The hinterland of social democracy: On the conceptual limits of Nordic welfare capitalism

ABSTRACT: Every instantiation of decommodifying welfare capitalism relies on a hinterland, an exterior space or world for which commodification remains the rule whose function is to service the interiority of social-democratic welfarism. Taking Norway as its case study, this article unfolds the notion of a protective “cupola,” following Žižek, and a “centaur state,” following Wacquant, as the preeminent political-economic innovations of late-modern social democracy. While extracting resources, cheap labor, goods, and financial profits from the global hinterland, the welfare-capitalist state privileges its national citizenry, and, despite significant neoliberal transformation, continues to protect the populace from the discomfiting effects and vagaries of the market, albeit at the expense of the world beyond its bounds. Social democracy, then, hinges on the preservation of difference, and fails to offer a truly global, universal solution to the commodifying effects of market capitalism.

Introduction

Social democracy—and its related (inverted) invariant, democratic socialism—is enjoying a period of significant global interest. More particularly, and perhaps unlike ever before in its history, the Nordic model of embedded welfare capitalism is experiencing a worldwide publicity boost, powered and projected by rising dissatisfaction with the deleterious effects of unfettered market capitalism. In the post-Global Financial Crisis era, laissez-faire capitalism is looking increasingly unsavory, a tendency only amplified by the lethality of the COVID-19 pandemic and the potentially cataclysmic effects of catastrophic climate change, which will demand a substantial, coordinated state response.

Writing in 2013, a lead writer for The Economist noted that “the four main Nordics—Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland—are doing rather well,” before adding: “If you had to be reborn anywhere in the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want to be a Viking.”[1] What this centrist magazine found so appealing in the Nordic model of social democracy was its “proving that it is possible to combine competitive capitalism with a large state.” Capitalism was not destined to be unbound, the Nordic countries seemed to suggest.

While neoliberalism long seemed like the only viable political-economic game in town, enjoying spectacular doxic appeal since the era of Reagan and Thatcher, the financial meltdown of 2007-2008 seemed to sound the death knell of this rather cozy state of affairs: The hegemony of the Washington Consensus was bruised by an economic meltdown wiping out an estimated $9.8 trillion worth of home equity in the United States alone,[2] and which had gone largely unforeseen by the vast majority of professional economists. The naturalized ideological grip of the pseudo-discipline of economics seemed, at least, to weaken, causing the once self-assured Alan Greenspan to pronounce in 2009 that “the whole intellectual edifice…collapsed in the summer of last year.”[3] Faced with quickly diminishing life prospects, induced by the subprime mortgage crash, the post-2008 era has been characterized by a kind of ideological restlessness—one in which Fukuyama’s triumphalist liberal-democratic capitalist “end of history” thesis looks increasingly implausible—a fact only heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic and, far more dangerously, an increasingly hot and hostile planet.

On the one hand, COVID-19 forced even the most staunchly market-liberal politicians to admit that the basic mechanisms of market-bound life would have to be checked: In the U.S., nearly $5 trillion were devoted to “pandemic stimulus” efforts—a euphemism for the state temporarily (and, it must be added, inadequately) disconnecting life chances from a market existence—with workers alone receiving almost $700 billion unemployment benefits. One Chicago economist noted, in the words of the New York Times, that “unrestricted cash…was used broadly by the federal government to stem the economic devastation” created by SARS-CoV-2.[4]

Across the Atlantic, in a very different kind of society, Norway, the government spent nearly 260 billion Norwegian krone (approximately 26 billion dollars[5]) between 2020 and 2022 on various pandemic measures, with 109 billion krone transferred to private corporations, aimed at compensating for revenue losses.[6] The state also directly intervened on behalf of wage-earners, processing some 617,000 applications for compensatory daily wage allowances (dagpenger)—a significant proportion in an economy whose work force consists of around three million individuals[7]—suggesting that, as in so many other Western countries, the fundamental axiom of market capitalism, viz. that life chances are intimately connected with the imperative to sell wage-labor, would have to be disabled with the advent of a generalized societal crisis that threatened to undermine not only social reproduction (that is, a continued belief in the viability of the capitalist structure), but the very biological life-force ultimately underpinning value production and, therefore, capital accumulation.[8]

