Newspapers are owned by the wealthy and powerful and you think they will allow an opposing view of capitalism?

[Cirsium]

44. response

I didn't say that the Nordic countries did anything in particular. I said they are not a good model.

All of Europe is complicit in and benefits from the exploitation of the global South, not just the US.

I don't see economic systems as something we choose. More like economic systems choose us. Ergo, the notion of having a personal "preference" is absurd, it is delusional.

The dark side of the Nordic model

For decades we have been told that nations should aspire to develop towards the Nordic countries. But in an era of ecological breakdown, this no longer makes sense. If everyone in the world consumed like Scandinavians, we would need nearly five Earths to sustain us.

This kind of over-consumption is driving a global crisis of habitat destruction, species extinction and climate change. You will not see much evidence of this in Norway or Finland, but that is because, as with most rich nations, the bulk of their ecological impact has been outsourced to the global South. That is where most of the resource extraction happens, and where global warming bites hardest. The violence hits elsewhere.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/12/6/the-dark-side-of-the-nordic-model/

Swedish colonialist neutrality
A tradition of double standards from historical colonialism to current environmental injustice

excerpt:

Swedish colonialism in the ‘great olden days’ and today

Sweden’s ‘free lane’ into business profit in formerly colonized areas depends on the common perception that Scandinavian colonial violations were marginal, if they occurred at all. But however negligible the Swedish exercise of power has been, it is paradoxically depicted with great glamour. A telling example is the Swedish national anthem from 1844, including the patriotic stanza which begins ‘Du tronar på minnen från fornstora dar, då ärat ditt namn flög över jorden’ (‘You are enthroned on memories of great olden days, when honoured your name flew across the Earth’).

Many Swedes probably tune into the song with a sense of pride—most commonly at sport events—and a vague notion of its references to the Swedish Era of Great Power in the years 1611-1718. Sweden was then a colonizer, although admittedly on a smaller scale than Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Great Britain or France—and allegedly of a benevolent type.

But the Swedish Crown and power sphere were in fact heavily involved in the European colonization project with all its atrocities. This is convincingly shown in the anthology on Scandinavian colonialism from 2013 edited by Naum and Nordin. In more than a dozen close-up descriptions of colonial encounters, a continuous whitewash of Scandinavian history is revealed. The anthology displays Swedish involvement on several continents: from expansion up North to the New World, Africa, and Asia. In 2015 this book was succeeded by Våra kolonier in which popular historian Herman Lindqvist uncovers a strong Swedish ambition to develop a colonial role. Conclusions in the two books align: dreams of gold, ivory, sugar, spices, and tobacco triggered the Swedish search for and foundation of colonies from the early 17th century in North America, West Africa, and later the West Indies. Ships were built to export iron, wood, and tar, financing increasing imports.

https://unevenearth.org/2020/01/swedish-colonialist-neutrality/

The colonialism of Denmark-Norway and its legacies

Overshadowed by British and French Imperialism, the small-scale colonialism of some of the Nordic countries can all too easily be downplayed. From the 19th century, the self-image of the Nordic countries as a group of small, neutral nations has probably perpetuated this misconception. However, Denmark-Norway engaged in a variety of colonial activities throughout the world from the 17th century which still have legacies today. On a lesser scale compared to other colonial powers, its colonialism was characterised by different contexts - some of them brutal - in the Caribbean, West Africa, India and Greenland.

https://nordics.info/show/artikel/the-colonialism-of-denmark-norway-and-its-legacies

Unequal exchange of labour in the world economy

We arrive at several major conclusions. (1) We find that the labour of production in the world economy, across all skill levels and all sectors, is overwhelmingly performed in the global South (on average 90–91%), but the yields of production are disproportionately captured in the global North. (2) The North net-appropriated 826 billion hours of embodied labour from the global South in 2021 (in other words, net of trade). This net appropriation occurs across all skill categories and sectors, including a large net appropriation of high-skilled labour. (3) The wage value of net-appropriated labour was €16.9 trillion in 2021, represented in Northern wages, accounting for skill level. In wage-value terms, the drain of labour from the South has more than doubled since 1995. 4) North–South wage gaps have increased dramatically over the period, across all skill categories and sectors, despite a small improvement in the South’s relative position. Southern wages are 87–95% lower than Northern wages for work of equal skill as of 2021, and 83–98% lower for work of equal skill within the same sector. (5) Workers’ share of GDP has generally declined over the period, by 1.3 percentage points in the global North and 1.6 percentage points in the global South.

Despite contributing 90–91% of the total labour that goes into global production and the production of traded goods in 2021, including the majority of high-skilled labour, the global South received less than half (44%) of global income, and Southern workers received only 21% of global income in that year. In other words, while global production is overwhelmingly performed in the global South, the yields are disproportionately captured in the global North, indicating a disproportionate command of the global product.

...

Our analysis here focuses on flows between the core and periphery of the world system, using the country classifications set out in Supplementary Table 1. As a proxy for the core, or the global North, we used the IMF’s list of 'advanced economies' as a guide and created the closest possible approximation of this list given the countries available in EXIOBASE. The category includes USA, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Norway, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland, Japan, South Korea, Estonia, Spain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Malta, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Taiwan, Cyprus and the Czech Republic.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49687-y