Atlas / Comparisons / Maoism vs Nordic Social Democracy
Maoism and Nordic Social Democracy
Measured distance across six axes
Opposed programmes with little shared ground. No axis places them within three points of each other. They diverge by eight points or more on AU, ID, CH.
Axis by axis
| Axis | Mao Zedong Thought | Folkhemmet | Gap | Reading | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| EC · Economic organisation | −10 | −05 | 5 | Differs | Real difference, but not the dividing line. |
| CU · Social and cultural order | −02 | −06 | 4 | Differs | Real difference, but not the dividing line. |
| AU · Organisation of power | +10 | −06 | 16 | Diverges | Carries the disagreement. Any claim that these two are alike has to explain this. |
| SC · Scale of decision | +09 | +02 | 7 | Differs | Real difference, but not the dividing line. |
| ID · Rule of membership | +04 | −04 | 8 | Diverges | Carries the disagreement. Any claim that these two are alike has to explain this. |
| CH · Method and tempo | +10 | −08 | 18 | Diverges | Carries the disagreement. Any claim that these two are alike has to explain this. |
Each axis runs from −10 to +10; the distance is the straight-line separation across all six at once, out of a maximum of 49.0. How the scoring works →
The evidence behind the widest gaps
A distance figure is worth nothing unless the scores behind it can be checked. These are the artefacts supporting the axes that separate these two most.
Mao Zedong Thought · AU +10
At the ceiling, with the distinctive feature that the party's own institutions were destroyed from above and below.
- Documented act or statuteThe head of state was purged and died in detention in 1969 without trial.
Folkhemmet · AU −06
Strongly dispersed authority: proportional representation, coalition norms, and institutionalised bargaining with organised interests.
- Documented act or statuteGovernment formation has required multi-party coalition or confidence agreement in almost every postwar parliament.
- Documented act or statuteWage-setting is conducted by employer and union federations rather than by statute.
Mao Zedong Thought · ID +04
Coded moderately positive: class background was hereditary in practice and determined life chances.
- ScholarshipClass labels assigned in the land reform were inherited and governed schooling, marriage and employment for decades.
Folkhemmet · ID −04
Civic and universalist in law, with migration policy tightening substantially since 2015.
- Documented act or statuteCitizenship by residence with no ancestral requirement; Sweden received the highest per-capita asylum intake in Europe in 2015.
What this comparison does not establish
Proximity means similarity of stated position. It carries no claim about competence, circumstance, scale of operation, or what either organisation actually did to the people under it. Two organisations can sit close together and produce entirely different histories, because those things are not on any axis and could not be.
Maoism
1949–1976 · China
Peasant-based revolution, continuous class struggle after the seizure of power, permanent mobilisation against the party's own institutions.
Nordic Social Democracy
1932– · Sweden, Norway, Denmark
Universal welfare, full employment and centralised wage bargaining, inside a market economy and a liberal constitution.
Distance is not the whole answer. Two organisations can sit the same distance apart for entirely different reasons, and the reason is the content of any claim about them. Open the comparison in the atlas to weight the axes yourself.
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