We begin by extending our solidarity to the families, survivors, and co-workers affected by this unimaginable tragedy. Their grief is a collective wound we all share, and it is through solidarity that we can honor the victims and carry the struggle forward.
The Role of Racism in the Attack
The brutal mass murder in Örebro reflects the structural racism embedded in Swedish society, where public discourse still rests on a colonial hierarchy of power. For decades, the media landscape and political rhetoric have constructed a demonization of non-white communities, creating an environment in which racially motivated violence can take shape.
This attack must be understood within a broader social climate in which the old discourse of racial biology has been reformulated in the language of culture, allowing continued racialization and marginalization of specific groups. The systematic demonization of migrants, racialized workers, and students has normalized exclusion and violence. Such a climate creates the conditions for racist attacks like the one we have now witnessed in Örebro.
After the massacre, media outlets, politicians, and academic commentators quickly mobilized to divert attention away from structural racism as a motive. Instead, the discussion has focused on individual psychology, access to weapons, or abstract “social factors,” while refusing to recognize racism as a driving force. This strategy of denial reflects a deeper systemic failure: the refusal of Swedish society to confront its own colonial and racist legacies.
Class Struggle and Resistance
At an adult education center where migrants were studying Swedish, an armed man carried out a systematic mass killing. He triggered the fire alarm to force students and teachers into the schoolyard before opening fire. The victims were working-class people, many employed in health and care sectors largely sustained by racialized workers. These are the very groups who carry the economic and social burden of neoliberal Sweden while being demonized in media and politics.
The Örebro massacre was not an isolated act. It was an attack against some of the most exploited sections of the working class, part of a long historical continuum of colonial domination and capitalist exploitation. Throughout history, racism has been used to justify violence, exploitation, and exclusion; this mass murder must be understood as an extension of that logic. In a society where racism is used to divide and rank the working class, violence becomes part of the structural order.
This tragedy cannot be dismissed as the act of a lone madman. It must be analyzed as the outcome of a social process in which racist structures and neoliberal economic systems work together to sustain inequality. The impoverished working class is formed within this reality, and only through a solidaristic workers’ movement—uniting the struggle against capitalism and racism—can we build a future free from these violent structures