“Although always small in numbers and often regarded with suspicion by Labour and trade union leaders, the Mot Dag organization was nevertheless an important factor in providing the Norwegian workers’ movement with a cultural policy and attracting artists, writers and intellectuals to the socialist cause. Well-known and respected authors and artists figured prominently in the organisation’s ranks as members and as contributors to the journal of the same name. Mot Dag was also instrumental in establishing cultural and educational enterprises for Norwegian workers within the workers’ movement, most famously the Arbeidernes leksikon (The Workers’ Encyclopaedia), a gigantic and unique collective effort by specialists and writers who worked without remuneration.

It set up a successful publishing house where Falk published his Norwegian translation of the first volume of Marx’s Das Kapital (Capital), an undertaking that actually turned out to be profitable. In many ways Mot Dag had a position in Norway comparable to that of The Partisan Review in the United States, as an organisation that, as Hugh Wilford puts it, had a “dual commitment to anti-Stalinist Marxism and cultural Modernism”” (Sørenssen, Olav Dalgard – Politics, Film, Theatre and the Avant-Garde in Norway in the Interwar Years)