I’ve been dealing with a fairly aggressive Cold Warrior boomer from the US lately. When I counter their red baiting with criticisms of American liberalism, the person insists that they’re not actually a lib, but rather a Nordic-style socdem.
Does anyone guide me to any good communist criticisms of the Scandinavian capitalist states?
Pic possibly unrelated.
Not really, that is something that was pushed by americans who were opposed to even minor reform, SK is way worse for example. How is SK more advanced btw?
The main thing I'd look at is how most of the current proponents of the "nordic model" are just neolibs who want to dismantle it a bit slower. That or they're ethnonationalists.
Yeah, I do get the impression that the high water mark for welfare and workers’ rights in those societies was the 1970s, and they’ve slowly been eroded since then. Do you know any good introductory resources on this?
I wish I could tell you. My knowledge of South Korea comes more from experience and also from marrying into a Korean family. They're all a bunch of prosperous liberals, but they fucking hate the IMF and the Japanese (during the colonial period but also beyond). The best I can do is to recommend talking with a Korean person, if you can. You'll probably get a lot of lib or even fascist shit, at first, but the IMF and the Japanese really do drive most, if not all of them absolutely up the fucking wall, and that can be a great pathway toward thinking systemically about their country's problems, as well as socialism generally. They have a pretty bad impression of leftwing politics, however, because they look at North Korea as a failed state, something as an annoying Trotskyist I don't totally disagree with.
As I think about it, the best books I've read about Korea are actually both about North Korea. "The Cleanest Race" and "Without You, There Is No Us" are both highly critical of North Korea, but they're a step above most other Korea-related books in English because at least the authors speak Korean and have both spent some time in North Korea itself. Both also do have a lot of information about South Korea, particularly The Cleanest Race—which is about how leftwing politics in Korea can veer into very weird racial nationalism.
The point about nordic suicide came in the endless debates I have with my left-lib dad. His point was that if things are so great there, why does anyone kill themselves? There's some data on this here:
https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/0ef32604-en/index.html?itemId=/content/component/0ef32604-en#:~:text=Latvia%2C%20Slovenia%2C%20Korea%2C%20Lithuania,lowest%20and%20highest%20suicide%20rates.
I believe I also found that suicide rates in the Soviet Union were actually pretty low until the 1970s, when they started trending upward. Then they of course exploded in places like Russia when the USSR vanished.
Of course it's because of a comparatively robust welfare system and protections for workers and NOT due to a culture where men are taught to repress their emotions, a Protestant work ethic, the fact that it's dark and miserable for half the year or any number of other reasons! Americans truly have brains made of putty
🍔s gonna 🍔
One of the points to help is that the Nordics were also similarly known for suicide before welfare policies took effect. Just that it didn't become a popular talking point until the 60's when Anglos started using it as a way to critisize welfare programs and any amount of planned economy, pushed by Dwight Eisenhower and his CIA pals.
Interesting. Yeah, I assume (but am not completely sure) that terrible weather must be a factor in any given country's suicide rates. I know that suicide tends to spike in the early spring here in the USA.
Here are some happy Finns from the late 1800s
Also, here's a poem all about that jolly, carefree Nordic living
Point is, life was kind of ass for the average person until the 20th century and we've had a propensity to be a bit grim way before the Nordic Welfare State became a thing