Neoteny wrote:That first paragraph is a mess. Why anyone would look to Forbes for a reasonable discussion of socialism is beyond me. It's like seeing James Comey giving election advice to Democrats. It's not in good faith, and, even if it were, he clearly doesn't have a fucking clue what he's talking about.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/07/what ... -socialism
jacobinmag wrote:The Scandinavian countries are what we call “social democracies,” societies with robust social safety nets and labor movements that check the worst tendencies of capitalism and limit the power of the wealthy in key ways.
Over the course of the twentieth century, workers in these countries won full employment, a strong welfare state, and high levels of unionization. But they never successfully challenged the source of capitalist class power: their ownership rights over the major national corporations.
As a result, in the last thirty or so years, a reinvigorated capitalist class in these countries has led a persistent and successful campaign to roll back these progressive achievements. These failed progressive experiments show that our democratic socialist vision has to go far beyond the narrow limits that today’s newly minted socialism experts on cable news will allow.
jacobinmag wrote:That will mean nationalizing the financial sector so that major investment decisions are made by democratically elected governments and removing hostile elements in the military and police. It will mean introducing democratic planning and social ownership over corporations (though the correct mix of state-led planning and “market socialism,” a mix of publicly-owned firms, small privately-owned businesses, and worker cooperatives, is a matter of some debate in our movement). And it will mean rebuilding our democracy by instituting public financing of elections, a ban on corporate lobbying and private campaign donations, and even more radical demands like writing a new constitution.
