In previous chapters, I discussed the Third Way’s idea of modernization as a process of improvement that takes place essentially within, through the upgrading of the human capital in our souls. I pointed to similarities between the Third Way’s notions of improvement and social democracy’s historic discourses. However, in its emphasis on change as something essentially taking place within us, the Third Way seems to differ substantially from social democracy historically. The historic emphasis on change as a process of collective improvement is replaced, in the Third Way, with a focus on the individual as the primary locus of change. At the heart of the process of modernization is the learning individual and the process of turning people into competent, dutiful, and knowledgeable citizens. This idea of the constantly learning and relearning individual is social democracy’s utopia for the knowledge era. Social democracy has not rid itself of utopian reasoning; rather, it has relocated utopian projection from the collective sphere of mobilization to the individual sphere of self-improvement.
The idea of autonomous individuals has always, in some form, been at the heart of social democratic ideology. However, in the history of social democracy, the dream of free and emancipated people was part of its understanding of socialism’s mission to break the chains of fettered individuals and of the idea that individual freedom rested on the shoulders of collective advancement: in short, that it is only through the solidarity of all that we are free. The Third Way, through its individualized discourses on flexibility, learning, and meritocratic ascendancy—discourses that shift the locus of social change, responsibility, and risk from the collective sphere to the individual—marks a break with this social democratic tradition regarding the role of the collective to free the potential of all. Despite its communitarian emphasis on the social embeddedness of individuals, the Third Way’s idea of the learning individual reflects a concession to one of the utopias of neoliberalism, namely, that of the entrepreneurial and competitive person, one who is able to cast off the chains of circumstance and set his or her potential free.
In previous chapters, we have discussed the significant differences that exist between the parties in how they articulate the relationship between collective and individual advancement. The individual projected by the SAP is secure and solidaristic; in contrast, the New Labour person is a restless and calculating climber. These differences are not unimportant. On the contrary, they define the political subject, and, arguably, they are also constitutive of social relations, and perhaps even of politics themselves. These representations of the social democratic person are also representations of what social democracy considers to be the scope and limits of politics. Its narrative of modernization relies on the construction of its utopic knowledge individual. Its discourses of lifelong learning, autonomy, and responsibility are all intended to bring about this knowledgeable person.
Of course, it is arguable whether this really is a knowledgeable individual or, indeed, what kind of knowledge this utopic citizen is supposed to possess. Social democracy’s vision of the knowledge citizen is dependent on its contemporary notion of knowledge as something having to do with particular dispositions and character—a kind of modernizing spirit that is defined first and foremost by the ability to constantly change and modernize, to learn and relearn. As we have seen, these dispositions are owned and embodied primarily by the entrepreneur: the individual who possesses useful knowledge and who knows how to make the most out of his or her potential. To that extent, the entrepreneur emerges as virtually the ideal social democratic citizen, the knowledgeable and virtuous individual who is able to see and grasp opportunity.
This representation of the entrepreneurial citizen comes with the projection of an Other, the individual who lacks potential. We can see this Other mirrored in the Third Way’s discourses on social exclusion, in the concern with a digital divide and a class of “workless” or even “useless” people. Social exclusion is a deeply worrisome empirical phenomenon in contemporary societies, and there is no question that contemporary social democracy is very concerned about its human and social implications. Nevertheless, its discourses of exclusion seem to contain what is, at times, a disconcerting outlook on people as capital, people who are either carriers of useful knowledge or void of that knowledge. Social exclusion, like other forms of poverty and inequality in the knowledge era, has become understood in terms of its link to knowledge, talent, human and social capital—and defined as the absence of these things.1 In a sense, the socially excluded represent the antithesis of modernization in Third Way discourse because they are the backward, laggard people who cannot keep up in the process of change, the ones who fail to improve. Just as the idea of the knowledge society (or economy) contains presumptions of a new global division of labor between those who create originals and those who produce copies, post-Fordist labor markets and education systems create new divides between “information haves” and “information have-nots,” between critically minded and creative people and those who are not.2 These are people who lack the modernizing spirit, who lack the virtues of citizenship. Therefore, the entrepreneur and the socially excluded can be seen as two central stereotypes of contemporary politics—quite as social democracy historically built its political project around the stereotypes of the good worker and the idle vagrant.
