> Well, as I said, if we in the US had what they have in > Sweden or the Netherlands, we'd think we had won. And > certianly it would be a great victory.
The grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence. What you shouldn't overlook is that inequality and disparities have increased a lot in the Netherlands also (as well as in Sweden), and this can be proved quantitatively quite easily. The Gini coefficient for the USA and the Netherlands are growing closer all the time. The down side of social-democratic or christian-democratic type of regulation is that large numbers of people could also be trapped in a "poverty cycle" here, because phenomena like market-segmentations, prejudice and market closure can also mean the white middle class shuts workers out of opportunities with the most patronising, snobby racial rhetoric. That is why the sexual revolution has been culturally progressive here, but, this does not necessarily mean that egalitarianism is breaking out everywhere here either, to the contrary. It just means that new rules for access to resources are emerging. So insofar as Dutch society is more egalitarian, this may not necessarily be attributable at all to social democracy either, we have to be careful about that idea, because social democracy often only redistributes wealth that is already there, and previously obtained through trade. The Dutch Constitution, like the Swedish, is more progressive than the American one, but even so I've had almost none of my Constitutional rights respected in the Netherlands. What is progressive in the Dutch Constitution, is article 20, which states that Dutch nationals resident in the Netherlands who are unable to provide for themselves, shall have a right, to be regulated by Act of Parliament, to assistance from public authorities. That means the Dutch government has a statutory obligation to look after the survival of its citizens, and therefore also has a responsibility to ensure it can do this. In Sweden, you do not have the same right, the Swedish Constitution just affirms that "All persons shall have access to nature in accordance with the right of public access". The EU Constitution, which is a purely bourgeois constitution, effectively removes any constitutional obligation for social assistance. To compare constitutions, refer to http://confinder.richmond.edu/). Nevertheless, the trend towards viewing the state only as a private corporation with the business of forcing taxes out of citizens is also visible. What is really troubling about Marxist discussion concerning a "socialist market" is, that what a "market" means fails to be defined specifically. Marxists just do not really know what markets are. That is partly why they have almost never been able to specify what such concepts as Marx's "law of value" refer to. That is why much of the market-socialism discussion is technically useless. One of the basic fallacies involved in this discussion is an adaptation to bourgeois ideology, namely people talk about "the market" as if there was only one market, which operates according to uniform principles. This is not the case at all. It is a bourgeois fetishism. In reality, class and sectional forces operate through the market, to strengthen their own position. Jurriaan
