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hussyknee · 4 months ago

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It says a lot that Global South people are far more concerned about finding out about the conditions of Palestinians, building trust with Palestinian blogs and their vetting processes and actually finding which GoFundMes to donate to, whereas white and western users first and foremost question is who the scammers are and whether they're getting scammed. And then they can't understand why the white right wing and "fiscally conservative" liberals in their own countries, who distrust the government more than the left and associate poverty and opportunism with minorities, don't want to expand welfare and social security.

It's for the same reason as why you think scammers proliferate more than the millions of people in need, and distrust any minority representatives that offer accountability and advocate for themselves. Why you seek to validate that distrust instead of trying to find information and processes that enable you to trust. The difference between domestic and foreign issues is that white leftists are often poor themselves or live within proximity to poverty and recognise that they themselves are in need of social safety nets. So the brunt of their racist indifference and paranoia of the Other is turned against the people of the Global South victimized by the same colonial capitalist and imperialist military systems.

Paranoia that your empathy, emotional labour and wealth will be exploited is part of white colonial anxiety, that resents its own guilt and sees oppression primarily as a weapon that can be turned against the "privileged but innocent". It's why the tide of leftist support is turning against Palestine after nearly an year of genocide. Accountability for and cessation of the genocide might extract a heavy cost from their domestic politics, and the funds begging private citizens for financial aid are increasing by the thousands in proportion to the amount of tax money their governments are sending to blow those people up. Unable to pay this cost of their complicity, western liberals rationalize that their empathy for Palestine is being exploited and used to extort them. This is the racist fear that liberal Zionists so successfully leverage against Palestinians to sabotage their credibility, protests and cries for help and allyship. Today it's attacks against the credibility of GoFundMes, but in a few months liberals will be questioning the credibility of the genocide itself.

Propaganda works by giving people rationalizations, fallacies and false evidence for things they already want to believe. People are predisposed to despise vulnerability, believe themselves victimized when called to account, and cling to a comfortable status quo. These are the building blocks of fascism. Genocide, colonization and war is the status quo on which the Global North was built, especially the US, and Palestine is the first time this status quo has been so thoroughly disrupted since perhaps the Vietnam War. The easiest way to return to it is to not believe Palestinians, return to deprioritising foreign policy, and giving yourself license to ignore their cries for help by telling yourself that it's "too hard" to find trustworthy information. And Zionists are only too happy to provide justifications, rationalizations and "evidence" to do so.

You have perfect right to delete, block, scroll past or blacklist tags and do whatever you need to draw your own boundaries. That's not in question. What you do need to sit with and examine is this "distrust" and "anger at scammers". If your distrust of asks and GoFundMe accounts is not followed by the will to find and follow Palestinians accounts and trust that they have done all they reasonably can to verify a fundraiser; if you believe that scam accounts truly outnumber the desperate and displaced Gazans who cite internet access as essential to survival as food and water; if you're not willing to run some reasonable risk of being scammed just so you might end up helping a real family being genocided; if you don't consider whether the people casting doubt on the veracity of Palestinian users and GFMs and their vetting process might be racists and Zionist saboteurs speaking to your own biases; then your "distrust" is actually just racism. Are you really angry at scammers or are you trying to validate your distrust and decision to ignore pleas for help by deflecting the blame onto the asker?

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atalana · 6 months ago

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Rawiri Waititi's groundbreaking speech this week declaring Māori independence, because it's making me really emotional to watch and I think everyone needs to see this (video taken from this NZ Herald article)

Two days ago there were massive protests across Aotearoa, as the new right wing government put out a budget that cut funding to Māori in a wide range of sectors, threatening to destroy initiatives to boost Māori welfare that have been decades of work to set up. Here in parliament the leader of Te Pāti Māori (the Māori party) reminds everyone that Māori deserve sovereignty over their own country, and Te Pāti Māori will no longer allow themselves to be treated as second class citizens on their homeland. They have announced that they're working towards a separate Māori parliament, "by Māori, for Māori, to Māori, kaupapa. Not by Pākeha to Māori, we've had enough of that". Representatives from both the Labour and Green party have voiced their support.