This is a highly normative vision of people, and it reflects the way that the idea of the knowledge economy and the knowledge society is an inherently powered discourse. It goes without saying that there are no people in the world who do not possess knowledge and potential. The crucial issue at hand is not that certain forms of knowledge are intrinsically worth more than others. There are many forms of work and social production in society that are essential to us even when their value is not quantified in economic terms.3 Many other forms of creativity exist other than the entrepreneurial search for use and application, and many talents in society fall outside the growth policies of the Third Way. Rather, the key issue is how we ascribe value to individual potential. The knowledge economy and its language, institutions, and policies are active agents in the production of new subjects and new social hierarchies, just as new technologies actively create new forms of disabilities such as digital illiteracy or multiple stress disorders (through complicated social processes).4 At the basis of our social hierarchies is the idea of use, value, and worth, to ourselves and to others. The definition of usefulness, that is, of who is a productive citizen, is per definition also a definition of who is not, of who is “useless.” From this perspective, the idea of the knowledge society contains something deeply worrying for social democratic politics because of the way that it seems to draw on constant judgments of talent and potential. It is one thing to judge achievement but quite another to judge talent and innate potential. You are born with or born without. To that extent, potential is a notion of individual worth that, as Richard Sennett points out, is infinitely more devastating than notions of achievement because it comes down to a judgment of the self, a judgment of character:
Judgements of potential ability are much more personal in character than judgements on personal achievement. An achievement compounds social and economic circumstance, fortune and chance, with self. Potential ability focuses only on the self. The statement “you lack potential” is much more devastating than “you messed up.” It makes a more fundamental claim about who you are. It conveys uselessness in a more profound sense.5
The very idea of use, of useful knowledge and talent, stands in contrast to the social democratic idea of the equal worth of everyone and that all young people should be convinced of the worth of their own particular uniqueness and allowed to develop and explore their talents.
The problem of social exclusion is one that is deeply associated with late industrial modernity. In its modern form, the idea of social exclusion can be traced to the 1960s debates on the mechanisms of poverty and need in the affluent society, stemming from the postwar puzzlement that growth did not, as previously believed, trickle down to all groups of society. To use a modern phrase, the economic tide did not raise all boats. Rather, affluence seemed to have brought with it a whole new set of needs that had less to do with material want and more to do with intangible feelings of rootlessness and alienation. In late industrial capitalism, the old division between elites and the poor masses seemed to have been replaced by a growing middle-class mass and an increasingly marginalized group on the outside. This phenomenon was behind different political attempts to reshape agendas of poverty and find new means of social intervention in the 1960s. The American War on Poverty is the most well-known example.6
As multifaceted as they were, 1960s discourses on social exclusion contained a critique of the advanced industrial society and capitalism as something that systematically and structurally marginalized an important segment of society and deprived its members of a place in society and production. The postwar notion of progress was replaced by the fear of a deeply dichotomous social order, where some groups in society seemed to keep up with the accelerating pace of modernization while others fell mercilessly behind. The early works on a coming knowledge order, for instance the French sociologist Alain Touraine’s work on the end of class, were concerned with the emergence of this two-tier society, a society in which the hierarchical class divisions of the factory were being replaced by social divisions around knowledge and creativity, inclusion and exclusion. This was part of a growing 1960s critique of growth and technology as something that actively shaped new social hierarchies, new forms of want, and new groups disabled by development. This critical perspective informed the rise of the New Left and its critique of social democracy in both Sweden and the United Kingdom.7
