Esben Bøgh Sørensen has a PhD in the history of ideas from Aarhus University. He writes about history and politics.
Recent decades have seen a historic shift in Danish politics, with mass-membership parties replaced by a professionalized media-political sphere. To drive real social change, the socialist left needs to go beyond creating a progressive niche — and rebuild the mass organizations that once made the working class a mighty political force.
Born into a blue-collar family on the eve of World War II, Curt Sørensen became Denmark’s most prominent Marxist intellectual. He insisted that Marxism wasn’t just a tool for academic analysis — rather, it had to be an aid to the workers’ movement, learning from and feeding back into practical efforts to achieve socialism.