The End of a Performance? Swedish Rent Strikes in the 1980s

Abstract

During the 1980s, Sweden saw several rent protests and rent strikes in different parts of the country. While there is an obvious continuity from the Swedish rent contention in the 1970s, the rent contention in the 1980s is in itself an interesting topic to study. The influence of radical leftist groups in the 1980s isn’t as obvious as it appears to have been in the 1970s, and rent striking seems to have been seen as a legitimate way of handling grievances during the first half of the 1980s. Most of the rent protests took place in municipal and other forms of non-speculative housing, and contention took place both between tenant and landlord and within the established organisations of the tenant’s movement, thus turning into a challenge against the social democratic leadership. Using the theoretical framework of Contentious Politics Studies (CPS), this chapter examines rent contention in Sweden during the 1980s and especially the rent strikes of the period, looking at the role of rent striking and other forms of protests in the tenant contentious repertoire of that era. Of particular interest is the disappearance of evidence of rent strikes after 1985, signifying a change to the contentious tenant repertoire.

Introduction

This chapter examines the rent strikes and protests in Sweden during the first half of the 1980s. During the post-war era, Sweden had a very ambitious housing programme, with a massive increase in rental apartments, especially in the newly built non-profit municipally owned tenements of the so-called “Million Homes Programme”. The internationally strong Swedish tenant’s movement, organising about half a million households, had been an important factor in shaping the new housing regime. However, discontent seems to have been brewing among Swedish tenants, especially in the newly constructed blocks, and contentious episodes occurred in several places in Sweden.

Internationally, several rent strikes and protests happened during the 1970s, in places such as Italy, Germany, England, Northern Ireland and the United States.¹ In 1984, perhaps the most widespread rent strikes ever started in South Africa. Eventually, upward of 300,000 tenants would participate, most of them living in and around Johannesburg. Despite heavy and deadly police repression, the refusal to pay rent carried on well into the 1990s and in some areas stayed on after the fall of the apartheid system.² Given this, it is interesting to note that Sweden, known for its relatively high housing standards, also saw collective protests over rent and living standards during the same period.

Rent contention has a long history in Sweden. There are accounts of collective rent protests and rent strikes in Stockholm as early as the nineteenth century. As the tenant’s movement grew and became more formalised during the first half of the twentieth century, rent protests increasingly came under the control of the tenant’s unions, using it as leverage for enforcing collective bargaining.³ The 1930s saw a high level of tenant militancy, but the level of militant action calmed down during the rent control period from 1942 to 1968, even if it did not cease completely. While several of its founders were syndicalists and communists as well as reformists, the tenant’s national union Hyresgästernas Riksförbund (HRF) and its member organisations were to become increasingly centralised and politically dominated by the ruling Social Democrats and institutionalised. This was accented during the period of direct rent control from 1942 to 1978, when deals with property owners, both for-profit and non-profit, were made in more informal settings in rent tribunals. Thus, just like the labour market, a “culture of negotiation” intent on keeping the conflict level low did appear early on. Rent control gradually evolved into a system based on collective bargaining of rents, based on use-value and with strong security of tenure. This transformation was championed by the leadership of both the tenant’s and the landlord’s organisations.⁴ With the easing of rent control, however, came de-centralisations within the movement and increasing dissent. The rent strikes of the 1970s and 1980s in Sweden were similar to the ones during the mid-war period in one way: they tended to take place in newly constructed buildings with high rents and lacking facilities. The rent strikes of the 1970s and 1980s did, however, differ from the ones in the mid-war period in several ways. They mainly took place in non-profit municipally owned properties and were organised outside the established tenant’s organisations.

The argument in this article is that even though they can be seen as a continuation of the radical wave of the 1970s, the rent strikes and rent protests of the 1980s are an interesting phenomenon to study on their own, not the least since it appears as if the ties between rent strikes and leftist organisations, in particular Maoists, appear to have been much less clear than during the 1970s. It seems like rent striking had re-emerged as a part of a contentious repertoire during that decade and that the performance, in the 1980s, was enacted in a wide variety of cases. The rent strikes of the 1980s were, however, to signal an end to militant tactics used by organised tenants, a phenomenon that has only been picked up again by tenant activists in Sweden in recent days.

