The chapter sets out from a discussion of a so-called ‘Swedish exceptionalism’ (Schierup and Ålund, 2011) in terms of a changing character of power and governance. From there we take a step back to a principled discussion of ‘racial capitalism’; a concept that in Black Marxism Cedric Robinson (2000) picked up from the South African debate on apartheid in the 1970s (e.g. Wolpe, 1972; Alexander, 1979; Nkosi, 1973). This, we argue, was a debate with potential for reaching an understanding of what we call the ‘neo-apartheid city’ related to today’s Swedish social and political-economic urban reality. Proceeding from there we record segregation, racial stigmatisation, predatory housing policies and precarious labour, conditioning livelihoods in Sweden’s most disadvantaged urban neighbourhoods. We reflect on the positionality and voices of the subaltern, confronted by epistemic violence under conditions of an expropriative racial capitalism, reproduced by political discourse and institutional practice. We offer an approach to subaltern struggles centred on a local case, focusing on movements contending the financialization of housing and the precarization of labour.