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Abstract

The paper discusses empirical evidence and theoretical perspectives on structurally and spatially ingrained racial capitalism, dispossession, and precarisation in what is identified as ‘neo-apartheid’ Sweden. Theoretically, the argument rests on a critical re-engagement of the notions of ‘racial capitalism’ and ‘neo-apartheid’ in contemporary critical research, inspired, historically, by rich research on racial capitalism in South Africa under apartheid. The argument is illustrated, empirically, by a scrutiny of processes of segregation, racial stigmatisation, and ‘the return of primitive accumulation’ reflected in predatory housing policies and super-exploitation of labour, conditioning livelihoods and opportunities of subaltern Others in disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. Through a local case in the region of Järvafältet in metropolitan Stockholm, the paper addresses subaltern struggles contesting these realities of racial capitalism in a society that used to be an international showpiece of social equality and inclusive diversity policy.

Keywords

sociology racial capitalism neo-apartheid Sweden subaltern movements precarity

Introduction

The 2007–2008 financial crisis and its aftermath were distinguished by turbulent urban uprisings of Sweden’s subaltern racialised ‘Others’;¹ a ‘language of the unheard’² speaking of the precarious backside of the celebrated Swedish Model of the welfare state and pleading for social justice. The riots harbingered indeed the end of a cherished ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ (Schierup and Ålund, 2011), a protracted retrogressive transformation in several acts. It is marked by an improvident commodification of the welfare system, pillage of public housing by corporate financial capital, an extending precarisation of labour, deepening residential segregation and a polarised spatialisation of race and class inequality. These are all portents of an exacerbated regime of racial capitalism, in the third decade of the 21st century, forging a predatory interconnection of racism and capital accumulation. It surfaces as a contingent conditionality of what. Michael Hudson (2022) identifies as the sombre destiny of Western civilisation.

We step back in the following to a principled discussion of ‘racial capitalism’; a concept Cedric Robinson (2000), in his celebrated book Black Marxism, picked up from the South African debate on apartheid in the 1970s. This, we argue, was a debate with a productive potential for reaching an understanding of what we call a condition of ‘Neo-apartheid’ with reference to today’s Swedish social, political, economic, and urban reality. Proceeding from there we discuss segregation, racial stigmatisation, predatory housing policies and precarious labour, conditioning livelihoods in Sweden’s most disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. We reflect on the positionality and voices of the subaltern under conditions of an expropriative racial capitalism, reproduced by political discourse and institutional practice. We offer an approach to subaltern struggles centred on a local case, focusing on movements contending the financialisation of housing and the precarisation of labour.

We wind up by a discussion of these struggles, exposed to the conditionality, vagaries, and challenges of what Agamben (2005) has defined as a pending ‘state of exception’.

Race and the accumulation of capital

Martin Legassick and Harold Wolpe were among the South African scholars theorising the political economy of the apartheid regime. In ‘The Bantustans and Capital Accumulation in South Africa’ (Legassick and Wolpe, 1976), they elaborate on Marx’s classical concepts of ‘primitive accumulation’ and the ‘reserve army of labour’ as key for understanding the apartheid system’s rationale, stratagems and institutional setup. They also emphasise that in depth analysis of apartheid, its race legislation, its extreme securitised segregation, and its developmental dynamics must relate to imperialism, coloniality, and the global capitalist system. They thus, in consequence, insert the idea of racial capitalism into the global framing of primitive accumulation belonging to the intellectual heritage of Rosa Luxemburg (2003 [1913]).

This relates to Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism in The Accumulation of Capital, where she contested the idea that primitive accumulation, conceived as the prehistory of capitalism affected by naked political violence, should be a once and for all historical event. She maintains that primitive accumulation is a continuous, integrated, and essential constituent of capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, arguing that ‘the accumulation of capital, seen as a historical process, employs force as a permanent weapon, not only at its genesis but further on down to the present day’ (Luxemburg, 2003 [1913]: 351). It is indeed the life blood of capitalism per se, a social and economic system of a fundamentally dual character of which, as condensed by Wang (2018: 113), ‘one sphere is governed by freedom of contract and the rule of law while the other is dominated by political violence and looting carried out by hegemonic capitalist nations’. Luxemburg’s penetrating analysis of colonialism and imperialism and her discerning description of ‘the havoc wreaked upon what we now call “the Global South” (Hudis, 2023) speaks critically to today’s dominant theories of globalisation in the voice of an “unsung hero of postcolonial theory”’ (Dabashi, 2020). ‘Rather than casting slavery and Native genocide as temporally circumscribed events that inaugurated the birth of capitalism in the New World . . . Luxemburg’s approach shows how the racial logics produced by these processes persist to this day’ (Wang, 2018: 115). Or as Tadiar (2022: 14) puts it in a nutshell from the standpoint of the subaltern:

‘A war of dispossession is the mode of accumulation dominantly understood as the “original” or “primitive” basis of the rise of capital, even as those who struggle to survive in this moment know intimately well that a racist, sexist war of dispossession is the beating heart of contemporary global capitalism’.

