The slowness of language, the speed of capital: conflicting temporalities of the “green transition” in the Swedish north

3.1 Desynchronization: on the limits to social acceleration

There is also the question of why anyone would want to hinder this rapid development. For capital, speed is obviously beneficial, and most people agree that we need to quickly find solutions in order to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. The local community, furthermore, has begged for years for something to happen so they can leave their peripheralized existence behind. The problem is, as sociologist Rosa (2003; 2005; 2013 has pointed out, that there are spheres of social life that are not as easily accelerated as the economy. On the one hand, there are biological and natural limits (such as the need for sleep and nutrition, cognitive abilities, etc.) to how much the tempo of human life can be sped up; and on the other hand, there is a certain inherent slowness to many social institutions constituted by human interactions. In a democracy, political processes necessarily take time (Chesneaux 2000), and the more dynamic and heterogenous societies become, the slower any collective decision-making will be (Rosa 2014: 125). According to Rosa, this leads to the problem of desynchronization, whereby some spheres either fall behind, or risk changing beyond recognition due to acceleration.

Here, I will consider how the inherent speed limits of language teaching and learning are handled in a context of accelerated social transformation. Without overstating it, linguistic repertoires require at least a minimum of space and time to develop. How much of each can be discussed – and it depends after all on a variety of factors both within and outside the individual learner’s control (see e.g. The Douglas Fir Group et al. 2016) – but that they are needed is indisputable; certainly, no one has ever learned a language in a vacuum as if by magic. As an embodied social and local practice (Pennycook 2010), language is therefore subject to not only natural and biological but also sociopolitical boundaries for acceleration. In other words, how quickly you can learn a language depends partly on your cognitive abilities and partly on the social spaces you are given access to, but in both cases there is an outer limit to how much they can be accelerated. Put simply, your brain can handle only so much without becoming overloaded, and the maximum number of social interactions you can have in one day is set by, among other things, the available interlocutors.

Admittedly, most biological limits are not fixed forever, but rather co-evolve with technological and social development (Malm 2019). Any human being acts according to a framework set by their biological constitution at this particular moment, but what human beings are able to do today is not necessarily what they can do tomorrow. Considered in the narrow neoliberal sense, as an individual skill development (Del Percio and Flubacher 2017), it might therefore already be possible to accelerate language learning beyond what most people think is feasible, as demonstrated by, for example, self-proclaimed “language hackers” (Bruzos 2023b), posing on YouTube with the ability to learn up to 50 different languages in a short amount of time. Sociopolitical limits are much more difficult to stretch, however, and when pushed can lead to the most severe desynchronization problems (Rosa 2014: 124). Languages understood as a set of individual skills can be “hacked,” but social practices cannot (Bruzos 2023b: 1224). Language learning on speed can still be considered learning even if the individual suffers burnout and depression because of it, but on a societal level no common language practices at all will develop if there is not enough time for people to interact with each other. Similarly, beyond a certain point, democratic deliberation on speed will no longer resemble what we think of as democracy but will rather take on the shape of its opposite, authoritarianism (Rosa 2005).

What I seek to do in this paper is to consider the social relations embedded in “the green transition” from the point of view of language education. My starting point is the basic idea, put forward already by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, that language is a social practice, emerging from the need (or necessity) to communicate with other people (Marx 1995: 144). Language, however, is not only a practice; it is “also and always infused with and caught up in the political economic, national, (post)colonial, and political circumstances that shape its use and its role as an object of study, political manipulation, and cultural value” (Cavanaugh 2020: 51). Hence, language and materiality are inevitably intertwined, so that on the one hand meaning-making consists of material properties formed by human bodies (air waves, signs, etc.), while on the other, “material conditions shape ideologies and uses of language” (Shankar and Cavanaugh 2012: 356). In other words, which semiotic resources that are at our disposal – as well as how they are circulated, used, and valued – are dialectally formed in relation to the sociopolitical and economic conditions on separate but interconnected scales, from the local to the global (cf. Blommaert 2007). By examining how communicative practices are being (re)shaped and (re)valued in a local community undergoing rapid social transformation, we might therefore be able to say something about how social relations are concomitantly being reconfigured.

