Upstream - Historical Materialism w/ Torkil Lauesen

Starting point is 00:00:00 The only way to study materialism and dialectics is to study it with a purpose. You cannot just read it in abstract. You have to have a purpose with your study. And our specific purpose was to find the principal contradiction in the world and from this develop our strategy and from this our practice in order to give our modest contribution to move the system in the right direction. So this dialectic materialism it was not so much a philosophy it was a tool that we needed to acquire and it's not easy. You can learn the concepts, but to use them in your analysis, it's not that easy. It takes a lot of practice to master it. You're listening to Upstream. Upstream. Upstream. Upstream.

Starting point is 00:01:22 A podcast of documentaries and conversations that invites you to unlearn everything you thought you knew about economics. I'm Della Duncan. And I'm Robert Raymond. Historical materialism is the science of Marxism. It's the theory developed by Marx and Engels that explains how human societies develop and change over time based on economic organization. Like Darwin's theory of evolution through natural selection, historical materialism serves as a powerful tool in understanding the world around us. It explains why societies are arranged the way they are, why there are classes, why

Starting point is 00:02:05 revolutions happen, and when taken together with the Marxist philosophy of dialectical materialism, historical materialism becomes a rigorous scientific tool for analyzing the entire world and most importantly acting within it. Everybody on this planet would benefit greatly from having a clear understanding of historical materialism, and every Marxist should at least understand the basics of it. And in this episode we're going to provide an introductory exploration of historical materialism along with dialectical materialism, which is deeply intertwined with the former.

Starting point is 00:02:45 And we've brought on the perfect guest to help us do this. Torkill Lauesen is an activist and writer from Denmark who has spent the last 50 years immersed in the study and praxis of historical materialism. Torkill spent many years in his youth engaged in both legal and illegal activities with the purpose of materially supporting anti-imperialist struggles in the Third World, including in Palestine. And he spent half a decade in prison for this work. This episode is part of an ongoing series on Marx's philosophy and theory. The first episode in the series took a close look at dialectical

Starting point is 00:03:25 materialism with Josh Sykes as our guest and was published in June of 2024. This episode serves as a follow-up to that episode but can also be listened to on its own. We explore concepts from Torkle's latest book, The Long Transition Toward Socialism and the End of Capitalism, published this last November by Iskra Books, along with many fascinating topics related to historical materialism that span from Marx's concept of use-value and exchange-value, the history of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, anti-imperialism, neoliberalism, the rise of China, and much more. And before we get started, Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support.

Starting point is 00:04:17 There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, along with our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. You can also make a tax deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website at upstreampodcast.org forward slash support. Through this support you'll be helping keep upstream sustainable and helping us to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And now here's Robert in conversation with Torkill Lawson.

Starting point is 00:05:21 Torkill, it is a pleasure to have you on the show all the way from Copenhagen. Thank you for the invitation. So I invited you on today because I have been reading your terrific book, The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, which is published by the terrific Iskra Books. And I had originally reached out to Iskra to see if they could put me in touch with you to invite you on to discuss that book after I had finished reading it, but I actually thought it would be great to bring you on earlier to discuss a topic that I think is really

Starting point is 00:05:58 central to the book and is a topic that we've been meaning to do a standalone episode on for some time now. And that topic is historical materialism. And like you mentioned in our communications, I don't think that we can really talk about historical materialism without talking about dialectics and dialectical materialism, of course. And we did do an episode specifically on dialectical materialism earlier this year with a fellow named Joshua Sykes from the organization Freedom Road Socialist Organization, or FRSO, but we'll also be bringing dialectical materialism into this discussion as well.

Starting point is 00:06:39 So yeah, I think since both topics are so intertwined, it's a good idea to do that. So before we get into historical materialism and dialectical materialism and all of that, I would really love to just start if you could give us a brief introduction of yourself for any of our listeners who may not be familiar with you or anybody who just wants to know about a little bit about the work that you do and how you came to be doing it. Sure. I'm an old man. I'm 72 now. Since the late 60s, I have been an activist and I have also a lot of writing articles and books. And from around 1969 until 1986, I was a member of a small communist organization which supported the anti-imperialist struggle in the third world, especially in Palestine by legal and also illegal means it was material support work.

Starting point is 00:07:50 It was money and different kinds of services and trying to help them and supply them with the materials they needed. Eventually, after nearly 20 years, this organization was tracked down by the police and intelligence service and I ended up with a sentence of 10 years of imprisonment for robberies, mainly benefiting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. But when I was released from prison, I joined an organization called International Forum here in Copenhagen, which is a broad anti-imperialist organization, which is currently active in the solidarity movement with the Palestine struggle. I'm also a board member of an organization called

Starting point is 00:08:45 the Aguirre Emmanuel Association, which is dedicated to spreading the knowledge of his work on political economy. He is the father of the concept of unequal exchange. So that's briefly my story. Wonderful. Thank you so much for that. And yeah, I remember reading a little bit about your biography and just really being quite impressed and astounded by all the different work that you've done, including those illegal

