The Finnish Social Democratic Party has elected Jutta Urpilainen as party chair.Urpilainen beat Erkki Tuomioja's quest to lead the party and, being only four years older than yours truly, is relatively young.
Urpilainen, like all good sotsid, prefers to cloak herself in red, the color of, uh, social justice and affection. See examples of her social democratic fashion statement here, here, and here.
Urpilainen, though, is not alone. Estonian sotsid have also fallen prey to the idea that if they wear red, votes will follow. Check out Heljo Pikhof, Marianne Mikko, and even Ivari Padar. Ah well, as they say, better red than ... whatever color this is.
9 kommentaari:
I love red, white and black in clothing and mix them all the time, but I´m quite right-conservative :)
She does not only like to wear red, she also used the word 'comrades' excessively in her 1st speech as the chairman, which got somewhat ridiculed in media coverage. But that's really only semantics. What's more important, she named one P.Lipponen as her prime minister candidate - so, does she have anything to say at all or is she just another pretty doll who lets ugly old men pull the strings?
Why do social democrats flirt with Marxism? Lenin had all the social revolutionaries shot, let alone the social democrats. I guess it's what they call communist chic.
same reason why teenagers like to wear things with a Che picture on. They think it's cool and they don't know (or don't even want to know) what a bloodthirsty bastard he was. It's a westernised way of being controverial, a way of being a "rebel" without actually being one. It's like... like imagining you're in a swordfight when you're actually doing needlepoint.
Well, I have flirted with Marxism, too. The problem is that I found actual Marxists and Socialists to be really annoying.
I would go to a demonstration, and the Marxists would sell books and the Socialists would sell crappy newspapers predicting how one random event would bring about the world revolution that they would lead.
It's one thing to play with those ideas. It's another thing to head a pretty mainstream political party and do it.
Well, actually communists used to shoot social democrats - and for example in Finland it was the SDP that was the most important in defeating communism after the war. Marxism was the common inheritance of both ideologies and both developed Marx's thought to very different directions, communists towards Leninism-Stalinism and the social democrats towards Bernsteinian revisionism. I understand that these things might be bit difficult to perceive in countries like Estonia or the USA where the left has been represented in very narrow ways, but you really shouldn't confuse social democrats with communists.
Can anybody tell me what color Savisaar's jacket is in that link at the end? I really don't know. Fluorescent brown?
Erm... You could also say that the Social Democrats shot on the communists (like in Berlin, 1918-19, Noske and the worker uprisings in the Ruhr and Bavaria...).
Well, yeah - I guess the point is that no love was lost there. One remembers how the social democrats were seen as "social fascists" by the communists (as dictated by Kremlin) in Weimar Germany...
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