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WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM NORDIC SOCIALISM  
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Chris Kutalik
September 9, 2025
Jacobin
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_ 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

 

Review of _Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy_ by
Pelle Dragsted (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025)

Pelle Dragsted’s _Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic
Economy_ is a book [[link removed]]
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
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for democratic employee-ownership funds, which bore similarities to
Sweden’s Meidner Plan
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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,
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the Alaska Permanent Fund
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Texas’s two “petro-socialist” education funds
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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
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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?

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Chris Kutalik is the former Democratic Socialists of America
communications director and editor of Labor Notes. He currently works
as Showing Up for Racial Justice communications director in Los
Angeles.

* Denmark; Nordic Socialism; Socialism and Capitalism; Democracy;
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