Rent Contention

The theoretical framework for the study is contentious politics studies (CPS), following a tradition mainly from Sidney Tarrow and Charles Tilly, and the changes to the contentious repertoire of the radical tenants that seem to have occurred during the 1980s will be analysed using this theoretical approach, emphasising institutional changes and changing opportunity structures as explanatory for the changes to a radical social movement. The established tenant’s movement’s strong ties to the labour movement influenced its organisational logic as well as the contentious repertoire from which the contentious tenants would enact their contentious performances. As described in the works of Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow, a contentious repertoire can be seen as a common norm for how contentious groups act, for example, during a strike, during an election campaign or during a political meeting. These ways of acting, contentious performances, come from a repertoire but are in turn modified to fit the particular circumstances of the situation.⁵

Most of what Charles Tilly sees as typical elements of a social movement were in place in the Swedish tenant’s movement at an early stage.⁶ The movement organised a sustained campaign with specific claims on landlords and the government. The tenants also made frequent WUNC displays, that is concerted public representations, such as marches and gatherings, designed to show worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment. They also employed a wide repertoire of performances such as the creation of special-purpose associations, holding of public meetings, petition drives and statements to and in public media. The associational character of Swedish social movements has always been strong, and the tenant’s movement was no exception. The establishing and managing of tenant’s unions was from the beginning a central part of the movement goals, and these organisations were later to become parts of a wider project of merging The Swedish Union of Tenants, Hyresgästernas Riksförbund (HRF).⁷ The rise of non-profit housing cooperative organisations and municipal companies also empowered HRF as it could enter into strong alliances with these companies and with the trade unions and consumer cooperatives.⁸

Tilly and Tarrow note that institutional changes and changing opportunity structures often affect movements, but the changes are hard to predict, and thus the historical cases need to be studied as individual examples. The behaviour of a movement may change with institutional changes, which is an interesting factor to consider when studying, for example, organised tenants. In Tarrow and Tilly’s system, a political actor is called a member if they have a secure standing in day-to-day politics and a challenger if they lack this but regularly make their presence available.⁹

Source Material

The empirical material used in the study is mainly various newspaper articles, a source material often used in historical research on labour conflicts.¹⁰ These come from the daily press, accessed through the press database Svenska dagstidningar,¹¹ and from other movement-related newspapers from the smaller tenant activist networks and groups. Other documents used are biographies and organisational documents such as pamphlets, programmes, meeting protocols and annual reports.

A Changing Housing Market

The rental contention took place in a Swedish housing market that had changed dramatically during the so-called post-war “record years”. From 1961 to 1975 close to 1,4 million new homes had been constructed. About 476,000 of these were built in single-family houses and 920,000 in apartment blocks.¹² The non-profit municipal housing companies did build a huge housing stock and especially the concrete tenement blocks were to become the most important symbol of the era. The newly constructed homes meant largely improved housing quality and increased living space for families and the increasing number of single households. The period coincided with large demographic changes as people were leaving rural Sweden for the major and medium cities but also smaller mill towns. There was also a move in the cities from the city centres to the new suburbs with their tenement and single-family house blocks.

Bo Bengtsson has noted a shift in the Swedish housing regime beginning in approximately 1975. After decades of focusing on ever-increasing housing construction, the focus now shifted to managing the existing housing stock. The established organisations continued to play an important role and collective bargaining in the rental sector was properly institutionalised in 1978 when a law made the right to establish a bargaining procedure statutory.¹³ The early 1980s saw increasing stagflation and unemployment became a political issue. While the population increase and migration were predicted to be minimal, large parts of the housing stock were deemed in need of repairs and reconstruction. This was also seen as a possible way to combat unemployment. A massive programme that renovated and reconstructed the existing housing stock, the ROT programme, was launched in 1983. It had mixed success and the goal of 425,000 units reconstructed or renovated was never reached.¹⁴