This perspective helps us to address contemporary processes of financialisation and political force crucial for contemporary capital accumulation, as claimed by David Harvey (2012), dispossessing the urban masses of ‘rights to the city’. Nancy Fraser (2022: 27), in turn, argues in Cannibal Capitalism – with reference to the tradition of Black Marxism – that capitalism has, across its historical transmutations, always been ‘structurally racist’. She recuperates Luxemburg’s duality of capital accumulation by re-engaging the Marxian concepts of ‘expropriation’ and ‘exploitation’ in a discussion of historical and contemporary racial capitalism. In the same instance, however, she also criticises Marx for discounting the question of race and racism in his conceptualisation of capitalism.

Forcible and illicit dispossession and ‘expropriation’ of labour and resources, argues Fraser, has been the ‘backstory’, as well as ‘an ongoing, albeit unofficial, mechanism of accumulation, which continues alongside the official mechanism of exploitation’ (Fraser, 2022: 7–8). Shifting articulations of racism remain contingent on this ever-present juxtaposition of expropriation and exploitation, embedded in political orders of capitalism and their historical transformations, in which the ‘expropriation’ of racialised ‘others’ constitutes a necessary background condition for the ‘exploitation’ of ‘workers’. Accordingly, Fraser concludes, ‘the two exes are systemically imbricated aspects of a single capitalist world system. And the division between them correlates roughly but unmistakably with what Du Bois called ‘the color line’’.

This seeming ontological a priori of capitalism is, however, crucially historicised in her understanding of the present hegemony of an extraordinarily predatory financial capitalism, which necessitates, she admits, an, at least partial, revision of the systemic racial bifurcation along the exploitation/expropriation axes. Beyond a sustained racial dichotomy, a plurality of dispossessing expropriation under the sway of financialisation is subjecting, Fraser argues, ever-broadening population groups, even in the contemporary global north, to a multifarious state of encumbering precarity, on the far downside of socially necessary costs of reproduction. It is a condition roughly corresponding also to what Mario Marini (2022 (1973) has termed ‘super-exploitation’; customarily considered a quintessence of labour and life of the capitalist periphery under the peril of imperialism. This crossroad, also designated as ‘the Brazilianisation of the West’ (Beck, 2000) is a proliferating process, with a spread of temporariness, insecure employment, discontinuity, loose informality, and including dispossession of rights of citizenship that were taken for granted by white majorities during the so-called ‘thirty glorious’ years of the Fordist welfare state. It is a debilitating condition operating in the present but at the same time appropriating also the future (e.g. Tsianos, 2007: 191), crossing Fraser’s two ‘exes’ and with an extensive spread and variability (Schierup and Bak Jørgensen, 2017).

Hyperprecarity, racism and the reserve army of labour

A prevalent multitude of precarious population groups, bereft by our contemporary ‘great exclusion’ (Jordan, 1996), do remain racialised Others (Schierup and Ålund, 2015). They carry the ‘double weight’ of a ‘toxic risk’ of hyperprecarity (Woolfson et al., 2008; cf. Lewis et al., 2015). This signifies the embeddedness of multiple points of mutually reinforcing vulnerability in global processes of expulsion, super-exploitation and coercion among migrants and post-migrants in the global north, and especially across the global south in societies for centuries ‘underdeveloped’ by a racialising coloniality. Nevertheless, the observation that ‘we are all precarious’ (i.e. dispossessed) today (Seymour, 2012) – echoing Fraser’s observation concerning the escalating state of precarity under contemporary financial capitalism – urges us to take a step back to recuperating an ontology of ‘racial capitalism’, devoid of preset systemic functionalism; essentially in line with Robinson’s (2000) historical analysis in Black Marxism. Hence, the capitalist mode of production does not simply create a superstructure or ideology of racism. Capitalism as a concrete empirical reality is on the contrary constituted by the very history of racism (Rajaram, 2018: 629; cf. Hall, 1996). Rather than a fixed property of the capitalist mode of production, the reconfiguration of today’s racial capitalism in terms of ‘precarity’ represents a novel motion in a path-dependent historical bricolage.

Accordingly, the confluence of racism and capitalism is a historically ‘contingent’ rather than a ‘logical’ necessity (Go, 2021). This speaks to the distinction, argues Julian Go (2021), between the theory of capital and the theory of capitalism in the writings of Marx. While the former, the theory of capital, offered a ‘formal and abstract representation of the inner workings of capital’, its contradictions and accumulation, the latter, the theory of capitalism, ‘refers to capitalist development and dynamics in their empirical specificity’. While Capital (Marx, 1976 [1885)) and other of Marx’s major theoretical works were rather scant in terms of reference to racism, his correspondence with colleagues, journalistic, and other writings demonstrate that ‘Marx not only discussed race, slavery, and colonialism but saw them as central for capitalism’ (Go, 2021: 42).

Hence, with the Irish working class as an exemplary case, Marx (1975 (1870) discusses the confluence of coloniality, racial stigma, and class fractionalisation in terms of an antagonism between ‘free’ and ‘unfree’ workers, systematically reproduced, in the interest of the ruling hegemony, through politics, law, ideology and media discourse. He sees this as comparable to the relations of Black and White workers in the US South and attributes its complex conditionality with wider importance for understanding stratagems of accumulation, race, class and power in world capitalism.

