An odd lesson to pick

By BJ Bjornson

Look, as my name might indicate, I’m rather partial to stories that put the Nordic countries and their people in a good light, but I still have to shake my head at this article from Alternet about how the Swedes and Norwegians paved the way for a more equitable society, referencing events in the 1920’s and 30’s to make its point.

Why am I bemused? Well, for starters, because you hardly have to go overseas for examples of how to build a better and more equitable society. The 20’s and 30’s were the home of massive general strikes and violent suppression of the same here in North America, as well as the period when the first major advances towards a more progressive modern state took place under Roosevelt’s New Deal. What happened in Sweden and Norway were reverberations of the same movement that was wreaking havoc worldwide in the industrialized West, not some unique unfolding that had never been seen before or since.

Second, there is the not-really-small matter of the Second World War, a discontinuity event even on this side of the Atlantic, but very much more so in Europe, and particularly for the conquered and occupied Norway. That’s not to say that the events of the pre-war period were unimportant, but it might behoove the author to note just how those countries were able to pick themselves back up after the war and return to a peacetime economy that still carried on the earlier tradition.

And again, there is no need to look to Scandinavia for examples, since the post-WWII boom in the U.S. and the rise of a true middle class is practically the textbook example of how these things get done, absent a few tweaks such as a universal health care system that your northern neighbours managed to pull off during the same period.

While I don’t pretend to be professional historian, what I have read and seen is that the single most important factor in ensuring an economically fair society is a strong labour movement, something the Republicans, for all their other craziness, have maintained a laser-like focus on for decades, and work to destroy, disrupt, or outright dismantle at every turn whenever they get the chance, as can be seen most recently in Ohio, Wisconsin, and elsewhere.

It may just be me, but I rarely see this kind of focus from the left on this point, and this article from Alternet is little different. It’s not that I don’t think the struggles of the Scandinavian labour movement isn’t inspirational to some degree, but it isn’t quantitatively different from the same struggle in North America or elsewhere. The real questions that needs to be asked is how the Swedes and Norwegians, and other European nations, maintained their strong labour movements while the U.S. saw its labour unions being sidelined and crumble away as a political force, and how and what it will take to bring a real labour movement back.

The article doesn’t say, and in that, it doesn’t strike me as too much different from a lot of progressive blogging these days. They know what they want to see as an end result, but seem incapable of charting or even exploring a tried and true path towards achieving it. Inspiration isn’t enough. Give working people the information they need to really organize themselves.

I have a feeling I'll be coming back to this.