the obsession some of the US and European center-left has with European social democracies is fucking racist and counterproductive
@amsomniac you know how like Bernie Sanders and Jacobin and their ilk talk about how Sweden and shit are "socialist" and treat them as role models when in reality they're capitalist welfare states funded by imperialist plunder and what social programs they do have are being rapidly dismantled? that's bad
@amsomniac Jacobin published an article fetishising the "Nordic model" as a transitional state to socialism, which is totally incompatible with marxist analysis and has been historically demonstrated not to work. social democracy sucks.
i don't think they confused, i think they're just fundamentally liberals who don't want more than a capitalist welfare state because they never talk even in vague terms about socialism meaning more to them than just that
@amsomniac @morganastra the reason this take is racist is that nearly all successful and sustained actually socialist projects have been in the global south; many of the best socialist writers and organizers these days are people of color who center those movements, but the Jacobin crowd mostly ignores those or derides them as "not real socialism" for one of a litany of contrived standards they never apply to white countries
@morganastra thank you for explaining in more detail. This reminds me of Laurie Penny's article about the "new media", hyped sites like Jacobin that conveniently happen to be mostly cis white men
http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2014/04/where-are-real-outsiders-new-media
@amsomniac the root of the problem isn't really that they're predominantly white men - Bhaskar Sunkara isn't white, for example - but that they fail to apply a material analysis of the role imperialism has played in the development of capitalism (and that anti-imperialism has played in the development of socialism, globally) and that, as liberals, they find more to identify with in liberal capitalist societies than in non-liberal socialist ones.
@morganastra I think they've confused socialist and social democrat.
The imperialist plunder part is bad, the fact that they're losing the social programs Jacobin writers and Sanders admire them for isn't really a critique of the countries that held on to those programs for so long...
is this in reference to a particular thing or just a general assessment? Like, did a Jacobin writer claim the Swedish or Norwegian "races" are inherently superior or something? 😡