haha, wanted to quote the same passage with a diffrent reading. Yes, I think that democracy is the freedom of the slave owners basically, and there are other Lenin quotes where he shows that he isnt quite that sure that democracy is a good thing.

Once some party members asked Lenin why he doesnt allow any contradictary opinion in the bolshevic party and he answered that 'this was the dumbest thing he ever heard' or something.

In fact i believe that freedom is based on private property, because in a capitalist society i can make people work for me i i own private property, and i have to sell my workerpower if i dont own that private property.

What else could freedom mean more than this? Its certainly not what i do in my private room, since nobody is interested in that.

And im not sure how democracy will work if we abbandon all this freedom. also we will abandon equality. Equality befor the law is an inequality, because it ignores the class-diffrence and the money that one can spend to get a good lawyer.

so you want to claim that these anti-authorians are the way to go? i dont think adorno or the anarchist have alot of good content tbh. and the second international ended with world war I imo.

It seems to me that the debate about the upsides and downsides of communism vs capitalism should take into account the years in question. In 1820 and 1920 there were still a lot of important things to accomplish and create that might have been delayed a long time without the incentives capitalism provided. But in 2020 we have almost everything that people really care about (except for medical advances and a few other things) and the more important goal would be to see that most people get them.

I ddn't state that it was.

unique != immutable. Thanks for playing though.

If it is not immutable, then there is no reason for it to be unique.

The status of being unique can change.

You asserted that Scandinavian models "cannot be exported." There is no conditional on that statement to indicate that you think they could be exported when trust levels change in the lands importing them. Thus, either trust levels would have to be immutable, or else trust is not an definitive factor in their implementation - - something else would have to be blocking their implementations in places where trust was high if such a place could not import them. The latter goes against the core thesis of the author being quoted, so the former is the implication.

So, do you think trust levels are immutable, or are you merely a bad writer/quoter, and you actually think that implementing a Scandinavian model is pretty realistic, as long as public trust comes along in tow? If the latter, you agree with the liberals, congrats.

Democracy under capitalism has mostly consisted of 'warring brothers' as ruling class interests compete - Conservatives-land-owning class vs liberals-free market capitalists etc.. still in the US there is no workers' representatives party. What of social democracy? Interestingly in the UK the Labour party, a party of the trade union bureaucracy, has only had 3 periods of serious power, twice during the post war boom period where a national consensus meant that Tory and Labour politics were closely aligned, and again in 1997-2010 during a further consensus this time around a neo-liberal programme. So what is the purpose of democracy as applied to the working class and poor? It is double edged as Lenin states - capitalism has to give concessions to the workers, an illusion of control. But in giving this away the workers gain political understanding and therefore frustration in the political system and an opportunity for further struggle to develop, to spill over into other areas of public life. The workers can also apply pressure via the labour bureaucracy to win reforms via legislature, provided these reforms dont disrupt but support the running of the system eg. better health for a more productive workforce, unemployment benefit to account for a permanent level of unemployment to keep wages down etc etc... So yes Lenin is correct, the democracy of capitalism must be smashed along with all other forms of subjugation. It does not mean workers are expected to blindly follow a party line - though contextual examples would be given eg. in the civil war when conditions were unfavourable to socialism.

We can talk about the soviets but this creates confusion due to the USSR. A similar development took place during the Iranian revolution of 1979 (which btw is the reason the US consistently has Iran in its crosshairs, the despotic Shah was a US stooge, replaced by an anti-western Islamist government) with the formation of the shoras - workers councils, which organised strikes but also community activism eg. delivering food to the poor and desperate. These are the embryos of true workers' democracy - the active participation in public, economic, ideological and political life. It is also an interesting example of the role of the official communist parties - the Iranian communist party opposed the shoras and took a nationalist line.

ITT: People who have never actually put Scandinavia under a microscope to see how it really works or how it got where it is today.

Most of you may live in places where you're surrounded by people who think, act, and look like you do, but you are not representative of the average American. The social and economic problems of the US are not going to be solved by simply CTRL C / CTRL V the policies of {insert_nordic_nation_here}. Their way of life is incompatible with a nation as massive and diverse as the United States, especially in this age of such extreme "us vs them" mentality.

Sklansky is on to something in that capitalism built the world as it is today. Maybe it's preferable now to simply bring the innovation engine to a halt and instead focus on scraping more people off the bottom of the economic barrel. However, you can't have your cake and eat it, too. There's almost no short/medium-term return on investment for much of the spending required to bring about such extreme change on a massive scale. So, are you willing to risk that the "betterment of humanity" is going to be incentive enough for the best and brightest to continue doing their thing as efficiently as the profit-based model enables? Will we actually be asking for >100% efficiency, in order to keep up current levels of comfort for those who are doing all the heavy lifting, or do we start demanding wholesale sacrifices?

Are there any Nordic posters on the forum? Spill your dirty little secrets about life behind the pristine curtain of a socialist utopia.

Inso,

Yes, racists in America are an impediment to implementing the Scandinavian system, but no, they are not a reason why it cannot work. And you will note, Scandinavian economies have continued to grow at a pretty good pace "despite" their welfare state. No one should take as a given that giving money to poor and middle class people stagnates growth.

Dirty communist checking in.

I never post in this forum, but it is of course amusing reading your (and spewmachine's, and adios's) posts.