Starting point is 00:09:14 activities that you mentioned earlier. And I believe robbing banks and sending the funds to different parts of the periphery. So that's really quite a resume you have. And thank you so much for all of your years of incredible work. I think I'd like to start our conversation about historical materialism by asking you how you acquired your knowledge

Starting point is 00:09:41 of historical materialism and dialectics. Yes, of course. This was in my early youth. I was on a boarding school and a friend of mine on this boarding school introduced me to Marxism. It was in the glorious year of And like many other young people of that generation, I was inspired by the anti-authorian ideas, hippie movement, Bob Dylan, the times are changing, and also the protest against the war in Vietnam and all things. Maybe I was looking for some kind of framework to understand this messy world. In this way, Marxism and especially historical dialectic materialism became some kind of an answer and I rushed into read the classic and I began to actually understand how the world worked and how things were working.

Starting point is 00:10:54 I remember I actually became high on reading this material and actually more high than on smoking the cannabis I also did occasionally. So I skipped the latter and stayed on the first stimulant. But it was very much the phycology of the aspect of Marxism. I was not yet organized, but it was a kind of jump in my consciousness from this floating around to understanding of my surroundings. I think when you feel that the world is messy and you try to find out what is up and down, it's sometimes good to sharpen your analytic tools and dialectic materialism and historical materialism did that trick

Starting point is 00:11:50 without comparing, you know, that Lenin in 1914 was in a kind of crisis due to the socialist parties in Europe voted for the war credits, which led up to the first world war and also the collapse of the second international. And in that crisis, he began to study Hegel to have a better understanding of dialectics. You can also see that with Mao after the long march, he ended up in Yemen with the remaining Red Army. They were also in a deep crisis. And here they also began to study actually the basic of historical materialism in order to develop a new strategy to renew the struggle. And also this, I mentioned Aguirre Emmanuel. He was not only an academic, he participated in the Greek resistance against the Nazi Germany

Starting point is 00:12:53 occupation in Greece and also in ensuring a civil war in Greece between the right-wing government, which was supported by the British and the Greek communist. And in that civil war, Emmanuel was arrested and he actually got a death sentence for treason. However, he was pardoned, but he was transferred to a British prison camp in Sudan. And in that desert, he also wrote a book on dialectic materialism for his fellow inmates. So in that crisis, people often turn to this philosophy study of dialectics to get a tool to analyze the situation. And I think we are in a similar position.

Starting point is 00:13:43 Capitalism is completely out of balance economically and politically. And we see all the time, sudden change and shift of alliances. And I think it's crucial in that situation to develop a strategy. And here we need the tools of historical materialism and dialectics very much. Going back to 1969, I actually became organized in a communist group. It of course has a study group not only about political economy but also about materialism. We were this group of people between 20 and 30 years, but we have a very good tutor. He was an old member of the Danish Communist Party and he went to the party school in Moscow in the 50s.

Starting point is 00:14:40 He was well-schooled, but he turned a Maoist already in 63. And he told us that the only way to study materialism and dialectics is to study it with a purpose. You cannot just read it in abstract. You have to have a purpose with your study. And our specific purpose was to find the principle contradiction in the world and from this develop our strategy and from this our practice in order to give our modest contribution to move the system in the right direction. So this dialectic materialism,

Starting point is 00:15:25 it was not so much a philosophy, it was a tool that we needed to acquire. And it's not easy, you can learn the concepts, but to use them in your analysis, it's not that easy, it takes a lot of practice to master it. Wow, thank you so much for all that. And I couldn't really relate more to you in terms of like, you know, feeling sort of when you're trying to analyze the world using whatever tools have been handed down

Starting point is 00:16:00 through bourgeois education and bourgeois society, it does feel like you're floating around. And I also really appreciate and resonate with the idea of getting high on historical materialism. Because I mean, yeah, reading about it recently, and it's just been a couple of years, maybe two, three years, that I've been getting more deeply into Marxism and Marxism, Leninism, and historical materialism and dialectics. It's a completely different way of thinking about the world

Starting point is 00:16:29 and it really, it clicks in a way and it helps to sort of make sense and contextualize so much that it does feel almost like your consciousness has shifted and you know, I don't know if I would say that, you know, your consciousness is altered before and now with historical materialism, you have a bit more of a firmer grasp on reality, but it does still feel like an altered sense of perception and consciousness a little bit when you start to get into it more deeply and understand it. the study with like an aim, right? Like something like that. It feels very relevant to historical materialism as a concept and also just a great way of like applying theory and knowledge. And I know that, you know, you've mentioned that you did that through your work and your

Starting point is 00:17:17 studies, which I think is awesome. And the last thing I'll say before I jump into the next question is I really did appreciate this idea of the principle contradiction in the way it showed up in the book. And I almost thought of it as the principle contradiction that you talk about in the book being sort of the main character of the book in a way, and it kind of weaves its way throughout. And we'll get into, you know, and feel free if you want to talk more about that, obviously, but we'll also explicitly be talking about your book. Hopefully we'll have you back on early next year to talk about the book more deeply. And yeah, but if you have anything from the book that you want to bring in, obviously,

