Welcome to Jacobin Radio, I'm Susie Wiseman.

On today's show we continue looking at the coronavirus

pandemic by shifting our focus from the United States to Scandinavia. There's a

sharp contrast in policy between Norway, Finland, and Denmark, where

isolation and quarantine are in effect as compared to Sweden, where the economy is

open and the death rate is much higher. Our guest, Mike Selteltzer is in Norway. He says learning from the

experience of Scandinavia is instructive for the United States as for

example Georgia opens up for business while others stay locked down.

We ask Mike to look at the history and politics

behind these different approaches.

We then turn to the US and look at the American South

with Mike Goldfield, who's just published book, The Southern Key,

Class and Race and Radicalism in the 1930s and 40s, argues that the experience and failure of organizing the working class in the South

holds the key or at least explains the origins of the current state of the United

States and the world and that the defeats from

that time closed off the possibilities for meaningful class and anti-racist

politics as well as for a successful labor movement for decades to come.

All this when our program returns in just a moment.

Welcome to Jacobin Radio, I'm Susie Weisman. I'm Susie Wiseman. Very, very

pleased to have Michael Selter with us. Mike is a professor emeritus at Oslo Metropolitan University that's in Norway he's also a

cultural anthropologist he went to Norway way back in the 1960s working in the engine room of a Norwegian freighter and then the in 1975 and has lived there ever since.

And he's also a former teamster of Local 41.

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