Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Document Notes
There’s something here. Lessons to be learned about how, even when you’re trying to take your society down the path of good, you have to keep that goal in mind while you’re building the stable economic framework. If you prioritize growth, and say that once we have some wealth hopefully we can redistribute.. that makes it an after thought. You are at the whims of capitalism and will abandon the latter stuff when crises occur. You can’t slave your values to the desire for growth at all costs.
Highlights
id763971666
he was still a key proponent of the Social Democratic economic thinking that social development was possible only through first increasing production and then distributing the proceeds.
✏️ Ernst Wigforss, finance minister of sweden’s past and driving ideological force of the party at times too. For all its socialist tendencies, Sweden never fulfilled its “promise” of economic democracy. They kept to the notion of capitalism/neoliberalism.. right? 🔗 View Highlight
id763972295
Olof Palme, party leader (1969–1986) and prime minister. During the 1980s, Olof Palme and the Social Democratic leadership changed their views in accordance with the global neoliberal turn. In some strange way, Palme followed in Wigforss’s footsteps, even though Palme’s hunt for economic growth took him, the party, and Sweden into the neoliberal desert instead of thirty years of growth
id763973111
The idea of the wage-earner funds came from the trade union movement, which managed to make this the party line in the early 1970s. The funds were intended as a way toward workers fully owning and controlling the private companies. The implemented reform, which was voted through parliament in 1983, however, ended up meaning that the funds, financed through an extra company tax, were to buy shares in companies (a maximum 8 percent of each company) and then use a maximum of half their shares to influence each company. But the funds were scrapped within a decade.
✏️ An attempt at creating economic democracy, but seems/sounds like it was half-hearted at best? The PM at the time watered it down to make it less threatening to capitalists. 🔗 View Highlight
id763973562
popular movements were the driving factor of periods of radicalization, and the party leadership and the parliamentary groups and bureaucrats the driving force behind periods of deradicalization
id763973755
How was the party’s right wing able to maintain its grip on the parliamentary groups and party bureaucracy for so long if the membership was consistently to the left? From where did the different parts of the movement get their forces in that moment, and where did they go? These are urgent questions for anyone who is interested in building and maintaining left-wing political power in our day.
id763973995
one economic dogma seems to have been constant: it was only through increased production that social reforms could be made possible. This was not a rejection of redistribution, but it meant that economic growth was the party’s highest priority and that it often prioritized cutbacks over redistribution. This has been proven time and time again, since the first occasion the party formed cabinets and onward
id763973999
The importance of convincing the electorate that you are indeed good managers of the economy is a lesson well needed for parts of the Left. People know that the system is unjust but tend to vote for an unjust system that they believe will put food on the table rather than for a just system that they don’t believe can achieve this.
id763974029
Since economic downturns generally affect the working class the hardest, these are the times where redistribution is most needed. They also often coincide with popular radicalization. A party that consistently turns to cutbacks during such times misses out on the opportunity to turn radicalization into organizing.
id763974354
didn’t have a clear economic horizon of their own, beyond the need for growth. This meant that they were especially exposed to the risk of changing economic currents turning them away from their other goals.
id763974358
A movement needs to prioritize building a stable economic framework of its own and to combine this with its other strategic goals.
id763974477
it is clear that much of the party thought that it was on the path to socialism — by which they meant democratizing the power of capital. The leadership seems — no matter what nice words they used — to have continuously been on another path.