In the 1990s and 2000s, this idea of social exclusion was and continues to be discernable under another guise in the idea of the social web, in which inequalities are not conceptualized as hierarchies in status and power but in terms of spatial in-exclusion from the social web. This has similarities with postwar discourses on social exclusion, indeed, in contemporary ideas of a growing technological divide, where the crucial social line of demarcation runs between those who are included in the network and those who are excluded from it and who can therefore not take part in democratic processes or are rendered digitally illiterate.8 In both the United Kingdom and Sweden, attempts to extend opportunities for upgrading skills, for distance learning, and for universal access to the Internet are reactions to this fear of the possibly exclusionary effects of ICT.9 However, in line with the way that contemporary social democracy seems to have broken with its critical articulations of capitalism, these contemporary notions of social exclusion seem to be detached from any critique of knowledge capitalism. Contemporary discourses on social exclusion reflect fundamental changes in our understanding of social organization. Principles of citizenship, solidarity, and equality are replaced by an emphasis on work and individual compliance with the norms of the network as the main principle of inclusion. Through such conceptualizations, the problem that Touraine observed as a question of social hierarchies and, indeed, of class becomes a question of the individual’s location inside or outside the social fabric. Equality has become social cohesion, a concern with social order, the social order that is also understood as a source of economic prosperity. This is social democracy’s understanding of poverty in the era of the network.10
Social exclusion is a highly complex term, with very different definitions in different national institutional settings and political cultures.11 The problem of social exclusion also takes very different empirical forms in the United Kingdom and Sweden because of different prevailing inequalities in British and Swedish society. But national interpretations of social exclusion are also highly dependent on different ideological legacies around poverty. The meaning of the term in Swedish—social utslagning—is literally “knocked out,” a metaphor that places a significant emphasis on the agents who strike.12 In recent years, this language has changed because of the emphasis of the European Union on national action plans against social exclusion, which has meant that the European terminology of social cohesion and inclusion has also become central in Sweden, without much critical discussion of the normative assumptions that the concept brings with it.13 In the United Kingdom, there has been an enormous production of policy concerning social exclusion, which was placed at the heart of the New Labour agenda with the creation of the Social Exclusion Unit under the aegis of the prime minister in 1997. The SEU was the flagship of New Labour’s modern governance project, working in cross-sectoral partnership with other departments and in local communities and heavily reliant on modern technologies of government such as ICT and audits.14 New Labour’s language of social exclusion, however, echoes a liberal tradition of the deserving and undeserving poor and of the cultural theories of poverty and dependency that originated in the American War on Poverty and were brought to the United Kingdom by social theorists such as Charles Murray and Lawrence Mead.15
In both countries, social exclusion is framed in an economic language that has to do with the waste of human capital. This is the mirror image of the growth policies of the Third Way—if the key to growth in the new economy is people’s potential, then social exclusion is that potential gone to waste because it represents people whose knowledge and talent are not put to use. Social exclusion is wasted human potential. As such, it cannot be accepted in a modern society where success hinges on the utilization of the potential of all.16 This, like other articulations of the Third Way discussed in previous pages, is ambiguous, vacillating between a critique of capitalism and a discourse of efficiency and improvement. The idea of waste reflects social democracy’s classic critique of inequalities as inefficient, of, as it were, capitalism’s “inherent” tendency to destroy social resources and “use up” or “waste” people. But the notion of waste also stands in direct relationship to the Third Way’s capitalization of people.
In the United Kingdom, social exclusion has been predominantly framed in the economic language that treats people as forms of capital. It is thus understood as a problem not only of human misery and plight—or even social injustice—but as a problem for a vibrant innovation economy.17 There has been a crucial focus on the costs of social exclusion—not just in terms of wasted lives but in terms of the social costs of crime and welfare bills, the costs to business for reduced market demand and a reduced skilled labor force, and the costs for the knowledge economy in terms of lost entrepreneurs.18 Just as New Labour has had an ambitious social agenda in other areas, it has certainly had a radical agenda on social exclusion, with means such as the Sure Start program, programs for extending educational opportunity, or the young apprentice program designed to provide room for all talents. However, it has also linked social exclusion to asociality, crime, and immoral behavior, adding up to a pervasive underclass discourse, which effectively centers in on the deviant behavior of the underclass.19 This underclass discourse merged with New Labour’s economistic understanding of social justice as a problem of prosperity and its approach to the social as the locus where crucial processes of wealth creation take place. Social exclusion is, thus, a problem for the creation of social capital—and as such a problem for the efficiency of knowledge capitalism.