It's a huge step in indigenous rights, and I can only hope that they're successful, and that this can be an inspiration to improve indigenous rights worldwide. (Anyone who wishes to sign the petition in support can find it here)

#aotearoa #nz politics #nzpol #rawiri waititi #indigenous rights #maori

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txttletale · 1 year ago

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Why does everything seem like you can only pick one of the two social systems of socialism/communism vs capitalism instead of a mixed economy? Like I live in a country with mixed economy social system, healthcare, lifestyle, telecommunications, public transport, etc, all have a govt/public system funded by taxes and kept at the lowest prices possible vs a privatised funded version where you get relatively finer services. And some systems kept completely out of private like research, military, prisons. I mean individual corruption never really stops, in both systems, so why not mix both to keep it in check? Like the lowest prices available as well as maximum upper limits set by the govt for things like food, make sure capitalism doesnt go haywire, but also allows it to form a competitive system for development. 🤔🤔🤔

there's nothing 'mixed' about this system. under capitalism, the state exists as an expression of bourgeois interests to maintain and enable the private sector, not as a separate thing (e.g.: who enforces private property rights? who gets called to physically prevent you from violating them using violence?). infrastructure and some degree of social safety net being paid for by the government are good for capital, because capitalists use infrastructure and need workers who are Alive. (to say nothing of the fact that 'government/public-funded' usually means that the government is writing huge checks to any myriad of private companies who are happily pocketing it). what you're describing is a capitalist system with a welfare state -- a fully capitalist system, in which the working class has to sell their labour to survive and that labour is directed towards the reproduction of capital rather than towards the fulfillment of any societal needs.

#ask

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beardedmrbean · 2 months ago

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A mother of eight has told of her lavish spending on a horse and breast enhancement surgery despite being on benefits.

Marie Buchan has been relying on taxpayer-funded handouts for 23 years, amounting to about £500,000.

But despite being jobless and living off of the state, the 42-year-old has been able to spend the money frivolously.

Ms Buchan, 42, who has been dubbed “The Welfare Queen”, told The Sun: “Being on benefits has never held me back from doing anything. I have had a lot of luxuries.”

The single mother, who lives in a four-bedroom house in Selly Oak, Birmingham, is among about 9.4 million people who are currently jobless, according to the Office for National Statistics. At the Labour Party conference on Tuesday, Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, vowed to “do everything we can to tackle worklessness”.

In her 23 years of claiming benefits, Ms Buchan’s annual income has fluctuated between £26,000 and £37,000.

While she admits she feels guilty for taking taxpayers’ money, she argued there was no incentive to work.

“I believe we are better off on benefits, because we get help in every area of our lives, whether that’s the rent, bringing up the kids, or bills,” she said. “You can access food banks or fuel vouchers. There’s a lot of help out there. I’ve completed six college courses on mechanics and social work, but I’m still sitting here claiming my benefits. I’ve done nothing with them. “It’s very easy to sit in the system for the rest of your life.”

In 2018, Ms Buchan caused outrage after travelling to Turkey to spend £1,500 on breast surgery.

After being met with widespread backlash, Ms Buchan insisted she had raised the money to pay for the procedure through car boot sales.

The following year it emerged that she had travelled abroad for surgery on her vagina. She again insisted she financed this from car boot sales.

“I did fly abroad to get the surgery, but it’s something I’ve come to regret,” she said. “It was all a very big mistake and it’s embarrassing for my kids.”

She faced further backlash after deciding to buy a horse with her benefits.

Aged 19, Ms Buchan gave birth to her first child Tia and entered the benefits system, giving up her career as a part-time carer.

In 2015, she appeared on This Morning and said the proposed £23,000 a year benefit cap would leave her short.

“I was on £26,000 at the time, meaning I only had £500 a week to survive on,” she said. “We are a big family, so half of it would go on our food shop alone.

“We also had the rent, the council tax and bills to worry about. The council only paid £45 per week towards rent and £16 per week towards council tax.”

