the Nordic model

“It puts more pressure on the state—which is presided over by the 1 percent—to step in more and more forcefully, with the middle class saying, ‘We care about order. We don’t want chaos,’ ” he said. “That’s what happened in Germany. It was a strengthening of the state. This happened in Italy as well. That’s what the game plan was for fascists in Norway and Sweden. It didn’t work. It didn’t work because the left didn’t play their game. They didn’t allow themselves to be baited into paying attention to them, doing street fighting.”

“Instead, [what was done] in the civil rights movement we would have called ‘they kept their eyes on the prize,’ ” Lakey said. “They knew the prize was to push away the economic elite, get rid of its dominance, so they can set up a new economic system, which is now called the Nordic model. What they did was: massive strikes, massive boycotts, massive demonstrations. Not only in the urban areas, which is what you expect, but also in the rural areas. During the Depression [in Sweden and Norway], there were lots of farmers who had their farms foreclosed on. Farmers are perennially in debt and had no way of repaying that debt. When the sheriff came, farmers in that county would come to join them and collectively not cooperate—not violently, but very strongly—in such a way that the sheriff couldn’t carry out the auction.”

“Remember who is actually running things, and we keep our focus on them both politically and economically,” Lakey said.

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