New Labour’s understanding of social exclusion reflects its cultural analysis of social problems, an analysis that stems not only from the underclass discourses of American theorists of poverty but also from its understanding of knowledge and learning as things that are culturally dependent and fostered. Social exclusion, within the communitarian agenda, is essentially seen as being caused by the breakdown of community values, indeed, the erosion of the sense of obligation and the individual lack of aspiration. Correspondingly, inclusion is a process that starts with the individual embracing these values and with the individual’s coming to terms with problems of character.20 There has been a dynamic emphasis in the concept of social exclusion—an emphasis, that is, on the mechanisms of exclusion. Investment into deprived communities and policies directed at urban renewal have been designed to create aspiration.21 Ultimately, however, the drivers behind social exclusion are understood as cultural, as the cultural poverty of aspiration that is the result of decades of social decay. The dynamic emphasis, thus, is on the inclusion into the social fabric by learning the virtues of citizenship, embracing the work ethic, and accepting prevailing notions of duty.22 In this manner, the individual willingness to improve, accept opportunity, become employable comes into the heart of politics, in the fusion between cultural analysis and economic argument that forms the basis of social democracy’s understanding of the knowledge age.
There is a fundamental duality to this cultural analysis, between a progressive emphasis on helping people bring out their potential and a much more repressive emphasis on discipline and coercion to induce them to bring out their potential. On the one hand, in its fight against social exclusion, New Labour has struggled to extend educational opportunity and educational allowances also to those far from the general education system, specifically targeting 16- to 18-year-olds who leave school with small chances of making it in the labor market.23 On the other, the conditionality in entitlements and the careful monitoring of progress through standards and audits apply to the socially excluded as well. The use of ICT as a new means of political governance reflects this duality. While ICT has been an important policy tool for creating services tailored to the special needs of those on the outside, through distance learning and web portals with information of entitlements, it has also been made into a tool of surveillance and coercion. For instance, to prevent truancy, schools have been enabled to send automatic text messages when children are not present at the beginning of the school day, and schools have also been allowed to publish pupils’ academic performance on school websites.24
While fighting social exclusion has been at the heart of the New Labour agenda for over a decade, it is very striking that New Labour does not have much of a theory regarding the possibility that there is something in the new economy or in the process of capitalist transformation that creates social exclusion. It recognizes that rapidly changing demands for skills lead to an increased risk of social exclusion for those who fail to upgrade their skills, but its answer to this lies in its language of opportunity. If opportunity is provided through the expansion of education, then failure is truly an individual responsibility. It also seems oblivious to the argument that there might be something in its own policies—in the moralistic and authoritarian nature of its means of social intervention, its meritocratic language of excellence, and its economistic vision of a social order based on competitive strife—that might produce the kind of individual behavior it is trying to sanction. Competition, to New Labour, is a disciplining force, also when it comes to the socially excluded. Standards and audits apply also to them, monitoring their progress and inclusion.25
This is strikingly different from a sometimes highly romantic Swedish language of making room for everyone and making sure that “everyone gets on the train,” which applies to social exclusion as well. The cement of society, to Swedish social democracy, is to be found in the individual allegiance to certain core social values: democracy, equality, and solidarity. Historically, in Sweden social exclusion has been understood as the incapacity to participate and exercise democratic rights, hence, of being outside of the samhälle and not being able to have a voice in the process of change. To the SAP, the problem of social exclusion fits into its overarching narrative of universalism and collective solidarity and responsibility—its emphasis on the “lift” and on “getting everybody on the train” or “bringing everybody along.” These metaphors originated in the party’s 1990s Program, which was concerned with an economic and technological development that might potentially leave a group behind while others were allowed to “board the train.” It spoke of a worrying tendency in contemporary capitalism to divide opportunities and life chances between those who steadily gained in opportunity and those who found themselves “on the outside.” It was clearly influenced by the idea of a two-tier society and the rise of a production order that might not have room for everyone. 26
Nevertheless, the SAP’s understanding of social exclusion also fits into a more classical social democratic understanding of inequalities and poverty as a form of waste that is caused by capitalism. Swedish social democracy has grappled with the problem of social exclusion since the 1960s, when a government Committee on Low Income concluded that significant groups in Swedish society had fallen behind despite the full employment and solidarity wage bargaining of the Swedish Model.27 In the late 1960s, this was rapidly interpreted as an effect of the automation and rationalization of production, as something that led to the exhaustion of human production factors. Social exclusion was interpreted as a phenomenon related to industrialism and, as the 2001 Program put it, “capitalism’s inherent tendency to destroy human and natural resources.”28 In a speech in 1978, Olof Palme spoke of social exclusion as the waste of the industrial society—“people on the garbage heap of the industrial society.”29 In the advanced industrial society, growth was no longer created by putting more people into work but seemed to be created by exhausting people’s productive resources in intensified and rationalized production processes. The party’s drive for economic democracy and workplace influence in the 1970s was a reaction against this development, an attempt to rethink the role of social democracy in capitalism and push the equality agenda even further, not only for the immediate working class but also for those “on the outside.” Jonas Pontusson expressed this most astutely when he noted that its failure to implement economic democracy also proved to be the historic limit of Swedish social democracy.30 One might say the same thing for the party’s incapacity, or unwillingness, to incorporate social exclusion into its theory of progressive universalism.