4.1 Language education as pause: on the necessary outside of the labor market

In Sweden today, as in most other European countries, the teaching and learning of the majority language has gained an increasingly prominent role in the migration policy debate, with growing demands on L2 learners’ demonstrated language proficiency (Milani et al. 2021; Rydell 2018). The current right-wing government has announced a goal to strengthen the requirements for proficiency in Swedish for citizenship, and also intends to limit the right to mother-tongue instruction and introduce a limit on how long someone can participate in the municipality-funded adult education SFI (Swedish for Immigrants). What these partly conflicting proposals have in common is a stated ambition to speed up the integration process and strengthen the social cohesion in Swedish society. In a news article reporting on some of the new language-related proposals in the daily Svenska Dagbladet (Thurfjell 2024), Integration Minister Johan Pehrson states:

Similar demands for accelerated language learning have been noted by applied linguists in other contexts (Barnawi 2020; Lising 2023), usually linked to an increased individualization of the integration process, placing the responsibility of social inclusion primarily on the migrants themselves (see also Nuottaniemi 2023). While it is undoubtedly true that participation in second-language education can improve an individual’s chances on the job market, and also facilitates social participation in other areas, the relationship between language skills and job market access is complex (Fejes and Dahlstedt 2023). Access to the labor market is influenced not only by knowledge of the majority language but also by factors such as educational background and social networks, the latter of which often clearly outweighs the former. And then we haven’t even touched on the structural racism in the West that tends to lead to racialized speakers being judged as illegitimate speakers regardless of their actual abilities (Flores and Rosa 2015; Piller 2016; cf. Heller and McElhinny 2017 quoted above). From a Marxist perspective, however, it is also necessary to consider that full employment has generally been abandoned as a goal of political governance in the neoliberal era. Unemployment in fact has a clear economic purpose in capitalism, both providing an “industrial reserve army of labor” (Marx 2018 [1867]: 555–566) for the characteristic boom-and-bust cycles of particular markets as well as keeping the actually employed workers docile, in fear of being excluded altogether from the ranks of wage laborers (see also Mau 2021: 281–287).

In Skellefteå, where an already low unemployment rate has dropped to record levels following Northvolt’s establishment, it therefore comes as no surprise that unemployment has still not been erased altogether. And for those who for various reasons are kept far from the job market, it is also clear that participation in Swedish instruction is less than sufficient for becoming a part of the rapid development. Using the same metaphor as the municipality director quoted earlier, the principal at the school for adult Swedish education, SFI (Swedish for Immigrants), likens the situation with being caught in a tumble dryer, but with some people being pushed outward rather than inward:

In the principal’s account, those who do not meet Northvolt’s expectations of a “good worker,” and for various reasons learn slowly – or are not recognized as legitimate speakers by the listening subjects in their environment – end up on the sidelines, left out. They live their desynchronized lives in a different, significantly slower temporal regime, partly unaffected by the social acceleration surrounding them (cf. Barnawi 2023). For them, language education becomes a type of pause, as they are partially stuck somewhere for an extended period because there is no place for them even on an overheated job market (Nuottaniemi 2023).

However, posing this as a learning problem merely hides the capitalist logic at work. The reason for their exclusion is that they are currently not exploitable through wage labor, which can only partly be said to depend on their individual skills (cf. Olofsson et al. 2023). Capitalism, in fact, would not function properly without an industrial reserve army. The inherently slow temporality of language learning (slower for some, admittedly, but as we will see this is not always regarded as a problem) here rather serves the purpose of regulating the spatial-temporal fluctuations in the demand for labor, and of keeping a necessary space outside of production where workers are always at risk of being relegated (cf. Del Percio 2023). Claiming that language is “the key” to opening society’s doors appears to be nothing less than a cynical blaming of the victim, especially considering the doors that readily open for more desirable newcomers in this context, who do not need to know a single word of Swedish to be welcomed.

