AttackFormation
Master Don Juan
I'll take this opportunity to clear some things up (TL;DR at the end):
1. We (Sweden) don't have oil, Norway does.
2. Nordic welfare capitalism has been extensively watered down by a particular form of capitalism, namely neoliberalism: deregulation (although it's not really "deregulation", it's letting plutocrats make the regulations), austerity, privatization. Add conservative labor unionism that doesn't seek transformative change but merely try to create a peaceful status quo on to that.
3. The "Nordic model" shouldn't have that name, because there is nothing revolutionary or unique about our countries. It's a very watered down social democracy, and social democracy is a kind of capitalism - welfare state capitalism.
Historically there were effectively three socialist movements:
- The anarcho-syndicalist movement which I sympathize with wasn't organized strongly enough here to affect change or require state violence to put down, unlike in certain other places like Revolutionary Spain and the Free Territory of Ukraine.
- The communist movement was marginalized by everyone else who saw how their seizure of state power in the USSR created a newly repressive regime, just as the other two branches of socialists had earlier predicted would happen: the goal was to dismantle the state, not to create a new state. This is a fact you won't hear any right-wing pundits mention if they are aware of it because it detracts from their necessary propaganda message that there is no "socialism" except the discredited states, and that any repressive state means "socialism".
- The social democrats, rather than instituting some kind of market socialism as many of those who today call themselves "democratic socialists" (picking that name in the early 20th century to distinguish themselves from the USSR) envision as a step toward full socialism, the social democrats degenerated into what we have today. A capitalist status quo which is reverting back in socioeconomic structure to the 19th century: tax favoritism for the wealthy (plutocratic government control, tax evasion and a tax shift off property and capital gains on to labor) and systemic polarization of wealth.
The European social democratic parties today are as much in the pockets of the plutocrats as any other party. When I asked a social democrat who knocked on my door this year if it really was "democratic" that the will of a few plutocrats overrides the will of the other 10 million of us in an example I gave on economic policy, he hurriedly shifted the subject.
But I diverged from the subject. What I meant to say was that social democracy is neither revolutionary nor unique, and it's being dismantled by neoliberalism. For example, I bet you've never heard of Simon Patten, the first American economics professor at America's first business school. The kind of things he took for granted that society would progress toward then would probably be regarded as "communist" today - and he was from the business school -, because our Overton Window is skewed so very far to the right and we are utterly ignorant especially of how banks actually work and what they actually do.
4. GDP doesn't measure wealth or growth. It's a totally cooked statistic that measures extractions of economic rent like interest payments and asset price inflations as if it were growth. But when something remains the same materially but becomes more expensive, or you go into more debt, the economy doesn't grow... it shrinks. GDP is a fake measure.
TL;DR: Don't let people either on the left or right of the spectrum "move your goal posts" about the Nordic welfare capitalism. Don't be fooled by either Sanders supporters or enemies who call his moderate social democracy "socialism". The left wants to use it as a success story of "socialism" while the right wants to discredit "socialism" but they are both wrong because there is no socialism here. Socialism in a nutshell: a system of governance built on positive liberty and workers' democratic self-management of industry and society, with supporting socialist economic theory of things like surplus value, economic rent, class relations, reducing working hours, actual technical cost of production, "rentier", etc. That is not at all what our countries are, they are formerly arguably social democratic, now neoliberal, capitalist welfare states.
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