Essentials of the racial conflicts dividing labour in 19th century England reappear in new configurations of race, class, nation and coloniality in contemporary Sweden and much of Europe, experiencing austerity, protracted social crisis, and the rise of a discriminatory nationalism. The prevalent political recipe is ‘integration’, ‘assimilation’ or expulsion of the ‘alien’, the culturally deviant; indeed, not squarely unlike a prejudiced formula for solving the problem of the Irish worker once prescribed by Friedrich Engels (1971 [1845]). Marx, however, steered clear of Engels’ prejudices, approaching racial rupture and conflict within the working class analytically, examining it in conjunction with the disciplinary dynamics of the reserve army of labour (Chandana and Dermot, 2009; Duggan, 2013). It is a multidimensional theory the basics of which continue to provide insights concerning migration and hyper-precarity, racial discrimination, and the spatialisation of super-exploitation (Rajaram, 2018).

The basic logic is that cyclically occurring crisis for the valorisation of capital generates a lay-off of regularly employed labour to be absorbed by (an ever latent) reserve army of labour consisting of a surplus population of unemployed and of workers locked up in precarious jobs. A reserve army of surplus workers is, however, all but ‘superfluous’ to accumulation. Surplus populations function as capital’s ‘backstage operations where cheap and irregular labour is used up in the search for hyperprofit’ (Rajaram, 2018: 628). The surplus population is consequently also functional, in being instrumentalised for putting pressure on the (relatively privileged) employed in the regular army of labour. It is held in a floating condition through austere welfare and labour market policies, and through politics of racial stigmatisation and segregation, as we have demonstrated in the case of Sweden (Schierup and Scarpa, 2017), yet also by manipulation of a transnational reserve army of circulant migrant labour, including refugees exposed to a commodified asylum process. Hence, rather than being plainly a ‘reserve army’ recruited to fill empty spaces in segmented labour markets, migration and racial stigmatisation are factors for corporate strategies to shape, regulate and restructure asymmetrically niched labour markets (Bauder, 2006).

Neo-apartheid Sweden

The idiom of ‘neo-apartheid’ was coined in South Africa in the 1970s, at a stage when the strategic focus of the apartheid regime shifted from the labour reserves of exhausted rural ‘bantustans’ to the super-exploitation and policed containment of rebellion in segregated urban ‘townships’. It was a time of ‘collapse of an economic system centred on welfare and transformation’, argued Nkosi (1973), passing over to ‘one premised on individual authority and the discipline of the free market’, and with apartheid threatened by a Black working-class movement demanding non-racialism and democratisation.

In the 2000s, ‘neo-apartheid’ was re-used as a critical phrase in South Africa to suggest ‘that the constitutive line of colonialism and apartheid has survived the so-called transition from apartheid to post-apartheid in that impoverished black people remain ensnared in a zone of stasis’ (Madlingozi, 2017: 125). It is also circulated in other parts of the world as a loaded designation of totalising discrimination towards ethnically or culturally designated groups, aiming at making them fluidly procurable economically and politically. It is distinguished by spatial separation under conditions of neo-liberalism, sustained coloniality, and new forms of discriminative urban governance (Chiodelli, 2022); yet institutionalised through other means than explicit racial legislation, and articulated ideologically in terms other than explicit phenotypical markers (Bradlow, 2021).

It is a sombre contemporary configuration of the historical and institutional-structural background to which we have, focused on the Swedish case, discussed in earlier publications (e.g. Ålund et al., 2017). It has followed in the tracks of three decades of deepening transformation in terms of an outsourced and degraded welfare institutional system exposed to profiteering by corporate entrepreneurs, soaring social inequality, and race-class polarisation. It represents the outlawing of society’s least wanted, but most needed, as the centre-right and centre-left have converged towards a neoconservative hegemony, with visions of solidarity, equality and social justice sacrificed, and political legitimacy riding on fear-mongering and a collective obsession with the allegedly non-belonging ‘other’, depicted as welfare scroungers, potential criminals, and a peril to ‘social cohesion’.

This may appear as an appropriation by mainstream parties across the traditional left-right divide of the political discourse of the Sweden Democrats (Sverigedemokraterna), a nationalist and racist neoconservative political party with a Nazi and Neo-Nazi past (Schierup et al., 2018). The party has, incrementally, during the 2000s, bled the votership of both the traditional left and the traditional political right, and its politics of hate and islamophobia have fomented racialisation and deepening socio-political rifts between workers. Yet, ‘democracy erodes from the top’.³ A furtive racist agenda has engulfed the political mainstream in competition for the votes of a disoriented electorate, which no longer feels convinced by a time-honoured narrative of welfare state solidarity and the boons of ‘diversity’ (Schierup and Scarpa, 2017).

Racism is so, in a conjuncture of political and social crisis, ‘instrumentally deployed to foster a state’s authority over a population’ with discourses of threat to the nation, trumping class and societal divides (Rajaram, 2018: 630). It is, more specifically, emplaced as a ‘war against the suburb’ (Wirtén, 2012). This hints at racial capitalism with spatial dimensions, demarcating precarious communities in larger Swedish cities – with a high proportion of citizens with their background in Africa, West Asia, Latin America, the Balkans, and the former Soviet Empire – in terms of the floating signifier of ‘outsidership areas’ (utanförskapsområden). They are guzzled by an ‘advanced marginality’ (Wacquant, 1996) and victimised by a racialising epistemic chain corresponding to the castigation of France’s ‘banlieus’; Badlands of the Republic (Dikeç, 2007). These northern ‘badlands of the kingdom’ (Schierup et al., 2014) are in common political parlance designated as förorten (literally ‘the suburb’).

