Dorte Grenaa – Workers‘ Communist Party (APK), Denmark.
There is a growing interest in socialism and in the understanding that capitalism and imperialism are not able to solve the huge and growing problems of today; there is a search for alternatives and ways to achieve them. Therefore, we also see the launching of new opportunist theories of socialism at an ever-faster pace, hostile to the scientific socialism of Marxism-Leninism.
APK is taking part in that debate, standing on the foundation of scientific socialism, with a strategy and program for the revolution of the working class, with the working class as the leading and main force in the class struggle today, in the revolution and as the new ruling class under socialism – all elaborated and concretized in our program “The Manifesto for a Socialist Denmark” and the main documents of the ICMLPO.
The constant rebirth of reformism
In Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, generations of workers have been infused with the Social Democratic Party’s reformist, class-collaborationist policy, which has covered their lives, literally speaking, from cradle to grave. For several decades, in the so-called Nordic welfare societies, increasingly better living conditions were created for a large part of the working class and the population. With the existence of the then socialist Soviet Union as a living reality from 1917-1952 and a very strong and comprehensive union organization at that time, which fought for reform demands, the bourgeoisie and the employers chose to join forces with the Social Democratic party and the labour aristocracy in the top leadership of the trade union movement and made a “class-collaborationist contract” that ensured them social peace in order to ensure a very intense exploitation of labour and high profits. Only a very small part of the value created went to public welfare. The welfare model turned out to be a short-lived historical parenthesis.
The Social Democrats today are in a long-lasting crisis. This has accelerated, not the least since the bourgeoisie terminated the “class-collaborationist contract” at the end of the 20th century, with the collapse of Soviet revisionism, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “New World Order” of US imperialism, in which the Social Democratic party adopted completely open neoliberal positions. But the Social Democratic party has a chameleon-like ability to reinvent itself as the defender and protector of the working people. Today, they are once again trying to stand as the bulwark against the increased inequality and exploitation and the growing development of a social and economic crisis. However, they cannot do this alone, without first aid from the opportunist parties that play an active role in the constant rebirth of reformism.
On the political left wing in Denmark, in particular the parliamentary support-party of the Social Democratic government, the Unity List and the political forces around them are launching a pluralist range of socialist theories such as “Red/Green Socialist Europe,” “Nordic Socialism,” “Communist – and Eco socialist counter-growth” and “Communism for the 21st century.”
These political currents speak radically about the need for a rupture with capitalism before the climate catastrophes have wiped out the planet and all of humanity. But what they offer in practice is, and has been, to shield the old Social Democracies and their governments as “better than bourgeois governments” and divert all steps in the class struggle into purely parliamentary roads. In the trade union movement, they have taken over the old role and positions of the revisionists as the fire extinguishers for the top leadership of the trade unions and of the labour aristocracy.
Since its foundation in 1989, the Unity List has not been able to agree on a program for socialism due to the existence of different main currents and factions within this party: the classless platform of democracy of the Left Socialists (VS), the anti-monopoly democracy of the revisionist Communist Party of Denmark (DKP) and the undefined world-socialism and anti-communism of the Trotskyist currents. The theory of a special “Nordic socialism” is an attempt to create a common theoretical platform for a third way between capitalism and socialism, between a reform path of social democracy and a revolutionary path of a socialist revolution. It is an attempt to theoretically substantiate and provide arguments for the policy that the leadership in the Unity List has developed and pursued over many years. At the same time it is an attempt to intervene against a growing realization on the left and in the working class that the Unity List is not and does not have the answer and cannot respond to a rupture with capitalism and the building of socialism but is merely a modern form of Social Democracy.
Although this anti-Marxist-Leninist theory is launched as a Scandinavian phenomenon, due to specific historical features and current conditions, it is part of an international fashionable trend: that of cooperative enterprises and democratic public ownership as the new form of peaceful path to socialism. It has elements from the ideologues of the U.S. left in Bernie Sanders’ think-tank such as taming monopoly capitalism and introducing the old Nordic social democratic so-called welfare model that collapsed decades ago. It also has elements from currents such as Collaborative Democracy (socialist reforms) that we also find in sections of the Labor Party in the UK.