If anything, global climate change seems to demand even heavier state-centered action, perhaps necessitating a kind of “war communism,” as Malm (2020) suggests, including consumption quotas and production bans (on particularly resource-intensive goods and services), with the ramped-up normalization of direct intervention in the economy at a scale hitherto precluded by liberal economics. Žižek (2020), too, used this combative phrase—historically denoting the severe measures taken by Soviet Russia during the Civil War between 1918 and 1921, when it faced the prospect of existential destruction by the combined forces of Western Europe and the “Whites”—in the context of an early intervention on the topic of how best to address the pandemic in the early days of 2020; Žižek observed that even Trump’s actions to “limit the freedom of private enterprises” were in some sense “socialist” or could even be construed as a kind of “Communism” (2020: 93). This conceptual echo is suggestive of how the COVID-19 pandemic perhaps served as a premonition of an even greater coming crisis—and the scale of ideological transformation this necessarily will require.

Indeed, the history of the early twenty-first century may someday be written through this lens of ideological unsettling: a tripartite movement of global financial crisis, global pandemic, and planetary-wide climate crisis, each serving to undermine or even, in the final analysis, explode neoliberal orthodoxies. What remains certain is that one cannot go home again: There can be no return to the comfortable Clintonite vision of liberal markets only minimally corrected by a bare-bones regulatory state, with working people left to fend for themselves. The crisis-pocked “long decade” of 2007-2022 has permanently upset the natural order of all things political-economic.

The imaginary of Nordic welfare capitalism

Much of the consequent casting-about for new ideas and structures in the post-Washington Consensus era, it must be said, has been channeled into the resurgence of more traditionally nativist, at times authoritarian, right-wing politicians and movements, mischaracterized as “populist” (as if their cardinal sin were an over-reliance on the populus, on public sway over policy, or untrammeled democracy)—item, Trump’s Muslim bans and immigration raids; item, Johnson’s dysfunctional Brexiteering (with Johnson aptly sorted under the category of political strongmen by the Financial Times reporter Gideon Rachman [2022]); item, Bolsonaro’s pro-business-Evangelical assault on the Amazon rainforest and COVID protective measures.

Simultaneously, however, there has been an opposite (and unequal) reaction, less electorally successful, certainly, though significant at the level of ideas: a corresponding boom in concern with constructing an ameliorated mode of political economy, a “capitalism with a human face.” In the United States, the Democratic Socialists of America, once a marginal group, now boast of 92,000 members; Bernie Sanders, its well-known associate, received more than 9 million votes in the 2020 Democratic primary elections. Decommodification looks increasingly popular. Among Democrats and “Democratic leaners,” some 65 percent of respondents to a Gallup poll reported a “positive image of socialism” in 2021,[9] astonishing given the level of ideological vehemence directed toward collectivist notions in the American public imaginary. In the United Kingdom, the leftwing Jeremy Corbyn was able to climb to the apex of the Labour Party in 2015, albeit not without concerted opposition, ultimately leading to his toppling five years later. But his ideas remain attractive. In 2021, a public opinion poll of young people in the UK suggested that 67 percent of respondents would “like to live in a socialist system,” with three-quarters agreeing that climate change is a “specifically capitalist problem” while “blam[ing] capitalism for Britain’s housing crisis” and supporting the notion that socialism is a “good idea” that has had the misfortune of being “badly done.”[10]

There is a natural desire to see one’s ideals realized in concrete terms. Real-world confirmation helps bolster the credibility of what some might otherwise suspect are unrealizable ideals. For a host of reasons, various post-neoliberal malcontents have fastened onto the Scandinavian model. The mantra, “Look to Scandinavia!”, has resounded in one shape or another in public policy circles, legislative chambers, and journalism—as with George Lakey’s 2017 pop-economic book, Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right, or as seen in the filmmaker Michael Moore’s 2015 documentary, Where to Invade Next; Moore visits a Norwegian minimum-security island prison, Bastøy, portrayed as but one particular (penal) instantiation of a deeper, more functional method of organizing state and society.[11] Similarly, in April 2022, Senator Bernie Sanders, then chairman of the U.S. Senate Budget Committee, invited Norway’s ambassador in Washington, D.C. to a virtual summit on the topic, “What can we learn from Norway?”.[12] Sanders expressed astonishment at such minutiae of this Nordic country’s healthcare system, wherein patients’ annual spending on prescription medication is capped at around 350 US dollars. The senator expressed a desire to learn from Norway, to reconstruct, in the American context, “a government that works for all, not just those at the top.”