Inhabitants in these areas suffer incommensurably from commodification and refraction of a once universalist public welfare system. This corroborates precarisation of livelihoods and labour implanted in a spatially articulated, racial and class inequality, with Sweden’s larger cities having become among the most segregated in Europe in terms of race and class, with half of all children in disadvantaged metropolitan neighbourhoods growing up in poverty (Thörn and Thörn, 2017). It is a state linked with a transmutation of the welfare institutional system, forging an increasingly discriminatory, structurally rooted and institutionally reproduced, racial formation. It includes a dispossessing financialisation of housing, an austere migration and refugee policy, a precarisation of labour with a spatial and racial visage, and a commodified primary and secondary school system, the obtrusively corrupt and asocial dynamics of which are observed to ‘rip the nation apart’ (Kornhall and Bender, 2018). It has, resulted, predictably, in dropouts and in criminal violence enrolling ever younger teenagers and children.

Bio-political measures targeted at ‘outsidership areas’ through social work – for moral improvement, discipline and conforming behaviour – have long been overshadowed by escalating police violence and extensive racial profiling (Schclarek Mulinari and Wolgast, 2020), involving policy bids for the mass incarceration of ever younger individuals. It generates a ‘lockdown Sweden’ with overcrowded prisons increasingly comparable to its US antecedent. In tandem with this the discriminatory epistemic carriage of ‘outsidership areas’ has become accentuated by the adoption, in media and politics, of the notion of ‘parallel society’; that is, the obscure ‘homelands’ of those lesser breeds not considered belonging to the nation. It was canonised through a report by the police authority (Polisen, 2017) listing 61 housing areas as an alien world apart, supposedly ruled as ‘parallel’ social structures by extremists and criminal gangs. This calls, emphasised the former social democratic premier, Magdalena Andersson in a critical note on Instagram in 2022,⁴ for a battery of disciplinary action, including incremental securitisation and the sharpening of austere politics of workfare through special treatment of ‘welfare dependent parents’. Upping the ante, she toppled in 2023 the securitisation agenda by a proposal for mobilising the Swedish army in the service of law and order in poor suburbs. Her party advocated surveillance by drones, seconded by a governmental proposal for the use of electronic foot shackles, to keep control of adolescents and children seen to be running a risk for being drawn into criminal activity (Socialdemokraterna, 2024).

It is a development that is prone to become exacerbated by the implementation of the so-called Tidö Agreement, a neoconservative political compact adopted in 2022 by a centre-right government in alliance with the Swedish Democrats. It harbours a series of discriminatory stratagems, including special legislation relating to disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. It envisages, among other, forms of securitisation outlawed on Swedish territory in general, including the institution of special so-called ‘visitation zones’. The Tidö Agreement foresees, moreover, area-based discrimination concerning housing and social policy. It anticipates politically stipulated wages for certain occupational groups and the sharpening of already austere measures towards inhabitants who are dependent on social benefits. It corroborates, beyond the confines of liberal legality, the moralistic category of ‘deportment’ (Swedish: vandel as criterium för belonging, and conversely as liability for deportation upon revoking residence permit or citizenship. Altogether, concludes a review of the Tidö Compact (Sundborg, 2022), this represents a ‘headway towards an authoritarian state. . . a Swedish apartheid with a part of the population subject to a number of special laws’.

This modality of neo-apartheid, marked by obsessive securitisation. racial stigma, and deepening systemic cleavages, underpin expropriation of the livelihoods of society’s most disadvantaged in stigmatised suburban communities, operated as floating reserves for financial profiteering and cheap precarious labour; a dual process of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2012) – or speaking with Sassen (2010) – a ‘return of primitive accumulation’.

Financialisation of housing

Sparked by de-regulation and commodifying reforms of the 1990s, and with Sweden following the European Union’s privatisation policy, a financialisation of housing has taken place, with global investment corporations like Blackrock and Blackstone as powerful actors (Christophers, 2022; European Commission, 2020; Gustafsson, 2021). As a consequence, rental housing in Swedish cities has come to straggle in an ambivalent state in which housing is (still) officially seen as a universal social right, yet on the other hand as a commodity for capital accumulation (Kadıoğlu and Kellecioğlu, 2023; Kellecioğlu, 2021). A public housing policy emasculated by a stealthy stepwise de-regulation and commodification creates and reproduces socioeconomic inequality (Thörn and Polanska, 2023). Although Swedish housing policies are thus not (yet) full bread neoliberal, a systemically engrained ‘entrepreneurial governance’ can be identified, argue Thörn and Thörn (2017), as a driving force for race-class segregation of Swedish cities. This implicates an underlying consensual priority of political and economic elites on private investment in pace with a capital affirmative process of institutional de- and re-regulation. It feeds a development (Thörn and Thörn, 2017: 294) ‘where some urban areas are viewed as financial assets and others are left to decline’.

The implication is a step by step, but highly ‘selective, re-making of parts of the city for upper- and middle-class consumption [. . . ] and displacement of poor people that increases social segregation’ (Thörn and Thörn, 2017: 294–295). These are processes operating through and conditioning stigma and racial segregation, blocking avenues for social and spatial mobility of society’s most disadvantaged. As indicated above, they are powered by stigmatising political and media discourse and apartheidising institutional practices, including incumbering securitisation in the excluded domains of so-called ‘parallel societies’.

