FRAN HEATHCOTE believes that while the the Chancellor outlined some positive steps, the government does not appreciate the scale of the cost-of-living crisis affecting working-class people, whose lives are blighted by endemic low pay
Scandinavia and imperialism: why are Sweden and Finland now joining Nato?
by Prabhat Patnaik
INTO THE FOLD: Finland’s Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto, left, Sweden’s Foreign Minister Ann Linde, right, and Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg attend a media conference after the signature of the Nato accession protocols for Finland and Sweden
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is pouring €11.5bn into the Kiev swamp, blocking Trump’s peace plan, and pushing Nato right up to Russia’s borders – no matter if it costs hundreds of thousands of lives, warns SEVIM DAGDELEN
The 2025 Budget shores up the PM’s political position with headline-grabbing welfare U-turns, but with no improvements on offer to declining public services or living standards, writes MICHAEL BURKE
The unifying victory of Irish progressive forces in the presidential campaign should be a salutary lesson to the left in this country, argues MARY GRIFFITHS CLARKE
Martin Taylor, the hedge-fund multimillionaire who has poured millions into pushing Labour rightwards, helped finance Lucy Powell’s supposedly dissenting campaign — suggesting her victory was not the ‘soft-left’ rebellion some have claimed, says SOLOMON HUGHES
A November 15 protest in Mexico – driven by a right-wing social-media operation – has been miscast as a mass uprising against President Sheinbaum. In reality, the march was small, elite-backed and part of a wider attempt to sow unrest, argues DAVID RABY
SO SCANDINAVIAN countries Sweden and Finland are joining Nato. There are many misconceptions about Scandinavian capitalism.
A common one is the belief that since the Scandinavian countries developed vigorous capitalist economies, without ever having acquired any colonies of their own, they refute the claim that capitalist development necessarily requires imperialism. This is based on a misconception, not just about Scandinavia but above all about imperialism itself.
Indeed, one may say many positive things about the concessions wrung out of capitalism by Scandinavian social democracy (although many of these are under threat in the current epoch of neoliberalism), but it represents a complete misreading of capitalism to say that Scandinavia constitutes an example of non-imperialist capitalism. The Scandinavian countries themselves may not have had colonies, but they have ridden piggy-back on the imperialism of other powers.
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