#nunyas news #who'd have thunk it

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acti-veg · 8 months ago

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are you pro, or anti immigration for refugees? what do you think in regards to the immigration situation with sweden?

Well refugees aren’t emigrating so they can’t be counted in the category of immigration. Refugees have the legal right to claim asylum in any country, regardless of their immigration policies. Our right-wing media conflates the two groups (on purpose) but it’s very important that we don’t treat them as belonging to the same category.

I assume you’re talking about Sweden requiring non-EU labour migrants to have secured a monthly salary amounting to at least 80% of the gross median salary in Sweden to obtain a work permit. It will backfire, as similar policies always have across the EU. Labour migration is good for economies, this is a demonstrable fact that nobody seems to want to acknowledge anymore. Modern capitalism literally depends on underpaid migrant workers.

This is a policy informed by xenophobia rather than economics, and it’s sad to see Sweden going to same way we have in the UK. i would bet that it will be quietly watered down as soon as the relevant sectors (farming, manufacturing, care, medicine, service) feel the full effects. That’s exactly what happened in the UK less than a year after we implemented our own ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies.

In an ideal world (free from capitalism) the unfettered free movement of all peoples would be a human right, but if we’re talking purely national policy here and now then immigration of course needs to happen at a controlled rate to allow communities to adequately support, integrate and provide for their new members. That means a robust social welfare system, well-funded healthcare and education, and a true living wage. Of course, I support refugees as any reasonable person should.

#immigration #politics #refugees #asylum seekers #Sweden

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dailyanarchistposts · 5 months ago

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J.5.15 What attitude do anarchists take to the welfare state?

The period of neo-liberalism since the 1980s has seen a rollback of the state within society by the right-wing in the name of “freedom,” “individual responsibility” and “efficiency.” The position of anarchists to this process is mixed. On the one hand, we are all in favour of reducing the size of the state and increasing individual responsibility and freedom but, on the other, we are well aware that this rollback is part of an attack on the working class and tends to increase the power of the capitalists over us as the state’s (direct) influence is reduced. Thus anarchists appear to be on the horns of a dilemma — or, at least, apparently.

So what attitude do anarchists take to the welfare state and attacks on it?

First we must note that this attack on “welfare” is somewhat selective. While using the rhetoric of “self-reliance” and “individualism,” the practitioners of these “tough love” programmes have made sure that the major corporations continue to get state hand-outs and aid while attacking social welfare. In other words, the current attack on the welfare state is an attempt to impose market discipline on the working class while increasing state protection for the ruling class. Therefore, most anarchists have no problem defending social welfare programmes as these can be considered as only fair considering the aid the capitalist class has always received from the state (both direct subsidies and protection and indirect support via laws that protect property and so on). And, for all their talk of increasing individual choice, the right-wing remain silent about the lack of choice and individual freedom during working hours within capitalism.

Secondly, most of the right-wing inspired attacks on the welfare state are inaccurate. For example, Noam Chomsky notes that the “correlation between welfare payments and family life is real, though it is the reverse of what is claimed [by the right]. As support for the poor has declined, unwed birth-rates, which had risen steadily from the 1940s through the mid-1970s, markedly increased. ‘Over the last three decades, the rate of poverty among children almost perfectly correlates with the birth-rates among teenage mothers a decade later,’ Mike Males points out: ‘That is, child poverty seems to lead to teenage childbearing, not the other way around.’” [“Rollback III”, Z Magazine, April, 1995] The same charge of inaccurate scare-mongering can be laid at the claims about the evil effects of welfare which the rich and large corporations wish to save others (but not themselves) from. Such altruism is truly heart warming. For those in the United States or familiar with it, the same can be said of the hysterical attacks on “socialised medicine” and health-care reform funded by insurance companies and parroted by right-wing ideologues and politicians.