Several studies have documented how this ‘selective remaking’ implicates the covert operations of transnational financial corporations, entailing (using Fraser’s terminology introduced above) stratagems of ‘expropriation’ of people’s livelihoods in poor racially segregated communities. The resulting hyper-precarious situation for families living on the income margin has created overcrowding and eviction of poor. This is a regime, conclude Blackwell et al. (2023) in a critical analysis of Swedish housing politics, which systematically favours financial capital and construction companies. It generates housing shortage; it leads to fewer and more expensive hiring contract. Resultant overcrowding among those with the lowest income is among the worst in Europe. This is a type of situation where finance basically determines housing policy and the makeup of the city.

One illuminating international study on the financial dealings of global housing corporations in Berlin, Stockholm, and Malmö was, seen from the perspective of tenants in rental housing, undertaken in 2020–2021 by a German-Swedish research group, CRUSH, the Critical Urban Sustainability Hub.⁵ A local case study within that larger project was undertaken by Kellecioğlu (2021) on the community of Husby, situated in the Stockholm region of Järva.

The Järva region has a population close to 100,000, characterised by a polarised social geography. It includes Kista Science City, one of the world’s most important IT clusters, serving a network of strategically integrated cutting-edge companies and relevant service institutions, side by side with poor residential communities, such as Husby, in which more than two-fifths of families with children live under conditions of excessive precarity. In the Järva community Husby – one of those communities branded by the police and the dominant political and mass media narrative as a ‘parallel society’ – a vast majority of the residents are born outside of Sweden or have two foreign-born parents. Husby is home to a majority of low-income households with precarious livelihoods affected by overcrowded housing, a high level of unemployment, precarious working conditions, and dependence on a fluctuating gig economy. Close to every fourth child in the community is recorded to live in poverty. Living conditions in this, originally well-planned and well-built municipal rental housing area, have deteriorated due to successive privatisations. Livelihoods in the area have declined due to a diminishing presence of institutions for health and education and other public and private services, while territorial stigmatisation and the racial blemish of ‘place’ obstruct life chances in Swedish society (Fischer et al., 2016) and bar legitimate claims for justice by a hyper-precarious population from being heard (Schierup et al., 2014; cf. Dikeç, 2007).

Municipal housing has become an attractive prey for privatisation and hit-and-run short-term profiteering. Husby is a revealing and thoroughly studied case of this. Since the privatisation of a substantial stock of the community’s municipal housing, bought from the municipal housing company, Svenska Bostäder in 1996, it has been appropriated by and sold among nine different corporations, of which Blackstone, one of the world’s largest and most powerful transnational financial corporations, was one (Kellecioğlu, 2021). While profit calculations have ruled the sales process during this entire period (1996–2023), the development since privatisation has suffered from deficient investment in maintenance by private landlords.

After a short episode, with the Swedish company, Hembla, as the main owner, its housing stock in Husby was in 2019 sold on to the German multinational company of Vonovia, but still with Hembla as a sub-contractor in charge of management. Hembla, today rebranded into Victoria Hem, is a joint stock company in charge of administrating and maintaining privatised housing complexes in communities with a majority population of non-European backgrounds, disadvantaged with respect to power for defending their (formal) civic rights, not only in Husby but across Sweden. Vonovia, with Blackrock among its main investors (Gustafsson, 2021), is one of Europe’s largest real-estate corporations; notorious among locals in Järva and elsewhere for fake-renovation and bogus rent increases as well as neglected maintenance of their housing stock (Kellecioğlu, 2021).

In comparison with the remainder of the municipal housing complexes in Husby, still managed by Svenska Bostäder, the privatised stock has been marked by a decaying standard during the period 1996–2023 and by an, often health demeaning, lack of maintenance. A conspicuous difference between municipal and privatised stocks remains in this respect, even though also the remainder of a formerly subsidised municipal housing stock in Husby and Sweden has become pressured by re-regulations demanding profitability for organisations in the public sector.

This contrast is, obviously, as demonstrated by critical Swedish housing studies related to continuous processes of accumulation by expropriation by corporate owners and managers, with a racial signature. Alongside strategies for added value through gentrification, super profits in privatised stock are captured by fake renovations; and investment strategy, loading tenants with illicit rent increases (Gustafsson, 2021), while processes of ‘renoviction’ are forcing poor tenants, unable to pay an injudiciously increased rent, onto the street (cf. Polanska et al., 2019). This takes place through multiple strategies of domination, which is amply documented by Kellecioglu (2021), based on interviews with tenants in Husby. Resting on this research and other critical research in Sweden and elsewhere in Europe, it appears reasonable to conclude that national and international regulations remain insufficient to protect populations in disadvantaged communities. It includes improper maintenance, sham renovations and, effectively, expropriative dispossession of substantial rights to decent housing (Kadıoğlu and Kellecioğlu, 2023). As we shall discuss further below this has called for local civic mobilisation and the formation of national and international alliances in defence of this basic citizen’s and human right.

