I’m not talking about things Nordic countries are producing. I’m talking about the basic necessities of life Nordic countries import that are produced by effective slave labour using resources extracted from the global south.

This has absolutely dick-all to do with their political configuration. It is a consequence of supply and trade routes wholly outside their command. Social Democracy as an organizing principle functions to create and administer domestic civil services and is, if anything, undermined by the process of outsourcing capital and labor demand. The quippy “Nords Bad Because Social Democracy” mischaracterized milquetoast liberalism on the periphery as the kind of expansionist imperialism that Scandinavian states have neither the capacity nor the interest in mustering.

These countries piggy back on US imperialism

Because of their geographic position and ethnic sympathies, not because of their political organization. Were Sweden positioned off the coast of West Africa or deep within the Amazon, it would have a completely different set of social relations. Bolivians and Senegalese socialists do not enjoy parallel social relations, despite desiring much the same in terms of housing, health care, education, and transportation as their Baltic peers.

Scandinavian companies get to plunder the global south along with the rest of the west, Scandinavians enjoy commodities extracted from the global south by the empire.

A select group of Scandinavian business interests get a minority stake in the imperial projects of wealthier and more well-armed western nations, on the condition that they police and corral their native populations. The end result is a deteriorating public sector in Scandinavian states, as the profits of imperialism are plowed into neoliberal privatization at home. The benefits of social democracy are not defended by imperialism but clawed back. The institutions of social democracy are not girded but undermined.

Imperial tendency is adversarial to social democratic institutions and policies, as the profits go not to improved standards of living but greater degrees of surveillance, incarceration, coercion, and media-instigated hysteria.

That’s the wages of empire. Not cheaper commodities and greater social comforts but grander delusions and more entrenched phobias.

The case of Sweden shows that the democracies are curtailed by the domestic capitalists https://jacobin.com/2019/08/sweden-1970s-democratic-socialism-olof-palme-lo

The Swedish economy got off to a flying start after the end of World War II, a conflict in which Sweden had remained neutral. Sweden benefited from the three-decade-long postwar economic boom, the so-called Trente Glorieuses. As the historian Eric Hobsbawn pointed out, it is perfectly justifiable to characterize the quarter-century between 1950 and 1975 as the period during “which the most dramatic, the fastest, and the most wide-reaching revolution in people’s everyday lives” took place. There was a sort of symbiosis between the capitalists’ demand for mass production and the people’s demand for mass democracy. Fordist welfare societies were created on the foundation of economic growth.

The case in Sweden showed the bounty of neutrality in the wake of a continent-wide obliteration of domestic capital.

What’s more…

Sweden was strongly affected by the radicalization of the 1960s. As in most other countries, it began with youth solidarity with the Third World. Swedish opposition to the Vietnam war was broad and influential. Swedish students joined others in demonstrations and in occupations. This new left contributed to pushing socialism further up on the agenda.

This would posit a distinctly contrary view to what you’re stating above. Far from sympathizing and allying with imperialist states, the Swedes continued their commitment to the non-aligned movement and to independent sovereignty both for themselves and for their Third World peers.

In 1976, the social democrats lost control of the government. This was not — as many in Sweden claim today — because welfare had become too extensive or taxes too high. On the contrary: at the time, no party challenged the solidaristic welfare state, and the new bourgeois government continued to raise taxes. Social democracy’s loss might have been the result of a protest vote against a party that, after ruling for 44 years, had become overly autocratic. (The most important reason for the 1976 electoral loss, however, was the social democrats’ support for an expansion of Swedish nuclear power. This brought it into conflict with the radical environmentalist movement.) By the time the party regained control over the government in 1982, its leaders had accepted the basic principles of neoliberal politics.

Since then, the welfare state had been successively weakened. Increasingly large parts of the public sector have been privatized. The pension system has been fundamentally revised, and today Sweden has growing numbers of poor pensioners. Large sections of the public-owned housing stock have been sold. Today, Sweden is among those European countries whose economic and social divides are increasing most rapidly. This is most notable in increased segregation within the educational sector, which has become increasingly privatized. Bourgeois governments have led the way in this development, but social democrats have accepted the reforms afterward. They have not attempted to launch alternative political platforms.

So, far from the narrative of imperialist calf-fattening, we’re entering the 80s (a period of consumerist glut) and social democrats are falling out thanks to the conflict between public demand for cheap energy and local environmental activism. They’re embracing neoliberal policies not out of hunger for foreign imports but due to a sag in the post-war boom.

At the same time, despite the political consensus among the leaderships of the different parties, this development is deeply unpopular among Swedish citizens; discontent extends deep within the bourgeois parties’ own core troops. A large majority of the population still supports a commonly owned public sector and is prepared to pay the taxes necessary to finance it. This fact comes as confirmation that the solidaristic welfare state of the 1970s represented a series of collective conquests by broad layers of the Swedish people.

When people in the rest of the world point to Sweden as a prototype, it is these conquests they mean — not the increasingly hollow welfare state that has survived to today.

These are not conquests of foreign territory but conquests within the Swedish economy of Swedish residents in opposition to foreign investors and military powers.

The Swedes yearn not for their own foreign feudal lands but for the dictatorship of the proletariat.