Contribution of the Communist Party of Sweden

Dear comrades,

The Communist Party of Sweden thanks the New Communist Party of the Netherlands for hosting this teleconference. The topic of this meeting is especially important at this point in time, with the reality of yet another imperialist war of redivision looming over us.

As the EU gears up in preparation for war, calling for a war economy, those calls are echoed by leading Swedish government ministers. With the Swedish state likewise preparing for war, with massively increased military spending, all parties of parliament, from both the bourgeois left and right, agreed last year that rearmament could be financed through borrowing up to 28 billion euros. Meanwhile cutbacks will be the overall goal for state finances. As always it is the working class - including retirees, students, the sick, and the unemployed - that shoulders the costs of war, just as with the more "peaceful" recurring crisis of capitalism. Even before imperialist competition escalates to armed conflict, the preparations for it are already hurting the people.

And while Sweden prepares for war, the narrative of a Sweden at peace for more than two centuries is still very much a part of the national self-image. But does this image hold up to more than surface-level scrutiny?

In 1814 the Treaty of Kiel stipulated that Norway should enter a union with Sweden, and this was enforced by Sweden through a military campaign against Norway. One need not look further back than to the NATO-led 2011 intervention in Libya, where Sweden provided aerial support, to show how tenuous the narrative of Sweden's peacefulness since 1814 is. But it is worth diving deeper into this almost 200-year long period of bourgeois "peace".

In 1905 a plebiscite in Norway backed a dissolution of the union with Sweden. This took the two countries to the brink of war, but the working people of Sweden had no interest in waging war on their Norwegian brothers and sisters. Through mass meetings and demonstrations, the threat of both strikes and refusal of military service, the working people of Sweden showed their class solidarity and made war on Norway all but untenable for the Swedish bourgeoisie. It is quite possible that without organized Swedish labor and class solidarity the modern history of Sweden would not have been quite as peaceful.

During the Winter War of 1939-1940, the Swedish state gave considerable support to Finland, with the most relevant example, in this context, being the formation of a nominally volunteer Flying Regiment of fighter planes and bombers. These airplanes were taken from Swedish Air Force inventory and largely crewed by Swedish military personell, who had been granted leave and allowed to fight under Finnish military command. This allowed Sweden to maintain legal neutrality, while in practice supplying the Finnish war effort with armed troops who participated in the fighting.

Contrast this with the treatment of the Swedish volunteers who fought on the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, which ended in 1939 — the same year the Winter War began. A majority of these volunteers, who joined the fight against the fascists in Spain, were organized communists. Upon returning home, they were rewarded for their bravery and sacrifice by the Swedish bourgeoisie with blacklisting from employment.

The nature of Swedish neutrality and dealings with warring parties during the Second World War is something that cannot simply be left unmentioned, but it is also a topic too large to tackle in the context of this text. However it is worth noting that during the Second World War repression against the communists increased drastically in Sweden. Among the methods used by the state was the imprisonment of several hundred Communist Party cadres in concentration camps. Such is the bourgeoisie's so-called peace, and even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the current military build-up, the Swedish state had started to strengthen its tools of repression, as the contradictions within imperialism grew sharper. More resources have been directed to the police and a wide range of repressive laws has been enacted, making protest and civil disobedience riskier, along with making striking next to impossible for the workers, among other things.

It is clear that as capital presses the workers harder in its hunt for profits, with full support by both social democratic and right-wing governments, the state will be ready for the inevitable backlash from the working people.

What is also clear is the fact that war is profitable for Swedish capital, with the defense industry in particular in rapid expansion, and with a significant increase in turnover and profits. On top of the Swedish military buildup, and the general scramble for armaments, Sweden's NATO membership has expanded the possibilities for arms export. 

The support that the Swedish state has provided to Ukraine has also been highly profitable for Swedish capital. Most recently the Swedish and Danish governments have jointly agreed to supply Ukraine with an air defense weapon system worth almost 250 million euros. The system in question is built by Swedish BAE Systems Bofors and Saab.

This deal, like earlier ones, benefits Swedish capital. At the same time, it prolongs the imperialist conflict in Ukraine and brings continuing misery and loss of life for the peoples. 

The Communist Party of Sweden has since last autumn run a campaign with the slogan "Capitalism Breeds War - Let Us Build Peace" to raise awareness among the people of the relationship between capitalism and war. The ongoing rapid military buildup is not being done for the defense of the people, but to secure the interests of capital. Yet the people carry the cost of this as always. The people want peace, while capital desires profits, no matter what the cost to the people.

As capitalism inevitably breeds war, the struggle for peace must become the struggle for socialism - the only alternative for those who seek lasting peace. Socialism offers the conditions to eradicate war through an economic system based on the needs of the people, instead of capital’s drive for increasing profits, which necessarily leads to conflict and war. Such is the nature of capitalism.