4.2 Language education as promise: on the subordinate inclusion of migrant workers

To put it simply, knowledge of Swedish seems to be of highly varying importance to different actors in the green transformation. In another recent interview in the major newspaper Dagens Nyheter, the Minister of Education, Mats Persson, cited a lack of proficiency in the majority language as an important reason for the difficulties recruiting labor from the mostly urban southern of Sweden: “Idag är det för många som hoppar av SFI, eftersom det är för kravlöst. Det måste vi ändra på, för om vi inte gör det, kommer industrin i norr att fortsätta skrika efter folk.” [“Today, too many people are dropping out of SFI because it’s without demands. We have to change this, because if we don’t, the industry in the north will continue to cry out for people”] (Kejerhag 2023). On the local scale level, however, such explanations have very little relevance. As a principal at the local SFI school puts it: “om du pratar engelska i din vardag och gör det helt perfekt (.) så är ju Skellefteå ett ställa nu där alla andra kommer att b örja prata engelska runt dig” [“if you speak English in your everyday life and you do it perfectly (.) then Skellefteå is now a place where everyone else will start speaking English around you”] (Interview with SFI principal).

At Northvolt, their only concern is that the workers they hire demonstrate a working knowledge of English – Swedish is of limited interest, and will most likely continue to be so for the foreseeable future (Interview with HR-manager at Northvolt). The principal’s statement that it is those who speak “perfect” English who are greeted with open arms has some truth to it, but also hides the fact that the majority of those now being hired at the battery factory are not highly educated, and do not need to demonstrate such advanced skills.

Based on interviews with a human resource manager at Northvolt and six migrant workers living in one of the company’s temporary barrack villages in the town, there do not seem to have been any uniform language requirements for the regular industrial jobs. Rather, it appears to have been up to the individual recruiters, who in turn work at various staffing agencies such as Adecco and Randstad, to test candidates’ English skills at the time of the interview itself. For some, this meant that they had to take an online multiple-choice test, while for others the recruiter temporarily switched to English during the interview, which was otherwise held in their Central and Eastern European first languages. As one of the workers explained to me, also submitting one’s CV in English can be considered a sort of test:

Andreas: so there was no- there was no special test or?

Migrant worker 4: no special tests but they (.) sometimes they will like speak English (.) maybe to (.) check if I understand and also I think the CV was (.) like you have to write it in English (.) so I think that was like maybe (.) a test or (.) maybe *I mean I don’t know because I don’t work there but*

(Interview with migrant worker 4)

When I talked to the migrant workers in the first half of 2024, the requirements for the bulk of newly hired employees had actually been gradually lowered over an extended period in other respects as well. According to one of the managers at the adult education center, during their initial contact with the municipality Northvolt said they intended to employ over 3,000 engineers. However, they soon backed away from this plan as it did not align well with the factory’s timeline: “skulle man ha utbildat (.) tretusen ingenjörer som det var (.) tanken från början ja då skulle väl (.) Sveriges samlade universitet ha få hållit på i kanske (.) tio år” [“if they had trained (.) three thousand engineers as originally planned then Sweden’s combined universities would probably have been involved for maybe (.) ten years”] (Interview with adult education center manager). As such a lengthy timeframe was not even thinkable, they adjusted their ambitions to envision a workforce in which 15 % had university-level competence and 85 % high school-level competence. However, as the education manager emphasizes, assessing a high school competency level does not mean that everyone must have a high school education. Less than two years after the first battery was manufactured at the Skellefteå factory, the need for labor was so high that: “dom anställer ju vem som helst […] och sen kommer dom till oss och sager hjälp oss och utbilda dom litegrann” [“they hire just about anyone […] and then they come to us and ask for help in training them a little”] (Interview with adult education center manager). Instead of providing the local community and the company with inhabitants and skilled labor in the long term, the municipality now finds itself in a situation in which it uses both personnel and expensive teaching materials (see Figure 1) to quickly introduce already employed Northvolt staff to basic tasks, such as those required by an automation operator. These introductory training sessions are conducted primarily in English, further highlighting their limited relevance to the broader Swedish job market.