To the SAP in the knowledge era, capitalism’s waste of social resources appears to have been taken one step further, as growth no longer seems to need everyone to begin with. The phenomena of jobless growth and technological developments, which rapidly render new skills obsolete, seem to have created a group of undesired and unprofitable people in society—people who are effectively rendered useless. These are the “knowledge proletariat,” or the underclass of knowledge-lacking people that the party sees as a feature of knowledge capitalism. The SAP’s insistence, in the 1990s, on measures designed to increase the competence of all and extend access to higher education, particularly in regional colleges, for instance in the suburbs of Stockholm; the modernization of folkbildning; and the increased resources for early schooling; along with the knowledge lift for the long-term unemployed have all been aimed at thwarting such a development. Similarly, its employment policies have stressed that room must be made for all to participate based on their capacity and that working life needs to be adapted to the different needs and talents of the workforce, including matters of disabilities and differences in competitiveness.31 The crucial difference to New Labour is that this contains a certain critique of what the party conceives as trends of knowledge capitalism, of a development in which competition and the quest for productivity gains drive up the process of change to the extent that there is no room left for those who do not meet required standards. This is a development that needs to be counteracted by the social democratic state, with protection for those who are, as it were, “weak.”
This may seem to be a very ambiguous rhetoric, but it vacillates between emphases on the pressures of contemporary life, on the one hand, and the seeking of explanations to social exclusion in discourses on the weak, the less capable, and the less competitive, on the other. Arguably, this is an indication of the gap in the Swedish case between a kind of programmatic critique of capitalism in party discourse and the absence of a political analysis of economic and social change. However, it is also an indication of the fact that there is something about the idea of social exclusion that is fundamentally awkward to Swedish social democracy. Because of the historic role of the welfare state and the historically high levels of social equality and labor market participation in Sweden, social exclusion is, or at least has been, a much less prominent phenomenon in Sweden than in other European countries. Indeed, the comparison with the generationally entrenched poverty levels in British society is staggering. On the one hand, this makes social exclusion much less of a political problem; but, on the other, it also means that it is somehow more conspicuous. Social exclusion does not fit in with the SAP’s worldview of Sweden as a good country in which to live—a society where no one should experience need or suffering, a society where indeed there are “no stepchildren and no favourites.”32 The mere phenomenon of social exclusion in Swedish society seems to hold a kind of accusation, namely, the suggestion that in the process of building the People’s Home, the party might have missed some groups and effectively left someone behind. The cultural dependency or underclass discourse of New Labour is very far from its ideology; yet there is something so individual in the problem of social exclusion that it somehow seems difficult to explain in its normal social democratic language. Questions of truancy and welfare scrounging are a problem for principles of universalism and solidarity. In addition, the increased social inequalities and insecurities that have followed in the wake of the 1990s somehow seem to imply that the party did something wrong in its restructuring of Swedish public finances, in short, that it failed to protect the weakest. In integration policy and labor market policy, social democracy has been at pains to stress inclusion, but the means of inclusion are increasingly to be found in notions of individual responsibility, cultures of aspiration and hope, and individual activity. The Swedish action plans against social exclusion follow the conclusions of the Balance Sheet for Welfare, which stated that growing trends of social exclusion in Sweden have to do with groups that “fell off” the train in the 1990s and have not been able to get back on.33 This is awkward to social democracy, which has been reluctant to talk about the social effects of crisis because this seems to address the issue of its own responsibility. In addition, while social exclusion is clearly acquiring an ethnic dimension in Sweden, Swedish social democracy is highly uneasy with the notion of structural discrimination, which critics of the Swedish welfare state have argued are an integral feature of “universalism.”34
