Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia.
Many conservative intellectuals tend to give exceptional prominence to Antonio Gramsci and the mythologised Frankfurt school in explaining the progressive hegemony of the left in the West and the emergence of what has come to be known as cultural Marxism. However, many of the ideological dogmas that have been substantiated in the implementation of social policies that largely translate these dogmas into legislation have their origins elsewhere, specifically in a European country that for decades has been considered a paradigmatic example of how state intervention can free people from their dependencies by replacing them with a well-intentioned and intense dependence on the state and its policies. This country is Sweden.
Sweden’s decisive role in the political evolution of Europe began in the second decade of the 20th century, when the Swedish Social Democratic Party abandoned orthodox Marxist postulates and devised a new path. It did not give up on eradicating capitalist society, but simply changed its strategy. This new strategy consists in transforming the competitive capitalist society into a technocratically managed society gradually, without violence and using a new path. The means of production are not expropriated because private management is much more efficient, but a process is set in motion that will allow the state to condition the goods that citizens consume. To this end, Swedish politicians will put the emphasis on “modernising” people’s way of thinking, so that they will lead a healthy and correct way of life. In this way, capitalism will not be controlled on the supply side, but on the demand side. In short, through state intervention, people’s habits and customs will be gradually changed.
This strategy will give rise to an intense process of social engineering that will leave Swedish citizens at the mercy of experts and authorities. Prominent among the former were Alva and Gunnar Myrdal, a pair of intellectuals whose book Crisis in the Population Question (1930) inspired the creation of the welfare state and in which the premise is established that, in order to allow individual freedom, especially for women, and at the same time make it compatible with the birth rate, social reforms are essential.
Decades later, Prime Minister Olof Palme would pragmatically apply the theories of Alva and Gunnar Myrdal through a mechanical conception of social policy. Thus, Swedish society incrementally replaced dependence on family and social ties of individuals with dependence on the state and its policies.
This understanding of the state, which goes far beyond its subsidiary role or the mere redistribution of wealth, will end up being projected beyond Sweden. Numerous European countries and later, by extension, the European Union itself, tended to imitate it. In fact, as early as 1969, the writer Susan Sontag, in her book A Letter from Sweden, wrote: “more than one Swede told me that what happens here applies five, ten or fifteen years later in some other part of the developed world”.
It seems clear that the new Swedish social democratic path has helped the spread of so-called cultural Marxism. After all, this new way has been the gateway through which an overwhelming social engineering has been introduced, which even, true to the principle of controlling capitalism on the demand side, has ended up conditioning large corporations, giving rise to a kind of woke capitalism.
However, this trend, which is very influential in Western Europe, is much less so in Eastern Europe. Indeed, it has met with strong resistance in certain societies there. The explanation may seem paradoxical, for it is the Iron Curtain that has kept these societies safe from deconstruction. But not because orthodox Marxism certainly isolated them from the rest of Europe for much of the 20th century. It was the reaffirmation of their beliefs, customs, habits and social ties as a means of survival in the face of Soviet totalitarianism that has made them especially resilient.
Javier Benegas (b. 1965) is a Spanish political analyst and writer, co-founder of the Spanish daily Vozpópuli, of which he was opinion director, and founder of the think tank ThinkAct, as well as editor of the political and sociological analysis journal Disidentia. He is a regular contributor to various Spanish media, both in the press and on radio and television, and is a prominent contributor to The Objective. He is the author of the essays Sociedad terminal: La comunicación como arma de destrucción masiva (2007) [Terminal Society: Communication as a Weapon of Mass Destruction], co-author of Catarsis. Se vislumbra el final del régimen (2013) [Catharsis. The end of the regime in sight] and author of La ideología invisible: Claves del nuevo totalitarismo que infecta a las sociedades occidentales (2020) [The Invisible Ideology: Keys to the New Totalitarianism Infecting Western Societies] y Vindicación (2022) [Vindication].
