this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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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.
Scandinavians are part of the US empire, and Scandinavian companies are directly involved in exploitation happening in developing countries. US does provide the military might to back this exploitation to be sure, but the resource and labour extraction is done by all western countries.
Except that it does since Scandinavia is not a closed economy. This the whole point here, much of the labor needed to make Scandinavia run happens in the countries the empire subjugates. You have to look at this in a holistic fashion accounting for all the labor needed to make these economies operate as opposed to just the labor that happens domestically.
Sure, the positive aspects of Scandinavian economies aren't exclusive to Scandinavia, and Cuba is indeed a far more principled example of socialist policies in action.
Undeniably. But the benefit of this exploitation accrues first and foremost to the ownership class.
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.
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 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 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.
Of course, but the conditions of the working class are also improved by imperialism and that's the reason there is sufficient support for ruling class policies from the working majority in the imperial core.
My point was that many of the stable goods consumed by the people in Scandinavia are either partially or entirely sourced in colonized countries. This eliminates a lot of the hard labor jobs in Scandinavia that would otherwise be necessary.
I'm not arguing that the proletariat are the primary beneficiaries of colonialism, I'm just pointing out that people in western countries enjoy a higher standard of living because of it. And this is a necessary part of the social contract that keeps capitalists in power.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Of course, undermining labor power is the point, but in the short term overall standard of living is raised. Eventually, the empire ends up hollowing out its core because the cost of maintaining the colonies starts to outpace the plunder. This is the point we're reaching now with standard of living starting to crumble in the west. However, people in the west enjoyed a far higher standard of living than people in the countries the west has been subjugating for many decades on end. This fact can't be understated.
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. Western countries don't even have this wealth of natural resources to lean on. They are robbing the rest of the world of these resources while subjugating the people of the colonized countries. The life of a Swedish democratic socialist or a British constitutional monarchist would be wildly different without the plunder the empire is doing.
The empire is indeed starting to hollow itself out today, but we can't ignore the history of how we got here. There are stages of development of the empire, and in the early stages most people living in imperial core did enjoy the benefits. As we get into later stages of the empire, the benefits are starting to fizzle for the majority.
I'm not talking about individualistic liberal perspective here. I'm talking about how Cuba behaves as a nation and we can also look at how USSR behaved. 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. When US empire collapses, the standard of living in the subjugated countries will rise. That's the difference.
Democratic Socialism is just a the sheep's clothing of imperialism.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
Implementing public professional services in the domestic market (or not) has no impact on your foreign policy.
Right, the standard of living is declining all across the empire, including Scandinavia. The difference is that there were stronger social safety nets erected at the peak, so the decline hasn't hit as hard as other places, such as US, with more shaky safety nets.
Not really, the west has continued to dominate the global south, and has a massive military presence across the globe. Western companies are extracting resources from Africa and other places at record pace today.
Of course it does, all the material good such as appliances, phones, laptops, TVs, and so on are produced using resources and labour done predominantly in the global south.
And the whole reason we're seeing countries increasingly preferring China to the west is precisely because China offers mutually beneficial relations as opposed to exploitative ones the west imposes.
You ignored my point that USSR was not under these restrictions and did not behave in the way you suggest. Given that Cuba being modelled on USSR politically, there is every reason to expect that Cuba would not behave in such a way either even if it was not under a blockade.
Again, the point here was that USSR was able to have positive mutually beneficial relations with their partners as opposed to exploitative ones the west imposes on weaker countries.
It's not possible to have any meaningful democracy when the means of production are owned privately. And foreign policy is very obviously influenced by this fact. To give you a concrete example, let's say you have a factory that's owned privately by a capitalist. The owner wants to reduce operating costs and increase profits. They have an incentive to move production to a cheaper labour market where they can exploit the workers more than they can at home. This creates a direct incentive for capitalists to colonize other countries and exploit them. On the other hand, let's say the same factory is cooperatively owned by the workers. They would have no incentive to move the factory to a cheaper labour market because they'd lose their jobs at that point. The incentive for imperialism is directly related to the economic system.
Which were rooted in domestic industry and professional services, not extractionary practices targeting populations abroad. The erosion of these social safety nets has matched the erosion of labor unions, socialist organization, and left-wing party activity within the Scandinavian states.
Western state control of the Global South has eroded with the outsourcing of US domestic industry abroad - particularly in the wake of the 1980s, when industry transplanted itself to the South Pacific. Latin American states are no longer dominated by western military juntas. African states are increasingly free of colonial and apartheidist regimes. South Pacific states are operating at parity with their western peers, rather than as occupied subordinates.
But even outside of this fact, the Scandinavian states are nearly non-existent in western foreign policy. Finland only just joined NATO, for instance. And only thanks to a collapse in European-Russian foreign policy relations, which I'd count as a mark against imperial domination rather than one in its favor.
The US actively embargoed Soviet States starting with the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1951. These sanctions continued into the 1990s and were slowly repealed under Clinton and then Bush in exchange for concessions by the United Russia government of Yeltsin and then Putin. What trade did occur was not inhibited by any some moral compunction of Soviet leaders. Exxon did business with the Soviets well into the 1980s, for instance.
That's simply not true. The USSR had strategic partnerships with a host of left-leaning governments. But these were driven by tactical considerations, not ethical ones. The Soviets were happy enough to trade with the Israelis all through the Cold War period and with both England and France for most of its history. Meanwhile, the Sino-Soviet split persisted for decades despite the mutual benefit a Russia/China alliance would have had both for the region and for international communism broadly.
Soviets would routinely aid domestic revolutionary forces against colonial governments if it suited their needs, but were happy enough to back Syrian military dictators and Romanian dipshit demagogues entirely out of Realpolitik.