While there now existed a housing surplus, the increasing number of small owner-occupied homes, fiscally favoured by policy-makers, meant that the more well-off in the working class and the middle class increasingly left the tenement-dominated neighbourhoods. The increasing housing segregation was a widely discussed political issue from the second half of the 1970s.¹⁵ In the Swedish public debate, the problem with high rents, especially in the many newly constructed units, was a hot topic. The increased social welfare costs due to families needing help from social services due to high rents were seen as very problematic.¹⁶ In 1979, there were reports of widespread discontent and tenants wanting to buy their municipally owned rented townhouses.¹⁷ The right to buy was implemented in 1981 by the liberal government and tenants were given the right to transform municipally owned properties into semi-cooperative bostadsrätter.¹⁸ There were demands from HRF to increase subsidies for the rental sector to make up for the gains that those who owned their own homes had gotten.¹⁹ The division between the owner-occupancies, favoured by the right, and the rented apartments, favoured by the left and fiscally disadvantaged, was never really solved and has continued to this day.

A Contentious Period

In December 1979, a rent strike, or rent stalling, against two separate municipal housing companies with about 450 households participating took place in Southern Järva, north of Stockholm. According to a local tenant’s union board member, the protest was arranged through the local contact committees where it had gotten the support of almost two-thirds of the votes.²⁰ The rent stalling was followed by a protest march against rent hikes on September 28, 1980, with about 150 participants.²¹ In Sundbyberg, a municipality close to Järva, a tenant collective deposited their rents after the housing association that they rented from had failed to pay for heating. The tenants were encouraged to participate in the rent strike by the local tenant’s union.²² Tenant contention was also noticeable in the southern Stockholm area. In Södermalm there were calls for protests over rising rents, encouraged by the protests in Järva.²³ In Hägersten a “citizen play” was put together in 1981 by a local theatre group, exploring the militant past of the workers of southern Stockholm, including the militant actions of the local tenant’s union during the 1920s and 1930s.²⁴ The tenant’s union of the Southern Stockholm suburbs during that period had been one of the most contentious ones, engaging in mass boycott actions against a tram company as well as against landlords.²⁵ In 1983, miners in Svappavaara, facing cutdowns from state-owned mining company LKAB, made threats of occupying the mine and initiating a rent strike in case salaries were withheld.²⁶

These episodes can and should be viewed from a longer perspective. From 1969 onward through the 1970s, rent protests and rent strikes had happened in several places throughout Sweden. In the Stockholm greater area there was agitation and plans for rent strikes in for example Åkersberga, Enskede, Salem, Sundbyberg, Tensta and at the student home Jerum. Throughout the country, several other planned and in some cases realised rent strikes took place in for example Gothenburg, Stockholm, Luleå, Mariestad, Växjö, Eskilstuna, Örebro and Lindesberg. Radical students carried out rent strikes in Gothenburg, Lund, Stockholm and Umeå in the early 1970s. Two rent strikes in 1972 became especially notable, a student rent strike in Umeå and a large rent strike in municipally owned tenements in Uddevalla. The Uddevalla rent strike, against rent increases and faulty conditions, seems to have gained more sympathy from established media than the student rent strike in Umeå the same year, but much like the other one, it was carried out without the blessing of the established tenant’s union, which had already collectively bargained according to the new rules. The rent strike carried on for two months and the rent strikers paid the rent as it had been before the rent hike, depositing the rest.²⁷ The Umeå student rent strike, against rent increases, ended in dramatic evictions, where the student tenants had blocked entry in the hallways with bicycles, logs and chicken wire, methods also used by other rent strikers, such as the ones in St. Pancras, London in 1960.²⁸ This sort of violent eviction didn’t occur in any other rent strike during the period but would later be frequently used against squatters.