Occupational ghettoes

A proliferating financial extractivism in housing is flanked by the function of Sweden’s most disadvantaged urban communities as incubators for occupational ghettoes populated by a super-exploited precariat. In tandem with this, embedding specific values onto a fragmented urban space narrows the alternatives for poor, segregated groups to involve themselves in public, political and social life, thereby also constraining their range of alternatives in terms of labour.

The notion of ‘occupational ghetto’ was coined by Feuchtwang (1982) with reference to types of employment that are insecure, monotonous, often dangerous, dirty, and mostly poorly paid. They are traps in the labour market from which transition to other, more attractive, more varied, and better-paid forms of employment is extremely difficult; traps in which disproportionately many ethno-racial minority groups are held captive, contingent on racial stigma and prevalent stratagems of recruitment and management. We contend in extension of Feuchtwang’s argument that occupational ghettoes serve as containers for a latent, racially segregated, reserve army of labour.

One revealing example of an ‘occupational ghetto’ is the Swedish construction sector.

Construction used to be an advanced showpiece of the so-called ‘Swedish Model’ of regulated employment, decommodification of labour, and a continuous upgrading of technology, wages, and labour qualifications, resting on centralised negotiations and agreements between unions and the national employers’ organisation. Construction benefitted, until neoliberal reforms of the mid 1990s, from state support and unstinting public subsidies in the service of building affordable housing for working class families. The union of building workers (Byggnads) was in the heyday of the Swedish welfare state characterised by a certain craft guild ideology, and it for long successfully defended wages among the highest for Swedish blue-collar workers. It was a privileged and exclusivist domain, with few women and immigrants or workers of migrant background employed (Mulinari and Neergaard, 2023).

In the 2000s, confronted with EU directives, the power of the builders’ union to sanction labour market regulation has faded, and the basic premises of the compact between labour and capital refracted, with the result that a majority of (especially smaller) enterprises in construction now stands outside the system of collective agreement (Ågren, 2014). In tandem with this, the organisation of labour has changed through the extension of new employment strategies. This pertains, among others, argues Slavnic (2010), to the informalisation of labour under conditions of changing state/corporate business power relations, with opaque chains of subcontracting bypassing existing laws and regulations in a country where the informal economy used to be of marginal importance. Through stratagems of subcontracting, hyper-profits are expropriated by large corporations in construction and by financial capital. The actual labour process may take place in small enterprises in the informal economy way down the chain of subcontracting, engaging migrant labour for subminimal wages, doing unauthorised working hours under conditions without concern for occupational safety and health, and with scant opportunities for holding the corporations on the top of the value chain answerable.

In this transformed industry, the typical worker is no longer the privileged white blue-collar union member but a racially stigmatised resident of vulnerable communities like Husby, working under precarious circumstances, with part-time or per-hour jobs, under opaque circumstances in informal chains of subcontracting, with no or insecure contracts, and often without union membership or support. Or precarious ‘surplus labor’ may be recruited from a huge vulnerable transnational reserve army of labour migrants and asylum seekers, produced, and reproduced by imperial extractivism, wars and environmental degradation. And they are the very same building workers who are engaged in expropriative renoviction projects in disadvantaged urban areas, thereby minimising the labour costs for real estate managers, and raising the profits of the financial corporations on top of the value chain.

Construction offers only one among numerous examples of occupational ghettoes in Sweden. Others are, for instance, located in cleaning, home assistance, public transport, taxi driving, jobs as assistant nurse, and online warehouse retailing (Rydström and et al, 2023; SCB, 2023).

An illuminating example is home care, a niche in the Swedish urban labour market, which in the 2000s has experienced a deep-seated organisational change (Buller, 2023). This is related to extensive processes of commodification through outsourcing of welfare services to private entrepreneurs. It is a transmuted regime extracting hyper-profits through the expropriation of poorly monitored public funding, combined with a harsh labour-saving stratagem. This is instrumented through a predatory intensification of labour, exposing care workers to exorbitant stress and early burn out. Every single work task has become calibrated and monitored according to a stringent time measurement regime, implemented through disciplinary surveillance by a constantly wired, digitalised management. It influences even work-processes implemented in realms of the occupation that remain under direct public management, yet are subjected to demands for profitability under conditions of competition with private entrepreneurs. Precarisation of labour in the occupation is, through this, effectively evacuated from work tasks of the very emotional and caregiving qualities that are habitually seen as associated with the occupation (Farris, 2017). These stratagems of precarity operate and are effectively brought to fruition, argues Buller (2023), on the background of constant pressure from and the potential or actual extraction of fresh sources of precarious labour by employers in the trade from a national reserve army of labour, with racial subalterns as the most vulnerable and available; yet also by expropriating the inexhaustible resource of a transnational reserve army of labour, engaged under temporary and volatile conditions. It is an institutional remaking followed by ‘white flight’ from what is becoming an increasingly locked-up occupational ghetto. This is paired with mounting pressure on remaining regularly employed care workers, mostly citizens with a migrant background or with longitudinal migrant status, and exposed to racial discrimination, barring them from access to alternative jobs.

The subaltern speaking

At the heels of the 2007–2008 financial crisis, the transversal antiracist justice movement of the subaltern, reminiscent of Chicago’s legendary ‘Rainbow Coalition’, resounded across Sweden’s marginalised urban spaces (Schierup and Ålund, 2018). By re-inscribing their local communities into the city and the wider space of Swedish society, they produced a ‘differential space’ (Lefebvre, 1991), or what among Swedish suburban activists came to be referred to as place struggles (León Rosales and Ålund, 2017), alluding to past working-class struggles, but reading predicaments of the political on their own terms.

