Where Did You Go, Sweet Dreams?

Even though Fordism, the 1900s’ economic ‘magic-spell’ with the ingredients of scalability, specialisation, standardisation and scientific management, is no longer the path to financial success, it still exerts a great influence on the welfare apparatus.

It has its historical and organisational causes. Fordist ideas came, over time, to be adopted more by politicians, sociologists and cultural practitioners than by business. They have also been able to hibernate for a long time in the public sector, where there is no market that can correct inefficiencies and break down the conservative ideologies that were formed around all major systems.

Neither is there in our country any political direction that seriously tries to challenge the existing order. This could be related to the fact that both Left and Right have had their fingers in the cookie jar. During its heyday, Fordism came, for various reasons, to be loved by all political persuasions from communists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, to fascists.

But, of course, it is only the Left that had large-scale production as a fundamental part of its ideology. Both the Marxist analysis of societal development and the idea of ??the collective-driven society point to the large-scale. Perhaps this is why the fruitful criticism of the different movements of technocratic society that developed in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s, which can be summarised by the term the counterculture, never really took hold in leftist Sweden, or Europe in general.

Counterculture was about questioning and freeing oneself from the military-industrial complex, and all other major systems that were so complicated and difficult to control that they seemed to live their own lives beyond human control. It was an alternative movement with people at the centre, trying to rediscover and restore human values ??and human community.

Environmental issues were certainly important, but the main enemy was the system. In order to create the good life, one had to make oneself independent, and this was achieved by looking both backwards and forwards. Old ideas about wind power, locally growing, alternative medicine, local community, yoga, massage and other things needed for the independent life were rediscovered, while interest in new DIY technology exploded.

It was in this culture that the idea for the personal computer was developed. The big companies had their huge computers, so every citizen needed to have their own personal computer to defend themselves.

Ideas hostile to the system, however, were difficult to sell in Sweden, which was dominated by the Social Democrats. The call for decentralisation was answered with municipal reform in 1971, when the cities became the municipalities, which in turn were merged and standardised and became suppliers of large-scale welfare production.

The alternative movement in Sweden, in this environment, became a green movement that devoted more attention to birds and kilowatt-hours than to human liberation. Sure, the ideas of small businesses emerged in later years, but the technocratic elements dominate. Many environmentalists, with the wild, swinging centrist Per Ankersjö at the head, look to skyscrapers as the solution to the housing crisis. The arguments for these revolve around the environment, never about human lives.

And there we stand today. No one talks any longer about the need for systems, large-scale production and standardisation, but the organisations, the methods and the underlying lines of thought live on. We are skilled at reforming our system, but systemic change is as controversial today as it was 20 years ago. The theme in this issue is about the future of the Swedish welfare system. Despite major changes in the public sector, with increased targets and demands for increased reporting, positive results have been slow in coming. The privatisation of services in health, education and social care has led to increased choice, but maybe not always better quality. This could possibly be due to lack of procurement skills.

Something that continues to cause concern is that the private sector tends to be as large-scale as the state. As Henrik Berggren points out in his article, that includes today many private schools in large groups. It is, perhaps, not the form of ownership that is the key to future prosperity, but the scale. Economies of scale will bring standardisation, bureaucratic and impersonal treatment, whether it is in the public or private sphere.

Maybe we need a new municipal reform that dissolves Fordism’s shackles. Perhaps we should question the idea of ??unity. Welfare need not look exactly the same throughout the whole country. There is, after all, quite a difference between Stockholm and Haparanda.