ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the World War I as the point of departure because it leads into the first of three important time-specific phases of the development of social democracy in Sweden. It describes these phases: first, The Golden Years of progress from 1917 up to the 1970s, when social democracy had almost complete dominance in Sweden; and second, the instability of social democracy during the beginning of the 1970s, which, in the third phase, has come to be described as a crisis of social democracy from the 1990s. The chapter provides an overview of the socio-cultural and political changes afoot in contemporary Sweden. It identifies significant themes for wider consideration within the problematic of class consciousness and socio-cultural forms of struggle in hegemony. The instability of the Swedish social democratic order and its economy had by the 1990s become an emergent crisis of social democracy as conceived during the Golden Years.
