Below follows Arete’s response to Fredrik Segerfeldt’s op-ed of 30 April 2026, titled “The working class would have been better off if LO had never existed” — a reply that was rejected for publication by Dagens Nyheter.
Arete – the think tank for popular education and pedagogy – is neither a Social Democratic nor an LO-affiliated organisation. We are independent and driven solely by ambitions of truth-seeking and formation (bildning). It is from this position that we respond to Fredrik Segerfeldt’s argument – not as political opponents, but as critics of dishonest historical writing.
Fredrik Segerfeldt of Timbro presents his op-ed as a reckoning with “deeply rooted misconceptions”. But it is his own account that is misleading, and in a way that reveals more about the ideological needs of market liberalism than about Swedish economic history.
Let us begin with the most obvious point: Segerfeldt sets up a straw man. No serious historian claims that the Social Democrats alone created Swedish prosperity out of nothing. The Social Democratic narrative concerns distribution — making the fruits of growth accessible to the broad layers of society — not the claim that the party invented economic growth. To refute a simplified version and present it as revealing analysis is not historical scholarship but, at best, rhetorical manipulation.
Segerfeldt’s central thesis is that the Swedish golden age took place between 1890 and 1950 — that is, before the welfare state was built out. But he leaves out what is decisive: it was after that period — with active labour-market policy, the Rehn-Meidner model, real-wage increases and an expanding welfare sector — that the Swedish middle class actually came into being. The fact that an industrial worker could live in a single-family house and travel abroad on holiday is precisely the outcome that the Social Democratic policy of the 1950s and 60s aimed at and achieved.
The claim that “the wage earners’ share of value added has remained remarkably constant” is, moreover, an economic truism to which Segerfeldt ascribes a significance it does not carry. What matters is the level of wages in absolute terms and how equally they were distributed. The fact that the trade union movement did not alter capital’s share of the pie says nothing about whether trade union organisation pushed up real wages, secured protective legislation, shortened working hours and created a bargaining power that without union presence would never have materialised.
The argument that the radicalisation and wage spiral of the 1970s wrecked the economy contains a grain of truth. But Segerfeldt presents it as the whole picture. He does not mention that it was international forces — the oil crisis, the collapse of the Bretton Woods system, industrial restructuring — that triggered stagflation across the entire Western world. Sweden did not hit the wall because LO was too powerful, but because the country, like every comparable country, faced a global economic shift that no model was prepared for.
The most glaring omission, however, concerns what actually happened after the crisis of the 1990s. Segerfeldt takes the crisis as proof that the Social Democratic model failed — but passes over the fact that it was the same popular-movement tradition and party structure that subsequently consolidated public finances, reformed and restabilised the economy in a manner internationally regarded as exceptionally successful.
There is a deeper methodological point on which Segerfeldt never reflects: counterfactual history is an extremely uncertain ground for drawing conclusions. To claim that “a Swedish worker would probably have had a higher standard of living if neither of the two branches of the labour movement had ever existed” is not a factual statement — it is an ideological wish-dream dressed in the grammar of economic history. What distributive policy, in the absence of the trade union movement, would have steered the gains in productivity? What working hours, what legal protections, what voice in the workplace would the poor have had without organisation?
Segerfeldt concludes that the modern industrial worker’s prosperity was achieved “in spite of, not thanks to, the Social Democrats and LO”. This is a polemical formulation that is only possible if one has decided on the answer in advance. It is not historical science. It is Timbro’s ideological agenda with a veneer of economic history