zifnab25 [he/him, any]

I’m not talking about things Nordic countries are producing. I’m talking about the basic necessities of life Nordic countries import that are produced by effective slave labour using resources extracted from the global south.

This has absolutely dick-all to do with their political configuration. It is a consequence of supply and trade routes wholly outside their command. Social Democracy as an organizing principle functions to create and administer domestic civil services and is, if anything, undermined by the process of outsourcing capital and labor demand. The quippy “Nords Bad Because Social Democracy” mischaracterized milquetoast liberalism on the periphery as the kind of expansionist imperialism that Scandinavian states have neither the capacity nor the interest in mustering.

These countries piggy back on US imperialism

Because of their geographic position and ethnic sympathies, not because of their political organization. Were Sweden positioned off the coast of West Africa or deep within the Amazon, it would have a completely different set of social relations. Bolivians and Senegalese socialists do not enjoy parallel social relations, despite desiring much the same in terms of housing, health care, education, and transportation as their Baltic peers.

Scandinavian companies get to plunder the global south along with the rest of the west, Scandinavians enjoy commodities extracted from the global south by the empire.

A select group of Scandinavian business interests get a minority stake in the imperial projects of wealthier and more well-armed western nations, on the condition that they police and corral their native populations. The end result is a deteriorating public sector in Scandinavian states, as the profits of imperialism are plowed into neoliberal privatization at home. The benefits of social democracy are not defended by imperialism but clawed back. The institutions of social democracy are not girded but undermined.

Imperial tendency is adversarial to social democratic institutions and policies, as the profits go not to improved standards of living but greater degrees of surveillance, incarceration, coercion, and media-instigated hysteria.

That’s the wages of empire. Not cheaper commodities and greater social comforts but grander delusions and more entrenched phobias.

The case of Sweden shows that the democracies are curtailed by the domestic capitalists https://jacobin.com/2019/08/sweden-1970s-democratic-socialism-olof-palme-lo

The Swedish economy got off to a flying start after the end of World War II, a conflict in which Sweden had remained neutral. Sweden benefited from the three-decade-long postwar economic boom, the so-called Trente Glorieuses. As the historian Eric Hobsbawn pointed out, it is perfectly justifiable to characterize the quarter-century between 1950 and 1975 as the period during “which the most dramatic, the fastest, and the most wide-reaching revolution in people’s everyday lives” took place. There was a sort of symbiosis between the capitalists’ demand for mass production and the people’s demand for mass democracy. Fordist welfare societies were created on the foundation of economic growth.

The case in Sweden showed the bounty of neutrality in the wake of a continent-wide obliteration of domestic capital.

What’s more…

Sweden was strongly affected by the radicalization of the 1960s. As in most other countries, it began with youth solidarity with the Third World. Swedish opposition to the Vietnam war was broad and influential. Swedish students joined others in demonstrations and in occupations. This new left contributed to pushing socialism further up on the agenda.

This would posit a distinctly contrary view to what you’re stating above. Far from sympathizing and allying with imperialist states, the Swedes continued their commitment to the non-aligned movement and to independent sovereignty both for themselves and for their Third World peers.

In 1976, the social democrats lost control of the government. This was not — as many in Sweden claim today — because welfare had become too extensive or taxes too high. On the contrary: at the time, no party challenged the solidaristic welfare state, and the new bourgeois government continued to raise taxes. Social democracy’s loss might have been the result of a protest vote against a party that, after ruling for 44 years, had become overly autocratic. (The most important reason for the 1976 electoral loss, however, was the social democrats’ support for an expansion of Swedish nuclear power. This brought it into conflict with the radical environmentalist movement.) By the time the party regained control over the government in 1982, its leaders had accepted the basic principles of neoliberal politics.