The Scandinavian, or Nordic, countries—the nomenclature is often inconsistently applied—seem, in short, to offer a ready example of ethical capitalism, a space in which the “corruption of capitalism,” to use Standing’s (2016) phrase, has at least partly been redressed. The lesson of Scandinavia is, seemingly, that market economies can function not just in the interest of the owners of private enterprise, but the wider public, ensconcing capital’s movements in welfarist packages, capable of delivering reasonable or free public healthcare, schools, higher education, and childcare, inter alia, while offering a panoply of unemployment, sickness, and disability benefits to guard against various existential risks. These are, of course, not insignificant gains. Just as enthusiasts of the Nordic prison systems cheer on its tendency toward humane carceral conditions and reasonably low rates of imprisonment (see e.g. Pratt and Eriksson 2013), so too, more broadly, do enthusiasts of Nordic political economy applaud what one American columnist—slyly echoing and subverting Deng Xiaoping’s famed phrase—refers to as “capitalism with Scandinavian characteristics.”[13] Writing in Foreign Policy, Nima Sanandaji rightly points out that while Scandinavian societies are often held aloft as exemplars of practicable “socialism,” the reality on the ground is that they offer a demonstration of what the author calls centrism, essentially denoting a commitment to core capitalist values, encapsulated within a framework of taxation, modest redistribution, various assistive institutions, and an assortment of social safeguards.[14]

The Nordic neoliberal counter-revolution

In his preface to the Philosophy of Right, Hegel famously claimed that “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the coming of the dusk” (cit. Blackburn 2016: 346). By this somewhat cryptic remark, the German philosopher meant that philosophy—or, more broadly, perhaps any kind of organized discursive reflectiveness—always arrives on the social scene too late, as it were, catching up to phenomena precisely as they begin to wither away. Only with maturity unto decay, Hegel claims, can serious thought begin to comprehend that which is falling apart.

Similarly, the paradox of look-to-Scandinavianism is that the rest of the world seems to be catching up to Nordic welfare capitalism at precisely the moment in its history when its decommodifying, welfarist credentials have fallen under the sway of rising neoliberal headwinds. To borrow Hegel’s terms, dusk is approaching on intently decommodifying welfarism. Take the example of public healthcare: Norway’s much-lauded public healthcare system, long considered a rival to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), increasingly faces competition from the rise of private health insurance providers and healthcare subcontractors. While only around 29,000 individuals were covered by private health insurance schemes in Norway in 2003, this figure has climbed steadily and rapidly across the ensuing decades, to a level of more than 696,000 individuals by 2021.[15] One must be careful not to exaggerate the role played by private providers in a country that devoted some 17.9 percent of public spending on healthcare in 2021.[16] However, that same year, some 14.4 percent of health spending was derived from private sources, a clear sign that cracks in the system were beginning to appear—slowly and moderately, to be sure—as social elites increasingly desired “choice” and “flexibility” as well as the freedom to skip ahead of others in an often-backlogged public system of specialist consultancies.[17] Even government agencies recognize this nascent privatization: The Norwegian Directorate of Health (Helsedirektoratet) spoke in December 2020 of an “emerging market for privately funded services (?),” during a presentation of Norway’s system—admittedly with a tantalizing parenthetical question mark appended.[18] Aleris, Norway’s largest private provider of healthcare services, remained outspoken in support of state provision—“The public [sector] should still be responsible for providing good health services to the population,” it claimed, staking out an auxiliary role for its service provision[19]—even as it generated revenues of more than 1.1 billion NOK in 2021,[20] and the market for private health insurance looked likely to continue along its past 20-year trajectory of year-on-year growth.