Social democracy creates public institutions that control the means of production within their fields. But the public institutions tend to be confined to education, health care, transport and other civil services. They don't extend out to the industrial wing of the economy.
So if you want meaningful democracy, you're going to be doing some social democracy at some point in your transition. Freaking out at people who organize towards publicly financed colleges and hospitals and calling them evil imperialists will do nothing to advance the cause of public ownership in the industrial sector.
The reality is that it's both.
That's just a false narrative.
Scandinavian states participate in the plunder just like every other western bloc country. My cat can't doesn't get much say in how my house is run either, but it does benefit none the less.
USSR had an entire bloc around it and plenty of non aligned countries to trade with. US embargoes clearly didn't prevent USSR from being able to trade and to exploit countries if it chose to. The relations USSR developed with its partners were of a profoundly different kind than the ones western imperial powers have with the countries they subjugate today. The whole discussion here is regarding the exploitative nature of the relationship between the west and the global majority.
Social democracy can have a slight short term impact in these domains, the benefits however are never permanent and end up being rolled back in times of regular capitalist crises.
Social democracy isn't part of any transition, it's a mechanism that props up current capitalist relations.
Not sure what that's referring to even.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
What nascent leftists and left-liberals find appealing about the Scandinavian states are the high quality low cost public services.
I've explained what I mean here repeatedly in this thread. I don't know how much more clear I can make it. I'm not talking about things Nordic countries are producing. I'm talking about the basic necessities of life Nordic countries import that are produced by effective slave labour using resources extracted from the global south. This is what allows people living in these countries to focus on doing things like biotech.
Again, nowhere am I arguing with the fact that the empire is entering the stages of collapse.
This has dick-all with the point I'm making. Perhaps I'm not articulating it clearly enough?
These countries piggy back on US imperialism, they're getting the benefits of imperialism by being members of the system. Scandinavian companies get to plunder the global south along with the rest of the west, Scandinavians enjoy commodities extracted from the global south by the empire.
The case of Sweden shows that the democracies are curtailed by the domestic capitalists https://jacobin.com/2019/08/sweden-1970s-democratic-socialism-olof-palme-lo
And it will continue to be western political strategy as long as the capital owning class remains in power.
This has absolutely dick-all to do with their political configuration. It is a consequence of supply and trade routes wholly outside their command. Social Democracy as an organizing principle functions to create and administer domestic civil services and is, if anything, undermined by the process of outsourcing capital and labor demand. The quippy "Nords Bad Because Social Democracy" mischaracterized milquetoast liberalism on the periphery as the kind of expansionist imperialism that Scandinavian states have neither the capacity nor the interest in mustering.
Because of their geographic position and ethnic sympathies, not because of their political organization. Were Sweden positioned off the coast of West Africa or deep within the Amazon, it would have a completely different set of social relations. Bolivians and Senegalese socialists do not enjoy parallel social relations, despite desiring much the same in terms of housing, health care, education, and transportation as their Baltic peers.
A select group of Scandinavian business interests get a minority stake in the imperial projects of wealthier and more well-armed western nations, on the condition that they police and corral their native populations. The end result is a deteriorating public sector in Scandinavian states, as the profits of imperialism are plowed into neoliberal privatization at home. The benefits of social democracy are not defended by imperialism but clawed back. The institutions of social democracy are not girded but undermined.
Imperial tendency is adversarial to social democratic institutions and policies, as the profits go not to improved standards of living but greater degrees of surveillance, incarceration, coercion, and media-instigated hysteria.
That's the wages of empire. Not cheaper commodities and greater social comforts but grander delusions and more entrenched phobias.
The case in Sweden showed the bounty of neutrality in the wake of a continent-wide obliteration of domestic capital.
What's more...
This would posit a distinctly contrary view to what you're stating above. Far from sympathizing and allying with imperialist states, the Swedes continued their commitment to the non-aligned movement and to independent sovereignty both for themselves and for their Third World peers.
So, far from the narrative of imperialist calf-fattening, we're entering the 80s (a period of consumerist glut) and social democrats are falling out thanks to the conflict between public demand for cheap energy and local environmental activism. They're embracing neoliberal policies not out of hunger for foreign imports but due to a sag in the post-war boom.
These are not conquests of foreign territory but conquests within the Swedish economy of Swedish residents in opposition to foreign investors and military powers.
The Swedes yearn not for their own foreign feudal lands but for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It has everything to do with the political configuration, and I've already gave a direct contrast with USSR showing what relations look like with a socialist political configuration. Politics are inherently inseparable from economics.
They absolutely align with the US because of their political organization.
Nowhere have I argued that socialist structures benefit from imperialism. I'm arguing that the notion of social democracy doesn't actually work to hold back imperialism and capitalism which is its state goal.
No, it's not contrary to my view at all which is that social democracy doesn't work. Capitalist class that holds power gets their way in the long run. That's precisely what the article explains.
Yet, the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot be achieved via reformism. The whole system is explicitly built to promote the interests of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. You can't use the master's tools will to dismantle the master's house.
That doesn't get you from "Democratic Socialism" to "Imperialism", as evidenced by your own linked article.
Per your own linked article, they remained neutral even after the end of WW2 and sympathized more with the Non-Aligned states than either of the two Superpowers.
Alright, asshole. I think we're done.
That's not an argument I made anywhere. What I keep telling you is that democratic socialism provides a veneer of democracy for the masses which allows capitalism to operate. Capitalism is what's responsible for the imperialism.
Oh please, it's the height of dishonesty to pretend they were actually neutral after WW2.
I think we are done, you'll have to go make straw man arguments in a different thread now.