Back in 1989 when the former Soviet bloc was breaking up, a group of 1000 women in East Berlin met together and formed an Autonomous Women's Association. This association issued a "Lila Manifesto" (lila being a German word for purple). The manifesto declared:
In the GDR the ideal of a socialist society of self-determining and self-creating women, men, and children was sacrificed to a social concept in which people were subordinated to economic premises...
So according to these women, most of whom would have spent their entire lives as members of a socialist state, the ideal of the communist GDR was ... the same as that of the liberal West, namely to establish a society of self-determining and self-creating autonomous individuals.
The East German women thought that this ideal hadn't been met under communism. The East German state had allowed the traditional family to continue as a means to improve birth rates and economic performance. That meant that instead of being "self-creating", men and women continued to follow distinct gender roles.
It seems to me, looking at things in a larger historical context, that the Swedes have taken the ideals of the East German state much further than the East Germans ever managed to do. Swedish left-liberalism has proven to be a more radical vehicle for modernist ideals. What the East German women demanded in their Lila Manifesto, the Swedish state is intent on delivering.
That's not to say that there is no difference in approach between communism and liberalism (Jim Kalb has a theory on such differences here), but both clearly share some fundamental attributes.
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