Thirdly, anarchists are just as opposed to capitalism as they are the state. This means that privatising state functions is no more libertarian than nationalising them. In fact, less so as such a process reduces the limited public say state control implies in favour of more private tyranny and wage-labour. As such, attempts to erode the welfare state without other, pro-working class, social reforms violates the anti-capitalist part of anarchism. Similarly, the introduction of a state supported welfare system rather than a for-profit capitalist run system (as in America) would hardly be considered any more a violation of libertarian principles as the reverse happening. In terms of reducing human suffering, though, most anarchists would oppose the latter and be in favour of the former while aiming to create a third (self-managed) alternative.

Fourthly, we must note that while most anarchists are in favour of collective self-help and welfare, we are opposed to the state. Part of the alternatives anarchists try and create are self-managed and community welfare projects (see next section). Moreover, in the past, anarchists and syndicalists were at the forefront in opposing state welfare schemes. This was because they were introduced not by socialists but by liberals and other supporters of capitalism to undercut support for radical alternatives and to aid long term economic development by creating the educated and healthy population required to use advanced technology and fight wars. Thus we find that:

“Liberal social welfare legislation … were seen by many [British syndicalists] not as genuine welfare reforms, but as mechanisms of social control. Syndicalists took a leading part in resisting such legislation on the grounds that it would increase capitalist discipline over labour, thereby undermining working class independence and self-reliance.” [Bob Holton, British Syndicalism: 1900–1914, p. 137]

Anarchists view the welfare state much as some feminists do. While they note, to quote Carole Pateman, the “patriarchal structure of the welfare state” they are also aware that it has “also brought challenges to patriarchal power and helped provide a basis for women’s autonomous citizenship.” She goes on to note that “for women to look at the welfare state is merely to exchange dependence on individual men for dependence on the state. The power and capriciousness of husbands is replaced by the arbitrariness, bureaucracy and power of the state, the very state that has upheld patriarchal power.” This “will not in itself do anything to challenge patriarchal power relations.” [The Disorder of Women, p. 195 and p. 200]

Thus while the welfare state does give working people more options than having to take any job or put up with any conditions, this relative independence from the market and individual capitalists has came at the price of dependence on the state — the very institution that protects and supports capitalism in the first place. And has we have became painfully aware in recent years, it is the ruling class who has most influence in the state — and so, when it comes to deciding what state budgets to cut, social welfare ones are first in line. Given that such programmes are controlled by the state, not working class people, such an outcome is hardly surprising. Not only this, we also find that state control reproduces the same hierarchical structures that the capitalist firm creates.

Unsurprisingly, anarchists have no great love of such state welfare schemes and desire their replacement by self-managed alternatives. For example, taking municipal housing, Colin Ward writes:

“The municipal tenant is trapped in a syndrome of dependence and resentment, which is an accurate reflection of his housing situation. People care about what is theirs, what they can modify, alter, adapt to changing needs and improve themselves. They must have a direct responsibility for it … The tenant take-over of the municipal estate is one of those obviously sensible ideas which is dormant because our approach to municipal affairs is still stuck in the groves of nineteenth-century paternalism.” [Anarchy in Action, p. 73]

Looking at state supported education, Ward argues that the “universal education system turns out to be yet another way in which the poor subsidise the rich.” Which is the least of its problems, for “it is in the nature of public authorities to run coercive and hierarchical institutions whose ultimate function is to perpetuate social inequality and to brainwash the young into the acceptance of their particular slot in the organised system.” [Op. Cit., p. 83 and p. 81] The role of state education as a means of systematically indoctrinating the working class is reflected in William Lazonick words:

“The Education Act of 1870 … [gave the] state … the facilities … to make education compulsory for all children from the age of five to the age of ten. It had also erected a powerful system of ideological control over the next generation of workers … [It] was to function as a prime ideological mechanism in the attempt by the capitalist class through the medium of the state, to continually reproduce a labour force which would passively accept [the] subjection [of labour to the domination of capital]. At the same time it had set up a public institution which could potentially be used by the working class for just the contrary purpose.” [“The Subjection of Labour to Capital: The rise of the Capitalist System”, Radical Political Economy Vol. 2, p. 363]

