The Fictitious Commodification of Nordic Social Democratic Capital: Three hypotheses

This chapter considers Nordic neoliberalisation in a transnational perspective, with a focus on the making and trajectory of Nordic Social Democratic capital (NSDC). I locate NSDC’s emergence in transatlantic networks, the American-Swedish dimension of which was more significant than is perhaps generally understood. I then formulate three hypotheses. First, NSDC’s authenticity as a Social Democratic good depended on its deployment by vocational Nordic Social Democrats located in a broader field of transnational exchange that included business journalism, cross-government networks, reformers, and social scientists of various stripes, but was not anchored by or heavily dependent on private corporations. Second, NSDC went through a process of fictitious commodification between the 1980s and the 2010s, becoming newly exchangeable in service of the profit-seeking interests of international finance. Third, I identify the causal locus of NSDC’s fictitious commodification at the intersection of Nordic Social Democratic parties and American-cum-international political consultancy, located in a broader transatlantic nexus in which multinational consultancy and private finance are important centres of gravity.