”Socialism Is Not a Utopia — It’s Alive and Thriving”

Pelle Dragsted of Denmark’s Red-Green Alliance in conversation about his new book, Nordic Socialism.

In recent years, renewed interest in socialism has grown across Europe and beyond — often sparked by mounting inequality, climate breakdown, and the failures of neoliberal governance. But what does socialism look like when it already exists in everyday institutions?

Pelle Dragsted, a member of the Danish Folketing for the Red-Green Alliance, believes the answer lies in the Nordic model — and in recognizing the democratic and cooperative elements already embedded within it. In 2021, his book Nordisk Socialisme (Nordic Socialism) sparked both critical acclaim and public debate across his home country, including a ten-part debate series in the newspaper Information. The book was published in Swedish soon afterwards, and now — finally — will be published in English by Wisconsin University Press.

Indeed, he insists not only that our societies are hybrids of capitalism and socialism (varying by degree from country to country), but that perspectives seeking to overthrow capitalism and replace it with socialism are counterproductive, and get in the way of meaningful radical reforms that could improve the democratic and socialist aspects of society. With this analysis in mind, Dragsted suggests a series of ten reforms to pave the way towards a much more democratized economy.

With Nordic Socialism set to appear in English with the University of Wisconsin Press later this month, Dragsted is currently on a promotional tour of the United States supported by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation. In between stops, he spoke with Duroyan Fertl about the book, his motivations behind writing it, and the road to a democratic economy in Denmark and beyond.

Your book Nordic Socialism, which has just been published in English, looks at the economic and social history of Denmark and other Nordic countries, including projects seeking greater economic democracy. It also takes up some much larger philosophical and political debates on the Left — issues of freedom and democracy, but also of socialist strategy — and makes concrete proposals for the building of democratic socialism. What was your motivation for writing this book, and what do you hope to achieve with it, especially now it has been published in English?

I wrote the book out of a sense of urgency. It’s becoming more and more evident that we can no longer allow capitalism to dominate our economies. It’s not just unfair, but as we are seeing in the US, it’s undermining the very foundation of democracy. The concentration of wealth inherent to capitalism creates oligarchic power — political influence stemming not from democratic mandates but from control of wealth and the economy. This isn’t a flaw; it’s a feature, an inevitable outcome of capitalistic ownership models.

But here’s the thing: It’s not difficult to argue that capitalism is harmful. The Left has always been good at that. More and more people agree that the way we currently organize the economy is unviable. So why can’t we get a majority behind transforming the economy into a fairer, more democratic model — what we would call socialism?

One reason is that the Left has been excellent at critique and at making broad, sweeping statements about socialist change. However, we’ve been less effective at presenting a viable alternative and answering the tough questions that arise when we talk about democratizing the economy, the workplace, and even parts of the market.

For too long, socialism has been treated as some utopian vision, not embedded in our daily struggles — whether in parliaments, trade unions, or popular movements. So, the motivation for the book was to make socialism more concrete, understandable, and viable. To take it out of the realm of utopia and bring it into the practical work we’re doing today.

Now that the book is available in English, I’m very excited. The timing feels right. The world, more than ever, needs a tangible alternative to both centrist neoliberalism and right-wing populism. Right now, I’m in the US, where the success of Mamdani in the New York primaries has once again put democratic socialism on the agenda. If my book can help democratic socialists around the world argue more effectively for a socialist alternative, that would be a tremendous achievement.

The Nordic countries are often seen as a progressive reference point for their historically strong welfare states and relative social equality, but usually in the context of a “nicer” capitalism. Ironically, however, the starting point for your book is a 2018 Trump administration report that calls the Nordic countries “socialist”. Is Trump right? 

This is a central argument in my book: that socialists can learn from the Nordic experience. We’ve neglected to recognize this on the Left, and that’s made it unnecessarily hard to argue for socialist change.

The term “Nordic socialism” was actually coined by Trump. In his first term, the White House published a report explicitly warning against what they called “Nordic socialism”. It was a response to American progressives like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who had pointed to Denmark and the Nordic countries as sources of inspiration for their vision of democratic socialism.

Back in Denmark, politicians across the spectrum quickly dismissed the claim. Our foreign minister called it “absurd.” Even many on the Danish Left rejected the label. But one of the key messages in my book is this: Fox News, Trump, and even Bernie Sanders are more correct than we’ve been willing to admit when they associate the Nordic countries with socialism. In my view, the Nordic model already contains strong socialist elements and embracing that truth could help us build a more just and democratic future.

Could you define what you mean by “Nordic socialism”, and how it differs from other conceptions of socialism? 

If we define socialism as organizing economic activities within a democratic framework of common ownership, then the Nordics are closer to socialism than, say, the United States. The Nordics have vast public sectors — care services, education, healthcare — owned and governed by the public rather than by capitalists. These sectors are funded through solidarity taxation, not through market exchanges. About one in three workers is employed in the non-profit public sector across the Nordics.