Since then, the welfare state had been successively weakened. Increasingly large parts of the public sector have been privatized. The pension system has been fundamentally revised, and today Sweden has growing numbers of poor pensioners. Large sections of the public-owned housing stock have been sold. Today, Sweden is among those European countries whose economic and social divides are increasing most rapidly. This is most notable in increased segregation within the educational sector, which has become increasingly privatized. Bourgeois governments have led the way in this development, but social democrats have accepted the reforms afterward. They have not attempted to launch alternative political platforms.

So, far from the narrative of imperialist calf-fattening, we’re entering the 80s (a period of consumerist glut) and social democrats are falling out thanks to the conflict between public demand for cheap energy and local environmental activism. They’re embracing neoliberal policies not out of hunger for foreign imports but due to a sag in the post-war boom.

At the same time, despite the political consensus among the leaderships of the different parties, this development is deeply unpopular among Swedish citizens; discontent extends deep within the bourgeois parties’ own core troops. A large majority of the population still supports a commonly owned public sector and is prepared to pay the taxes necessary to finance it. This fact comes as confirmation that the solidaristic welfare state of the 1970s represented a series of collective conquests by broad layers of the Swedish people.

When people in the rest of the world point to Sweden as a prototype, it is these conquests they mean — not the increasingly hollow welfare state that has survived to today.

These are not conquests of foreign territory but conquests within the Swedish economy of Swedish residents in opposition to foreign investors and military powers.

The Swedes yearn not for their own foreign feudal lands but for the dictatorship of the proletariat.

The reality is that it’s both.

That is not the reality, unless you’re going to explain how public education and biotech are extractionary. And if that’s your game, you’re going to have to explain Cuba.

That’s just a false narrative.

The US system of empire is failing, from the industrial bedrock of the Chinese cities to the farmlands of Ukraine to the mountains of Bolivia. Maybe Blinken (or the next guy) will turn things around, but we’ve been losing traction since the end of the Bush Era pretty much globally.

Scandinavian states participate in the plunder

The Scandinavian state services responsible for education, health care, and transportation had no discernible role in the occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, the bulk fabrication of arms and armor in Ukraine, the string of failed coups in Latin America, or the ongoing occupation of Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the Mid-Atlantic. They weren’t even NATO members until very recently.

This as dick-all to do with democratic socialism and singling these countries out as responsible fully whitewashes the conflict.

the benefits however are never permanent and end up being rolled back in times of regular capitalist crises

The benefits are only rolled back when the democracies themselves are curtailed, as the states are bombarded with fascist propaganda via foreign media. A compelling argument for a Scandinavian Firewall, but a piss poor criticism of the democratic institutions themselves.

Social democracy isn’t part of any transition, it’s a mechanism that props up current capitalist relations.

Capital relations are degraded through the imposition of social democratic reforms. And as residents rely on these reforms to sustain themselves, they become intractable. Only by unleashing fascist media, shock doctrine economics, and foreign coercion on a country do you curb the transitionary process. That’s exactly what western political strategy has been for the last 60 years.

Not sure what that’s referring to even.

What nascent leftists and left-liberals find appealing about the Scandinavian states are the high quality low cost public services.

The difference is that there were stronger social safety nets erected at the peak

Which were rooted in domestic industry and professional services, not extractionary practices targeting populations abroad. The erosion of these social safety nets has matched the erosion of labor unions, socialist organization, and left-wing party activity within the Scandinavian states.

the west has continued to dominate the global south

Western state control of the Global South has eroded with the outsourcing of US domestic industry abroad - particularly in the wake of the 1980s, when industry transplanted itself to the South Pacific. Latin American states are no longer dominated by western military juntas. African states are increasingly free of colonial and apartheidist regimes. South Pacific states are operating at parity with their western peers, rather than as occupied subordinates.

But even outside of this fact, the Scandinavian states are nearly non-existent in western foreign policy. Finland only just joined NATO, for instance. And only thanks to a collapse in European-Russian foreign policy relations, which I’d count as a mark against imperial domination rather than one in its favor.