It has elements from the red/green anti-capitalism of the Party of the European Left, which basically wants to create a more democratically competitive ecologically and socially just capitalism and to transform the European Union from within into a socialist Europe free of US imperialism. The Unity List is a member of the Party of the European Left along with 18 other European parties, including Die Linke in Germany, Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. The bankruptcy of this policy was fully demonstrated by the Syriza government in Greece, which in opposition to a referendum, capitulated to the pressure from the EU monopolies, followed their austerity dictates and totally betrayed the working class and the population.
Socialism as a transitional society
According to “Nordic Socialism,” Danish society today is a hybrid between capitalism and socialism. Where both coexist in Denmark! Where the capitalist form of production and private ownership of the means of productions remain dominant now, but that they coexist with socialist ownership in cooperative companies and democratic socialist forms of production. It states that it is possible, within the framework of the capitalist system, to make the two – capitalism and socialism – change places in a new form of socialism without the elimination and abolition of capitalism, private property, the ruling class, and its state. That this can be done through social reforms and democratic control, where socialism gradually becomes prevalent through the pressure of the grassroots popular movements, the trade union movement, and the ballot box revolution, which is intended to bring parties that promise this to power and be the guarantor of this taking place.
This is an experiment and theory which has already been tried in practice with disastrous consequences and defeats by “Eurocommunism” in former Yugoslavia, modern revisionism in the Soviet Union and in the former Eastern European “People’s Democracies.”
Marx and Engels have shown how different modes of production and property relations are expressions of the different classes that exist within a class society. What matters is which class is the ruling class and thereby the determining factor in the development of society in the specific period, as we live in class societies until the final classless communist society.
Socialism itself is a transitional society in which classes and strata still exist, and with class struggle for a revolutionary development and process towards communism. Historical experiences shows that it can only be implemented if it is the working class that is in power; if there is a socialist state of a completely different nature from the capitalist one through which this development can be organized, and which can keep the former exploiting class down and eliminate it as a ruling class.
The question of power and which class is in power is central. After Khrushchev managed, at the head of modern revisionism, to seize power in the Soviet Union and the Bolshevik Party, and the working class no longer was in power, both capitalist and socialist ownership and production relations existed. But only for the time it took to break down socialism and restore capitalism. Society changed character, it was no longer socialist, but a state monopoly capitalist society, until it collapsed and free-market capitalism was fully restored.
Do we see features in today’s Denmark and the capitalist world that contain the seeds of new socialist modes of production and organizations? Yes. There is an increasing internationalization of the working class, of the socialization of production, of the process of technical development, of the control by the global monopolies of a coherent chain of labour, raw materials, transport, logistics and markets. A development that Lenin describes in his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism,” pointing out that it draws the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into a new social order that forms the transition from completely free competition to complete socialization.
The high degree of socialization will also be able to promote the construction of socialism after the socialist revolution of the working class. It is in increasing contrast to the property relations under capitalism, where wealth and private property are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. It is held back by the laws of development of capitalism and the anarchy of short-term profit and are therefore unable to facilitate the solutions of the growing problems such as the current crises: climate crisis, energy crisis, inflation, people displaced and dying due to famine, natural disasters, imperialist wars and increasing poverty. This is part of one of the main contradictions under capitalism and part of the fundamental contradiction between labour and capital.
The Nordic features of the cooperative movements
The working class has its traditions and revolutionary experiences to build on, but it has been many decades since they coincided with the ideas of the Social Democratic Party, which is revived in the theory of Nordic socialism – that the working class can buy and or vote its way to socialism.
Particularly Nordic features and the way forward today are stated as the extensive cooperative movement and the existence of cooperative business. They were progressive in their historical context when they emerged at the beginning of the last century. They meant prosperity for the individual small peasants and farm labourers with a small plot of land to support their families in the rural areas and for groups of workers in the cities. They became important for the development from a farming and agrarian society into a modern industrial society. But they were never socialist, and today we live in a completely different time, where the former cooperative movement has developed into monopoly groups such as ARLA [Arla Foods is a Danish-Swedish multinational cooperative based in Denmark – translator’s note] and Danish Crown. Today there are no small farmers left, but large industrial farms with capital groups behind them and landlords who have crept out of hiding.