Figure 1:

One of the classrooms designed for training industrial workers at the adult education center in Skellefteå. On the wall are promotional pictures from Northvolt. Photo: Johannes Samuelsson.

For the labor migrants, coming from over a hundred different countries and hired on six-month contracts with a possibility for extension, the low language requirements are obviously a prerequisite for them to be able to take these jobs in the remote Arctic. At the same time, the lack of opportunity to learn the majority language puts them even more at the mercy of their employer, who already has almost full control over both their working hours and their leisure time (Interview with labor union representatives). The rapid establishment of the company, combined with unfavorable interest rates, has meant that housing construction has not been able to keep the pace up with the factory (Larsson 2022). Therefore, over a thousand workers live in (semi-)temporary barracks (see Figure 2) – euphemistically named “entrepreneurial housing” (Away Group 2024) – which through a complicated chain of subcontractors are in fact controlled by the parent company Northvolt. Here, migrant workers live without rental contracts under a strict disciplinary regime, whereby everything from smoking (see Figure 3) to collecting cans for their return deposit can lead to warnings, which ultimately means that they can lose both their work and housing from one week to the next. The location of the barracks, far from both the small city center and other residential areas, also makes the opportunities to interact with the local population and practice the majority language minimal.

Figure 2:

“Entrepreneurial housing” for migrant workers in Skellefteå. Photo: Johannes Samuelsson.

Figure 3:

Designated smoking area at the camp for migrant workers. Smoking outside of this area is one of the offences that lead to a warning. If a worker receives three warnings the contract is immediately terminated. Photo: Johannes Samuelsson.

The fact that the battery factory has recruited thousands of workers from within as well as outside the EU in such a short time with the help of staffing companies must be seen in the light of both the low propensity of Swedish workers to move permanently to where the jobs are located (Eriksson et al. 2023) and the increased informalization of the Swedish labor market (Olofsson 2024). As a result of a legal change in 2008 (Committee on Social Insurance 2008), Sweden, long regarded as an exception when it comes to inequality on the labor market, has in fact one of the most deregulated systems for labor immigration from countries outside the EU, whereby the driving force is companies’ demand for workers rather than national and regional considerations. As reported from the northern green industries – i.e. forestry, agriculture, and not least berry picking – it causes imported labor to be exceptionally exposed to individual employers, as their right to stay in the country is entirely linked to their employment contract (Eriksson and Tollefsen 2018). Together with the disciplinary regime, this makes any self-organizing of labor difficult at Northvolt, and instead risks leading to a “culture of silence” among workers (Interview with labor union representatives).