USSR was not under these restrictions and did not behave in the way you suggest

The US actively embargoed Soviet States starting with the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1951. These sanctions continued into the 1990s and were slowly repealed under Clinton and then Bush in exchange for concessions by the United Russia government of Yeltsin and then Putin. What trade did occur was not inhibited by any some moral compunction of Soviet leaders. Exxon did business with the Soviets well into the 1980s, for instance.

USSR was able to have positive mutually beneficial relations with their partners as opposed to exploitative ones

That’s simply not true. The USSR had strategic partnerships with a host of left-leaning governments. But these were driven by tactical considerations, not ethical ones. The Soviets were happy enough to trade with the Israelis all through the Cold War period and with both England and France for most of its history. Meanwhile, the Sino-Soviet split persisted for decades despite the mutual benefit a Russia/China alliance would have had both for the region and for international communism broadly.

Soviets would routinely aid domestic revolutionary forces against colonial governments if it suited their needs, but were happy enough to back Syrian military dictators and Romanian dipshit demagogues entirely out of Realpolitik.

It’s not possible to have any meaningful democracy when the means of production are owned privately.

Social democracy creates public institutions that control the means of production within their fields. But the public institutions tend to be confined to education, health care, transport and other civil services. They don’t extend out to the industrial wing of the economy.

So if you want meaningful democracy, you’re going to be doing some social democracy at some point in your transition. Freaking out at people who organize towards publicly financed colleges and hospitals and calling them evil imperialists will do nothing to advance the cause of public ownership in the industrial sector.

the short term overall standard of living is raised

But we’re no longer in the short term. Scandinavian social democracy has been ongoing since the 60s. That’s three generations worth of living standards which have largely leveled off and even begun to decline relative to their Eastern peers as neoliberal trade chews into proletariat standards of living. Scandinavian states were explicitly neutral during the Cold War and avoided the imperialist impulses of their southern peers. THIS is the windfall they reaped into the end of the 20th century.

However, people in the west enjoyed a far higher standard of living than people in the countries the west has been subjugating

This has been less and less true since the 90s, as the western states become heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports. It is the Middle Eastern bloc that’s seen all the real material benefits of imperial subjugation. Dubai and Riyahd and Amman and even Tehran have seen enormous windfalls. Folks in London and Boston and Berlin have not. Standards of living in Scandinavian states are slipping and poverty is rising (abet marginally).

If you look at the supply chains for practically any goods, such as cell phones, you’ll see that most of the resources needed to produce these goods are extracted in places like Africa using slave labor.

Scandinavian social democracy has nothing to do with American / East Asian materials extraction patterns. What’s more, as Chinese business interests take over traditionally western owned-and-operated enterprises along the African coastline, quality of life is improving. We saw this first in South Africa, as it joined the BRICS block and pivoted away from reliance exclusively on US/UK monetary policy. But we’re seeing it in Somalia, Kenya, Madagascar, and the DRC as well.

Should we laud Scandinavians because their purchase of electronics is finally becoming a boon for African miners? Should we laud democratic socialism for this transition? Of course not. Neither should we defame it for the atrocities committed by American, English, French, and Spanish post-colonial corporate thugs. No more than we should blame a shopper at an American grocery store for the crimes committed by the United Fruit Company.

I’m talking about how Cuba behaves as a nation and we can also look at how USSR behaved.

Cuba’s trade practices are strictly regulated by the American Navy and Coast Guard. Meanwhile, their retail markets and agricultural/biotech exports are what would inevitably draw in the exact same criminally sourced consumer goods. This isn’t a problem of Cuban (or Nordic) social democracy. It is a problem of foreign monopolistic exporters in occupied regions of the global south. And the Scandinavians, at least, lack a meaningful contribution to that project. The citations you link to are token at best. Akin to blaming Poland for the invasion of Iraq in '03.