All of this means that the SAP tends to vacillate between explanations of structural factors—the stress of contemporary working life, the problems of integration and discrimination in Swedish society, segregation in suburban areas—and rather befuddled ideas regarding the causes of individual sadness and substance abuse in the midst of a resurrected People’s Home. Sometimes party representatives clearly think that there is something ungrateful about people who may not want to belong in the first place. Thus, party policy falls back on what are ultimately highly individualized explanations of a social problem. In the 1960s, Social Democrats reacted to the discussion of social exclusion with an attitude that was captured in a famous radio debate with the Minister of Finance Gunnar Sträng—people who were earning low wages in the midst of Swedish society were quite simply not right in the head. In the 2000s, people are worried or a little sad.35 It is indicative of the party’s dearth of analyses of trends in Swedish society that the question of social exclusion or “utanförskap” was at the heart of the election campaign of 2006, as the Swedish Right made a powerful case for taking people off benefits and putting them into work by introducing tax credits and strengthening incentives for work. The “new Labour Party”—nya Arbetarpartiet—a reinvented the conservative party in the center field, campaigned to reform government bureaucracies that turn people into waste, or—as New Labour’s critique of the “old” welfare state put it—“write people off” as if they were not capable of contributing to society.36
In his 1973 book The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, the American sociologist Daniel Bell wrote of “exponential curves”—“the acceleration of doubling rates of all kinds.” Bell was referring to the way that the growth of knowledge seemed to have passed a point where it was no longer humanly possible to keep up. Development seemed to defy saturation and to call for adaptation to constant acceleration. Exponential curves, Bell wrote, transform our lives.37
Notions of exponential curves inform the idea of the knowledge economy. We have seen them in ideas of the silicon revolution or Moore’s Law, which presume the existence of a teleological logic of exponential expansion within the network. Similarly, the idea of human capital draws on a silent assumption that human capital, in contrast to the coal or steel or manual labor of the Industrial Revolution, will prove to be virtually limitless. Indeed, the idea of lifelong learning can be seen as a perpetual process of human capital expansion, a process that presumes that the expansion of the self and the expansion of the economy are virtually the same processes. In a sense, the knowledge economy seems to bring together the radical discourses of the late 1960s with social democracy’s productivism and to claim that the dilemma between industrialism and individual emancipation was solved. Inherent in this is a hope that a life of work in the knowledge economy will be fundamentally different from a lifetime spent in the factory and that the knowledge economy avoids phenomena of exhaustion and exploitation because it works for self-fulfilment and will create happier and more creative individuals who quintessentially control their own lives. Hence, the 1960s debate on the limits to growth and the social and ecological costs of growth seems to have been replaced by assertions that the knowledge economy is clean; environmentally friendly and people friendly.38
These are very bold assumptions, and they seem oddly detached from serious analysis. Social democracy’s virtual obsession with wealth creation and economic growth in last decade has meant that it has little theorization of the possible adverse effects of human capital expansion on human well-being. It might be argued that the limits of a productivity expansion driven by human capital must be the limits embedded—embodied—in that capital. These might be discussed in terms of the physical and cognitive scope and reach of human beings, the limits to our degree of adaptability, and our willingness and strength to learn and relearn, which do not, in contrast to presumptions of the constant expansion of productivity or the increasing efficiency of silicon, seem infinitely elastic. Studies show that work injuries are on a rise in contemporary societies and that physical work injuries are increasingly being replaced by disorders related to stress and insecurity. The French economist Daniel Cohen suggests that the phenomenon of burnout is endemic to modern capitalist societies and directly related to flexible production.39