While EU citizens who move to Skellefteå to work at the battery factory do not need to worry about their residence permit because they are covered by the free movement regulation within the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), it is still clear that the temporary contracts, the housing situation, and the lack of a social safety net make their maneuvering space very limited. For those who do not want to be dependent on Northvolt but still have a chance to stay in Sweden in the long term, the company’s language policy and the geographical segregation pose additional challenges. Partly to remedy this, a local community college [folkhögskola] offers free Swedish courses twice a week at one of the barracks. As a result of the rotating five-shift schedule and the opportunity to work large amounts of overtime at the factory, regular participants in these courses are rare, but a handful of the nearly thousand residents in the area can at least be considered recurring participants (Interview with Swedish teacher). By participating as an observer on some of these course occasions I have had the opportunity to talk to course participants about their motives, and even though they differ (such as a general interest in language learning, ideological conviction regarding the importance of proficiency in the majority language, or a lack of other meaningful leisure activities) it is clear that one motive is the desire to utilize one part of what Marx ironically calls the worker’s double freedom; that is, the opportunity to choose which capitalist they will sell their labor to (Marx 2018 [1867], p. 146). Even this highly limited freedom is not enjoyed today by labor migrants to most high-income countries (Hedberg and Olofsson 2022), and as one of the workers I spoke with explained, one reason for this may be the inadequate conditions for developing knowledge in the majority language: “because I think finding other jobs might be hard without (.) knowing the language” (Interview with migrant worker 2). The adult education center manager – responsible for introducing training programs in English for Northvolt workers – agrees, and says that if the automation operators they educate at the center would want to work somewhere else (for example at the local metal smelter Rönnskärsverken) they would need to know Swedish (Interview with adult education manager).

From the perspective of the local community, there is also a promise attached to language education. For the factory establishment to benefit the municipality, a large proportion of those who are now moving there for work must stay in the long term. It is only as taxpaying residents that they will become a real asset to the local community, but the chances of this happening obviously decrease as long as they live in segregated, company-controlled barrack areas with insecure employment. The limited role of language education for migrant workers shows that, at least so far, the demographic change in Skellefteå mainly involves importing labor, not people, in striking similarity with the treatment of seasonal workers in the green industries (Olofsson 2024: 27). In contrast to the low-educated refugees, the migrant laborers are seen as exploitable by capital and at least on paper have the same rights as Swedish workers, therefore gaining some sort of social inclusion. But this is a form of subordinated inclusion (Tollefsen et al. 2021), whereby their opportunities to take advantage of most of their formal rights are extremely limited. As I have demonstrated here, one element of this is the lack of opportunities to learn the local language(s) (cf. Pennycook 2020). And at the same time, the local community’s need for socially sustainable development is downgraded in favor of capital’s need for a quick profit.

4.3 Language education as pastime: on the language consumption of the hypermobile elites

But what about the highly educated 15 % – the group of engineers, economists, and managers that the local politicians originally envisioned in connection with the establishment of the battery factory? Instead of demanding that these new elites should earn their place in society (through linguistic and other means), one can see that it is now rather the local community that is doing everything it can to adapt to their presence. One of the requirements set by the company for the municipalities competing for their establishment was, as mentioned earlier, that there must be at least one international, English-speaking school in the area. Even though the Social Democratic-led Skellefteå has long prioritized a cohesive, equal school, and despite the increasing monolingualism at the national level, it did not take long before the municipal council gave the green light to a profit-making company to start an independent school that was exempted from the requirement to follow the Swedish curriculum (Skellefteå kommun 2019). The local education committee, which feared that such an elite school would lead to increased costs for the municipality, in fact first rejected the establishment, but for the first time ever saw itself overrun by the municipal leadership on a school issue (Interview with local politician). Today, about 70 children of the Northvolt-employed engineers and managers attend the school, with only 2 h of teaching in Swedish each week and limited contact with the surrounding local community. The Swedish class is merely a fun break in the otherwise demanding schedule, and unlike other subjects is not graded as it is not included in the Cambridge curriculum (Personal communication with teacher; see also Cambridge IGCSE Subjects 2024).

Meanwhile, their parents have fundamentally changed the municipal SFI education in just a short time. Among relatives of the most well-paid Northvolt employees, it has indeed become popular to attend evening courses in the Swedish language. But, unlike the clientele SFI teachers are used to planning their lessons for, they do not do this in order to have the continued right to stay in the country or to improve their position on the Swedish labor market, but rather because they have time to spare and it is free (that is, tax-funded). Therefore, unlike the rest of the adult education, whose premises stand empty because the battery factory does not have time to wait for the tailor-made courses, Swedish teaching is therefore growing at an unprecedented rate. The new students’ approach poses a challenge both to the way the teachers’ are accustomed to working and to the municipality’s economy:

