Image: In a suburb of Stockholm, a pig carcass was hung from a pole decorated with a potato attached to its snout and a sign with the message “Polis polis potatisgris” (A Swedish nursery rhyme where “police” is rhymed with “pig” and “potato” is used to fill out the cadence) on its body.
NOTE: We strongly condemn the smear campaign by the bourgeois press and police against this action, which aims to portray it as an “unlawful threat” or “incitement against an ethnic group” after working to conceal its true purpose and political message.
A few months ago, a new-old law came into force in Sweden, namely that it is illegal to “insult” the state’s lackeys (civil servants). This law is yet another blow to the democratic rights of the people introduced by the current government, which despises the people. It exists solely to give the police an excuse to repress people who express their justified hatred. At the same time, Ebba Busch can urge her mercenaries to fire live ammunition at demonstrators during the so-called “Easter uprising” (completely legally!).
The fact that the deputy prime minister can encourage deadly violence against demonstrators and crowds rebelling against fascists, but the people cannot even repeat children’s rhymes such as the one mentioned above without being arrested, shows the true face of the capitalist state. We understand that the very nature and function of the bourgeois state is to defend the imperialist system, which exploits the peoples of the Third World and the proletariat and the people in its own country.
We recommend reading what Lenin wrote in his great work The State and Revolution, where he quotes Engels to describe the materialist conception of the state. The state is not an omnipotent God, standing above the classes and helping them to reconcile, so that we can all live in heaven on earth – rather, it is a tool that one class uses to oppress others:
Summing up his historical analysis, Engels says:
“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ‘the reality of the ethical idea’, ‘the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.”
This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.
All demonstrations and protests against the misery and poverty of class society must take place through the state apparatus of the ruling class, naturally on the basis that hypocritical bourgeois “democracy” (i.e., the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie) is inviolable and impossible to abolish; i.e., that we have reached the “eternal state,” the highest point and end of human development, the end of history, the threshold to paradise on earth. In addition to its administrative department, the state is supported by its backbone, which is its armed forces. The watchdogs of the “Busch administration” (A play on words of Ebba Busch Thor’s own making where the irony is lost on her as she obviously looks favourably on George W. Bush and his genocidal cabinet) guard the interests of the ruling class, and therefore pour out hatred against any popular protest; and even more so if it is armed with stones, etc. But police violence is directed primarily against the establishment of a socialist state, the abolition of private property, a just society led by the best sons and daughters of the class.