A legacy of the movement is a vibrant local antiracist common, the community centre of Husby of the People (Folkets Husby), founded in the Stockholm community of Husby in 2016; a ‘reinvention’ of an urban common with roots in the Swedish labour movement of the late 19th century (Schierup et al., 2020), The People’s House (Folkets Hus).⁶ In the following, we relate to the struggles of two organisations based in the house: Place to Place (Ort till Ort) contesting the financialisation of housing and Husby Workers Centre (Husby Arbetarcentrum) concerned with precarious labour.

Fighting financialisation

Place to Place is a local activist organisation for the right to the city. It is a member of a European coalition of housing activists (European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City). Place to Place supports through voluntary work involving counselling and professional intervention, households exposed to evictions and unreasonable rent increases related to fake renovations. It links activists around housing issues in national and international solidarity, transversing racial boundaries, yet with activists in racially stigmatised communities on the frontline. It has been active in organising rallies against market-driven rent setting in the housing sector. A notable achievement was its part in the mobilisation of a transversal national movement against a pending political bill on market-controlled rent setting in 2020. In collaboration with the Tenants’ Association, the Civic Council of Northern Järva (Norra Järva Stadsdelsråd), and the Welfare Alliance, Place to Place arranged a start-up meeting for residents in Stockholm, in Folkets Husby, in February 2020. The mobilisation against market rent continued with demonstrations, which took place on 18 April 2021 in 155 locations across Sweden. The demonstrations brought together more than 70 organisations, networks and local associations, a popular mobilisation crossing generations and bringing together a variety of local communities, civil rights organisations, established civil society organisations and trade unions. A similar movement inaugurating meeting was held in Husby on 27 October 2023. It sparked the preparation of a national rally of a coalition for the protection of tenants’ rights and livelihoods, facing a historically unprecedented rise of hires, announced by private and municipal landlords, at a time when an increasing number of families experience grave difficulties in making ends meet.

This sustained popular mobilisation reflects the potential of what Castells (1996: 498) has called a ‘counterforce of places’ – a critical response to the dismantling of the welfare state and the polarisation of the city in terms of class, race and place. When such mobilisation includes a diversity of participants moving in the same direction, we can speak of an emergence of a counter-hegemonic ‘network of equivalence’ (Purcell, 2009), which realises ideas of transversal solidarity beyond that of the local community and across ethno-racial and confessional divides.

A budding community unionism

For the start of the independent syndicalist trade union, The Central Organisation of Swedish Workers (Sveriges Arbetares Centralorganisation/SAC), took charge of local matters relating to labour, providing counselling in Husby of the People, and offering support to locals on issues of employment and work-conditions. SAC has a strong record for involvement in labour disputes and support on workplace-related issues and, contrary to mainstream unions movement, it is heavily involved in counselling and support on issues relating to undocumented workers.

Today (2024), the trade union-oriented activities in Husby of the People are carried out by the Husby Workers’ Centre (Husby Arbetarcentrum/HAC), associated with SAC. However, unlike SAC’s syndicalist’s workplace orientation, HAC is a localised trade union organisation, based in Husby with operations in the wider Järva area. Its transversal coalition building with other locally based organisations and its networking nationally and transnationally, represents a combined struggle against neoliberal capitalism and racism. HAC’s political position, focusing on the local urban community, and a holistic perspective on the protection of livelihoods of the subaltern, relates both to the Swedish labour movement and to the work of Place to Place, and the Swedish Tenants Association.

Concurrent with this, HAC describes itself as a historical innovator of the Swedish labour movement with a focus on the radically changed conditions of the 21st-century labour market, changes which, disproportionately, affect the subaltern Other. That is, ‘workers who lack many of the elementary [. . .] union rights that the labour movement has fought for more than 100 years’.⁷ Its mission is based on and evolves from the local community. But rather than seeing the focus on the local community as a limitation, this constitutes a strength, its founders, Shamal Ali och Jonis Farah, maintain.⁸ In today’s fragmented labour market, they argue, there are no longer the occupation-based worker collectives that previously formed the basis for union mobilisation and collective action. This applies not least to those parts of the labour market that are marked by fragmented and precarious working conditions, super-exploitation, precarious and temporary employment without union protection, and to which residents of poor and stigmatised urban areas are relegated. Thus, other trade union strategies are required where organisation and solidarity mobilisation, and mutual support based on the local community, are fundamental. This relates also to the intersection of class, race, and gender; and on the background of the vulnerability of women, not least those employed in the care sector, HAC has established a women’s section.

HAC is thus an activist organisation working outside the framework of traditional unions. It is envisaged as a meeting place for education and socialisation for people who may feel isolated, as residents and as relating to their situation at work. Within the framework of HAC, and Husby of the People, residents of the area can meet, learn about their rights, exchange experiences, and collaborate with others in a similar situation. This extends beyond abuse and controversies pertaining to work and the labour market but relates to housing, education, and the local population’s entire life situation, including, for example, popular mobilisation confronting abuse in a dilapidated, spatially fractured, and racially tinged health system, in confrontation with politics and institutions of urban governance (e.g. HAC, 2024).

