Labour Party was established in 1887 and was largely a trade union federation. The party did not proclaim a socialist agenda, elevating universal suffrage and dissolution of the union with Sweden as its top priorities. In 1899, the Norwegian Confederation of Trade Unions separated from the Labour Party. Around the time of the Russian Revolution, the Labour Party moved to the left and joined the Communist International from 1919 through 1923. Thereafter, the party still regarded itself as revolutionary, but the party's left-wing broke away and established the Communist Party of Norway while the Labour Party gradually adopted a reformist line around 1930. In 1935, Johan Nygaardsvold established a coalition that lasted until 1945. From 1946 to 1962, the Norwegian Labour Party held an absolute majority in the parliament led by Einar Gerhardsen, who remained Prime Minister for seventeen years. Although the party abandoned most of its pre-war socialist ideas, the welfare state was expanded under Gerhardsen to ensure the universal provision of basic human rights and stabilise the economy. In the 1945 Norwegian parliamentary election, the Communist Party took 12% of the votes, but it largely vanished during the Cold War. In the 1950s, popular socialism emerged in Nordic countries. It placed itself between communism and social democracy. In the early 1960s, the Socialist Left Party challenged the Labour Party from the left. Also in the 1960s, Gerhardsen established a planning agency and tried to establish a planned economy. In the 1970s, a more radical socialist party, the Worker's Communist Party (AKP), broke from the Socialist Left Party and had notable influence in student associations and some trade unions. The AKP identified with Communist China and Albania rather than the Soviet Union. In countries such as Sweden, the Rehn–Meidner model allowed capitalists owning productive and efficient firms to retain profits at the expense of the firms' workers, exacerbating inequality and causing workers to agitate for a share of the profits in the 1970s. At that time, women working in the state sector began to demand better wages. Rudolf Meidner established a study committee that came up with a 1976 proposal to transfer excess profits into worker-controlled investment funds, with the intention that firms would create jobs and pay higher wages rather than reward company owners and managers. Capitalists immediately labeled this proposal as socialism and launched an unprecedented opposition—including calling off the class compromise established in the 1938 Saltsjöbaden