Contribution of the Communist Party of Sweden

Comrades,

First of all I would like to extend my warmest thanks to the Greek Communist Party for this meeting and for having the opportunity to share experiences with comrades from other countries in Europe, experience that we can take advantage of in our common struggle for a better world and a better Europe.

Sweden is also suffering from the crisis of capitalism, even if we have a government that claims to be able to control it. Their ways of handling the crisis do not necessarily differ very much from the procedure in other countries. The main line is to pass on the crisis burden to the working people, and to guarantee the capital its profits. Sweden is a small but hungry imperialist state and have or is trying to gain access to all organizations on an international scale to counteract the rightful interests of the working people in a life of security and social justice.

It also reflects their actions in Sweden with extensive privatizations, corporatisations and buy-outs, and sometimes off waiver of public properties to the capital's representatives, but also extensive cutoffs in the public sector and in our social security systems.

It is unreasonable with taxation and a distribution system where the schools, the health care, the elderly and the child care goes on their knees while profits and unearned incomes on a tremendous scale favors the richest decile in Sweden. A wealth that they particularly create themselves by plundering the sick, unemployed, socially disabled people and the weakest groups in the society through the non-allocation policy that should be natural in any civilized society.

The profits are created in the production where the climate also hardens for those who are fortunate enough to keep their work and are managing to stay passably healthy. Employers have strengthened their dictatorships over the working people, bloggers and people who speaks out critically in the media gets fired, the fixed employments are deleted in favor of staffing companies and short-time employments. The tendencies are the same in the private and public sector. The ambitions of the politicians and the capital owners seems to be to wipe out the public sector in order to create a larger market for the capital

A policy that we now are viewing the results of in Sweden but also in Europe and other parts of the world. In Europe, the employment is declining faster than Titanic, the currencies are fluctuating and the dollar is held up by war and its expected profits. In Sweden, the government is bragging about that the economy is healthy and invests a few billions in the war in Afghanistan so that they in a long-term perspective will be able to control the country’s enormous raw material resources such as oil and minerals. At the same time they are refusing to invest in a communication system that works even during the winter, a Swedish Transport Administration which is bureaucratized and Swedish State Railways has been given the main task to prepare for more extensive privatizations, the work of maintenance, and the laborers are minimized in favor of bureaucrats.

The tax policy and the labour market policy are two important and essential issues for the working people. Besides, they have a clear connection. Without a tax system that gives the society the financial conditions to steer the production in a direction that will satisfy the social needs, will the question of the labour market policy never be solved. It can never be in the society’s interest to have an untapped labour supply (the expression of the employment office concerning the jobless and underemployed) which corresponds 473 000 full-time workers with 40-hour working week. These are the real numbers, consider the improvements that Sweden would make with a financial system that allowed almost another half a million people to participate in the production.

But the government lacks all ability and willingness to deal with these problems as well as the parliamentary opposition, which consists of Social Democrats and a party that calls them the Left Party. They still believe that the problems can be solved by punishing the unemployed and the sick. The gaps between those who have jobs and those who do not get the opportunity to work continue to grow and will lead to social tensions that we are already seeing sign of in the big city´s suburbs. Gaps that will grow far beyond the big city's suburbs as a growing number of people are suffering from poor working conditions and cutbacks in the social security systems. The fact that the government has become blinded by their Potemkin coulisses is bearable, but the most serious problem is that the so-called opposition also has been affected by it and proposes a policy which content is similar to the old child's play "follow the leader".

The policy and its aim seem to be to turn Sweden into a colony ruled by imperialist interests.

By the end of March, the EU bureaucracy held a summit where the issue was the combat of human rights in the union and on the Democratic field. The attack took place under the light of strengthening the financial governance.

We have for several decades witnessed how they have abolished all sets of regulations for the capitalists, and particularly the finance capital which is responsible for the devastated economies around the world. Each mantra that magicians and fortunetellers in the shape of economists repeatedly have been given full support by the EU bureaucracy; their statements are more about sorcery than science, which also the real development is indicating. Nor can it be otherwise, for capitalism confuses on the basics of anarchy. If you desire capitalism, you get anarchy in the economy and in the production. And one of the EU opening paragraphs is freedom for the capital to freely govern and rule, to move across national borders in a constant hunt for new speculative items that will enrich them and increase their profits. At these players disposal they have placed our pension money and other governmental funds.

With rules on deregulations and privatizations, the financial capital also had been given the power over the actual production, a production that the finance capital is dragging around the world to find the absolute lowest wages.

The capital which has engaged the EU Commission wants to strengthen its hold of the economy, by implementing laws that gives them the opportunity to control and direct the financial policy of the member states. But they also desire power over the wage levels and the salary formation. One question that over the last hundred fifty years in Sweden have been regulated by negotiations between employers and workers. And just over the last hundred years there have been those of the working class formed unions, which have conducted the negotiations. Sometimes good and sometimes less good, but the right to organize oneself in unions in order to protect their financial interests belong to the human rights. And a successful completion of the attack could mean the beginning of the end for the Swedish model of the collective agreement.

We must look after that the unemployment insurance is an incitement to look for work, echoed Barroso. Indirect taxes tend to be more growth friendly than direct taxes, and cuts in taxation is way better than higher ones, was the message from Olli Rehn, Commissioner for Financial and Monetary Affairs, and claims that Sweden is a outstanding example. Sweden is a good example if you want to reduce employment, because since the Reinfeldt government initiated cuts in taxation, the occupation rate have been declined from 70 percent to 66 percent, while the richest decile of the population have increased their wealth and liquid assets by nearly 100 percent and the poverty among 30 percent of the poorest have been increased exponentially.

Clearer, it can hardly be said that the EU is a institution for the reaction and the big capital.

Sweden is also an obedient tool for imperialist NATO; it has in the past 20 years supported all of the crusades that NATO has undertaken to promote the interests of the imperialists. The recent one in Libya, where it participates with eight JAS-planes. A global selling campaign for the military industrial customers looking for potential clients of their freak Jas Gripen. Besides, we have a Secretary of State who is deeply involved in war material - and the oil industry.

Sweden's Communist Party sees as its most important task to go from defense operations to an aggressive campaign to strengthen the human and democratic rights of the working people, by building broad social, anti-monopolistic and anti-imperialist alliances

To reach this strategic agenda, we highlight the importance of the working class organization and development of the class struggle, but also the ideological struggle and the fight for working class unity.

The ideological struggle of the communist movement is crucial to repel the contemporary anti-communism, to confront the bourgeois ideology, anti-scientific theories and opportunistic tendencies that reject the class struggle, and to combat the social democratic forces that defend and implement an anti-popular and pro -imperialist policy by defending capitalism approach.

Our party is now running a national campaign for the equal right to work, established in the UN Charter Paragraph 23rd. To have a job to go to every day is an indispensable part of a happy life. Having a job means not only that you have their subsistence, it also means that you each day is expected and needed. It means that you are a part of a community, that is to say a part of a social network. The capitalistic system denies many of us this particular right.

We are therefore now running a campaign to highlight the violations of the human rights as mass unemployment means. We want to show that there is an alternative. We want to show with our policy that there is a solution to the problems that capitalism causes, namely socialism.

Thank you.