USSR did not subjugate other nations the way the west does, and when it collapsed the standard of living in places like Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea also collapsed because they had a mutually beneficial relationship with USSR.

At which point they had to reorganize and reestablish new trade ties in order to rebuild their living standards. But this had to do with access to developed industrial capital, not the exploitation of labor through imperial expansion.

Democratic Socialism is just a the sheep’s clothing of imperialism.

Implementing public professional services in the domestic market (or not) has no impact on your foreign policy.

the conditions of the working class are also improved by imperialism

I think that’s highly debatable. If nothing else, imperialism undermines domestic labor power, as domestic workers are devalued at the industrial level and shuttled off into police/military industries where they are more easily controlled from the top. But my main focus is on the industries where democratic socialism have the biggest impact. Health care, education, mass transit, and other service-sector work isn’t easily exported and won’t directly benefit from generically “cheaper” cost of living for a functionally poorer working class cohort.

many of the stable goods consumed by the people in Scandinavia are either partially or entirely sourced in colonized countries

These consumer goods exist within the private market. Imports undermine domestic labor and retail work is almost entirely privatized. There is no notable distinction between a Swedish democratic socialist shopping at ICA and a British constitutional monarchist shopping at Tesco. They both receive the same capitalist-driven benefits. Neither system is predicated on imperially supplied imports.

people in western countries enjoy a higher standard of living because of it

People in China enjoy a comparable (sometimes superior) standard of living despite it. People outside of western countries - particularly those in the Global South - can experience democratic socialism without any of the horrors of imperialism tacked on.

Democratic socialism and imperial economic expansionism are two independent political phenomena. One does not contribute to the other, save in contradiction. I might argue that Scandinavian democratic socialism is actively being undermined by imperialist political arrangements, as in the case of Finland joining NATO and ceding a large chunk of its surplus to militarization. Alternatively, one might look at how Worst Korea, the UK, and India have suffered sever living quality declines as neoliberal economic policy cannibalizes their public sector services.

The benefits of imperialism - particularly in the wake of the 21st century - do not appear to accrue to lay residents of these nations. They are entirely bound up in aristocratic cadres who can reinvest the surplus into imperial expansion. This pattern isn’t unique to the modern moment, either. It is the same story told during the Dutch post-30-years-War Era, the post-Civil War period, and the WW1-WW2 period.

Cuba would not exploit other countries if it wasn’t embargoed because exploitation isn’t inherent in Cuban economic system as it is under capitalism.

If you showed up in Havana with a cargo ship full of H&M clothing and electronics produced in a Samsung sweatshop and cosmetics tested on adorable animals and gold jewelry mined out of a West African slave pit, plenty of Cubans would receive them happily. This is commodity fetishism in action. Nobody understands the blood and toil that made these surplus goods appear and relatively few people are able to reconcile the information with how they live their lives.

Cubans who leave the island have absolutely no compunction at consuming right alongside their American peers. Americans who visit are never turned away because their money comes from a nation full of rapacious barbarians. There is nothing inherent to the Cuban economy that prevents it from absorbing the surplus labor of their neighbors. This is entirely a consequence of US foreign policy, executed with the belief that Cuban socialism cannot exist absent the cheap labor of their neighbors.

The Americans were wrong in the 1960s and again in the late 90s when they predicted the embargo would topple the Castro government. You’re wrong now. Democratic Socialism has nothing to do with Imperialist looting and plundering.

A great deal of western economy runs on exploitation of Latin America and Africa where western companies commit crimes against humanity on the daily basis.

Undeniably. But the benefit of this exploitation accrues first and foremost to the ownership class.

Scandinavian companies are directly involved in exploitation happening in developing countries

US cut-outs in Scandinavia function in much the same way as the 50-state strategy for the domestic arms industry. This secures political patronage by way of kickbacks and sinesures to elites within the Scandinavian domestic polity. But it does not benefit Scandinavians writ large. The beneficiaries are entirely within the foreign rooted patronage network and have contracted over time as the network grows more efficient.

