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> To counter the obvious success of the Nordics, some will define them as actually capitalist. That's because they are. They have privately-owned companies, wh
by msla 6y ago
> To counter the obvious success of the Nordics, some will define them as actually capitalist.
That's because they are. They have privately-owned companies, which is directly antithetical to the definition of Socialism as it's been understood since the 19th Century. You might as well insist America was Socialist during the New Deal.
> “welfare state capitalism,”
Historically, the welfare state was invented by Otto von Bismarck specifically to counter Socialism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck
> A master of complex politics at home, Bismarck created the first welfare state in the modern world, with the goal of gaining working class support that might otherwise go to his Socialist opponents.
This seems to define Socialism as per the old joke: "Socialism is when the government does stuff. The more the government does, the Socialister it is." That's a really neat way to insist you can have Socialism without having to solve any of the problems Socialism ran into in the previous century.
- kennywinker 6y ago> You might as well insist America was Socialist during the New Deal. People did. And the new deal is exactly what democratic socialists in the us are trying to evoke. E.g. “the green new deal”. I don’t think we have to deal in absolutes. You can be partially socialist, with some private corporations and some state owned. It’s not black and white, it doesn’t have to be.
- msla 6y agoI'd be a lot more open to this if the Socialist countries and the Capitalist countries hadn't spent the last half of the previous century at each others' throats. In any event, we have a term for New Dealism and what Norway is and everything similar: Liberal Democracy with a Welfare State. The problem is, in the US, the Republicans have been insulting that model by calling it Socialist for so long that people think that's what Socialism is and then insist they are Socialist when the idea of regulated Capitalism and a social safety net sounds good to them.
- Fnoord 6y agoThey're social democracies, like many Western European countries (such as Germany, The Netherlands, France, ...). They're capitalist and socialist at the same time, with a nuanced pragmatism on what priority is applied where. Sometimes one prevails, sometimes the other. The Nordic/Scandinavian countries are, arguably, the most socialist of all social democracies. For example, they have the most advanced welfare system, and pay the most tax.