Or take that much-vaunted pillar of social-democratic ideology, egalitarianism. Between 2012 and 2018, Norway saw its top 1 percent wealthiest individuals move from controlling 18.52 percent of wealth in 2012 to 22.67 percent in 2018—a moderate increase, but from an already highly unequal baseline, especially for a country that prides itself on its egalitarian credentials; the country’s top 10 percent wealthiest individuals went from controlling 50.09 percent of wealth to 53.84 percent of the country’s riches, a moderate increase, but again, suggestive of a durable, fundamental wealth inequality at the core of this putatively equality-oriented nation,[21] indicative of a direction of change, an ongoing society-wide trajectory away from a more intensely interventionist, decommodifying, redistributive postwar brand of social democracy. Meanwhile, the bottom 50 percent of the population’s net personal wealth stood at a meager 3.6 percent in 2021.[22]

In fact, like all postindustrialized societies, Norway has fostered a significant, self-assertive wealthy elite—albeit one increasingly given to offshoring their wealth, as in the case of the billionaire Kjell Inge Røkke, who announced in September 2022 that he was relocating to Lugano, Switzerland, putatively due to its “central location” on the European continent,[23] though more likely as a result of Switzerland’s status as a tax haven, extensively documented by the Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman (2015) and others. Norway, too, houses a significant proportion of the population with limited access to the nation’s great riches. The relative egalitarianism of the Nordics in comparison with the rest of the postindustrialized world only suggest that this world is, overall, a rather unequally distributed space, with the Nordics playing the part of a somewhat less (internally) unequal, but still unequally distributed, cluster of societies. Even here, though, one must allow for certain caveats: As Aaberge et al. (2021: 89-90) point out, there are number of definitional and accounting issues at stake that have caused official Gini coefficients and wealth data to underestimate the real extent of wealth inequality in Norway; they find, for instance, that constructing what they hold to be a more accurate estimate of the value of unlisted private companies reveals greater wealth inequality than previously assumed. Between 2011 and 2021, the pro-business journal Kapital estimated that the top 400 Norwegian billionaires (counted in NOK, equivalent to approximately 100 million dollars) more than tripled their total wealth in nominal terms, from a total of around 530 billion NOK to 1,696 billion NOK.[24] Meanwhile, more than one in ten children were reported to be growing up in families with “durably low income” levels in 2021, more than a threefold increase since 2001.[25] With rising energy and food prices and rising interest rates in 2022, a nationwide network of eight food banks estimated it would hand out 5,000 tons of food by the end of the year, a 30 percent increase from the year prior.[26]

The (national) limits of social democracy

Social democracy is, ultimately, not a global solution to the problem of decommodification presented by market capitalism, because it, too, relies fundamentally on the production and exploitation of difference, albeit typically spatially distanced difference-making. Social democracy hinges on axes of spatial differentiation, by which cheap labor, goods, services, and natural resources can flow to service the national citizenry ensconced within the nationally bounded engine of decommodification that is the social-democratic welfare state. In this sense, social democracy is always a kind of quasi-“socialism in one country,” an attempt to redress the ills of a multinational, indeed global, system of production, distribution, and accumulation, but within the framework of a single nation-state, which naturally demands a sorting between citizen-insiders (worthy of decommodification, protection, assistance) and second-rate outsiders (whose function is to produce, accumulate for, and service these insiders). Social democracy creates, to use Žižek’s term, inspired by Sloterdijk, a cupola, a kind of dome, protecting insiders from outside disruption, or a membrane, filtering away harms and risks while allowing, like a semi-permeable membrane, desirable flows of resources, and social energy, to pass undisturbed into the relatively comfortably ensconced insiders within.

Social democracy—understood as decommodified welfare capitalism, which seeks to curtail socioecononomic inequalities, provide relatively generous public services, such as free healthcare and education, and protect citizens from the vagaries of the market—can only function within circumscribed national or, at best, regional pockets. Social democracy is not properly speaking a realizable globalist ideology, but a kind of “democratic socialism in one country” (or a minor group of countries). The reasons are largely structural in nature: It is not the “welfare” modifier that hinders a globally distributed social democracy from forming, but the grammatical subject, “capitalism”: It demands spatial differentiation, trading on difference—differences in needs, desires, capacities, resources, and resilience, which ultimately produce the differences in exploitability that are the precondition for value-production. The homogenization of life chances implied in an actual, realized internationalist social-democratic vision would effectively close off the spatially differentiated avenues of difference-engendered capital accumulation.

