The assault by the right-wing terrorist Anders Breivik on the Norwegian government headquarters and his 90 minutes of cold-blooded killing deeply shocked the people of Norway and the neighboring Scandinavian countries.

Sixty-nine youngsters from the Labor Party’s youth group were killed in the assault.

The workers’ movement targeted in these attacks has every reason to try to understand why they happened, posing the difficult questions most of all to itself.

Although everyone is responsible for his own actions, it also holds true that no man is an island. Like the hijackers of 9/11, Anders Breivik is not a “lone madman”—he can only be understood in his political context.

In the last decades Norway, just like Sweden and most other European countries, has seen right-wing populist parties grow and take seats in parliament. These parties have one common denominator: blaming immigrants, mainly Muslims, for all of society's problems.

The Norwegian expression of this anti-immigrant current is the Progress Party and it was as a member of this party that Anders Breivik learned his first political lessons.

Breaking the Code

When the Progress Party began to attract a greater following, many Norwegian politicians called for “breaking the Progress Party code”—trying to understand the secret behind the party’s appeal, not least among workers.

After a year of investigating the Progress Party, its members, leaders, and voters, Norwegian journalist Magnus Marsdal declared in 2008 that the reason for the party's growth actually lay in the Norwegian Labor Party, which now runs the government.

The Labor Party, Marsdal said, like most of its sibling parties in Europe, such as Tony Blair's New Labour in Britain, had adapted itself to the neoliberal consensus—the idea that unfettered capitalism is the best way to run the world, free of regulation.

The party dropped most of its political issues of earlier decades, around both economic policy and social justice. Instead there was a broad agreement among all the political parties that all such things were best left to “the market” to solve.

These parties had no objections to the policies that created increasing inequality and redistribution of wealth.

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With most major differences between the parties now gone, superficial discussions of “culture” and “lifestyle” came to the forefront, alienating many working people who weren't able to identify with the lifestyle of the political elites.

The political debate was cleansed of any discussion of equality, justice, or economic power. The traditional workers’ parties lost more and more of their working-class profile. In Norway, the Labor Party is led by Jens Stoltenberg, born and bred in a solid upper-class family.

This abandonment of workers’ needs was what paved the way for nationalistic populism. The right-wing nationalists claimed to “say what ordinary people think” vs. the “political correctness” of the elite. They presented immigrants as the cause of all social problems. Problems which, as it happened, were not at all solved by the market.

Unions, Too

Parallel to the parties’ adaptation to the corporate agenda in politics, many European unions have played a part as well. Instead of international solidarity, they talk about national and company competitiveness, enrolling the membership in the international race for the bottom. We have been told to “fight” for our jobs against workers of other nations, companies, and even plants, by increasing the competitiveness of “our own” company, plant, or nation.

Sowing doubt about the possibility of collective power further weakened the labor movement's ability to resist racists and hate-mongers.

At the outskirts of this immigrant-bashing milieu, more militant right-wing currents groups have thrived. In their books, magazines, and blogs, Europe and the West are painted as being under attack by a worldwide Muslim conspiracy, aiming to take control of the world (not unlike the anti-Semitic fantasies of the early 20th century).

It was in this confused and hateful milieu that Anders Breivik got his inspiration.

Society can never be completely safe from every possible hateful individual gone lost in a political or personal wilderness. But it's up to the labor movements to drain the ideological swamp that feeds the kind of thoughts that led to the terrorist massacre in Norway last month.

This won’t be accomplished by telling people to be good to each other. It happens when the labor movement walks as it talks, when it’s a force that workers of all nationalities, beliefs, and backgrounds can identify with and where solidarity is not a nice word but the fundamental way the movement works.

Lars Henriksson works at an auto assembly plant in Gothenburg, Sweden, once owned by Volvo, then by Ford, now by a Chinese company. His book on how auto plants could be converted to green production is seeking translation into English.