Drawing on a Gramscian Regulation Approach and Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession thesis, this article discusses the structural and hegemonic mechanisms of the neoliberal transformation of Sweden’s welfare sectors. Providing new longitudinal data on welfare retrenchment, corporate governance, wealth shares, and private economic power, the article further analyzes how the transformation of the Swedish post-war universal welfare model is related to class struggle and accumulation regime change in the Swedish economy. Following a decade-long countermobilization of Swedish capital and a severe economic crisis in the early 1990s, neoliberal economic common sense was cemented among social democratic policy elites that manifested itself in an institutionalized austerity polity, leading to a slow but steady dismantling of the Swedish welfare project. Roughly a fifth of employees in the three largest welfare sectors work in private welfare companies that generate tax-financed profits on politically created welfare markets. Welfare profits are in turn defended by a welfare–industrial complex and undergirded by a hegemonic bloc consisting of capital elites and sympathetic policymakers. In the virtual absence of vocal antihegemonic forces, many social democratic leaders have limited criticism against welfare profits throughout the last decades. On the contrary, austerity measures practiced by Swedish social democrats have thereto led to deteriorating social cohesion and spawned distrust among core social democratic voters.

The cultural sector has become an important part of the ‘new economy’ and has affected artistic practices as well as the road to becoming an artist. By discussing two female students’ paths to aesthetic education, the article sheds light on some of the sociopolitical and economic conditions that students in transition between elementary and upper secondary school in Sweden encounter when entering aesthetic education with musical aspirations. The results give insight into the ways in which young people reason when entering a precarious sector that demands a high amount of personal investment and planning. It also shows the ways in which social class still plays a pivotal role in the choice of and reflection on educational goals. Further, the article discusses how creative desires can transcend the economic instrumental expectations that surround the world in which the students live. Thus, it provides a contemporary understanding of how young people navigate a world of profitability.

No abstract available.