Conceptually speaking, Nordic social democracy depends for its sustenance on a vast, exploitable hinterland: a fount of commodifying relations and services extracted via global market mechanisms, whose function under political-economic dualization is to service and ameliorate the life chances of a nationally privileged citizenry. By its nature, social democracy is premised on the power asymmetries inherent to the core-periphery structure of the world economy.

Like Wacquant’s (2009: 43-44) “centaur state”—liberal and permissive at the top (toward social elites), punitive and austere toward inhabitants of the lower end of social space—social democracy privileges and protects a national citizenry, ensconced within a privileged bubble, or cupola, where relatively decommodified social relations and generous social assistance still hold sway; but this is the “human half” of the social-democratic centaur. Its beastly visage remains in place, too. It shows its human face to the nation-state to which it hails; it reserves its animal nature for the hinterland that stretches on behind the welfarist nation.

Flexible, inexpensive foreign labor

By the end of 2020, 8.4 percent of the total employed labor force was constituted by foreign laborers, according to Statistics Norway.[27] Some sectors, such as the construction industry, were heavily reliant on nondomestic sources labor: In the building trade, the proportion of foreign workers was 22 percent, and in the hospitality sector this figure stood at 16 percent; one-quarter of all temporarily “rented” manpower (an industry labeled forretningsmessig tjenesteyting, or “corporate services,” by Statistics Norway) was made up of overseas workers.[28] In a study of resident workers from Poland and Lithuania—two important sources of labor importation following the 2004 eastward expansion of the EU—social scientists found that “there are clear indications that the majority of our sample” are paid more than the relevant minimum, or “tariff,” wage in the construction industry, even though more than one-third of Polish respondents and one-quarter of workers from Lithuania believed they were underpaid compared with their Norwegian coworkers (Ødegård and Andersen 2021: 5).

The hundreds of thousands of service workers sourced from lower-wage countries like Poland in the decades after the EU’s expansion served to generate value at a scale that would not have been possible with native labor alone. “The new labour migration flows,” observes Friberg (2017: 20) of the early 2000s, “represented a major shock to parts of the Norwegian labour market. Overnight, Norwegian employers in industries struggling with labour shortages and volatile demand gained access to a vast reservoir of cheap flexible labour in countries with wage-levels somewhere between one-fifth and one-tenth of Norway’s.” Friberg rightly points out that “this new large-scale labor migration flow has been positive for the Norwegian economy,” though with a more acutely political-economy lens, we might rephrase this in terms of a foreign labor pool’s function as a source of extraordinary value production and profitability for a small class of business owners. Indeed, this class-systemic function can be seen even in the upper echelons of the Norwegian political establishment: Norway’s social-democratic—and personally wealthy—Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre sold his ownership stakes in a construction site in 2017 after it was discovered that foreign workers working on the site were working without “tariff” agreements, on so-called casual labor contracts (løsarbeiderkontrakter);[29] Støre’s profits from the unplanned sale—undertaken to avoid further criticism of his role as Labor Party leader—netted him around 3 million NOK in profits.[30]

Of course, the hinterland of social democracy can supply the means necessary for welfare capitalism to reproduce itself by other means than brute labor importation. In 2021, China became Norway’s largest importing partner, with around 13 percent of imports arriving from China this year,[31] though outmatched by Germany and Sweden in the pre-pandemic year of 2019.[32] The world at large also presents ready opportunities for investment activities, from Statoil’s investments in ecologically destructive tar sand projects in Canada for a decade until 2016, when it felt impelled to pull out after massive criticism,[33] to an extensive Norwegian corporate presence in Brazil, in which only a measly 10.5 percent of Norwegian subsidiaries’ total profits, or “more than US$ 750 million,” as one boastful government pamphlet proclaims, were reinvested between 2019 and 2020.[34]

