Closer Than Mars: A review of Pelle Dragsted's 'Nordic Socialism: The Path Toward a Democratic Economy' [View all]

https://damagemag.com/2025/06/04/closer-than-mars/



What is socialism? That is a question that has broken up many a leftist party, friendship, and I’m guessing somewhere even the odd marriage. Marxists will vary between describing socialism as an aspiration, a transitional phase to full communism, or that which cannot be spoken of without coming dangerously close to writing recipe books for the cook shops of the future. Democratic socialists and social democrats from Eduard Bernstein to Canada’s Ed Broadbent describe socialism in terms of an expansion of freedom and democracy, a break with the bourgeois approach to production, or even a movement of continual transition and improvement. The late Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme boasted that Sweden under the Social Democrats had become more socialist than most countries that called themselves such. If Palme had held onto power and the weather was a bit better, perhaps the Swedes would have reformed themselves into a hallowed state of fully automated luxury communism by now.

Accompanying these definitional arguments are equally charged disputes about what countries, if any, can be accurately described as socialist. Just looking at who identifies with the label doesn’t help much. German “National Socialism” liquidated its own socialist and communist parties, and was about as committed to economic democracy as the People’s Republic of North Korea is committed to republicanism. Things get more complicated when pointing to the former Soviet Union or Maoist and then contemporary China. Most socialists now acknowledge the savage brutality of Stalin and Mao and reject any aspiration to emulate their regimes. Plenty are still too quick to apologize for starkly authoritarian practices—for instance by pointing to the Soviet Union’s defeat of the Nazis or the contemporary rise of China to the status of the world’s second power.

In the English speaking world, one of the more interesting debates to flare up recently is whether the Nordic countries (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and sometimes Iceland) can be accurately described as socialist. A small cottage industry has emerged introducing and defending the model. This includes popular books like Anu Partanen’s The Nordic Theory of Everything and George Lakey’s Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right-and How We Can Too. Self-described democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders and AOC have long identified their aspirations with the Nordic model. Even more ecumenical socialists, like Bhaskar Sunkara in The Socialist Manifesto, dedicate a great deal of time to explaining the rise and plateauing of the model. The attraction is obvious given that, by any metric, the Nordic countries enjoy higher qualities of life and more equality than most any other states on earth.

However, this very appeal has led many on the Right to push back against the characterization of the Nordic states as socialist. Libertarians and conservatives often insist that these countries have robust market economies, and even quite a few billionaires. In a more sinister vein, nationalists on the Right will insist that the Nordic model, even if it were socialist, could not be achieved in culturally diverse and increasingly non-white states like the US—economies of scale be damned. Interestingly they are joined in these reprobations by more than a few socialists and leftists. Marxists like Martin Hagglund stress how even the Nordic states are still defined by wage labor relations, and consequently exploitation. They also highlight how the generous model often depends on integration with the broader capitalist totality, and so participates in the super-exploitation of the developing world.

Reintroducing Nordic Socialism........

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