Members of HAC can participate in information and educational activities and acquire legal help relating to disputes with employers, not least regarding unpaid wages, bogus employment conditions and other work-related problems. These are often problems that, in mainstream trade unions vanish in the ‘bureaucratic apparatus’, as commented by Shamal Ali. He refers furthermore to the range of problems that the unions are not able, allowed, or willing to get involved in, applying for example to the situation of workers without contracts, gig workers or undocumented migrants. Meetings and exchange of experience can push individuals to feel active and involved and motivate them to take part in collective actions, like blockades, directed against hyper-exploitation and injustice in a fragmented labour market. Like Place to Place, HAC has also been involved translocally, for example in the nationwide mobilisation of a protest movement against deteriorations in the Employment Security Act of 2020.

A wagering state of exception

We have discussed how politics of expropriation relating to housing and labour have forged precarious livelihoods and contingent employment without security, protection, and predictability in disadvantaged urban communities. It captures, the role of race in the urban process, the formation of value and places implicated in contemporary power modalities (cf. Melgaço and Xavier, 2022). The same precarious urban spaces could, from this perspective, be seen as the battlefront of what Agamben (2005) calls a ‘state of exception’; subaltern struggles contending the extension of state power through which rights of citizenship, and human rights, are being reduced, surpassed, or denied, and with boundaries between the citizen and the noncitizen becoming increasingly blurred.

We have illustrated these processes of precarisation and its contestation with examples from the Stockholm community of Husby. Husby belongs to those parts of urban Sweden where ‘accumulation by dispossession’ (Harvey, 2004) related to municipal housing and a precarious labour market are particularly intense. This exposes a racial capitalism in which modes of dispossession or ‘expropriation’ (Fraser, 2022) are matched by a regime of systemic division, securitisation, and violent repression, mounting to what we have referred to as a state of ‘neo-apartheid’. In their daily reality, these communities are confronting a militarisation of police action. This is evidently meant to settle with proliferating criminal organisations, but apt to lead to new and aggravated cycles of ‘the war against the suburb’, as enlightened welfare politics are substituted by mass-incarceration of criminalised teenagers in an emerging lockdown Sweden. As expressed by Soar Ali (Folkets Husby, 2023), a local Husby activist, this war-like pose does ‘not blame political or structural problems, but the victims of them. There is no more democracy, equality, or freedom of expression. We have no right to express ourselves. This collision between political rhetoric and reality leads to political contempt’.

Soar’s statement reminds me of Martin Luther King’s (Autodidact, 2024) self-critical dictum towards the end of his life: ‘until the underclass is given justice and opportunity, we will continue to perpetuate the anger and violence that tears the soul of this nation . . . I fear that I am integrating my people into a burning house’. It confronts the gospel of ‘integration’ with Luxemburg’s (2003 (1913) argument that capital must destroy in order accumulate. Thus, expropriation through the financialisation of housing and the super-exploitation of precarious labour leads inexorably to the destruction of the vulnerable communities on the backs of which capital profits. It feeds the dystopia of criminalisation and the proliferation of deadly Maffia-like organisations as a reflection of the dominant ‘values’, bottom-up, of a democracy eroded from the top; and it spawns new cycles of apartheidising securitisation.

Yet, in that same conjuncture, movements from below, rooted in the most disadvantaged parts of the metropolitan cityscape, continue to insist on bringing forward the needs for recognition of the subaltern as a political voice against the erosion of democratic frameworks of rights, livelihoods, labour, and community. Thus, the community-based organisation Place to Place, which we have discussed above, challenges expropriation of tenants’ meagre income by transnational financial corporations that have appropriated privatised housing markets. The other organisation discussed, The Husby Workers Centre (HAC), challenges the super-exploitation of the city’s most disadvantaged through the emplacement of an innovative ‘community unionism’ or ‘social unionism’. It is radically deviant from the contemporary mainstream Swedish trade union model, but reminiscent, in microcosmos, of the (today faltered) unionism that once challenged apartheid in South Africa. Both organisations or movements share ambitions for developing alliances and contestative practices transversing scales: the local, the translocal, the national and the transnational.

The struggles that take off from such allegedly ‘marginal’ spaces carry forward alternative knowledge and epistemics. They bear a potential impact central to the future of all of us, subjected to a political regime, fermenting the very ills that King (1967) once identified as the three deep-seated and intertwined predicaments of the United States: racism, exploitation and militarism, with police violence on the inside intertwined with imperial warfare on the outside. The values of society need to be restructured, he argued. Thus, in lieu of conclusion; seen in this broader perspective, the subaltern struggles across Sweden’s stigmatised urban communities are, together with a multitude of related struggles and counter epistemologies of the ‘South’, in the geographical north as well as the geographical south, of intrinsic global import.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Carl-Ulrik Schierup

Ilhan Kellecioglu

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Racial Capitalism and Subaltern Struggles in Neo-Apartheid Sweden

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Race and the accumulation of capital

Hyperprecarity, racism and the reserve army of labour

Neo-apartheid Sweden

Financialisation of housing

Occupational ghettoes

The subaltern speaking

Fighting financialisation

A budding community unionism

A wagering state of exception

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iDs

Notes

References