Lazonick, as did Pateman, indicates the contradictory nature of welfare provisions within capitalism. On the one hand, they are introduced to help control the working class (and to improve long term economic development). On the other hand, these provisions can be used by working class people as weapons against capitalism and give themselves more options than “work or starve” (the fact that the attacks on welfare in the UK during the 1990s — called, ironically enough, welfare to work — involves losing benefits if you refuse a job is not a surprising development). Thus we find that welfare acts as a kind of floor under wages. In the US, the two have followed a common trajectory (rising together and falling together). And it is this, the potential benefits welfare can have for working people, that is the real cause for the current capitalist attacks upon it. As Noam Chomsky summarises:

“State authority is now under severe attack in the more democratic societies, but not because it conflicts with the libertarian vision. Rather the opposite: because it offers (weak) protection to some aspects of that vision. Governments have a fatal flaw: unlike the private tyrannies, the institutions of state power and authority offer to the public an opportunity to play some role, however limited, in managing their own affairs.” [Chomsky on Anarchism, p. 193]

Because of this contradictory nature of welfare, we find anarchists like Noam Chomsky arguing that (using an expression popularised by South American rural workers unions) “we should ‘expand the floor of the cage.’ We know we’re in a cage. We know we’re trapped. We’re going to expand the floor, meaning we will extend to the limits what the cage will allow. And we intend to destroy the cage. But not by attacking the cage when we’re vulnerable, so they’ll murder us … You have to protect the cage when it’s under attack from even worse predators from outside, like private power. And you have to expand the floor of the cage, recognising that it’s a cage. These are all preliminaries to dismantling it. Unless people are willing to tolerate that level of complexity, they’re going to be of no use to people who are suffering and who need help, or, for that matter, to themselves.” [Expanding the Floor of the Cage]

Thus, even though we know the welfare state is a cage and part of an instrument of class power, we have to defend it from a worse possibility — namely, the state as “pure” defender of capitalism with working people with few or no rights. At least the welfare state does have a contradictory nature, the tensions of which can be used to increase our options. And one of these options is its abolition from below!

For example, with regards to municipal housing, anarchists will be the first to agree that it is paternalistic, bureaucratic and hardly a wonderful living experience. However, in stark contrast with the right who desire to privatise such estates, anarchists think that “tenants control” is the best solution as it gives us the benefits of individual ownership along with community (and so without the negative points of property, such as social atomisation). The demand for “tenant control” must come from below, by the “collective resistance” of the tenants themselves, perhaps as a result of struggles against “continuous rent increases” leading to “the demand … for a change in the status of the tenant.” Such a “tenant take-over of the municipal estate is one of those sensible ideas which is dormant because our approach to municipal affairs is still stuck in the grooves of nineteenth century paternalism.” [Ward, Op. Cit., p. 73]

And it is here that we find the ultimate irony of the right-wing, “free market” attempts to abolish the welfare state — neo-liberalism wants to end welfare from above, by means of the state (which is the instigator of this individualistic “reform”). It does not seek the end of dependency by self-liberation, but the shifting of dependency from state to charity and the market. In contrast, anarchists desire to abolish welfare from below. This the libertarian attitude to those government policies which actually do help people. While anarchists would “hesitate to condemn those measures taken by governments which obviously benefited the people, unless we saw the immediate possibility of people carrying them out for themselves. This would not inhibit us from declaring at the same time that what initiatives governments take would be more successfully taken by the people themselves if they put their minds to the same problems … to build up a hospital service or a transport system, for instance, from local needs into a national organisation, by agreement and consent at all levels is surely more economical as well as efficient than one which is conceived at top level [by the state] … where Treasury, political and other pressures, not necessarily connected with what we would describe as needs, influence the shaping of policies.” So “as long as we have capitalism and government the job of anarchists is to fight both, and at the same time encourage people to take what steps they can to run their own lives.” [“Anarchists and Voting”, pp. 176–87, The Raven, No. 14, p. 179]

Ultimately, unlike the state socialist/liberal left, anarchists reject the idea that the cause of socialism, of a free society, can be helped by using the state. Like the right, the left see political action in terms of the state. All its favourite policies have been statist — state intervention in the economy, nationalisation, state welfare, state education and so on. Whatever the problem, the left see the solution as lying in the extension of the power of the state. They continually push people in relying on others to solve their problems for them. Moreover, such state-based “aid” does not get to the core of the problem. All it does is fight the symptoms of capitalism and statism without attacking their root causes — the system itself.

