Introduction: Organizing Care in Sweden's Crisis

In this introduction to the dossier, Elliot C. Mason gives an overview of the rise and fall of the welfare state in Sweden throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the initial protests and mass demands that led to reforms and a general program of state care, to the privatization of health care and the imposition of private capital as the mediator of all relations of care. Despite the sharp neoliberal turn in its politics since the 1980s, Sweden's international reputation as the ideal welfare state somehow remains. Here Mason studies the ways insurgent groups in Sweden respond to and exceed these contradictory deployments of brutality by continuing to bring out the foundational care of social life. Following Cedric Robinson's theorization of “the ontological totality” as the social modalities in which Black life survives despite the obsessive erasure of Black lives, the author here posits “the caring totality” as the rubric under which insurgent practices of care continue to provide survival despite and against privatization.