There has been little debate about this in social democratic ideology. New Labour’s idea of change as a competitive race to the top and its dismissal of individual needs for security in favor of an authoritarian call for opportunity leaves little room for questions of quality of life, happiness, and well-being, even if this is a discourse that has changed in the last years with a growing emphasis on the quality of jobs, work–life balance, and healthy workplaces. While this is, indisputably, a shifting ideological ground, these emerging discourses seem to remain firmly within New Labour’s all-encompassing modernization narrative; healthy workplaces and happy people are arguments for efficiency and growth because they lead to more productive workplaces. Discourses of healthy workplaces are ultimately also about absence management and early intervention, which ensure that an employee will return to work at the earliest possible opportunity. 40
In contrast, in Sweden, the idea of social exclusion has contained a certain, albeit hesitant, critique of the very process of modernization. The Persson years brought out a strand in social democratic ideology that is critical of modernization and growth, visible most clearly in the party’s vision of a Green People’s Home (gröna folkhemmet). Part of this strand has derailed into an unfortunate nostalgia for the People’s Home, which has taken focus away from the work with a strategy for sustainable capitalism. Nevertheless, this has brought back a party discussion on the nature of progress and the relationship between growth and individual well-being. So the SAP states that progress cannot be considered progress if it leads to exclusion of people from working life because of increasing demands. The party’s 2004 conference on growth concluded the following:
Growth is not an end in itself. The objective of our policies is a better society. A society where people do not wear out early in life. A society where all can participate in production according to their ability . . . The objective of our growth policies is to make people grow. Our policies encourage entrepreneurship but also ensure that the sick can be rehabilitated and the disabled given a place in working life.41
Social democratic growth strategies of the 1990s contained an emphasis on the reform of working life by increasing the responsibility of employers for work environment and rehabilitation and by finding places, particularly in the public sector, for people who are not competitive.42 The tripartite “Growth Conversations (tillväxtsamtal)” in 2003 and 2004 aimed toward the creation of a deal with employers, where government and trade unions agreed to tax reliefs for SMEs if business would accept increased responsibility for sick leaves, incapacity, and work injuries. This was a reaction to the soaring levels of long-term sick leaves and absenteeism in the first years of the 2000s, which were interpreted by the Swedish Right as “the Swedish disease,” caused by allegedly perverted incentives in a far too generous social insurance system.43 The growth conversations were not a success, mainly because of the SAP’s failure to reach an agreement with the trade unions over taxes, which led to the subsequent withdrawal of business from the talks.44 However, the social democratic emphasis on the roots stress related work injuries, and the party’s attempt to strengthen employer responsibility is very different from the way that responsibility, in New Labour politics, has predominantly been a question of strengthening the individual work ethic. Ultimately, this is indicative of a more important difference, namely, that the SAP sees a potential limit to the process of modernization, a limit set by individuals and their life situations. Life, the party claims, is not a race.45
New Labour’s idea of change as a competitive race and the Swedish rejection of change as exactly such a race are indicative of different notions of modernization and of the role of the individual in the process of change. While New Labour seems to presume that individual adaptation is virtually limitless, Swedish social democracy stresses the possible tensions between change and well-being. Ultimately, this falls back on different conceptions of growth as economic or human growth and definitions of what constitutes progress.
Nevertheless, in both countries the individual has clearly emerged as the focal point of change. Social policies have gained a cultural emphasis, which stands in direct relationship to the way that modern economic policies see growth as stemming from certain individual attitudes and dispositions. Such a cultural approach permits a limited egalitarian agenda, where policies are aimed at breaking with the barriers that lock in potential, foster a culture of aspiration and achievement, and create a culture of learning, but where these barriers are ultimately seen as located within individuals themselves, in the incapacity or unwillingness to learn. It is this conception of economic change as beginning in individuals that leads to the highly specific understanding of social exclusion as a problem of character. A possible alternative explanation of rising social exclusion in the Western world today would arguably be, as Zygmunt Bauman has suggested, that exclusion is an integral characteristic of post-Fordist labor markets, creating an abundant population without value.46