Invariably, this support for the state is a move away from working class people, from trusting and empowering them to sort out their own problems. Indeed, the left seem to forget that the state exists to defend the collective interests of the ruling class and so could hardly be considered a neutral body. And, worst of all, they have presented the right with the opportunity of stating that freedom from the state means the same thing as the freedom of the market (so ignoring the awkward fact that capitalism is based upon domination — wage labour — and needs many repressive measures in order to exist and survive). Anarchists are of the opinion that changing the boss for the state (or vice versa) is only a step sideways, not forward! After all, it is not working people who control how the welfare state is run, it is politicians, “experts”, bureaucrats and managers who do so (“Welfare is administered by a top-heavy governmental machine which ensures that when economies in public expenditure are imposed by its political masters, they are made in reducing the service to the public, not by reducing the cost of administration.” [Ward, Op. Cit. p. 10]). Little wonder we have seen elements of the welfare state used as a weapon in the class war against those in struggle (for example, in Britain during the miners strike in 1980s the Conservative Government made it illegal to claim benefits while on strike, so reducing the funds available to workers in struggle and helping bosses force strikers back to work faster).

Anarchists consider it far better to encourage those who suffer injustice to organise themselves and in that way they can change what they think is actually wrong, as opposed to what politicians and “experts” claim is wrong. If sometimes part of this struggle involves protecting aspects of the welfare state (“expanding the floor of the cage”) so be it — but we will never stop there and will use such struggles as a stepping stone in abolishing the welfare state from below by creating self-managed, working class, alternatives. As part of this process anarchists also seek to transform those aspects of the welfare state they may be trying to “protect”. They do not defend an institution which is paternalistic, bureaucratic and unresponsive. For example, if we are involved in trying to stop a local state-run hospital or school from closing, anarchists would try to raise the issue of self-management and local community control into the struggle in the hope of going beyond the status quo.

In this, we follow the suggestion made by Proudhon that rather than “fatten certain contractors,” libertarians should be aiming to create “a new kind of property” by “granting the privilege of running” public utilities, industries and services, “under fixed conditions, to responsible companies, not of capitalists, but of workmen.” Municipalities would take the initiative in setting up public works but actual control would rest with workers’ co-operatives for “it becomes necessary for the workers to form themselves into democratic societies, with equal conditions for all members, on pain of a relapse into feudalism.” [General Idea of the Revolution, p. 151 and p. 276–7] Thus, for example, rather than nationalise or privatise railways, they should be handed over workers’ co-operatives to run. The same with welfare services and such like: “the abolition of the State is the last term of a series, which consists of an incessant diminution, by political and administrative simplification the number of public functionaries and to put into the care of responsible workers societies the works and services confided to the state.” [Proudhon, Carnets, vol. 3, p. 293]

Not only does this mean that we can get accustomed to managing our own affairs collectively, it also means that we can ensure that whatever “safety-nets” we have do what we want and not what capital wants. In the end, what we create and run by ourselves will be more responsive to our needs, and the needs of the class struggle, than reformist aspects of the capitalist state. This much, we think, is obvious. And it is ironic to see elements of the “radical” and “revolutionary” left argue against this working class self-help (and so ignore the long tradition of such activity in working class movements) and instead select for the agent of their protection a state run by and for capitalists!