Rent strikers often deposited their rents at the county administrative board, which had been enabled in the rent law of 1939. It does appear, at least judging from the Swedish case, as if newly constructed buildings with frustrated tenants are an especially well-suited breeding ground for a rent strike, even if rent strikes historically have been quite rare. That the majority of rent strikes during the period examined in this chapter took place in municipally owned tenements might simply have to do with the fact that the municipalities were the main contractors for new tenement buildings during this period. Also, the “new left” activists, who seem to have played an important role in several rent conflicts, were probably far more likely to attack Social Democrat-run municipal administrations than the established tenant’s union officials were. That several rent strikes occurred in student homes is perhaps not such a distinctive historical change as one might imagine, since several of the early Swedish rent strikes and other collective tenant actions took place in middle-class districts and were led by middle-class organisers.²⁹ We can also see interesting parallels to the labour market, where several wildcat strikes took place in the 1970s. Much like this, most of the rent strikes from 1968 to 1985 were “wildcat rent strikes” taking place outside of the established negotiating procedure, which admittedly didn’t allow for rent strikes at all.

In 1984 there were reports of individuals rent striking on their own, as a protest action against perceived injustices.³⁰ The following year no fewer than three rent strikes took place in Stockholm. In Sköndal, southern Stockholm, a private landlord tried to raise the rent twice in one year, thus going against the standard rent setting model of one annual increase. The tenants were encouraged by the local tenant’s union not to pay the second increase.³¹ The last rent strike found in the material took place in Skogås, Huddinge, south of Stockholm in the fall of 1985. According to the newspaper Dagens Nyheter, 23 households started a rent strike with demands of getting two other tenants, accused of disturbances, drug dealing and prostitution, evicted. According to the newspaper reports, the rent strikers appear to have been successful as one of the disturbers of peace left voluntarily and the other one faced eviction. By early November, the unwanted neighbours had moved away.³² After 1985, no reports of planned or carried out rent strikes appeared in the source material.

New Leftist Groups and Other Challengers Within the tenant’s Movement

The Leninists, and in particular the Maoist left, appear to have played quite an important role in the rent contention of the 1970s and on. The Maoist Kommunistiska Förbundet Marxist-Leninisterna(KFML), from 1973 called Sveriges Kommunistiska Parti (SKP)³³ as well as other groups saw the rent struggle as an important arena for mobilising the working class and wrestling its organisations from reformist leadership. KFML/SKP, the largest and probably most active of the new organisations, appears to have prioritised the rent struggle and the influence in the tenant’s movement as secondary only to influence in the labour unions, and in a 1981 report from the right-wing think-thank Timbro, referring to internal KFML/SKP documents, there was a drive in the party to have its activists move to working-class neighbourhoods and focus on gaining influence in the tenant’s unions.³⁴ In a KFML/SKP pamphlet from 1973, demands for rent reduction were made and calls for turning the tenant’s unions into fighting organisations once again. Methods such as mass terminations of contracts, stalling of rent payments, and partial and full rent strikes were discussed and the tenant’s union’s role as a popular front organisation was emphasised.³⁵ In a later pamphlet from 1978, the demand was for rent stop rather than rent reduction. A total of eight rent stalling actions, most in the Stockholm area, that had happened “during the last year” were listed, but to what extent party activists had been involved was unclear.³⁶

It appears as if KFML/SKP activists were active in several rental conflicts, even if this is a matter that requires more research. On an intellectual level, a book on the history of the tenant’s movement by Gösta Hultén from 1973, published at KFML/SKP publishing company Oktoberförlaget, gained some attention and has continuously been cited by scholars.³⁷ Sven Bergenstråhle, later president of the International Union of Tenants, started as one of these activists and when interviewed in a book by Elisabeth Wredberg from 1988, Bergenstråhle remembers harsh debates and expulsions. While the Social Democratic leadership of the labour unions had dealt with communist opposition for decades, the leaders of the tenant’s unions were, according to Bergenstråhle, unprepared for the entry of the vocal and skilled activists of the 1970s. KFML/SKP did however have a lot of internal strife and several important figureheads, including Bergenstråhle, left or were excluded. Many of these were later to gain important positions within HRF.³⁸ It appears as if KFML/SKP had members or at least sympathisers in central positions in a couple of local tenant’s unions in the early 1980s.³⁹

