Duty. Accountability. Debt. Here are some synonyms for the word “responsibility”.
A little word that in recent years has become increasingly common in social democratic parlance.
And then not infrequently formulated exactly like this year’s May Day slogan: Shared responsibility for Sweden.
And over the past twenty years, S has said with increased intensity that they are very keen to join in and take this joint responsibility.
For an orderly migration, for reduced segregation, for the fight against anti-Semitism and other racism, for improved working conditions, for the countryside to live, for pandemic management, for the build-up of the defense.
In her May Day speech in Gothenburg, Magdalena Andersson wants to use shared responsibility to deal with the market failure that characterizes the Sweden of the 2020s.
Don’t shake hands with Ulf Kristersson
Away from an order where the mafia runs the home service and owns court buildings, where Islamists own preschools, where the elderly are neglected for profit, where you can pay bribes to get your roadworthy car okayed in the inspection.
Away from profit-driven grade inflation and school segregation.
The time is here to draw boundaries between what belongs in the realm of the market and what belongs in the realm of the commons.
Who should share the joint responsibility for it is possibly a little unclear.
The moderates? Hardly. Stefan Löfven had to learn the hard way that whoever shakes hands with Anna Kinberg Batra or Ulf Kristersson should count their fingers afterwards.
The middle parties? With the January agreement, the Liberals and the Center Party took joint responsibility for the state budget in exchange for humiliating LO and lowering taxes for the richest. Maybe not exactly the kind of responsibility that S deep down wants to exercise.
Then the voters remain. Which certainly voted for right-wing majorities in the Riksdag for over 20 years.
70 percent are against profit in welfare
In 2002, the last time there was a red-green majority, Göran Persson described in a May Day speech how he saw solidarity:
“For me, solidarity is linked to a shared responsibility for each other. That is exactly what the word means – ‘this little, beautiful French word’ as Ernst Wigforss said. Solidarity is shared responsibility. Not that I feel sorry for anyone. Not that I’m going to give you a helping hand. We are both capable of taking joint responsibility. I may be stronger than you, and I may carry more. But you can also bear your share of the responsibility. […] Because when everyone is included, we hold society together. Then we take joint responsibility. It is solidarity.”
This is probably exactly how it should be understood when Magdalena Andersson talks about shared responsibility in Gothenburg.
Over 70 percent of the Swedish people are against taking profits from tax-financed welfare activities. It is, just as Magdalena Andersson notes, not radical to consider that children receive school books instead of the school shareholders making profits.
Being against tax leakage is not a totalitarian fringe position. It is about protecting the legitimacy of the whole idea of tax-funded welfare services.
And it’s about wanting functioning systems that are able to take care of the dearest things we have: our parents, our children and our loved ones when they are sick and weak.
It is, quite simply, about solidarity.