But democratic ownership doesn’t stop at the public sphere. The private sector also has a long tradition of cooperatives, mutuals, and associations, owned and governed by workers, small producers, or consumers. For example, our second-largest supermarket chain, Coop, is owned by its 2 million customers. There’s no Jeff Bezos extracting profits when we go shopping there. Many of us hold loans, insurance, or savings in credit unions or mutuals — all collectively owned. In Denmark, one in five housing units is collectively owned via non-profit housing co-ops.

Now, I’m not claiming that these sectors are socialist utopias. They face real challenges. But they are qualitatively different: democratically governed and profit redistributed among members, not hoarded by a small elite. They help counterbalance oligarchic power rather than reinforce it.

So, in a sense, I use the term Nordic socialism both descriptively and normatively. Descriptively, the Nordic economies are more socialist than, say, the US. Normatively, I see them as a vision for a future economy — one that is even more socialist, grounded in the Nordic traditions of public and cooperative ownership, decommodifying large parts of the economy.

Many of the more promising historical proposals to deepen existing “Nordic socialism” — such as Economic Democracy in Denmark, or Sweden’s Meidner plan – were never fully realized. Instead, we have seen decades of neoliberalism asserting itself in the Nordic region, undermining the welfare state, as well as other democratic and social institutions. What is the current state play between neoliberalism and “Nordic socialism”? 

The Nordic model peaked in the 1970s, with the welfare state at its height and the cooperative sector playing a significant role in the economy. There were even plans for a radical transformation of ownership through so-called “fund socialism,” transferring ownership of large businesses to worker-controlled funds. But since then, there’s been a neoliberal counterattack on Nordic socialism. We’ve seen the expansion of capitalist ownership through privatization and the rollback of parts of the welfare state.

One of the key messages in my book is that the failure of the Social Democrats was their reluctance to challenge capitalist ownership more aggressively. Too much economic power remained in the hands of an owning elite, and when the opportunity arose, they struck back. That’s an important lesson: when socialists gain power, our main task should be to counter oligarchic power by democratizing ownership across the economy.

It’s also worth stressing that even after four decades of neoliberal backlash, the Nordic model hasn’t been fully dismantled. We still have a substantial decommodified sector with healthcare, education, and care being publicly provided. And the cooperative sector remains strong in housing, finance, and agriculture.

This shows that it’s difficult to completely roll back these kinds of gains. The Nordic experience teaches us that the relationship between democratic (socialist) ownership and non-democratic (capitalist) ownership is not fixed. It’s possible to change the mix and shift the balance of power.

These progressive gains largely took place under Social Democratic governments in the post-war period. Alongside social democracy’s abandonment of this “reformist” zeal, you also blame the revolutionary Left’s “utopianism” for weakening democratic and socialist forces in the Nordics. But you go further: in place of the old binary reformist/ revolutionary distinction on the Left, you argue for an approach that you describe as “gradualist”. Can you expand on this idea? 

In the beginning of the last century the Social Democrats had a socialist economy as their stated goal, and they enacted reforms that put them closer to that goal.

Through the decades, this goal was watered down, and today the Social Democratic parties have abandoned any ambition to change the economic model. But after the financial crises, we have seen the rise of a new transformative democratic socialism from the Left — from Corbyn, Sanders, Podemos in Spain, and Die Linke in Germany.

What I have found so promising in these movements is that they have reawakened the idea of transformative reforms — not just about redistribution, but about changing ownership structures. Both Sanders and Corbyn introduced ideas of a Meidner-like type of wage earner fund socialism, something I discuss in my book.

I see my book as a part of this tendency — a kind of radical democratic socialism that takes the best from classical Social Democracy and combines it with an insistence on transformative reforms. Because the Nordic experience shows us that without changes in ownership, all social reforms will be fragile.

Another key aspect of your thesis is the idea that rather than two discrete totalizing systems or modes of “capitalism” and “socialism”, we live in a “hybrid” society, with elements of each coexisting side by side. You accuse the Left — both reformist and revolutionary — of sharing a misconceived and unhelpful notion of capitalism as an all-encompassing system. Could you explain this framework, and what led you to it?

Actually, I found my inspiration for this thesis in an article by two feminist Marxists I read 25 years ago, co-writing under the name Gibson-Graham. In the article, they challenge the way the Left normally has conceptualized capitalism as an organic, all-encompassing and coherent system that can only be done away with by a revolution, where a new all-encompassing system — socialism — takes its place. They argue that this way of understanding capitalism has made it almost impossible to imagine and work for a gradual socialist transformation.

They then suggest a thinner definition of capitalism, where capitalism only takes up part of society — the economy where labour is being exploited. That leaves a space outside capitalism — of different kinds of communal and democratic economy. A space that can be expanded, that could be the building block for a future socialism. In the following years, I kept thinking about it, and it became clearer and clearer to me that especially in the Nordics, it is quite obvious that it is not meaningful to simply say that everything is capitalism.

So that was my first inspiration. Later, I discovered that the late American sociologist Erik Olin Wright had reached the same conclusion: that societies are hybrids or mixtures of several modes of production, and that you can strategize on how to get more socialism into the mix.

