(Just by coincidence, or maybe because of the ineluctable logic of analyzing Swedish social democracy dictates, the very next article I began looking at in order to write an article on Sanders, Sweden, etc. made basically the same point I made in my last message. This is once again from "Capital and Class" and written two years before the last one I referred to. Titled "The Politics of Transition: the Swedish Case" and written by Leonard Wilde, it has a conclusion that pretty much sums up thoughts that have been percolating in the old noggin ever since Syriza broke all your poor hearts.)
Have we seen the end of ‘social-democracy in one country’ in the same way that we have seen the demise of ‘actually existing socialism in one zone’? And if the inglorious end to the dictatorships of Eastern Europe signals the end of ‘Marxism-Leninism’ as a doctrine, does the Swedish experience mark the end of ‘Marxism-Kautskyism’? Do socialists have to concur with a pessimistic economic determinism in which there is ‘no escape from the laws of world economics’ (Frank, 1990)? Certainly one lesson of the recent past ought to be a respect for the power of the capitalist world-economy and the limitations it places on ‘national roads’ to socialism... [W]e have to acknowledge that in political and economic terms the internationalisation of labour lags well behind the internationalisation of capital. A good example is the respective responses to the ‘Vredeling directive’ of 1982 which emanated from the European Commission and which offered workers in multi-national firms the right to information on future policies which affected them. The proposals were rendered harmless after the most intensive lobbying from American and European business (Lambert, 1991, p.16; De Vos, 1990)... Politically, this implies nothing less than a reversal of the trend of the past 120 years, since the disintegration of the First International and the rise of socialist/ labour parties based in and sucked into the arena of the nation state. It is also clear that ‘economic’ demands have to be widened to encompass the priorities of the new social movements (see Gorz, 1989, part 3 & Appendix), in a coalition of forces seeking widespread democratisation of all areas of life, eventually leading to a new, much more radical, Social Charter mark two. The Swedish experience appears to confirm Marx’s observation in On the Jewish Question that ‘politics has become the serf of financial power’ (Marx and Engels, 1975, p.171). Both Marx and Engels pointed out that what they termed ‘communism’ was possible only on an international scale (Marx and Engels, 1975, p.53; Marx and Engels, 1976, p.352), although the squirming footnotes of the editors of the Marx-Engels Collected Works try to suggest that they did not really mean what they said. Socialist movements of various sorts have come to power in nation-states and all of them have had to contend with the hostile power of the world economy. But if Europe becomes the world economic hegemony of the 21st Century, the exercise of political power will perhaps be less vulnerable than in the old nation states. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
