When we’re in the midst of a downturn that leads one’s thoughts back to the mass unemployment of the 1930s and when Karl Marx’s Das Kapital is suddenly topping the best-seller lists in Germany, it seems as though that old notion of class is making a comeback. In Britain, there are currently at least two art exhibitions focused on the issue of class in progress, and in the Guardian a few months ago Rafael Behr raised the question of whether we were headed for a new class struggle.

Yet it goes without saying that the variables today are quite different than they were during the Depression in the late 1920s. In Sweden, the old Conservative Party has created an image of itself as the new workers’ party, while one famous journalist with an aristocratic name not long ago defined herself as having come from the working class, given that her doctor parents had taught her it that pays to work hard. A growing number of carpenters and chefs are becoming TV celebrities with hefty salaries and thereby enjoying the same kinds of privileges that belonged to the upper class.

And all the while, it appears that the upper class and working class are about to be devoured by the ever expanding middle class, which in turn is being stratified both in terms of income and education. If there were a clearly discernible upper class just three or four decades ago, which included lawyers, doctors and professors, these groups, like many other high-income earners, have now come to fall in the category of upper middle class, which often also embraces less well-paid professions requiring a university degree.

Nevertheless, the 1980s liberal vision of a society with optimal social mobility has not been realized. If we look at the education system, it seems that social stratification has in fact increased. Despite efforts to make higher education accessible to everyone and to establish university colleges that actively seek to attract young people from run-down neighbourhoods created during Sweden’s “Million Homes” programme in the 1960s and 1970s, differences in education levels have become based increasing on where a person lives and whether that person’s parents have or do not have a university degree.

It’s enough to get a quick overview of books published in Sweden over the last ten years or of journalists hired at our major newspapers and radio and TV programmes to see that this concerns an extremely homogeneous group of people, where almost everyone comes from this upper middle class and where we find very few counterparts to upwardly mobile Swedes of the past like Harry Martinson, P O Enquist and Gerda Antti.

However, for anyone who grew up in a family where studying at the university was not common practice, the consensus in the upper-middle class’s whole package of tastes and views tends to come across as being exclusive, indeed verging on incomprehensible. In the university-educated middle class, no one can imagine living in these Million Home neighbourhoods, instead choosing city apartments, preferably built before 1930. But people are just as categorical in their disdain for those who say they don’t like the architecture in these Million Home neighbourhoods.

They decorate their summer houses in tasteful Carl Larsson style but at the same time express their disapproval of people who say they love Larsson’s home at Sundborn. They despise the celebrity gossip journalism of Se & Hör but at the same time get upset about someone who says they would rather read Gunnar Ekelöf than watch Idol. Nonetheless, they can just as easily say that Gunnar Ekelöf is the greatest Swedish author of the 20th century, while expressing contempt for anyone who thinks Gunnar Ekelöf should be a role model for today’s writers. Of course, for anyone not trained in the liberal-left university way of thinking, this kind of intellectual slalom skiing only creates confusion and a feeling of being shut out.

For there is still a proletariat in Sweden; often they live in those very Million Home neighbourhoods that the educated upper middle class could never imagine living in. They come from families where no one has studied at the university; they’re divorced, have young children and low-paying jobs in the healthcare sector; they may come from other countries and have difficulty extricating themselves from cultural patterns that make it impossible for them to advance in a career in the Swedish working world. And so on.

So the tragedy is that the new proletariat tends to become cemented – for several reasons. Perhaps the most serious one is that representatives of today’s underclass don’t just see the middle class as a gated community with attitudes that bar their way but also rightfully think that no one is pleading their case. On the left and among Social Democrats, people have chosen to plead their case purely on socio-economic issues.

But when it comes to moral and aesthetic issues, the Swedish left long ago took on the role of advocate in upending every kind of traditional pattern of thinking, living, raising families and so on. However, these kinds of values have been cherished mainly in the middle class, among university-educated professionals, while those in the working class have had a harder time gaining a foothold. Given that the liberal right nowadays has not just appropriated the socio-economic policies of the Social Democrats, but also moved away from everything that conservatism and traditionalism entail, today’s proletariat runs the risk of feeling disappointed by the political establishment, which in turn leaves the field open to new political players.

It is this trend that is the starting point for the theme in this month’s Axess, where we consider the relevance of class as an issue in Sweden today, on both the personal and political level.