This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of the so-called “Meidner Plan.” On August 27, 1975, the trade union economist Rudolf Meidner and his collaborators, Anna Hedborg and Gunnar Fond, presented a radical proposal to gradually socialize large parts of Swedish industry through wage-earner funds. The proposal sparked one of the most heated episodes in modern Swedish history. It also remains one of the most plausible visions of a democratic transition to socialism.

Meidner is principally known for two things: the so-called Rehn–Meidner model (also known as the solidaristic wage policy) and the wage-earner fund proposal. While the two are sometimes confounded, they were distinct in important ways. Gösta Rehn, the “Rehn” of the Rehn–Meidner model, was critical of the wage-earner fund proposal. In Meidner’s own words, Rehn was “completely against it.” Meidner, on the other hand, saw his wage-earner funds as a logical extension of the solidaristic wage policy.

The solidaristic wage policy was developed against the backdrop of the mass unemployment of the interwar period. The Swedish Social Democratic Party (SAP) had assumed power in 1932 with no clear road forward. However, during the spring of 1933, as the economic depression reached its peak, an opportunity arose. In neighboring Denmark, a social democratic government had struck a bargain with an agrarian party the same day Adolf Hitler came to power. Now a similar crisis settlement was made in Sweden. Not only did the settlement give the Social Democrats a more stable parliamentary basis, but it also pioneered deficit spending as a solution to economic crises years before John Maynard Keynes’s ideas had risen to prominence in the Anglophone world.