Authors: George Lakey
When I give lectures in the United States on Viking economics, people often ask, “
How
did Norwegians move from a majority-poor, underdeveloped country to the top of the heap on international ratings?”
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Sometimes they are asking about the specific policies or major features of the Nordic model. But sometimes they mean something quite different:
How did they gain the political consensus to make such drastic changes?
The short answer is, they didn’t. Decades went by when Norway, to take one example, became more polarized instead of moving toward consensus. The long answer is, and now I’m talking about half a century, they
did
gain consensus. First, polarized Norwegians, put in power the group that had a vision of economic democracy. Only later did most Norwegians who resisted change realize that the change actually was a big improvement on the bad old days.
In other words, Norwegians created a small, visionary social movement that grew, engaged in struggle, attracted allies, and won. By winning nonviolently, the movement minimized pushback
after the victory and consolidated its gains. Today, even though Norwegians will tell you they are “a nation of complainers,” when you frame the conversation in global terms, almost everyone across the political spectrum would rather keep their Nordic model than operate like any other country in the world.
I’m happy to tell the story of those who made it happen: the little movement that could.
Imagine a poor family dependent on Lars, the sole breadwinner, who tells his wife and children, “We decided to go on strike, so I won’t be bringing in any pay for a while.” And the response of his wife, who says, “But last time you went out we got hungry
and
you lost the strike. What makes you think that this time you’ll win?”
The husband replies, “Nobody can be sure we’ll win, but we have to try!”
By the 1880s, families were having this conversation across Norway. The first small factories were built in those years and the workers began to form unions. The owners refused to accept them, so workers struck and went hungry in towns like Drammen, not far from Berit’s hometown of Skien. During Drammen’s 1885 strike, the owners turned to the government for help. The army intervened and opened fire at a demonstration, killing one and injuring others.
In 1887, the infant union movement took its next step, creating
Det Norske Arbeiderparti
(DNA, the Norwegian Labor Party). The party admitted only union members, expecting to represent them in the
Storting
.
Norwegian labor leaders wanted a national labor federation, but struggled to organize on a national level. One challenge was the linguistic division of Norway, understandable in a geographically decentralized population. The country has hundreds of valleys separated by ice-capped mountains. Each valley contained clusters of farms, a village, and usually a trading town at the end of the fjord that snaked its way into the countryside through mountain passes. Most Norwegians rarely had a chance to talk to anyone besides their neighbors.
The Norwegian language has so many dialects that linguists can’t agree on the number. Dialects can be very different from one another. A hundred years ago, someone from one valley might not understand a worker from another. Even today, most ethnic Norwegians use their local dialect for everyday speech, and linguistic diversity (not even counting the indigenous Sami language) is abundant. When Norway was trying to build a nation that could become independent, they made heroic efforts to identify a common language that all Norwegians would acknowledge. The best they could do was to come up with
two
official versions of Norwegian. Both are still used today.
Despite these difficulties, in 1899 unions across the country reached agreement to create the Workers National Trade Union. Their action stimulated an equivalent on the employers’ side: the Norwegian Employers Confederation. That same year twenty-year-old Martin Tranmael joined with others in the northern city of Trondheim to found a newspaper, called
Ny Tid
(New Time, or New Era). A year later the newspaper became the official organ of the Labor Party, and young Tranmael made a name for himself.
Martin Olsen Tranmael had left the family farm to become
a painter and construction worker. When he was seventeen he joined his first union. Like most workers he had little schooling, but he was a natural organizer and used his fascination with history to develop a big picture that empowered him for leadership.
He joined the movement at a time when a significant number of labor leaders were turning to Marxism, which meant that they organized workers for immediate gains and also for the overthrow of capitalism. Deviating from Marxist orthodoxy, however, the Norwegian leaders decided that when they achieved power they would not collectivize agriculture. Instead, they would protect and extend family farms and clear more land for development. This choice created a potential bond between industrial workers and small farmers.
Hungry for broader experience, Martin Tranmael went to the United States and found work in Minnesota as a painter. He stayed for three years while learning from the much more advanced U.S. labor movement.
Tranmael returned to Norway in 1902 with more to offer the
Ny Tid
newspaper and his fellow organizers. His reputation as an effective agitator grew. Workers elected him chair of a local branch of the Labor Party. One of his favorite tactics was to soapbox churchgoers as they left their Sunday-morning services.
The growth of the labor movement coincided with the increase of Norwegian nationalism. For ninety years Norway had been yoked to Sweden as a result of the 1814 settlement of the Napoleonic
War. Denmark, on the losing side of that war, had lost its Norwegian colony to Sweden.
Norwegian leaders tried to declare independence by gathering northeast of Oslo, at the town of Eidsvoll, to write a national constitution. They proclaimed their constitution on May 17, 1814, a date still celebrated as Norway’s Independence Day.
Sweden’s government, however, was unimpressed by the Eidsvoll declaration, and installed its king as the monarch of Norway, determining that country’s foreign policy rather than letting the Norwegian Storting decide vital issues affecting foreign trade.
Sweden had industrialized earlier than Norway, and by the beginning of the twentieth century, Sweden’s labor movement was more advanced. That proved lucky for Norway. When in 1905 the mounting tension between the two countries came to a boiling point, the Swedish workers were strong enough to make a difference.
The impatient Norwegians wanted to make their move unilaterally and walk out of the union. Sweden countered by demanding that there be a plebiscite. Then 99.95 percent of Norwegians voted to leave! Both Swedes and Norwegians deployed military forces at the border. Sweden was richer and more powerful, and it had a far larger army than Norway’s. Right-wing Swedish politicians pushed for a hard-line response.