The cooperative movement, which was one of the flagships of the Social Democratic labour movement, has not been able to exist outside of capitalist development, as an isolated island. It is claimed that in today’s Denmark in the private sector there are large pockets of democratic ownership, where broad population groups own and manage companies. In addition to the big agricultural and food monopolies, these are companies such as the cooperative energy supply, housing and insurance companies. In the financial sector, reference is made to cooperatively-owned credit institutions and banks and, not the least, to the billion-dollar pension funds which serve as a cover-up for a state-run redistributive machine for capital and gigantic robbery from the working class and population. Today these cooperatives are interwoven with global investment funds; they function and operate according to the principles of the capitalist market economy and as an integral part of the capitalist economy, despite an annual general assembly as a democratic veneer where all the “common owners” can show up for some snacks and free speaking time.
Today, a new cooperative movement is emerging, with new petty bourgeois joining their companies into cooperatives to survive in increasingly fierce competition. The state subsidizes entrepreneurs to start new businesses, but they only have two options – grow or die. The Unity List has developed a major reform program to promote this development, arguing that the democratically controlled and collectively owned companies stand stronger in in the capitalist competition than traditional companies. Another development, especially among the youth, is workers employed on day-labourer terms as their own “one-person company” in large global firms such as the Wolt couriers or Uber. Here the struggle is to become employed and organized as part of the working class.
The relatively large public sector (in which about 1/3 of the workforce in Denmark, Sweden and Norway are still employed) is supposed to be another specifically Nordic socialist characteristic and proof of the validity of the theory of Nordic Socialism. The size of the public sector is a historical feature, but today after decades of privatization, the policy of public-private partnership and with a health service that is on the edge of collapsing it is riddled with holes. It has never been socialist and can never be in a capitalist society under capitalist state power. When Nordic Socialism states that the public sector is owned and controlled by democratically elected bodies – parliament, municipalities and regions, and thus indirectly by all citizens of society – then it is pure imitation of bourgeois demagoguery about bourgeois democracy and the class character of the state.
This theory is a rehash of Social Democratic reformism and utopian socialism, which says it will raise the problems and challenges of the time in a new way, in sharp contrast to the experiences of Marxism-Leninism and socialism. It presents itself as standing in opposition to modern revisionism, Eurocommunism, and anti-monopoly democracy, but contains and repeats the failed basic elements of these – the revolution and the class struggle replaced by peaceful transition. The socialist economy replaced with competition between capitalism and socialism. Socialist democracy with the working class as the ruling class and its communist party replaced by the pluralistic basic democracy of all classes.
We must fight reformism and opportunism
As Marxist-Leninists, we know that revolutionary situations do not succeed spontaneously, that they are like an open window that can either be slammed back by reaction or can develop into a socialist revolution. That It depends on the consciousness, organization and ability of the working class to play a leading role and to put itself at the head of a broader alliance of popular classes and strata and its ability to see through the manoeuvres and preparations of the working class to repel the violent blows of the bourgeoisie. For a socialist revolution to take place, the working class must have its strong Communist Party, which has the strength and ability to bring its revolutionary consciousness to the working class, rally a majority of the working class around it – and, not the least, that it manages to isolate the reformists, revisionists and opportunists and remove their mass base. In Denmark this also applies to a significant extent to the upper layer of the labour aristocracy, which sits at the top of the leadership of the trade union movement.
There is no doubt that the working class and youth need something as a real alternative that can hold their faith, hope and dreams of another future that can create revolutionary energy and power and political and ideological clarity.
For the communists and Marxist-Leninists it is an ongoing task to work determinedly to spread the knowledge and understanding of scientific socialism even further. Our party must ensure that revolutionary theory, politics and historical experience are available in Danish, that we bring socialism forward in our daily agitation and propaganda and work and combine this with our political platforms and slogans and show a revolutionary path. As Danish communists, we do not have to find a new special Danish socialism; on the contrary Marxism-Leninism is an international theory on which we must work and develop the tasks of a revolutionary path, proletarian revolution and socialism in our country under the existing specific conditions and developments.
July 30, 2022