Meidner-ing at night w/ Shannon Ikebe

There's a lot to learn from Sweden's Meidner Plan, which would have phased in worker ownership of most of the economy over 30 years. As a followup to our episode with Joe Guinan, Dru Oja Jay spoke to Shannon Ikebe about some of the new archival materials about the Meidner plan, and insights it contains for current efforts to plan beyond capitalism.
Read Shannon's dissertation on Sweden's wage earner funds here: escholarship.o...

[@ylfetu]

Great talk. Great guest. Fantastic subject.
I haven't watched the whole talk yet, so I may be getting ahead of myself, but I feel it's important to point out that Soccial Democrat parties, prior to WWII were the natural home of Marxist revolutionaries. Lenin himself was the leader of the Russian Workers' Social Democratic Party. Rudoph Meidner was a German Social Democrat, a refugee from fascist Germany where the German Workers' Social Democratic party, the Communist Party, the Independent Social Democratic party had all been made illegal and their leadership had been imprisoned. My understanding is that Meidner saw this is a way of legislating the peaceful Marxist communist revolution. Basically it was the workers' seizing of the means of production.
Also, I remember listening to a Swedish podcast where they lay the failure of Meidner plan in it's scope. It was suggested that it apply only to large companies, if I remember correctly of over 50 employees, with presumably a view to expanding it to cover all companies, whereas the membership voted for it to apply to companies with over 15 employees, and the bill was watered down in parliament - Sweden having a PR system and therefore a coalition of several parties.