Global rentiers, national welfarists

Financialization is perhaps the premier route along which social-democratic welfare capitalism demonstrates its cupola-like nature—its dualizing, centaur-like tendencies. In the case of Norway, the government’s hydrocarbon-fueled “sovereign wealth fund,” the Government Pension Fund Global (GPFG), colloquially known as the Norwegian Oil Fund, has effectively turned every citizen of the country into a part-time rentier capitalist: wage-laborers by daytime, portfolio watchers by night—class-fragmented dividuals, to use Deleuze’s term, rather than one-class subjectivities. The fund’s valuation and scale necessarily vary, but in 2021 it was valued at 12.3 trillion NOK (approximately 1.2 trillion dollars) and held ownership stakes in around 9,000 companies around the world: “On average the fund owns 1.3 percent of all listed companies,” Norway’s central bank reports, [35] an astonishing figure for a nation of around 5.5 million people, representing a vastly disproportionate level of property ownership on a global level: Norway’s share of the world population is only approximately 0.07 percent, meaning its holdings in global equity markets constitute a nearly 18-fold level of disproportion, compared with a perfectly egalitarian situation.

In short, Norway’s welfare capitalism is to a significant degree premised on its government’s position as a leading actor on financial markets: Between 2019 and 2021 alone, the government transferred 1.033 trillion NOK from the fund to bolster public spending.[36] Importantly, the fund is itself propped up by oil and gas revenues from Norway’s offshore hydrocarbon industry. The extraction of revenue from the fund is—in theory—capped at three percent of its total value (the fund’s assumed rate of return on investment in the long run). But these natural resource revenues are, as it were, always-already financialized before they can be turned to public use.

While adherents of the fund are quick to point out that the fund has staved off the problem of a resource curse, or “Dutch disease,” far less analytic firepower has been trained on parsing the extent to which it effectively connects each Norwegian citizen, and the state as a whole, to the future well-being of global financial capitalism—and indeed allows the country to exert an outsize force within this system. As one news report emphasizes, “The fund holds the equivalent of $244,000 for every Norwegian man, woman and child.”[37] Norway’s sovereign wealth fund has effectively turned its social-democratic host nation into an apex rentier capitalist. Now, in a liberal economic paradigm, in which financial markets serve a necessary auxiliary function in the world economy, smoothing the way for efficient production and trade, this is an ethico-politically neutral, or even benevolent, move. But within a critical-theoretical framework, in which growing financialization represents a turn to fictitious capital (Durand 2017), financial profits must ultimately have their source in some other space than the financial market itself. “Since finance does not itself produce anything, it must draw its fruits from elsewhere,” as Durand (2007: 153) writes.

Two issues should be raised here: On the one hand, dividends are effectively a form of surplus-value, generated by workers and appropriated by owners. On the other hand, the gargantuan increase in financial markets as such has “equitized” the global economy in such a way that future crashes, dislocations, and inequalities seem ever more likely. Moreover, to participate in financialization is in itself to partake of a concerted “economic and social restructuring,” as Ben Fine (2013: 59) writes, who argues that “as long as financialization remains hegemonic, so will be neoliberalism.” This is not the place to rehearse the case against financialization more extensively; suffice it to say that it remains incompatible with a truly internationalist concern with decommodification, welfarism, and democratic values. “Financialized capitalism,” writes Nancy Fraser (2015: 179), “is the era of ‘governance without government’—which is to say, of domination without the fig leaf of consent.”

A sovereign wealth fund such as Norway’s “Oil Fund”—funded in part, lest one forgets, by planet-destroying hydrocarbon production—creates a class of owners, rentiers, insiders, whose life-chances are now intimately connected with the solidification of the financialized paradigm, and whose well-being is now codetermined by the ability to appropriate value from workers and extract resources from the environment, while de- and reregulating the polity to coalesce with the interests of financial capital. The extensive revenue streams thus generated facilitate the reproduction of a nationally-bounded welfarist regime, certainly, even in times of crisis and pandemic—but at the “loss of its own soul,” that is, at the expense of everyone else. The downside to “gaining the whole world”—

or rather, a significant, outsize chunk of global equity markets—is that comfortable insiders are thereby left exposed to the vagaries of fictitious capital, including the possibility of global financial meltdown. Global financial markets become another necessary, exploitable element in the hinterland of social democracy, serving to prop up the welfare state’s myriad fiscal commitments for insiders.

