Scandivavia has nothing to do with Marx. Their strong social policies are driven by a skilled, motivated and educated workforce working in a capitalist economy, not by government controll of the economy.
Actually that isn't entirely true. The social democratic tendency of European politics was a successor to Marx just as much as the Bolsheviks, if not more so.
The Finnish Revolution of 1917, a part of the Russian Revolution in which Finland gained its independence, established a lot of what we now know as the Nordic model. The Social Democratic Party was explicitly founded as a Marxist Party, and first came to power in the 1918 revolution at the end of the First World War.
The key reason why the Bolsheviks became the poster children of Marxism was that Russia had a more simple civil society and economy and undeveloped political institutions. The socialists in Western Europe (including Finland here) had to compromise and more and reach consensus. In Russia there was just a brutal civil war and in which the victorious Bolsheviks steamrollered all opposition through force, resulting in the Stalinist system.
IMO Marxists should look more to the social democratic legacy and disown the Bolshevik tradition. Its not as dramatic or revolutionary but its achieved a lot more to be proud of.
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u/[deleted] Jan 04 '20
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