Are You Dumber than an American?

[HiPointDem]

160. sweden 1st ventured into neoliberalization decades ago, and not just in ed. not something new, e.g.

Neoliberalization of Housing in Sweden: Gentrification, Filtering
and Social Polarization

During the last twenty-five years, housing policy in Sweden has radically changed. Once forming a pillar of the comprehensive welfare system, abbreviated the “Swedish model,” neoliberal housing politics have established market-governed housing provision with a minimum of state engagement.

This shift has had consequences on the social geography of housing
conditions. The research reported here analyzes social geographic change in Sweden’s three
largest cities, Stockholm, Gothenburg, and Malmö, between 1986 and 2001, relating observed patterns of gentrification and filtering to cycles of accumulation and to neoliberalization of housing policies.

http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=1776771&fileOId=2796177


DH: But here's the interesting thing: it's unreasonable to think that actually the US imposed neoliberalization on Mexico. What happened was that the US was putting noeliberalizing pressures on Mexico and an elite inside of Mexico seized the opportunity to say: yes, that's what we want... And actually if you look at the pattern, it's very rare for there to be a straight imposition of neoliberalizing policies through the IMF or the US. It's nearly always an alliance between an internal elite, as it had been in Chile, and US forces that put this thing together. And it's the internal elite who are as much to blame for neoliberalization as the international institutions.

SL: That point turns on its head a lot of the assumptions the left tends to make about neoliberalism being imposed on countries by the United States. One of the cases where this also was illustrated was Sweden, which had one of the most socialistic welfare states, and where ruling elites forced through neoliberal policies.

DH: There was a really serious threat to the ownership structure in Sweden during the 1970s, in effect, there was a proposal to buy out ownership entirely and turn it into a sort of worker-owned democracy. The political elites in Sweden were horrified by this and fought a tremendous battled against it. The way they fought was partly, again, through ideological mechanisms. The bankers controlled the Nobel Prize in economics, that went to Hayek, went to Friedman, that went to all the neoliberal figures to try to give legitimacy to all the neoliberal arguments. But then also the Swedes organized themselves as a confederacy of industrial magnates, organized themselves, built think tanks and the like. And every time there was any kind of crisis or difficulty in the Swedish economy, and all of these economies run into difficulties at some point or other, they would really push the argument: the problem is the strength of the welfare state, it's the huge expenditures of the welfare state. But they never actually managed to make it work too well. So they came up with the interesting strategy of going into the European Union, because the European Union had a very neoliberal structure -- through the Maastricht Treaty -- so the Swedish Confederation persuaded everyone they should go into Europe, and then it was the European rules that allowed the more neoliberal policies to be introduced into Sweden in the 1990s. It hasn't gone very far in Sweden because the unions are still very strong and the political history is very strong over social democracy and the like. But, nevertheless, there has been a process towards a limited neoliberalization in Sweden as a result of the activities of these political elites and their strategy of taking Sweden into Europe...

http://mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2006/lilley190606.html




Reportedly sweden's neoliberalization is a bit 'kinder and gentler' than the american model, but once that train leaves it's hard to stop. The writer's "we must all value traditional swedish value of trust etc" is weak tea, the same kind of weak tea served in the good old usa, where people used to leave their doors unlocked, etc.

Exhorting people to retain traditional value systems in the face of economic restructuring that changes people's material & social relations to each other is just window dressing on the train.