Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id760504588
Is Finland more capitalist than socialist? Partanen and Corson aren’t entirely off base. If by socialism we mean the state socialism of the Soviet Union, it would be silly to call Finland socialist. The Nordic business sector is alive and well, as are electoral democracy and the press. Nor can we say that the Nordic countries have achieved democratic socialism. While unions are strong and the public sector accounts for a much larger share of the economy, it’s not as if workers own and control the means of production.
✏️ The complexities of what it means to be socialist, democratic socialist, state socialist, etc. 🔗 View Highlight
id760505295
state ownership and unionization in the Nordics are orders of magnitude larger than in the United States. “The Finnish government,” Bruenig writes, “owns nearly one-third of the nation’s wealth. For the United States to match that amount, the US government would need to move about $35 trillion of assets into public ownership.”
✏️ one socialist aspect 🔗 View Highlight
id760505306
union density? “Around 90 percent of Finnish workers are covered by a union contract. To get America up to Finnish levels, it would need to unionize an additional 119 million workers.”
✏️ Another socialist aspect 🔗 View Highlight
id760522635
Most important was labor militancy.
id760522155
A huge swath of the programs considered essential to the welfare state were passed during this period: universal elementary education, minimum pensions for families, universal day care, laws on occupational health and safety, and countless others. All were won through constant pressure from the labor movement and socialist parties, whether inside or outside the government.
id760522170
the Finnish welfare state was often a compromise that satisfied neither labor nor capital. When it came to some services — say, health insurance or old-age pensions — unions preferred that capitalists foot the entire bill, while business naturally were reticent about this prospect. The state then acted as a middleman — offering the service as a public provision and therefore giving workers the programs and security they craved while freeing capital of the responsibility. Both pitched in taxes to fund it.
id760522546
crucially, it was not something decided in a technocratic committee or won simply through a campaign of moral suasion— it was the organic product of thousands of different struggles, some of them stemming from the traditional labor movement, others from the women’s movement (for maternity payments).