Why even bother writing those two sentences if you weren't going to provide any info? You've wasted both your time and mine.

Why do you think your country works as well as it does? What's in the secret sauce over there aside from free money?

Inso0 is incapable of seeing the word "Sweden" and not going full ******

goofyballer has the oddest of man-crushes on me.

I'm okay with it. No ****.


Still, I don't quite understand your three quotes there. The first post was true, the hue post was also true, and my response was actually just a tongue-in-cheek copy of someone's response to me when I had made a post similar to huehue's. You keep making these lolInso0 posts that just don't make any sense. Help me help you.

They don't make sense to you because you don't understand the ways in which you expose your own ignorance.

Everyone knows your post was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. The reason they laugh at you for it is because your tongue-in-cheek post is coming from a place of butthurt. You're like "ha ha, Huehue talking about Swedish history versus US history, because Sweden is super white, that's RACIST just like what people said to me the last time I tried it" when no, it's not the same, and by trying to joke about it you betray the fact that you have no idea why.

No idea why, what? Why people call me racist? I know why they do it, but I can't control other people's prejudices, so what do you want me to do about it? Deny it? Do you really think anyone is going to just say, "oh, well okay then" and leave it alone?

You calling me a racist doesn't make it true any more so than pretending cultural divides across race don't exist make them any less impactful on life in the US.

I don't think the homogeneity of Sweden is how they got to where they are today, but I do think it plays a very large role in the continuation of their success. Or rather, the very slow erosion of their universal welfare state. But I wanted Fabian to chime in with an opinion from the inside.

Where does he think things are trending in Sweden today?

No idea why what you said about Sweden is different than whatever you said that made someone call you racist.

Can we get a testable prediction for when the welfare state of Sweden will collapse by?

And you vigorously and enthusiastically support a system that treats black people and other groups as second class citizens. That makes you racist. If you don't think you are, change your politics.

"Collapse" is far too strong of a word. Maybe Fabian can come back and talk about the slow changes over the past 20 years or so.

I'm not ****ting on Sweden here. I don't believe I ever really have. Merely pointed out time and again that you can't just copy/paste their country onto ours and expect the same result.

We dont seem to fit the narrative you present, the nordic countries have big welfare states but their economies and innovation and jobs arent suffering to any degree. In fact quite the opposite seems to be the case, we are not only hanging in there, we are close to the top. I quote bloomberg:


“There’s something about those Nordic countries,” Bloomberg wrote when presenting its innovation index in 2017. The same seems holds true this year. In the 2018 Bloomberg Innovation Index the Nordic nations are featured in the top 15 countries.

The index ranks countries based on seven equally-weighted metrics using data collected from economic institutions like the World Bank and the IMF: R&D intensity, manufacturing value-added, productivity, high-tech density, efficiency of tertiary education, researcher concentration, and patent activity.




https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...n-as-u-s-falls

http://nordic.businessinsider.com/th...in-the-world--

I don't know. I do know that Megan McCardle et all aren't ideologically neutral observers. They bring up the lack of trust, not because they're lamenting that we can't have good things, but because they don't want the things the Nordic countries have here in the USA in the first place and many times actively push against them.

Not sure Sweden is more "homogeneous" than the US.

About 1 in 6 people in Sweden was born in another country, 2/3 of those born outside the EU. In the US the foreign born population is more like 1 in 7.

The percent of the population of Sweden that is Muslim is 2 or 3 times higher than is the percent of the population of the US that is Muslim.

Explain to me how this isn't like cherry-picking New York, New Jersey, Connecticutt, and Massachusetts out of the US. Surely if you restrict to the NE+California, the US beats everyone on every indicator imaginable.

The Scandinavian countries can't be considered independently of Spain and Italy and the rest, because that's their market ... and their cheap labor source.

There are two distinct reasons you could "not want the things the Nordic countries have." One is that you hate poor people, don't want to see reduced inequality, are bought and paid for by the Koch brothers, etc. That would suggest that your arguments are likely to be made in bad faith and are not worth engaging. The other is that you think "the things the Nordic countries have" would not produce good things if imported to the U.S. because [reasons]. That is a good-faith argument even if it's not "ideologically neutral" (whatever that means in the context of discussing the best social model!).

Relatedly, the Nordic model is obviously very successful, but there's an alarming tendency for observers to view "the Nordic social model" as a stand-in for "whatever I already thought was good." What are the differences between Denmark and France that, in your view, make France so much poorer than Denmark? What about high-tax, high-spending Greece? How do you square the belief that the new 21% tax rate for corporations is an abomination with your belief that the Swedish model of taxation and social spending (22% corporate rate) is great?

I shudder to agree with an Inso post, but a lot of Nordic boosterism sounds like nothing so much as a naive young Western development expert thinking about all the amazing modern institutions they are going to import into whatever poor country they are currently advising. A lot of those efforts did not go well, not because modern institutions aren't better than corrupt autocracies, but rather because the poor countries lacked the nebulous preconditions for the modern institutions to function appropriately.

... And missing the fact that the Nordic countries by and large have huge resource extraction businesses that are very location dependent. If it reminds you of Alaska that's not an accident...

...which you repeatedly assert based on nothing. Yeah, we know.

And good to know that your theory along these lines is also not falsifiable. Any change counts, and the collapse is always around the corner.