The communist movement appears to have influenced the tenant’s unions, at least locally, that remained in the early 1980s. Kommunistiska Partiet Marxist-Leninisterna (revolutionärerna) (KPML(r)), a breakaway party from KFML had a relatively strong position in Gothenburg. Unlike KFML/SKP, KPML(r) had taken a stance early on against demands for lowered rents, criticising KFML/SKP for having too much focus on “reformist” demands.⁴⁰ This was even though their leader, Frank Baude himself in 1968, while still a member of KFML/SKP, had been trying to organise a rent strike.⁴¹ In the early 1980s, it appears as if KPML(r) had once again switched positions, and in the regional HRF section for Western Sweden, they used their influence to undermine attempts at forming local committees for municipal tenants, which Olle Minell from the party saw as a “division” from the important goal of “politicising the rent struggle”, which was necessary for stopping the “plundering of the tenants”. An annual meeting in 1981 had to be postponed due to fractional conflicts.⁴²

Rent Contention in Gothenburg

KPML(r) appears to have had some influence both on a regional level and on the boards of local tenant’s unions. Taken together with KFML/SKP and the traditional communist parliamentary party Left Party-Communist (VPK), this meant that the HRF Social Democrat leadership was far from secure in the local tenant’s unions. In Angered, Gothenburg, the Social Democrats managed to regain control over the local board in 1980, but they were also forced to accept a resolution calling for rent stop and that the local tenant’s union was to mobilise for this rent stop, which would include calling for rent strikes.⁴³ As the annual rent increases for Gothenburg were announced in June 1980, the local tenant’s union spokesperson warned that the increases could result in rent strikes.⁴⁴ A march of, according to KFML/SKP newspaper Gnistan 3000 to 5000 tenants marched through central Gothenburg on November 7. Gnistan claimed that this was the first protest march arranged by the tenant’s union in Gothenburg in 44 years, which was the year of the famous Olskroken rent strike of 1936–1937.⁴⁵ In the 1930s, Gothenburg had a particularly militant tenant’s movement, with several large rent strikes and boycott actions, a tradition that later activists have often looked to for inspiration.

The Gothenburg municipality faced the problem of having costly empty apartments in Angered and Bergsjön. Since several properties in central Gothenburg were in bad shape, tenants who accepted moving to Angered or Bergsjön were promised a 60% rent discount for the first year and 30% for the second year. VPK objected to this and instead called for general rent reductions. Several local inhabitants threatened to move and local tenant activists planned rent strikes in Angered-Bergsjön. While most of the local tenant’s union sections were reportedly opposed to the rent discounts and in favour of general rent reductions, the local section of HRF accepted the discounts, causing internal strife.⁴⁶ The rent strike plans were widely reported but neither rent strikes nor general rent stops or reductions appear to have taken place. The plans to deposit parts of the rent at the county administrative board were first postponed and then dropped. The “Action Group for Rent Freeze” ultimately started a café where tenants would be able to meet and discuss local issues.⁴⁷ Gnistan reported that KPML(r) had chosen not to support the radical fraction at Hisingen, which had resulted in a city-wide majority in the Gothenburg tenant’s unions loyal to the reformist central leadership.⁴⁸

Rent contention in Gothenburg did not cease and the idea that rent strike was an available tool for local problems appears to have taken root. When the social services planned to have some of their services in a neighbourhood in Frölunda, Gothenburg, the local tenants signed a petition against these plans and also threatened to initiate a rent strike so that their children wouldn’t have to meet “strangers” in their backyard.⁴⁹ There were also calls within the local tenant’s union section in Frölunda for general rent strikes, but these failed to gain a majority.⁵⁰ The high level of contention also affected the annual regional bargaining with the municipally owned housing companies, who appear to have been particularly tough in the bargaining for the annual rents of 1982 and 1983. While HRF called for subsidies and tax reductions for tenements, a majority of the delegates in the regional section of HRF called for a rent freeze and a possible political rent strike to achieve this goal.⁵¹

