From Sweden to Socialism: A Small Symposium on Big Questions
Denitch, Bogdan
Without an imaginative utopian dimension, socialist thought remains excessively rooted in the present. It ends up as something very worthwhile, that is, the reform of the existing system; but it...
...Such bodies should control management and be regarded as the economic counterpart to local self-government...
...In Sweden labor can block attacks on the welfare state, and it can block attempts by capital to sabotage legislation...
...The borders of the possible are not even tested...
...Left politics increasingly resorts to talking about resentments of segments of the population and the unfairness in the distribution of the benefits of increased productivity rather than raising universalist egalitarian demands and a vision of a radically different organization of production and leisure...
...Mixed forms of property ownership—private, public, and cooperative—along the lines described by Alec Nove make good sense...
...Germany, France, Belgium, and Italy also have relatively advanced welfare states with a fair degree of control over capital as a minimal norm of civilized behavior...
...This is why Robert Heilbroner has done something useful by asking us to imagine what could, or rather should, lie beyond the present reformist valhalla, the Swedish welfare state...
...However, the intellectual hegemony of the capitalist system signifies an ability to define what is "objectively" possible to do in society...
...I think it will be revived...
...What can be counterposed to the hegemony of the capitalist culture are the independent organizations and social movements that accept at least partially different values...
...That is one of the recent lessons from Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union...
...but it remains restricted to what is "realistic" within the existing order...
...My somewhat simplified answer is that Sweden would have to move in two major directions...
...What is unique about Sweden and makes it possible to think of it as a site for a project beyond the welfare state are not just its generous social provisions or high living standards but rather the massiveness of its labor movement...
...This degree of organization makes it possible to answer other questions about what might be done in a near-Sweden...
...The second is to abolish the present concentrations of private ownership...
...At this time, there is a standoff...
...Mass literacy and state-controlled education, combined with a commercialized mass culture, successfully hasten the retreat of the autonomous cultures that had been built up by the industrial working class...
...I believe that only in societies with a high degree of autonomous selforganization and a thick set of overlapping movements and institutions, does it become possible to think of moving beyond the limits that capitalist civilization sets...
...To be sure, the Social Democratic parties increasingly solve that problem by not worrying much about any kind of socialist future and meanwhile doing what they do rather well, that is, defend the welfare state...
...Proposals to move 104 • DISSENT From Sweden to Socialism beyond the welfare state, and there were such during the seventies, did not win a convincing majority...
...Traditional solidarities of class, occupation, and workplace are replaced by possessive individualism...
...To raise such demands is considered unrealistic, but failing to do so destroys the moral and emotional basis of the movement...
...Such mass organization determines what popularly supported measures can be undertaken without being brought down by the invisible but very real power of capital even in an advanced welfare state...
...We are asked to think about a real place, or an almost real place, a more advanced Sweden, and that gives us an implicit time frame, presumably a few decades...
...That is, it rejected the capitalist competitive norms when determining its strategy...
...What a labor movement can do in Sweden is also limited by what it can convince the majority of the electorate to accept...
...Gross differences in wealth and income are unacceptable from the point of view of either equity or democratic theory...
...That argument is so obvious and well established that it provides today the most effective language with which to express the socialist argument—the language of democracy...
...The problem in thinking about a socialist society or program is how to make such a society seem possible and desirable to human beings who have been shaped by the present culture and social order...
...That is, 90 percent of all production workers...
...WINTER • 1991 • 105...
...Mass socialist politics in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been rooted in an autonomous working-class subculture, which, whatever its inadequacies, provided an alternate political socialization for generations of socialist, trade unionist, and broadly radical democratic activists...
...While very steep progressive tax ation combined with an almost confiscatory inheritance tax could alleviate this problem, in the more advanced welfare states we still have the question of the social and political effects of great concentrations of wealth...
...It is that which makes Sweden different and "special" for me, not the welfare state per se...
...This process extends to all organizations of citizens in the modern capitalist democracies, so that parties, voluntary associations, and unions become goods to be WINTER • 1991 • 103 From Sweden to Socialism passively consumed and democracy an exercise in consumer choice rather than a process requiring active participation by an informed citizenry...
...Although a high degree of organization is not required to disrupt and even topple an existing political order, it is required for constructing an alternate order...
...It organizes so high a percentage of the working population as to be qualitatively different from all other social democracies and welfare states...
...The figure for the trade unions is 85 percent of all employed...
...The only way to counter the potential veto by capital of any major move on the part of a left government is massive popular organizations of the type that the Swedish labor movement possesses...
...The majority of even left voters in advanced industrial societies today have been socialized to accept a whole range of assumptions of a capitalist civilization about what is possible and desirable, how one should live one's life, and what is the necessary minimum of material goods...
...Democracy cannot exist in any meaningful sense when there are gross disparities in political power...
...Thus my ultimate argument is that the welfare state should move in a socialist direction so as to complete the democratic transformation of society...
...No other country begins to approach these figures...
...When faced with dangerous alternatives, advanced egalitarian and welfare-state measures may well be accepted...
...The autonomy provided by homogeneous working-class neighborhoods, with their pubs, clubs, political organizations, and associations linked to left parties and unions, is for the most part, throughout Western Europe and North America, either vanishing or disintegrating...
...The first is to effectively expand control over the workplace through councils that involve the vast majority of workers in making day-to-day decisions about their work life, personnel decisions, and the overall direction their enterprises should take...
...This is a major problem, because the cultural hegemony of the capitalist order is now probably stronger than it has been at any point since the industrial revolution...
...To be sure, they are limits considerably more flexible than the traditional left used to believe...
...After all, advanced welfare states exist in other Scandinavian countries and Holland...
...Therefore, quite properly, the Meidner plan (which would effectively have abolished capitalism through wage-earner funds) is on a back burner for the time being...
...Its numbers give it strength, and its solidaristic wage policies, which have reshaped the Swedish income distribution toward greater equality, give it moral weight...
...The most massive example of such an organization that has, even if to a limited extent, alternative values is the Swedish labor movement...
...These limits are "set" mostly in the minds of the public...
...Wealth tends to translate into political and social power...
...The real question is: what would one need to see Sweden or any other country as moving toward socialism...
...Imagine a political strike in a country where 85 percent of the work force is organized...
...That kind of "realism" has almost destroyed West European socialism, leaving behind reasonable but dull administrators of a more humane capitalism within welfare states...
...instead, it pushed for increases across the board as a conscious decision to reduce wage differentials between skilled and unskilled, between women and men...
...The present urban community, by contrast, is atomized, collective goals are mobilized in the service of the existing order, and the idea that the common good may require sacrifice and effort is replaced by notions of self-fulfillment, often through individual advancement and accumulation of possessions...
...Clearly great concentrations of private wealth are incompatible with socialism or, for that matter, democracy...
...It is the very real threat of a "strike of capital" backed up by the world capitalist order that acts as the real limit on how far one can move beyond the welfare state...
...Such figures affect other political statistics, including the proportion of social democratic voters who are members of the party, the cooperative movement, the women's organizations, and so on...
...Unlike, for example, the Anglo-Saxon unions, Swedish labor did not favor the better-placed and more powerful unions...
Vol. 38 • January 1991 • No. 1
