Sweden’s Social Democrats came first in this month’s election, and Magdalena Andersson is poised to return as prime minister on a one-seat majority — with 28 percent of the vote, the party’s worst showing in more than 110 years. Bhaskar Sunkara uses the result to retell the whole arc of the movement that built what was arguably the most livable society in history, and then lost its grip on it. This is not a story of betrayal, he argues. It is a story about what a strategy for reforming capitalism can achieve, and where it runs into the structure of capitalism itself.

The interwar years are the lesson in governing without a plan:

  • Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour governments (1923–24, 1929–31) ran as minority administrations dependent on Liberal support and on fiscal orthodoxy; as unemployment rose, MacDonald defended the currency and cut benefits, broke with his party in 1931 to form a National Government with the Conservatives, and Labour was crushed at the polls
  • Léon Blum’s Popular Front (1936–37) won more, but largely by accident: two million workers occupied factories, and the Matignon Accords delivered collective bargaining, wage increases, the forty-hour week and two weeks of paid vacation — then capital flight and a business counteroffensive ended the government by 1938
  • Outside France, interwar social democracy nationalized almost nothing; it appointed commissions instead

Sweden’s difference was organizing power, not ownership:

  • The 1938 Saltsjöbaden Basic Agreement traded management’s “right to manage” for recognition of workers’ right to organize, and the SAP’s coalition with the Agrarian Party set nationalization aside
  • The 1951 Rehn–Meidner plan used centralized bargaining to compress wages — forcing inefficient firms to restructure or die while productive ones expanded — paired with active labor market policy and universal guarantees for health care, education and childcare. Wigforss called it a “provisional utopia”; Meidner called it “functional socialism”
  • By 1976 only 5 percent of Swedish industry was publicly owned, and the outcomes were still the best in Europe: full employment, compressed wages, and a state that pushed women into paid work at the highest rate in the world

Then the movement pushed past what its own party would defend:

  • The 1976 LO proposal for wage-earner funds would have required firms with more than fifty employees to issue new shares worth 20 percent of annual profits to worker-controlled funds — social ownership by dilution, and Meidner’s answer to “functional socialism”: “We cannot fundamentally change society without changing its ownership structure”
  • Delegates sang “The Internationale” when it passed; the SAP leadership never fought for it, and 75,000 people marched against it in Stockholm in 1983 in what was then the largest demonstration in Swedish history
  • The funds that survived in 1984 bought shares on the market instead of requiring new issues, and were dismantled after the center-right won in 1991

The structural bind Sunkara identifies is the part worth carrying around: social democracy depends on private profitability and on keeping workers demobilized outside the voting booth, so at the moment of crisis it chose economic orthodoxy and undermined the base that made it strong. The results show up in the data — in the 1950s the working class in Western democracies voted left at a rate 31 points higher than other classes; by 2020 the margin was 8. Parties of labor became parties of the educated.

He ends with Luxemburg’s image of reformism as the labor of Sisyphus. The boulder never came all the way down: pensions, health care, protection from the worst poverty all outlasted the retreat. But he locates the successor in the “class-struggle social democracy” now visible from Mamdani’s New York to state legislators and city councilors across the US — and warns they will meet the same wall the Swedes did. The question the Swedish labor movement put on the table is still open: who owns the wealth workers create, and who decides how it is used?