Similar voices were heard in the following year. The Social Democratic leadership didn’t support the calls for rent strikes and an apparent rift between different factions within the tenant’s unions was obvious during the annual bargaining, where calls for rent strikes against the municipal housing companies were uttered by delegates.⁵² The radical fraction appears to have ultimately failed, as rent increases of upwards of 40% were announced without any major rent strikes taking place.⁵³ The tenant’s union leader of the negotiation delegation maintained that rent strikes were for those who wanted “anarchy” and that they were “unsuitable” for a democratic country like Sweden. The rent increases were motivated by rising costs for the housing companies.⁵⁴

Rent Striking Students

Several, but far from all, of the rent strikes in the 1970s were carried out in student homes around the country. Even though the phenomenon wasn’t as widespread during the 1980s in Sweden, a couple of student rent protests did take place. Students in Lund threatened to organise a rent strike against rent increases in 1982.⁵⁵ At Lappkärrsberget, close to Stockholm University, students complaining about rent increases in June 1985 threatened to organise a rent strike. The student-owned foundation SSSB had raised the rent by more than 100% over five years and planned additional raise of about five percent. The students, organised in their own student tenant’s union SORG, planned to withhold the rent increase and only pay the rent as it was before the raise, and hoped to have at least 1000 of the 3000 students living at Lappkärrsberget joining the rent strike. They were in (their) turn threatened by eviction. The papers reported on the bad financial situation of students and about students who had been evicted after not being able to pay their rent. Students from two other student homes, Pax and Strix in Solna, also threatened to withhold rent due to grievances over high rents and faulty facilities.⁵⁶ Initially, about 200 students from Lappkärrsberget reportedly deposited the rent increase at the county administrative board.⁵⁷ As the oil prices dropped, SSSB announced rent cuts for the students. The rent strikers were, however, not satisfied and wanted guarantees against future rent increases. They also called for collective bargaining, which was not in place at the student homes.⁵⁸ The rent strike continued well into the fall and there were reports of about 850 to 900 students participating, most of them residing at Lappkärrsberget.⁵⁹

While the student rent strikes of the 1970s in several cases, such as in Umeå, appear to have been dominated by communist organisations, the Stockholm student rent strike of 1985 doesn’t necessarily appear to have been dominated by radicals. There was some division within the student organisations, and the SORG board, having previously faced criticism for being run by careerists dependent on SSSB, was replaced at an extraordinary meeting. From the meeting protocol, it appears as if there was a division between hardliners and more moderate students, but the hardliners eventually won. Material from the student rent struggle in Umeå was handed out.⁶⁰ Having gained control of the local board, the rent strikers were now in a position to directly negotiate rents with the SSSB at a central level.⁶¹ The last newspaper report found in the archival search reported that about 1000 students were participating in late October and that three rent strikers were to face charges in court.⁶² According to the SORG annual report, the legal charges caused division within the SSSB central board, which eased the way for a settlement. The students won an almost complete victory, with the full rent increase being reimbursed.⁶³

In their evaluation of the conflict, the SORG board noted that most of the work during the conflict had been carried out by a small circle of people, sometimes bordering on a single-person operation. To change this, an agreement with the locally established HRF-affiliated tenant’s union was made, and they became the main bargaining organisation with SORG having a veto on agreements. The following year, 1987, rents were raised by 6.2% and SORG cancelled their deal with the tenant’s union. A new deal was made in 1988 and annual deals of rent increases of about 6% were struck in the years to follow, without any notable action by the student tenants or their organisations.⁶⁴ Much like in other rental conflicts, it appears as if a small number of organisers had played an important role and as if contention had been temporary. As people are normally students only for a few years, student homes are generally places where people tend to stay for a short while, thus making sustained organising difficult. In the above-mentioned case, it also appears as if the established tenant’s union was called upon to increase predictability and perhaps, even though it wasn’t directly mentioned, to decrease the influence of the radicals.

