Sweden

Actually looking at those ILO stats this jumped out:

Denmark - 101,700 - 3,173,000

Which for a country a tenth the population of here is pretty nuts, that's over 100 times the number of strike days per person that year than the UK. Looking it up I see it was mostly due to a general strike. Interesting stuff...

labour has the same policies, just a bit tamer.

that is pretty cool.

i already said that things are not "as bad" but only marginally better.

I lived in sweden for 4 years. The levels of alcoholism are high all capitalist social problems and power relations are there with small gloss over. I dont really understand why sweden looks so different to you.

John, the days lost is not per capita, so the difference is not that big in the end. But strikes are not the only measurement of working class militancy or leftist politics.

besides, social democracy doesn't produce a lot of strikes to start with because of the tame nature of the class conflict

I am too lazy to look it up. What does it mean? Ecology is the environment and all that. Social ecology just means recycling and carpooling or what?

but we all know that when you see a glass 99% full, you will see it as pretty much empty

Capitalism may be a contributor, but if one thinks it is the only cause of the environmental problems in the world, take a look at how filthy China is, or the once beautiful Lake Balalaika in Russia that was completely ruined by large factories built right along the banks and dumping all of their waste straight into the water. My brother was for a time on an ice cutter sent to Antarctica to open up a path for some scientific group and he said once they were on the open sea it was normal practice just to empty all of the trash right into the ocean: plastic food bags, used petroleum, and all. That is not a product of capitalism, just shortsighted carelessness and stupidity.

a direct material interest, yes for now, but not necessarily for all eternity. very recent moves such as the fake bankruptcy bid by delphi, if generalized, would impoverish and infuriate lots more people and make this class larger to the point of significance, and it wouldn't take too long, IMO.

but those with a direct ideological/emotional interest are also in it. i'm in this category myself. i'm kinda secure, but would risk it 1: if there did not have to be some kind of holocaust in order to get 2: to a libertarian reorganization whose shape i could see and which 3: offered solid material security (not wealth necessarily, but security). (i have other qualifications, but that's not for here.)

i think, again, that not having some kind of dictatorship-of-the-proleteriat-or-anyone-else phase (#1 above) would be a big selling point.

Except maybe for the fact that as long as capitalism exists and its rate of profit continues to decline (which even right-wing capitalists acknowledge, claiming that equilibrium pricing tends to reduce all markets to as close to the production cost as possible with an increase in competition), it will look for newer ways of extracting any remaining surplus from society. When it can no longer saturate the market with goods and services nobody needs, it will do three things: 1) create as many monopolies and trade barriers as possible to reduce competition and thus create some level of profit; 2) expand to new markets in other areas of the world previously thought not worth the expense of building an infrastructure for import/export; and 3) attempt to reduce the burden of taxes as low as possible, including to nonexistance if that is possible. One and two began happening in the 70s with the failures of liberal capitalism and a slowdown in technological advances that led to more productivity (as well as the oil problems with OPEC). Number Three is happening ever since then with the selloffs and privatization of what's left of Keynes' entrails under the guise of "government waste" in the US, a barrier to joining the EU in Europe, and a barrier to IMF and World Bank assistance to the third world.

Welfare capitalism doesn't need to be criticized, because in some areas, like social security, it's unsustainable if the birthrate declines too much (as has happened), and in other areas it's preventing anyone from making money and is thus an obstacle that will eventually be eliminated. Liberal democracy doesn't protect the lower classes from the elimination of social programmes, it merely slows the process down and gives the illusion of opposition. That's a criticism unto itself. In twenty years nobody will need to offer a decent criticism to social welfare because it'll be little more than a handshake and a smile. And this will continue until neoliberalism comes to the same car wreck conclusion that Keynesian paleoliberalism did ca. 30 years ago.

how useful in terms of numbers? yeah you're right. yet it adds some.

but gee, getting rich and giving to charidee - that's not going to bring it! i mean, i'm here, aren't i!!

What kind of criticism is it of something to call it petit-bourgeois? Who the fuck are the chattering classes? And what the fuck goes on here but chatter anyway?

I suggest that anyone who is not acquainted with the work of Murray Bookchin and other social ecologist scholars goes and reads The Ecology of Freedom at the very least and preferably some other of the seminal works aswell, it's got to be better than relying on wikipedia!

You don't have to buy everything that Bookchin has ever written to see value in his work and it is certainly the case that he has looked at problems that earlier anarchist scholars simply did not.

not my position, in case there's any misunderstanding

I would've thought most people here's position would be that the majority of people either here or in Sweden would benefit materially from capitalism's destruction because we would no longer be having our surplus value stolen from us. That's certainly my position.

I can't tell: is Lazy Riser really not an anarchist, or is he just posing questions in a Socratic way?

Lazy Riser: let me pose a hypothetical situation to you. Say you woke up one day inside of a maximum security prison. There were no bars, per se, but you were still not allowed to leave. The food was excellent, the guards were polite unless you got too rude or loud, and your time was filled with a nominal amount of work followed by a moderate variety of leisure activities to pursue. You even could send the warden an e-mail in the prison library computer if you wanted to say something. Would any of this change the fact that you are, nevertheless, inside of a prison for life without ever committing a crime, no matter how pleasant or unprisonlike it may seem? Or would it not matter to you?

You only have a theory what's on the outside. Unfortunately, your only means of finding out would be to escape.

I'm not sure whose "razor sharp" analysis you think this is L.R, but wasn't it you that introduced social ecology into this thread as part of a pretty meaningless throw away comment? All I suggested was that anyone unfamiliar with Social Ecology should go to the source not to sectarian shorthand or Wikipedia.

With regard to the Swedish model and the reasons to struggle against it seems that the most important argument in favour of replacing even the most apparently benevolent social democratic system is that it will inevitably export its social and ecological problems to other parts of the world. Social democracy is invariably built on exploitation it's just that social democrats prefer to exploit people other than their core voters, preferably people who aren't even immediately or readily visible.

Now Sweden is a part of the increasingly globalised economy; it is quite irrelevant how nice it might be to live in Sweden for most of the people there. I am absolutely sure that there are many reasons why Swedish anarchists would want to change Sweden for very Swedish reasons - after all social democrats being the bastard mutant cousins of Bolsheviks are fucking control freaks and always less efficient than they claim - and these motives for activism need to be seen alongside the imperitive to internationalism.

Okay L.R. I don't see the hostile tone in my contribution there. I don't think we should get into comparing old posts to see who has been more hostile anyway, but I did apologise for my inappropriate language elsewhere.

I wasn't peddling neo-maoism and I am certainly no friend of Mr Geldof. Displacing social and ecological costs overseas is a demonstrable phenomenon and can be shown to be concomitant with social democratic reform again and again around the world.

But I wasn't suggesting that the threat of a third world revolution would spur the Swedes to revolt and neither did I suggest that there weren't good reasons for Swedes to want change in Sweden - look if I hate social democracy and all its bitter lies and hypocrisy why shouldn't Swedes?

Nevertheless the international argument is important. Internationalism is part altruism but not altruism alone it's also in part pragmatism; problems cannot forever be exported without rebound. We live in one world and it's no great radical insight to see this as a reason for change everywhere.

I think that last paragraph would be lovely set to music don't you LR?

Could you outline decadence theory for a tired worker who is up early in the morning?

Lazy Riser maybe the swedes will revolt simply because they hate working?

BTW Ned the prison you described sounds a lot like the prisons in Scandinavia...