Editorial from Kommunistisk Politik, No. 11, May 25, 2002
An internationally known "welfare researcher", Swedish professor
Walter Korpi, has been heading the analysis of the Danish "welfare model"
made by the Danish Democracy and Power Study. The analysis was published this
week, and its clear-cut conclusions spell it out: The "Danish welfare model"
does not exist.
Due to constant reductions of the social budgets, it has been well and truly
eliminated from 1980 and onward. Denmark is looking more and more like the US
and Great Britain, the analysis says. The new Danish "welfare model"
is the ideas and practise of liberalism, of the old liberalism as well as the
new one.
"Compared to the Nordic countries and a number of OECD countries, Denmark
is falling behind. When it comes to social security benefits, Denmark is one
of the countries, which have faced the biggest cuts since 1980," Korpi
says, and concludes: "The tendency towards bigger differences in income
is continuing. This gives a risk for a society with more division and less solidarity,
a society in which the social schemes are only for the weak people of society.
Of course, this is not a new conclusion to communists and people with class-consciousness
who have been fighting this backward development towards the 1930s and the time
before tooth and nail through decades. The only new thing is that the conclusion
now gets "scientific proof".
The slaughter of the special Danish model and its replacement by the "welfare
model" of classical capitalism have taken place in three phases which in
total have lasted several decades after the culmination of the Danish and Scandinavian
model in the 1960s which, because of special historical circumstances, placed
the Nordic countries as international models of welfare, first and foremost
as a counter model to socialism.
The first phase was the membership of the EU and the adjustment to this during
Anker Joergensen's Social Democratic governments (1972-82).
The second phase was the period of Conservative Poul Schluter (1982-93), a dark
decade of budget cuts, which made the big blow against the special Danish model.
And the third was the Nyrup Rasmussen Social Democratic government (1993-2001,
translator's note), which followed Schluter's footsteps benefiting the
monopolies and, loyal to the EU, drove the nails into the coffin of the welfare
state so there are now only sad remains left.
Fogh Rasmussen's Liberal-Conservative coalition government, supported by the
Danish People's Party, represents the programme of the ruling class after the
interment of the "welfare model": the construction of a "new
model" with the alluring name, "the minimal state", that is,
minimal welfare for the great majority and maximum freedom for the monopolies
to exploit and rob the workers and the general population.
The last glaze over the capitalist state of robbers, which is a tool in the
hands of the ruling class for taking care of its interests, is disappearing
in a torrent of words about free choice and possibilities for the citizens.
In the past, the Social Democratic Party gained huge prestige in the working
class by presenting the Danish welfare model as a child born of Social Democratic
class collaboration. But the main part of its positive sides were just demands
which the working class had raised and been fighting for for decades, not at
least headed by the communist party. The Social Democratic Party got the "honour",
so to speak, for the struggle of the class. In return, the party has played
a leading role in the liquidation of the Danish welfare model at the same moment
it was put on the agenda by the ruling class, that is, the moment when it was
no longer feeling that such reforms and confessions to the working class were
necessary for avoiding "social instability" and revolutionary mass
struggle.
In that way, the Social Democratic Party has lost the credit of the working
class while the so-called left-wing as the Socialist People's Party (SF) and
the Unity List (Red-Green Alliance), and in the time before the birth of the
latter, the revisionist Communist Party of Denmark (DKP), have been competing
about being the most influential hanger's on party to the big party of class
collaboration, being in power now and then. This has deepened the catastrophe
and made it considerably easier to liquidate the Danish welfare model so quickly
and effectively as has been the case. This fact also throws the present struggle
against the Fogh Rasmussen government and the supercapitalist minimal state
in relief: The struggle can never lead to any real results if it continues to
hang on to the Social Democratic Party. On the contrary, it must fight the destroying
Social Democratic policy of class collaboration, which entombed the Danish welfare
model.
May 20, 2002