I’ve been dealing with a fairly aggressive Cold Warrior boomer from the US lately. When I counter their red baiting with criticisms of American liberalism, the person insists that they’re not actually a lib, but rather a Nordic-style socdem.
Does anyone guide me to any good communist criticisms of the Scandinavian capitalist states?
Pic possibly unrelated.
Yeah, I do get the impression that the high water mark for welfare and workers’ rights in those societies was the 1970s, and they’ve slowly been eroded since then. Do you know any good introductory resources on this?
I wish I could tell you. My knowledge of South Korea comes more from experience and also from marrying into a Korean family. They're all a bunch of prosperous liberals, but they fucking hate the IMF and the Japanese (during the colonial period but also beyond). The best I can do is to recommend talking with a Korean person, if you can. You'll probably get a lot of lib or even fascist shit, at first, but the IMF and the Japanese really do drive most, if not all of them absolutely up the fucking wall, and that can be a great pathway toward thinking systemically about their country's problems, as well as socialism generally. They have a pretty bad impression of leftwing politics, however, because they look at North Korea as a failed state, something as an annoying Trotskyist I don't totally disagree with.
As I think about it, the best books I've read about Korea are actually both about North Korea. "The Cleanest Race" and "Without You, There Is No Us" are both highly critical of North Korea, but they're a step above most other Korea-related books in English because at least the authors speak Korean and have both spent some time in North Korea itself. Both also do have a lot of information about South Korea, particularly The Cleanest Race—which is about how leftwing politics in Korea can veer into very weird racial nationalism.