; we know they have a pattern of fewer staff, lower pay, more bed sores and more transfers to hospitals. This reveals some sources of profit, but doesn’t provide a full picture. There is indeed gold in the golden years, but too often not for those needing or working in care.

Ford likes to repeat the line that people will pay for standalone services offered by the for-profit clinics he’s granting a larger role in health delivery with their health card and not their credit card. Not to worry, he says, there will still be access to care without fees. But he fails to tell us what the sources of profits will be. There has been talk about ‘upselling’ services that you may or may not need: special lenses for those cataracts, to take just one example. However, there are some indications that the government will also pay more for services in these clinics than in hospitals, meaning that we may pay for the profits through our tax dollars.

When questions are raised about accountability, the answer has been unspecified regulations. It is a rather ironic answer from a government dedicated to removing ‘red tape.’ Some regulations are obviously necessary but many of these will undoubtedly be required, and at more cost to public funds if they are to be enforced. Effective regulations to prevent the poaching of doctors, nurses, and technologists from public hospitals to new ‘independent’ clinics with shorter hours will be very hard to implement.

Our research on scandals about long-term care homes in various countries shows both that the scandals are more likely to arise in for-profit homes and that in North America especially they are more likely to result in more, but not necessarily more effective, regulation. Unlike in Sweden and Norway where governments cancel their contracts with for-profit owners when scandals are exposed in the media, North American governments choose to regulate. In the US we are repeatedly told that care homes are more regulated than the nuclear industry, but regulation too often mean workers spend scarce care time on filling out forms with little visible improvement in the delivery of care.

A case can be made for specialized clinics. They can make sense in a number of areas such as cataract surgeries. But as doctors’ organizations in Ontario have argued, they make the most sense when they are connected to hospitals so that resources can be shared and complications easily transferred for more advanced care. They also make sense when they are not searching for profit but rather focused on quality care, with oversight from hospitals. And when they are publicly funded, they are publicly accountable, with open board meetings and minutes and enforced regulations about quality care and working conditions. What doesn’t make sense is spending public money on profit. Premier Ford has not even offered a case supporting for-profit care, only for independent clinics.

It is not enough to declare that, given the current crises in health care, the status quo will not do and thus we need to turn to the for-profit sector. Changes that are proposed need to be backed up with evidence-informed arguments. Meanwhile, the evidence indicates that for-profit delivery is less efficient, not more. Experiences ranging from dismal overall health outcomes in the US, to the dismantling and thus fragmenting of the NHS in the UK, to longer wait times for many following the move to for-profit cataract eye surgery in Alberta all make clear.

The crises in health care brought about by years of austerity faced with a pandemic have created the opportunity to build back better. However, it also created the opportunity for those searching for profit in all corners of care, from dental offices to home care, telehealth, colonoscopies, and vaccinations. We are at a critical point in our health care system. Now more than ever we have to make the distinction between private and profit clear. If our friend didn’t see the differences, clearly we have a lot of work to do.

Pat Armstrong is a Canadian sociologist and Distinguished Research Professor at York University. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada.

Hugh Armstrong is a Distinguished Research Professor and Professor Emeritus of Social Work and Political Economy at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ontario. Dr. Armstrong’s major research interests include long-term care, the political economy of health care, unions and public policy, the organization of work and family and household structures.