Organisational Discontent

The divisions within the established tenant’s movement continued throughout the 1980s. There were reports of serious conflicts in the local, established tenant’s unions, with stormy meetings where “leftist” activists challenged the Social Democratic leaders with demands of more focus on grass-root activities and less focus on centralised negotiations. A local tenant’s union in Gislaved had left HRF and instead bargained directly with the local property owners.⁶⁵ Another independent tenant’s union was formed in central Stockholm in 1984, with the stated intention of using rent strikes as a method if deemed necessary.⁶⁶ While “independent” tenant’s unions have come and gone through the decades, the 1980s certainly appear as a period of serious discontent within the Swedish tenant’s movement.

Tord Jacobssons’s book Välviljans förtryck is a case study of a conflict concerning renovations during the previously mentioned ROT programme in the Rosta area of Örebro during the second half of the 1980s. The often-elderly tenants in Rosta faced, according to Jacobssons’s results, unwanted renovations in the municipally owned tenements that they had lived in for decades. As they felt that their interests were not looked after by the established tenant’s union, the tenants of Rosta formed an independent tenant’s union, Bostadsrådet, in 1988.⁶⁷ While they never did organise a rent strike, the tenants did offer some resistance. In a particularly interesting passage, Jacobsson claims that the ultimate failure of the tenants resulted from the fact that while they did exit and form their organisation, they immediately allowed themselves to be co-opted by the old organisations and were included in the established system of collective bargaining. Jacobsson argues that the tenants could have accomplished something as independent, unpredictable actors, but since the tenants were overly long-standing Social Democratic voters, they had high trust in “their” organisations, including both the tenant’s union and the municipally owned housing company.⁶⁸ The case is an interesting parallel to other episodes described in this chapter, where the protestors appeared as challengers not only against the landlords but also against the leadership of HRF and its local branches.

Some, but hardly all of the discontent with the tenant’s movement, can be attributed to the radical left. The rapid decline of leftist groups and KFML/SKP from the mid-1980s and onward coincides with the decline of rent strikes in Sweden. However, from the available source material, there is little evidence of KFML/SKP activists having any crucial role in the rent strikes of the 1980s, even if that claim might not hold up for closer scrutiny. Activists belonging to KFML/SKP and similar groups often got their inspiration from the older labour struggles but new contentious performances were emerging during the same period as the rent struggles studied in this chapter took place. It is possible that the emergence of squatting as a housing activist performance did “outcompete” the rent strike. Squatting in Sweden had emerged during the 1970s as a contentious performance, but there was a surge in squatting and a peak in the 1980s.⁶⁹ There were frequent reports of European youth protests and squatting in the Swedish newspapers during the 1980s, and anarchist-leaning squatting emerged. The political, ideological and organisational change probably affected the contentious repertoire, although more research in this area is needed before drawing any conclusions. Squatting, unlike rent strikes, has continued in recent days.⁷⁰

The End of a Performance?

From the examples above it is obvious that rent strike as a way of solving housing-related issues was seen as a possible alternative for tenants as late as 1985. After this, however, the newspaper searches yield no results for tenant collective action in Sweden. This is, of course, not evidence of the total absence of rent strikes, but it is an indication of some sort of the change in the contentious repertoire of Swedish tenants. While marches, petitions and other forms of contentious performances over rent issues certainly haven’t been missing in the last four decades, it appears as if the rent strike as a form of contentious performance is no longer seen as a viable alternative. In 1992, the debate TV programme Striptease discussed, in light of the then ongoing economic crisis, the rent strike in Uddevalla twenty years earlier and why collective action seemed to have ceased.⁷¹ While the claim that collective action had ceased was an exaggeration, as we have seen, there does appear to have been a change in the contentious repertoire of Swedish tenants sometime during the latter part of the 1980s.