For the students who the teachers are now seeing at SFI, participation in Swedish teaching is rather a pleasant pastime activity than the high-stakes education it is for refugee migrants. According to the principal, they behave like consumers at a market, where an evening course in Swedish is equated with singing in a choir or learning to turn clay at a study circle. That the courses, according to law, must be free of charge and open to everyone who has the right to participate (Skolverket 2023) lowers the threshold at the moment of registration, but does not necessarily lead to a willingness to make the considerable investment that is required to pass a qualified language course with standardized examination forms. Therefore, the dropout rate is now so high that the school management has begun to worry that these uncompleted courses, with participants who had very little use for them from the start, will affect their ability to offer meaningful training to those who are the furthest from the labor market (Interview with SFI principal).

And what about the Northvolt employees themselves? Those who are directly employed by the parent company, and not one of the many staffing companies that employ the majority of the workers, hardly have the opportunity to participate in any demanding SFI courses. Given that the working language is English, their children attend the international school, and that many “northvolters” socialize even in their free time (Interview with member of civil society organization for expats), the need is not imminent either. Instead, they are offered the opportunity to participate in online courses that Northvolt purchases from a private language company. The explicit reason the employer gives for this is a wish to facilitate integration into the local community, which is of course appreciated by representatives of the municipality, but a closer examination of the courses the language company offers (Swedish for Professionals 2024) reveals that it seems to be more a symbolic measure than anything else.

As a manager at Swedish for Professionals explains, one of their most important tasks is “to create a fun educational trip” (Interview with entrepreneur at language company), with the customer’s needs at the center. This means that they minimize all elements of potentially uncomfortable assessment – above all, no tests or grades! – and that the teaching is characterized by playfulness and “gamification”. Indicative of this is that the teachers are not called teachers but rather “coaches,” and go through a form of casting before being hired, in which their ability to arouse enthusiasm is valued more highly than things like their formal education or documented pedagogical competence. All teaching materials are purportedly produced by the company’s own employees, and as an example of their innovative methods, an app is highlighted that allows participants in the simplest possible game format to practice choosing an indefinite article (“en” or “ett”) for randomly generated nouns.

These courses obviously bear very little resemblance to the high-stakes education at SFI. Mainly conducted individually in the participants’ spare time, they rather offer a way to give the incoming engineers and managers a form of gilt edge for their existence in Skellefteå. Learning to say “hej” or “hej då” makes the stay in the exotic Arctic a little more pleasant and bearable, and in this way is more an employment benefit than a requirement, similar to the wellness money that at many Swedish workplaces allows employees to exercise once a week during working hours. Language, furthermore, is not treated as a social practice in these courses, but rather as a reified and commodified set of skills: “discrete units, which are in principle separately teachable and assessable, and can be bought and sold as distinct goods in the range of commodities available on the educational market” (Fairclough 1992: 209).

Based on the educational contexts described above – and the priority taken there by “language as a finite and manageable object […] over language as an open-ended social practice” (Bruzos 2023a: 171) – there is nothing to suggest that the hypermobile elites attracted to Skellefteå to lead the “green transition” intend to become a lasting part of the local community. To the extent that they show interest in the majority language it happens on a mainly superficial level, and in their interactions that take place with the local population, it is rather the latter who must adapt. The municipality would like to see Swedish teaching as a kind of anchor, mooring and synchronizing the free-floating mobile elites to the local place and its temporality, but at the same time feels compelled to offer teaching entirely in English for their children when the company demands it, and evening classes in Swedish for bored partners who seldom manage to complete the ambitious courses. Therefore, a more realistic assessment of the effect of Swedish teaching is perhaps given by the manager of Swedish for Professionals, who believes that participation in these courses can make some of the mobile cosmopolitans stay 15 rather than five months (Interview with entrepreneur at language company).