True, it was initially quite a Marxist program, though at the time it was Marxist it was also considerably more ambitious: at one time the Scandinavian social-d

True, it was initially quite a Marxist program, though at the time it was Marxist it was also considerably more ambitious: at one time the Scandinavian social-democratic parties included among their goals the eventual ownership and democratic management of the means of production by the workers. Their main difference with the Communist Party was that they believed it could be accomplished through incremental, non-revolutionary, Parliamentary means. Today's Scandinavian Social-Democratic parties have jettisoned that part of their ideological history and no longer mention it much, though, and nowadays the idea of workers owning the means of production is not so popular, and even the state doing so is less popular than it was, with many privatizations taking place over the past 30 years. Today's dominant ideology is probably something more like Poul Nyrup Rasmussen's "flexicurity" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity), which is the idea that in terms of economic organization and control, the society should be fully market-based, not worker-owned, with things allocated by supply and demand, hiring and firing being easy, etc. But then there should also be taxation to provide for a safety net so the lower end of society doesn't fall too far. There are a few exceptions, for example health-care is still mostly non-market-based. I think I agree that the Cold War cemented some of this, but afaik the idea of a capitalist welfare state originated considerably earlier, some of it in Marx's writing itself. He argued that one way capitalism would defend itself would be to institute reformist measures to ameliorate the worst conditions of the working class, in order to keep them from revolting (Otto von Bismarck pioneered the "right-wing welfare state" in the 1880s for precisely this reason). Thus the argument among many Communist parties of the late 19th and earthly 20th centuries that the Social Democratic parties were just helping capitalists to delay revolution, and not fundamentally leftist parties. And then later, capitalist theorists like F.A. Hayek were in favor of a kind of capitalist welfare state (basic income, free hospital care, etc.).