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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Its so easy to forget all the garbage games that got churned out 20 years ago. Even the good games - your FF7s and Warcraft 2s - had their share of notorious glitches.
The ability to patch a game after release has definitely not improved first-iteration releases. But you can go out and get a copy of Skyrim or Resident Evil 7 or Dragon Quest 9 and play it with a very reasonable degree of confidence that it will work end-to-end as intended. You can’t say the same thing about Super Mario 64 or Mortal Kombat 3. Hell, the whole speedrunning community has to distinguish between “glitched” and “glitchless” runs, precisely because finding glitches in classic games is such a pivotal part of beating them in record times.