There are two traditions of welfare within society, one of “fraternal and autonomous associations springing from below, the other that of authoritarian institutions directed from above.” [Ward, Op. Cit., p. 123] While sometimes anarchists are forced to defend the latter against the greater evil of “free market” capitalism, we never forget the importance of creating and strengthening the former. As Chomsky suggests, libertarians have to “defend some state institutions from the attack against them [by private power], while trying at the same time to pry them open to meaningful public participation — and ultimately, to dismantle them in a much more free society, if the appropriate circumstances can be achieved.” [Chomsky on Anarchism, p. 194] A point we will discuss more in the next section when we highlight the historical examples of self-managed communal welfare and self-help organisations.

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vren-diagram · 10 months ago

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The Nordic model has been characterized as follows:[16]

An elaborate social safety net, in addition to public services such as free education and universal healthcare[16] in a largely tax-funded system.[17]

Strong property rights, contract enforcement and overall ease of doing business.[18]

Public pension plans.[16]

High levels of democracy as seen in the Freedom in the World survey and Democracy Index.[19][20]

Free trade combined with collective risk sharing (welfare social programmes and labour market institutions) which has provided a form of protection against the risks associated with economic openness.[16]

Little product market regulation. Nordic countries rank very high in product market freedom according to OECD rankings.[16]

Low levels of corruption.[19][16] In Transparency International's 2019 Corruption Perceptions Index, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden were ranked among the top 10 least corrupt of the 179 countries evaluated.[21]

A partnership between employers, trade unions and the government, whereby these social partners negotiate the terms to regulating the workplace amongst themselves, rather than the terms being imposed by law.[22][23] Sweden has decentralised wage co-ordination while Finland is ranked the least flexible.[16] The changing economic conditions have given rise to fear among workers as well as resistance by trade unions in regards to reforms.[16]

High trade union density and collective bargaining coverage.[24] In 2019, trade union density was 90.7% in Iceland, 67.0% in Denmark, 65.2% in Sweden, 58.8% in Finland, and 50.4% in Norway; in comparison, trade union density was 16.3% in Germany and 9.9% in the United States.[25] Additionally, in 2018, collective bargaining coverage was 90% in Iceland, 88.8% in Finland (2017), 88% in Sweden, 82% in Denmark, and 69% in Norway; in comparison collective bargaining coverage was 54% in Germany and 11.7% in the United States.[26] The lower union density in Norway is mainly explained by the absence of a Ghent system since 1938. In contrast, Denmark, Finland and Sweden all have union-run unemployment funds.[27]

The Nordic countries received the highest ranking for protecting workers rights on the International Trade Union Confederation 2014 Global Rights Index, with Denmark being the only nation to receive a perfect score.[28]

Sweden at 56.6% of GDP, Denmark at 51.7%, and Finland at 48.6% reflect very high public spending.[29] Public expenditure for health and education is significantly higher in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden in comparison to the OECD average.[30]

Overall tax burdens as a percentage of GDP are high, with Denmark at 45.9% and both Finland and Sweden at 44.1%.[31] The Nordic countries have relatively flat tax rates, meaning that even those with medium and low incomes are taxed at relatively high levels.[32][33]

The United Nations World Happiness Reports show that the happiest nations are concentrated in Northern Europe. The Nordics ranked highest on the metrics of real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, having someone to count on, perceived freedom to make life choices, generosity and freedom from corruption.[34] The Nordic countries place in the top 10 of the World Happiness Report 2018, with Finland and Norway taking the top spots.[35]

I think a lot of people are missing that the Nordic model is:

generally very friendly to businesses

composed of largely organically set standards (workers rights secured by collective bargaining and trade-unions, not by a centralized authority) (as opposed to a centralized bureaucracy)

Largely structured to provide citizens with benefits that make workforce participation easier. The ordering of the social safety net and welfare state make it relatively easy to upskill and hold a job.