Conclusion

Neoliberalism has reached Norway, too. The national oil and gas company, Statoil (now rebranded Equinor), was partly privatized in 2001 and listed on the New York and Oslo stock exchanges, even though the Norwegian government remains a two-thirds majority owner;[38] still, high levels of production taxation mean that, stunningly, around 42 percent of the state’s revenues are derived from the petroleum sector.[39] This is one of the key pillars of a hybridized state-capitalist system, which does ultimately generate welfare for its interior citizenry. Nevertheless, the welfare capitalism of the 2020s is not that of the postwar decades. There is an increasingly self-assertive, wealthy class of property owners that remains materially divorced from the rest of the populace: In 2019 alone, some 7.2 percent of the population received dividend payments from share ownership to the tune of around 63.35 billion NOK;[40] during the years of Conservative Prime Minister Erna Solberg’s government, from 2013 to 2021, the number of individuals classed as billionaires (in Norwegian krone) increased 2.5 times, from 161 to 400 individuals.[41] This interior class antagonism, within one society, which social-democratic ideology looks increasingly unlikely to tamp down, is simultaneously being replicated, fractal-like between the nation-state and the rest of the world, with the entire Norwegian social order increasingly becoming tied to the fortunes of global financial capitalism.

All of this makes for a highly ambivalent, ambiguous regime of political economy. It can variously be described as a form of dualization, as a centaur, or a cupola. Whatever one’s metaphor of choice: There is, on the one hand, an extant, but diminishing, system of decommodification reserved for a privileged interior population—securing free or relatively inexpensive education, childcare, and healthcare as well as reasonably generous social-security benefits and pensions—aimed at protecting a privileged, honorable citizenry from the shame and taint of life on the free market. But on the other hand, this system depends on an outside, an exteriority: a financialized world market, increasingly beholden to the vagaries of “fictitious capital”; a world market ready to supply cheap imported consumer goods, especially in East Asia; a source of inexpensive, docile labor drawn especially from the regions into which the European Union has expanded in recent decades; and, finally, a biosphere to be ravaged by hydrocarbon consumption, for which Norway is uniquely responsible with its decades of super-profitable extractive activities. If this is welfare capitalism, one shudders to contemplate its opposite.

In Plato’s Timaeus, Socrates describes his ideal guardians as persons both “spirited and philosophical,” so that they might be “appropriately gentle or harsh” (Plato 1997: 1226), whatever the circumstances might require. Is not this a model for welfare capitalism fused onto the nation-state—“gentle” toward insiders, “spirited” toward all that stretches beyond? Indeed, the iron law of social democracy—so benevolently disposed toward its own demos, so indifferent to or extractive of the wider kosmos—is such that for every welfare-capitalist regime, there must exist a hinterland, a “back country” of serviceable, willing inferiors (whether explicitly defined as such or not), of receptive markets, of a natural environment deemed valueless and undeserving of protection, ready to meet the needs, at once material and symbolic, of the glass dome’s privileged insiders.

References

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Durand, C. (2017) Fictitious Capital: How Finance is Appropriating Our Future. London: Verso.

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Malm, A. (2020) Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency War Communism in the Twenty-First Century. London: Verso.

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Rachman, G. (2022) The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World. New York: Other Press.

Standing, G. (2016) The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay.

Wacquant, L. (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Žižek, S. (2020) PANDEMIC! COVID-19 Shakes the World. New York: OR Books.

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Ødegaard, A. M. & Andersen, R. K (2021) “Arbeids- og levekår for bosatte arbeidsinnvandrere fra Polen og Litauen.” Fafo-rapport, 2021:14. https://www.fafo.no/images/pub/2021/20781.pdf.

Footnotes

[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2013/02/02/the-next-supermodel

[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/a-guide-to-the-financial-crisis--10-years-later/2018/09/10/114b76ba-af10-11e8-a20b-5f4f84429666_story.html

[3] https://foreignpolicy.com/gt-essay/the-end-of-economics-fareed-zakaria/

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/business/economy/guaranteed-income.html

[5] Calculated at the NOK-USD exchange rate valid on 14 September, 2022.

[6] https://www.regjeringen.no/contentassets/7f1fdef23b72488da28fde24416425e6/20220405_holden-iv_hovedrapport.pdf, p. 90, Table 6.3.

