What We Can Learn From Nordic Socialism
A new book by Danish MP Pelle Dragsted argues that socialists can start building economic democracy even before capitalism is fully overcome.
Dragsted’s vision is of a pluralist socialism — an economy where worker and consumer co-ops, public firms, sovereign wealth funds, and socialized markets coexist, expanding democracy into spaces now dominated by private capital. (Nils Meilvang / Ritzau Scanpix / AFP via Getty Images)
Pelle Dragsted’s Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy is a book about radical possibilities. Written by a Danish MP of the ecosocialist Enhedslisten (Red-Green Alliance), it makes the case that the next step beyond social democracy is neither center-left management of capitalism nor distant revolutionary rupture but the democratization of economic life in the here and now. Dragsted’s vision is of a pluralist socialism — an economy where worker and consumer co-ops, public firms, sovereign wealth funds, and socialized markets coexist, expanding democracy into spaces now dominated by private capital.
To begin, Dragsted rejects the idea that the question facing socialists is whether to attempt radical change through the state or against it. His views are instead similar to those of the socialist political philosopher Nicos Poulantzas, whose theorization of the state has long shaped the idea of a “democratic road to socialism.”
According to Poulantzas, the state is not a monolithic instrument of capital but a contradictory arena. Its institutions can be captured and democratized when they are linked to deep, powerful struggles in society. Social movements, especially those coming out of workers’ struggles, leave high-water marks that remain long after the tide goes out. To make the most of that interplay, Dragsted proposes prioritizing campaigns for “nonreformist” reforms — enacted through the state — that alter the balance of class power, not just the short-term distribution of resources.
In another rejection of overly strict binaries, Dragsted opposes the view that capitalism itself is a totality. Capitalism is not, Dragsted contends, an all-encompassing system that forbids experimentation with alternatives until it is successfully overthrown. Instead, following and citing the Marxist sociologist Erik Olin Wright who argued much the same, Dragsted proposes that societies are hybrids, frequently containing noncapitalist elements — cooperatives, public institutions, solidaristic welfare systems — even under capitalism.
For Dragsted, if Nordic countries are capitalist social democracies, as many socialists claim, then it is capitalists, not socialists, who can take credit for what works best about them. Instead, he argues, we should think about the more solidaristic elements of Nordic economies as shards of socialism within capitalism — and these, it is quite clear, make life better. Socialists claim them and seek to expand them.
This perspective undermines the false binary between reform within capitalism and revolution to start over after capitalism. Democratic socialist reforms are not simply “within” the system; they are the means by which noncapitalist modes of production expand, colonize new spaces, and gradually transform society. Just as capitalism emerged from the nooks and cracks of feudal societies, socialism too may arise through experimentation and the accumulation of democratic alternatives, continually building up the social forces dedicated to their defense and expansion, until a tipping point is reached.
Here Dragsted converges again with Poulantzas, as both reject the idea of a clean break and emphasize the messy, contradictory, and uneven process of transformation. The difficulty with this analysis, however, is that within capitalism, private investment remains the goose that lays the golden egg. So long as capital retains control over the investment function, any expansion of solidaristic or noncapitalist spheres runs the risk of rollback when profitability is threatened. The strategic question, then, is how to socialize investment itself — how to bring democratic control over the allocation of capital — so that the gains Dragsted highlights are not just fragile enclaves but the basis for a durable transition.
Overcoming the Capital Strike
Anticipating this objection, Dragsted proposes a program consisting of cooperative rights, wage-earner funds, social wealth funds, municipal socialism, democratization of finance, and socialized land and housing.
Proposals for wage-earner and social wealth funds echo Bernie Sanders’s 2020 campaign plan for democratic employee-ownership funds, which bore similarities to Sweden’s Meidner Plan of the 1970s. Under Sanders’s proposal, large firms would gradually transfer shares into worker-controlled funds, granting workers both dividends and collective say. It would have been a partial step toward democratizing ownership — a first attempt at giving workers real sway over investment and production.
These ideas are not totally alien to US history. Rural electric cooperatives, credit unions, the Bank of North Dakota, the Alaska Permanent Fund, and even Texas’s two “petro-socialist” education funds show how noncapitalist institutions have long coexisted alongside markets. They remind us that our society, like the Nordic countries, has sometimes also been hybrid — more or less capitalist in different domains — and that democratic forms of ownership can take root here as well.
Dragsted proposes to multiply these microcosms of socialism and build new ones in capitalism’s midst. His vision brings the socialist project down to Earth. Our reforms should be oriented toward expanding the commons into new realms, since “the right to repair and reuse is a cornerstone of democratic ownership.” He envisions democratic planning not as a total coup but as an ongoing experiment in collective goal-setting, “not dictating every detail of production, but setting priorities through deliberation.” We can advance the socialist project today by finding ways to embed ecological ceilings and social foundations into economic activity.
At the heart of Dragsted’s program is work itself. “The right to a job is as fundamental as the right to vote,” he writes. A public jobs guarantee would stabilize wages and direct labor into socially necessary work — care, ecological repair, infrastructure, culture — while shifting bargaining power toward workers. After all, “unemployment is a political choice, not an economic necessity.”
Taken together, these transformative reforms embody Poulantzas’s road. They democratize existing institutions and build new ones while embedding them in a broader socialist transformation.
For those seeking to anchor socialism in durable working-class coalitions, electoral expansion, and winnable reforms, this kind of clarity is invaluable. It provides both a political language and a legible road map for how the democratic to socialism road might unfold in the United States.
Nordic Socialism is a provocation: What would it mean to take democracy seriously enough to extend it into the economy?