ABSTRACT

The claim of the Scandinavian Social Democratic parties has always been that, in adopting reformist means, they were in no sense adopting reformist goals. The objectives

of a democratic socialist party remained those of any socialist party: a redistributive policy whose ultimate aim was a classless egalitarianism in which the principle of allocation would be ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. Social Democratic ideologues do not generally argue that anything like such egalitarian society has been created in the Scandinavian countries, but rather that there has been gradual progress towards that end:

we’re far ahead compared to other countries. And we’re far ahead compared to what Sweden looked like 30 or 40 years ago. But we have not gone very far if you want your dream of a classless society to come true. In that case, most of the work remains to be done! (Palme, in Vilgot Sjöman, 1968, p.33).