Reddit mentions of The Nordic Model of Welfare: A Historical Reappraisal

All Scandinavian countries have been in the process of decentrilization for the last 4-5 decades. Its been a slow transition from nationalized industries and companies to privatized markets with strong welfare programs. The changes in the tone of the red greens from revolutionary to just a left-wing party with regards to Danish politics, is not only a clear sign of this phenomenon, but also indicative of the fact that not only are they not revolutionary, but they're moving further and further away from it. This goes for all the other parties in Denmark, and most of Scandinavia. There is nobody who wants to de-privatize the entire market and turn it into stateless communes, nothing even close. They're all toying with different versions of welfare states, in which the grand majority of the nation's GDP will be private and allocated on free-market systems.


This has been the story of the Scandinavians over the past 40-50 years. They were always close leaders of Marx and other revolutionaries, and had been applying their ideas for a long time. I'm from Canada, and our early labour movements in the late 1800s and early 1900s benefitted from Fins migrating to Canada, who were already very radical communists. Nonetheless, over the years, with advancements in the social sciences, sciences and technology, they started to notice that Marx's criticism of capitalism was spot on! However, his solution wasn't as well formed as we thought. The path to prosperity, they learned was, letting the markets do their jobs because their way better at allocating goods and services, and then taxing the living crap out of the wealthy (and middle class), so that we see literally no homelessness or poverty (which they virtually don't when compared to their OECD counterparts). I mean, its not the craziest thing to believe that some old philosophers of revolutionaries from the 1800s might not know how to properly protect the proletariat in a world run by computers, automated machines, jets and planes that fly across the world in a few hours, wireless communication and algorithms shaping our decisions in a world 8x bigger than their's. Also, Marx was actually a fan of capitalism and read Adam Smith carefully. He himself didn't even offer a clear solution, because he believed it was a deterministic process (historical materialism) and that communism was an inevitability, not something that was necessarily going to be forced through activism. The means of production will advance and become so productive that we will have to allocate resources top-down, rather than some invisible hand. But along the path, he did believe, communist societies actually wouldn't be ideal.


I think this inkling that you have, that there is a strong revolutionary spirit among working classes across the West to bring about full-fledged communism or socialism, I think you have it overblown. There are young college educated kids who's lives are in good condition who tend to want that, but most super poor people in the West will look at you funny if you go, "Hey, what if we took every owner, took the company away from them, and made ourselves the owners!" They would look at you funny. Most people you're talking about within these parties simply have different views on how a welfare-state should be run, but they all deeply believe in markets. You can be anti-capitalist and still believe in markets, they're not mutually inclusive. There's nothing wrong with trading things, its about which types of trading/exchange/economic system leads to suffering and oppression for the working class. I think the Scandinavians found they still had a lot of hunger and oppression under nationalist/communist societies they evolved out from. They saw welfare states actually bring the goods in more effectively. And the red greens, along with most Danish parties that have been around for decades, have completely changed their tone on communism and revolution.

I would recommend you read this book, its a staple on the history of the Nordic Model, it outlines in details how the parties (and other Scandinavian ones) have evolved over the past century, - https://www.amazon.ca/Nordic-Model-Welfare-Historical-Reappraisal/dp/8763503417


And this is a good paper that condenses this books info - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/20004508.2018.1429768

Side-note, this is an interesting passage -

>in a thought-provoking essay, Terry Eagleton, a visiting professor at Lancaster University, in England; the National University of Ireland; and the University of Notre Dame, explains that Marx's view of capitalism was more nuanced than simple hatred. He writes:

>"This is not to suggest for a moment that Marx considered capitalism as simply a Bad Thing, like admiring Sarah Palin or blowing tobacco smoke in your children's faces. On the contrary, he was extravagant in his praise for the class that created it, a fact that both his critics and his disciples have conveniently suppressed. No other social system in history, he wrote, had proved so revolutionary. In a mere handful of centuries, the capitalist middle classes had erased almost every trace of their feudal foes from the face of the earth. They had piled up cultural and material treasures, invented human rights, emancipated slaves, toppled autocrats, dismantled empires, fought and died for human freedom, and laid the basis for a truly global civilization. No document lavishes such florid compliments on this mighty historical achievement as The Communist Manifesto, not even The Wall Street Journal."