Scandinavia is not a closed economy

The economic benefits of Scandinavian socialism are geographically and linguistically limited. Traveling overseas for medical care and education is a luxury, particularly when your conditions are chronic or time-critical. And the labor for these services is primarily sourced from the Scandinavian polity. They’re not importing a bunch of Global South doctors and teachers to get the cost of their socialized programs down.

the labor needed to make Scandinavia run happens in the countries the empire subjugates

The labor needed to make the Scandinavian Treats Network flow is a consequence of colonialism. But Treats trade through the privatized economy. There is no publicly financed cheap TVs, cars, and textiles service. And the benefits of these industries accrue primarily to the bourgeois not the proletariat. That is why they’re the focus of intensive advertising and other consumerist propaganda. Nobody in Scandinavia needs to spend millions during the local soccer tournament to promote the public mail service or the local judiciary in order to garner support for it. Its the newest FIFA title and scammy financial products and the fanciest luxury watch brands and clothing styles that get the lion’s share of promotion. None of those are consequences of Democratic Socialism.

Cuba is indeed a far more principled example of socialist policies in action.

Cuba isn’t “principled”, its “embargoed”. Cubans would be more than happy to get the Scandinavian tier of treats if they were on offer.

But my point is that Cuba can still deliver public services despite being cut off from treats networks. These are distinct systems of trade.

The whole western economy runs on cheap labour and resource extraction from the colonized countries

A great deal of the western economy runs on cheap imports from industrial rivals, like China and India. But Chinese standard of living has been improving by leaps and bounds, approaching (and in cases exceeding) their western peers. I don’t think it is fair or accurate to say that a Nordish person working in the O&G sector and using an Apple phone is somehow profiting off the back of Chinese labor any more than a Chinese person using a fossil-fuel powered device while working in a phone assembly plant is profiting off Nordic extracted labor.

Scandinavian social democracy only seems to work because of the imperialism they practice on third world countries

The articles you’re citing largely focus on the weapons export industry, the knock-on-effects of fossil fuels, and the relationship between economies as a whole. They fail to discuss either the scope or benefit afforded to individual Scandinavians, relative to the handful of senior executives and majority stakeholders in these industries.

To say the US democratic model or the Middle Eastern monarchy model are predicated on imperialism would be far more accurate. But, again, the flow of trade is heavily biased towards a minority of residents. The real benefit of Scandinavian socialism isn’t that it grants access to cheap consumer goods. You can get that anywhere - from Qatar to Haiti to Taiwan - without any regard to the social system. The benefit of the Scandinavian model is in how it delivers professional health care and education labor. That’s the primary appeal of the system and it has nothing to do with cheap foreign imports.

Success of social democracy is not possible without inflicting inhumane suffering and oppression upon people in the global south

Success of social democracy is not predicated on the success of a consumerist market economy. Cuba is an excellent counterexample. It implements a raft of policies that are comparable to Scandinavian social services and reaps enormous economic benefits despite being entirely cut off from imperialist trade and cheap labor.

The real benefits of the consumer economy are the capitalist brokers, not the Scandinavian social democrats.

Is this accurate or overstated? I was under the impression the Nordic Model is more predicated on fossil fuel exports than straight-up slave labor (as compared to, say, economic success of The Philippines or India or Israel or Saudi Arabia, where dirt cheap labor from neighboring states is essential to operations). Nords would be poorer without fossil fuel exports, but they’d still function within the EU trade network and enjoy a basic post-industrial standard of life with high quality education, health care, and mass transit.

By comparison, the Pacific Rim satraps are all ruled by folks who make their money entirely off of an export market powered by dirt cheap human labor. The shipping and vacation industries through the Pacific Islands are entirely a function of indentured labor. The agricultural industry is entirely plantation labor. Its a very different beast.