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lilacsmothership · 1 year ago

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In 1943, there was a piece published by a Polish economist called Michał Kalecki – it’s 7 pages long, there is no mathematics – in a journal called Political Quarterly. It’s called Political Aspects of Full Employment, and he asks the following question: If capitalism produces full employment as a public good for a sustained period of time, what happens to capitalism? One thing that happens is that the “right to manage” by managers becomes questioned because if labour can move costlessly from job to job, then they’re the ones that have the political power, particularly if the macroeconomic framework limits the ability of capital to move around and particularly if you have high social costs which are internalised by the workers themselves and redistributed. You will also generate inflation because if I can move costlessly from job to job because there is very full employment, very tight labour markets, then the only way businesses can pay is if they push up their prices – but I will then say I need more wages. He predicted the 1970s in 1943. His conclusion to this article is what will happen. He says they will find a political economist or two to declare that the situation is manifestly unsound, that books will be produced and reports will be written that say we need a change and that we need to bring back the market. That’s what happened.

Now, follow this one through for another 30 years for me. When you get to the 1970s, let’s think about what the world looks like. Labour share of national income across all OECD countries has never been higher. Capital share has never been lower. Profits were at an all-time low as a correspondence of this. Inflation was high. Political parties were strong, parliaments were strong, central banks were incredibly weak and capital was restricted in its movement. Now what happened for the next 30 years as we reversed all those things and we now live in a world not where we increase the demand for labour, not where we push up wages, not where we create inflation? We’ve created a globalised liberalised integrated world that produces structural deflation across the entire planet. We have chucked, collectively – depending on how you count it – up to 30 trillion dollars into the global money supply since 2009 – and there is no inflation, anywhere. That is an anti-Kalecki world. Basically, capital got organised in the 1970s and finally broke labour’s resistance to the ability to push down wages as a way of restoring the profit share, and they have done this on a global basis. Now, every regime undermines itself eventually. And what we’re seeing now, whether it’s in the form of Trump, whether it’s in the form of AfD, whether it’s in the form of the Front National, is a reaction to this one story – which social democrats have been implicated in heavily – that globalisation benefits everyone, in a world in which it produces manifest inequities and falling if not stangnant wages for the majority of the people that social democrats are supposed to represent.

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So why are the Swedes to blame for this? Here’s the fun part of the story. In 1974, Sweden was the most developed welfare state that there was – this was the social democratic paradise – and capital was feeling the squeeze. So, they came up with a proposal in the trade unions called the wage earners’ fund. And the idea was, we should really just leave social democracy behind and just get to socialism because things are going well, so we are going to declare a certain amount of profits excess profits, and we are going to use trade union money from this excess profit tax to buy the ordinary shares of the capitalists, and eventually, the workers will own everything. We are not going to expropriate them, we are not going to line them up and shoot them, we are going to buy them out. And it’s not even a leveraged buy-out. And here’s the interesting thing: in cash transfer terms, this is an incredible deal, right? Because what you’ve just said to Swedish capital is, we will use your profits to buy your shares, but you get the full value of your shares when we buy you out. It’s a money multiplier. So as a transaction, it’s a brilliant deal – take the deal. But they didn’t take the deal, they fought back. They mobilised, they spend 200 million dollars back then in the 1970s and 1980s advertising, campaigning, mobilising against this. Why? Because you wind back at Kalecki’s point. What this regime does is fundamentally challenge the right of capitalists to be capitalists. You’re taking away their identity, the reason for their existence. It’s not a cash transaction anymore, it’s a fight for who you are and the type of world you want to see. So the Swedes pushed us to the edge. Capital fought back. It started in Sweden, it went to the United Kingdom, it went to the United States, and eventually it caught Europe. And when we opened up the European Monetary Union project, we opened up the world’s largest common free zone of movement for capital – it’s in Europe, not the United States – and the consequences were a giant credit bubble, massively overbanked banking systems, and then a financial crisis that we are still trying to recover from.

— Mark Blyth @ Europe Calling: A New Deal for Europe (a Friedrich Ebert Stiftung event with Mark Blyth, Euclid Tsakalotos, Udo Bullmann, David Schäfer and Viktória Nagy)

I actually read that Kalecki article a while ago and I think I posted a quote from it. He really did basically predict the 1970s in 1943, and it’s really striking that when he described capital’s reaction to a strong welfare state and full employment, he described in 1943 a process that is still happening today.

(via ghost-of-algren)

reposted via because the old quote formatting is fucked up on new tumblr

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