Socialising capital: looking back on the Meidner plan

Joe Guinan

International Journal of Public Policy, 2019, vol. 15, issue 1/2, 38-58

Abstract: The radical 'Meidner Plan' for wage-earner funds in Sweden in the mid-seventies was one of the most promising roads not taken by the European left in the second half of the twentieth century. Had it been implemented in full, it could have marked a major shift within social democracy from income redistribution to asset redistribution, thereby setting course for an inexorable transition to economic democracy through the gradual socialisation of all major industry. Today, the genesis and fate of the wage-earner funds can provide a valuable historical perspective on the challenges of democratising wealth, while the core components of Meidner's innovative proposal - the share levy and collective ownership of capital - are once again up for reconsideration and recovery in the programme of the Jeremy Corbyn-led British Labour Party, given yawning inequality and a widespread and growing sense of the need for a very different pattern of political economy.

Keywords: Meidner plan; wage-earner funds; social democracy; public ownership. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=99049 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ids:ijpubp:v:15:y:2019:i:1/2:p:38-58

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in International Journal of Public Policy from Inderscience Enterprises Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sarah Parker ().