This mix includes an expanded cooperative sector, something historically strong in Denmark. Cooperatives must still operate — and compete — in a capitalist market, though, and the Nordic countries’ economies have always been heavily dependent on exports, exacerbating this vulnerability. How can such aspects of the “democratic” economy survive, and even expand, when subjected to dominant capitalist imperatives, both domestically and internationally?

I think our history shows that the democratic part of an economy can expand, pushing capitalist ownership away. It happened for around 100 years from the 1870s to the 1970s, despite strong resistance from the capitalist class. There is no doubt that globalization puts pressure on the democratic part of the economy — especially in our agricultural cooperative sector.

But regarding cooperatives, it is a myth that they can’t compete with capitalist companies. In fact, a lot of research shows that they are competitive — and even have higher productivity and more robustness — while at the same time providing higher wages. And we can use political tools to nurture the democratic sector— giving them preference in public tenders, for example. 

Perhaps surprisingly, you express a strong skepticism towards the Left’s traditional focus on nationalization, a planned economy, and the role of the state generally, preferring to focus on cooperatives, social wealth funds, fund socialism, and an expanded democratic civil sector in the construction of socialism. Could you expand on this approach?

Ok — let’s start with ownership. The question we need to answer is: if we want to replace capitalist ownership with common ownership of the means of production — who should own the enterprises, banks, companies, and so on?

Historically, socialists thought that socialization equaled state ownership. But the experience with this type of socialism is not very good, to put it lightly. It will necessarily create enormous centralization. It is also a very distant form of ownership. The factories in Eastern Germany were called “The People’s Owned Companies”, but the workers did not feel that they were the owners. That explains why there was so little protest when the state-owned companies in Eastern Europe were privatized.

I think more direct forms of ownership — cooperatives, wage earner funds, and other models — are more attractive because they are decentralized and empower their members. That does not mean I reject public ownership altogether — I think we should have much more public ownership than today. But I reject the idea of socialism being one uniform form of ownership and suggest a mixture of different forms of democratic ownership.

At the same time, you also argue for maintaining elements of the market while constructing socialism. Could you explain this?

I do not think that we can have a resource-efficient economy without using prices and markets. But the marketized areas of the economy should be reduced, and the parts where we use market mechanisms should be strongly regulated to avoid the negative externalities of market exchange. 

One thing not immediately obvious in your book is that of agency: who might compel the capitalists to give up their power and profits, and how? You make, for example, little mention of trade unions as agents of social change. Many of your proposals would also likely depend heavily on legislative initiative, or parliamentary protection, running the risk of a top-down, state-led approach to social transformation. How might the reforms you advocate be achieved in reality, while maintaining a democratic and pluralistic character?

These are really important and challenging questions. It is obvious that the reform I propose requires strong popular support and labor organizations, not just because workers must be key agents in the democratization of the workplace, but also because of the resistance we must expect from the capitalist class to transformative reforms. The Nordic model would not have been possible without strong labor parties and trade unions.

Regarding the resistance from the owning elite, I suggest that the reforms should be incremental. For every reform reducing the oligarchic influence of the elites, the next, even more radical reform will be easier to enact. For example, if we strengthen public investment banks or create democratic wage earner funds controlling a lot of capital, we will become less vulnerable to capital flight.

Is your “Nordic Socialism” really socialism? The project set out in your book eschews any “overthrow” of capitalism, or even more moderate calls to peacefully “transcend” it. Instead, you seem happy to increase the “democratic” aspects of the economy, while allowing capitalist ones to continue to exist alongside them. In the debate following its publication in Denmark in 2021, you were accused by some (and not only from the Left) of simply proposing minor democratic reforms (some of them already tried and failed) to the capitalist economy. What do you say to those who dispute that the society you describe is really socialism? Is it?

Yes. Definitely. If we define socialism as an economy where ownership is democratized, and the power in society and in the economy is based on democracy and not on the wealth of a few.

I reject the binary idea of socialism and capitalism as two totally separate systems. This spatial idea of some reforms being “inside capitalism” is a blind alley in my eyes. The question is how you move power from capitalist to people. From oligarchic to democratic power.  And that goes through changing ownership to the productive assets from the few to the many.

It is always a mixture. Right now we have an economy — even in the Nordics — dominated by capitalist social relations. What I suggest is an economy dominated by socialist relations — by democratic governance.

In my book, I make ten proposals for transformative socialist reforms that fall into two groups. The first concerns how to democratize and distribute ownership. The second focuses on reducing the influence of markets and decommodifying new areas of the economy — converting goods like dental care, public transportation, and communications into social rights, thereby making people freer from market pressure.

That is what Nordic Socialism is all about. Not distant utopias. But real lived experiences that we can expand to build a better world for the many

 

Pelle Dragsted is an MP and the political spokesperson for Danish democratic socialist party Enhedslisten (the Red-Green Alliance). He has played a leading role in developing Enhedslisten’s strategies and responses to the political and economic upheaval of the past two decades, and is viewed by many as one of its main ideological leaders.