Norway needed allies, and found one in an unusual Swedish journalist named Hjalmar Branting. Branting had been a young scientist who in 1884 switched to journalism to advocate for his vision of a just society. As editor of socialist newspapers he was imprisoned for three months in 1888, the same year that Swedes formed their national trade union confederation. A year later, Branting joined others to found the Swedish Social Democratic
Party, and in 1896 he became the first one of his party to be elected to parliament.
The Social Democratic Party grew rapidly, but many of its supporters weren’t allowed to vote because of limited suffrage. For that reason there were few socialists in parliament. When the possibility of war heated up, the parliament was of little use for resistance.
Fortunately, Branting and the Swedish working class knew that there is power outside parliament, in direct action. Later this knowledge would turn out to be crucial for making the Nordic model possible.
Branting created a slogan that was trumpeted around the country: “Hands off Norway, King!” The movement anticipated that if the Swedish-led government declared war on Norway, it would need to call up the reserves. To preempt that possibility, the movement organized reservists, getting them to pledge that they would not respond to the government’s call-up. Labor’s next step was to plan for, and publicize their plan for, a general strike.
Faced with all this, Swedish diplomats negotiated an agreement that Norway could make its own decisions and leave the union with Sweden.
Now that Norway was on its own, the question still remained: would it be governed by those who considered themselves “born to rule,” or might the workers force some kind of economic democracy?
In 1907, the ironworkers signed the nation’s first collective
agreement with an employer. Encouraged, union activity increased and more workers studied the writing of socialist visionaries. The cooperative movement grew in this period as well; twenty-eight consumer co-ops banded together to form the Norwegian Cooperative Association to act as their wholesaler. (That association is now Coop Norge SA, with 1.3 million members—one in four Norwegians.)
The class struggle became even more visible. By 1913, the Labor Party had twenty-four newspapers around the country, and six more were added that year. It also had its own publishing house.
Threatened by the trend, the government imprisoned Martin Tranmael in 1915 and repeatedly thereafter. The still-young leader gained even more prominence within the movement. He and his colleagues closely followed the developments in neighboring Russia, where the czar had led his country into a bloodbath that came to be called World War I. In 1917, Russians overthrew the czar. Inspired by the Bolsheviks’ role in the revolution, Tranmael and others led the Norwegian Labor Party to respond positively in 1918 when V. I. Lenin invited the Norwegians to join the Communist International (Comintern).
Postwar times were tough, even though Norway had remained neutral in the war. During 1919 and 1920, the Norwegian cost of living rose by 16 percent. 60,000 workers in different parts of Norway responded by organizing strikes that gained higher wages. At the same time, increasing turbulence in the global economy hit export businesses hard. In 1921, employers therefore demanded a 33 percent wage reduction.
Across the Atlantic in the U.S. ports, the U.S. Seafarers’ Union faced a similar situation. The Americans stopped work to resist the wage cut. Inspired, Norwegian marine workers did the same, and truckers struck in solidarity. The Norwegian Federation of Labor
then announced that it would launch a general strike, and two weeks later—on May 26—some 120,000 workers stopped going to work.
Revolution was in the air. Workers in Norway’s northernmost town, Hammerfest, formed a commune to be led by workers councils. The army intervened to crush the initiative.
At this point history becomes a family story. A young man living at the southern end of Norway, Johannes Mathiesen, heard about the army’s intervention and concluded that he should become a conscientious objector and refuse army service. This was the man who later married, and fathered a baby named Berit, who became my wife. Deeply religious, my father-in-law had no inclination for war anyway, but he told me that, as a young man, the thought of being conscripted to kill other workers made him a pacifist.
The general strike continued, but the employers were able to hold on longer than the workers. The national unions temporarily surrendered. The U.S. marine workers lost their strike as well. Localized strikes continued through the 1920s including a bitter ironworkers’ strike in 1923–24 and a fresh wave of strikes in 1928.
Erling Falk came from a politically active middle-class family in the north of Norway. In 1907, he moved to Duluth, Minnesota. He was twenty. In the eleven years that he lived in the United States, he threw himself into activism and found various jobs, including a stint as accountant for the Industrial Workers of the World (the “Wobblies”).
Falk returned to Norway in 1918 to take up university studies. Oslo had Norway’s only university at the time and therefore graduated much of Norway’s future leadership. Its student association—the Norwegian Students Society—was a political hotbed, and Falk became active immediately.
Falk quickly asserted his leadership and gathered a group of students to publish a new periodical,
Mot Dag
, with him as editor. The magazine’s full title was, “Toward the Day: For Workers and Academics.” Its first edition, September 1921, set the tone: “
Mot Dag
seeks an intellectual leadership. Every academic does not belong here, only the ones who think.”
In a few years the magazine had 6,500 subscribers and was the biggest and perhaps the most influential political periodical in the Nordic countries.
A year after the magazine’s start-up, Falk founded a membership organization, also called
Mot Dag
, that lasted from 1922 until 1936. The group was influenced by syndicalism and radical humanism as well as Marxism. Falk wanted a group of young workers and students who would make the revolution their first priority and work together, in a disciplined way, to influence the labor movement.
Members of the group joined the Labor Party and became a visible caucus within it, joining the revolutionary wing led by Martin Tranmael. While some of the group’s inspiration came from the United States, it was also an extension of the radical student tradition of celebrated thinkers like the Norwegian writer Henrik Wergeland.
In 1923, Falk joined Tranmael to write a proposal that the Norwegian Labor Party should act independently of the Communist International, of which it was a member. In Moscow the
Comintern was displeased and put the question on the agenda for an enlarged meeting of its executive committee. Falk went to Moscow along with Tranmael and other Labor Party leaders to face the music, and reportedly distinguished himself with his antiauthoritarian sarcasm. Top Soviet leader Bakunin demanded that the Norwegians choose between the Comintern and the young upstart Erling Falk.