[7] https://www.ssb.no/arbeid-og-lonn/sysselsetting/statistikk/arbeidskraftundersokelsen

[8] https://www.pengenytt.no/riksrevisjonen-nav-har-i-all-hovedsak-levert-under-koronapandemien/

[9] https://news.gallup.com/poll/357755/socialism-capitalism-ratings-unchanged.aspx

[10] https://iea.org.uk/media/67-per-cent-of-young-brits-want-a-socialist-economic-system-finds-new-poll/

[11] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IepJqxRCZY

[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oukkfJNrV8g

[13] https://www.startribune.com/capitalism-with-scandinavian-characteristics/505916412/

[14] https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/10/27/nordic-countries-not-socialist-denmark-norway-sweden-centrist/

[15] https://www.finansnorge.no/statistikk/skadeforsikring/helseforsikring/behandlingsforsikring/

[16] https://www.ssb.no/en/nasjonalregnskap-og-konjunkturer/nasjonalregnskap/statistikk/helseregnskap

[17] https://www.ssb.no/en/nasjonalregnskap-og-konjunkturer/nasjonalregnskap/statistikk/helseregnskap

[18] https://www.fhi.no/globalassets/dokumenterfiler/global-helse/evidence/health-care-financing-in-norway---lithuania---health-directorate-2020.pdf

[19] https://www.aleris.no/mer-om-oss/om/

[20] https://www.proff.no/selskap/aleris/oslo/leger/IFLRGGY00XB/

[21] All figures drawn from the OECD.Stat “Wealth” table for Norway, last updated in December 2021. https://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?lang=en.

[22] https://wid.world/world/#shweal_p0p50_z/US;FR;DE;CN;ZA;GB;WO/last/eu/k/p/yearly/s/false/-9.318499999999998/20/curve/false/country

[23] https://www.dn.no/marked/investor-kjell-inge-rokke-melder-flytting-til-sveits-et-krevende-valg-er-tatt/2-1-1295652

[24] The magazine publishes an annually updated list of the 400 wealthiest Norwegians, available online at: https://www.kapital.no/kapital-index/norges-400-rikeste. Correcting for inflation using Statistics Norway’s inflation calculator (https://www.ssb.no/kalkulatorer/priskalkulator) reveals the growth in real terms to be around 2.5 times, after adjusting nominal 2011 prices upward to average 2021 prices.

[25] https://e24.no/norsk-oekonomi/i/lVjMdk/ferske-tall-115000-norske-barn-vokser-opp-i-fattigdom

[26] https://www.nrk.no/tromsogfinnmark/matsentralene-er-i-krise-og-mange-kan-ga-sultne-i-vinter-1.16103259

[27] https://www.ssb.no/arbeid-og-lonn/sysselsetting/statistikk/sysselsetting-blant-innvandrere-registerbasert/artikler/viken-er-mest-avhengig-av-utenlandsk-arbeidskraft

[28] https://www.ssb.no/arbeid-og-lonn/sysselsetting/statistikk/sysselsetting-blant-innvandrere-registerbasert/artikler/viken-er-mest-avhengig-av-utenlandsk-arbeidskraft

[29] https://www.nrk.no/norge/store-selger-seg-ut-av-boligprosjekt-etter-dagbladet-avsloring-1.13532421

[30] https://www.nrk.no/norge/store-tjente-tre-mill.-pa-omstridt-byggeprosjekt_-mottok-gratis-salgshjelp-fra-venn-1.13671955

[31] https://www.ssb.no/en/utenriksokonomi/utenrikshandel/statistikk/utenrikshandel-med-varer

[32] https://www.ssb.no/en/statbank/table/08804/tableViewLayout1/

[33] https://www.thelocal.no/20161215/norways-statoil-exits-oil-sands-projects-in-canada/

[34] https://www.innovasjonnorge.no/globalassets/0-innovasjonnorge.no/subsites/in-south-america/publications/norwegian-investment-report-2021---english_screen_spread.pdf/

[35] https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/Market-Value/

[36] https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/meld.-st.-1-20202021/id2768215/?ch=3#:~:text=%2B%20Overf%C3%B8rt%20fra%20Statens,371%2C2, Table 3.3.