It appears as if the established HRF-affiliated tenant’s unions were, by the 1970s and 1980s, clear members in this sense and a part of an increasingly institutionalised corporative housing system. They were, however, challenged by new housing activists, working partially within and partially on the outside of the old social movements. Interestingly enough, these new tenant activists made claims not only on the state but also on the leadership of the labour movement, who had, in their opinion, become too embedded in the capitalist state and incorporative arrangements. Tilly and  Tarrow list some important properties of a political regime, including independent power centres within, openness to new actors and instability of current alignments, availability of allies and supporters as well as regime repression and facilitation of collective claim-making.⁷² Changes to all of these properties affect a movement’s ability to make effective claim-making.

The Swedish housing market changed a lot during the 1970s. As rents were being de-regulated, housing speculation and soaring rents affected tenants. Timothy Blackwell has argued that much of the housing regime changes that are often attributed to the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, such as renovations for rent increases, actually began in the 1970s.⁷³ As we have seen, there was discontent among Swedish tenants of the period and, coupled with the radicalisation of the period, it appears as if the field was open for new social movement challengers to partake in the collective mobilisation of tenants. In doing so, the new challengers picked up the old methods that the established tenant’s movement had used when they had been challengers in the system, including the rent strike.

It is, judging from the material that is presented in this chapter, possible to draw the conclusion that there was a realignment taking place among the actors of the housing market with the deregulation of the rental market and the rise and then a lull of public housing. The new contentious actors could take advantage of the move of the established tenant’s organisations from challengers to members and make gains both from discontent with the housing situation and from the influence of the radicalisation wave of the 1970s. Working both inside and outside the established tenant’s unions, the tenant activists seem to have benefitted from what Lucia A. Sebert and Peter J. Katzenstein have called protean power, which roughly means advantages generated by agility and creativity.⁷⁴ Contentious tenants of the 1970s and 1980s could both make use of existing organisations and repertoires and try out new methods and organisational forms. These were relatively short-lived but set a precedent for housing activism that is arguably present in Sweden still today.

Social democracy and the Social Democrats during the period examined in this chapter had a dual role in the housing struggles: firstly as the leaders of the municipal housing companies, and secondly, the tenant’s organisations were typically Social Democrats. While the results of the individual rent strikes varied greatly, it appears as if the “old” Social Democratic elite of the labour movement was ultimately able to regain control of the tenant’s organisations and again set the rules for the collective mobilisation of tenants. The opportunity structures were such that new challengers weren’t able to establish themselves. The labour movement of that time can be seen as a state within the state, the protean power of the challengers was not enough to overcome the control power of the established elite. In the tenant’s movement, rent striking had, since the very beginning, been a cause of division between those who looked upon it as excessive and those in favour of using it when the situation called for it. This division had traditionally been between Social Democrats and communists, and this appears to hold for the 1970s and 1980s as well. Thus, the very issue of what performances were valid within the contentious repertoire was a contentious issue within the tenant’s movement, and while the challengers of the 1970s and 1980s appear to have been able to re-establish certain performances to such a degree that collective rent strike was seen as a possible collective performance well into the 1980s, it appears as if the performance eventually disappeared. It is, however, an interesting question to ponder to what extent the discontent especially of the municipal landlords of the 1970s and 1980s de-legitimised the social democratic housing policy and helped ease the neoliberal turn in housing policy of the 1990s. This is a question that is worth investigating further.

One of the true feats of the Swedish social democracy historically has been its ability to quench outbreaks of radicalisation and to assure the centralisation of social movement organisations. It appears as if this was also the case in the period examined in this chapter. It also appears as if the rental discontent of the 1970s and 1980s was much higher than previously assumed, which is in itself interesting and something that calls for more research. The cases examined here suggest that protests really can inspire other protests, but also that radicalisation, as Kjell Östberg has suggested,⁷⁵ tends to come in waves. But it also shows that contentious performances can be reinvented and used in new episodes of collective mobilisation. Housing activism appears to be on the rise both internationally and in Sweden today, taking on new forms and practices.⁷⁶ While writing this chapter, there was news of a successful rent strike among students in Lund.⁷⁷ If it has been done before, it can probably be done again.