Starting point is 00:17:55 of course, please do. But yeah, this this episode is focusing specifically on historical materialism. And I think it is certainly possible to listen to this episode if you haven't listened to the dialectics episode that we did earlier this year. I do think it would serve as a good foundation, but at the same time this is going to be a completely standalone episode, so you don't have to go back and listen to the dialectics episode first. But just to start, I would love it if you could maybe just briefly explain to us what historical materialism is. We've been dancing around it a little bit so far. So maybe if you could just give us an idea of what historical materialism is and also

Starting point is 00:18:39 how it does build on the philosophy of dialectical materialism? Yes, well, historical materialism is part of dialectic materialism, but it deals with mainly the history of humanity. So it's about human society, its economics, its sociology, its politics, its culture, its human relation in the broadest sense. There have been a long discussion up through the 20th century whether the theory of dialectic materialism included all matters, both nature from the universe to the smallest proton or electron or just we should confine it to human relations to history. Marx and Engels were of the first opinion that it was about all matter.

Starting point is 00:19:34 Marx concentrated on the human relations but from time to time he also wrote about materialism and natural science. Engels was much more into natural science and wrote, you know, he wrote a book called Entenduring about this question and also the dialectics of nature, which is specific about the dialectic in nature. And actually Engels has been much criticized for his writing on dialectics of nature, pointing

Starting point is 00:20:06 out many factual mistakes in his concrete specific examples. However, these are more to blame for the lack of scientific knowledge at his time than his general writings on the dialectic of nature. There have also been intense discussions whether dialectic materialism could be applied to atomic physics and this still go on. However, in the recent decades, I think Engels have been rehabilitated much as the contradiction between nature and capitalism has developed much. Capitalism has an impact not only on human history, but actually also now on the history

Starting point is 00:20:53 of planet Earth and life itself in a perspective of millions and maybe billions of years. John Bellamy Forster from Monthly Review in 1999 wrote a book called Marxist Ecology on the Ecologic Dimension of Marx's Materialist Thought, based on Marx's writing on the so-called rift created by capitalist production. Today, in the analysis of the planetary ecological crisis, scientists talk about the anthropogenic rift in the biophysical cycle of the planet and also in the disruption of the Earth system's metabolism, which makes, I think, Marx and Engels writing on dialectic materialism and nature significant again as they see the political economy of capitalism and the metabolic rifts in the human social relation to environment as one single issue, two sides of the same coin. But I'm not a specialist on this subject, so I will stick to historical materialism as a tool for analyzing the world. Basically, there are four main rules of historical materialism,

Starting point is 00:22:30 and they are nicely explained in Mao's book on contradiction, actually. Marx didn't write a specific book on historical materialism, you have to find it here and there in his writing in capital, in his different kinds of manuscript. He has not a specific article or book about it, but Mao rounded it up very nice in his very short articles. The first rule of historical materialism is that you have to see all phenomenons, all processes as linked to other phenomena and other things and all other processes. Everything has a cause and an effect and everything is cause and effect.

Starting point is 00:23:22 Things are linked to each other. An example, a concrete example. We cannot understand the modernization of the agricultural sector in the late 19th century in Denmark without considering the demand for these agricultural products by the working class in Britain. The reason they raised their demand was that they get increased wage, and this was possible because of Britain's colonial empire. You have this breakthrough of industrial capitalism in Denmark in terms of mechanized agricultural production, diaries and slaughterhouses and infrastructure, as railroads and harbors to facilitate the export to Britain was dependent on the expanding consumer power of the English working class, which was in turn linked to colonialism.

Starting point is 00:24:22 And so you can see things are connected. We cannot understand the development in a particular country without considering how the global and national contradictions interact. All this might seem self-evident and trivial, but I have seen so many studies and strategies made out from starting from rather isolated national analysis and completely neglecting the global context or even the regional context. So we have to see this dialectic between the global perspective and the national perspective. this dialectic between the global perspective and the national perspective. So this was the first. And the second rule is what we have to see things as a process, as a history.

Starting point is 00:25:14 The world is in constant motion. It is a process. Capitalism history is 500 years old, it has a beginning and it also has an end as like all other systems in humankind. It's easy to forget this. We have a tendency to believe that our way of life is unchangeable. It is true that capitalism has been very good in adapting to new circumstances and integrating resistance. But there are limits even for capitalism and I think we are reaching them.

Starting point is 00:25:51 The third rule is that historical change happens in qualitative leaps. There are no linear developments. There are ruptures and sudden change. At first we see quantitative changes which have no qualitative effect, but there's always a point where they do. The productive forces change constantly and with them, the power relations between classes. And eventually, this was lead to tensions within the framework of the old society and make way for a new society.

Starting point is 00:26:31 This does not mean that socialism mechanically follow capitalism as spring follows winter. There's no laws which make socialism and necessarily follow up to capitalism. Capitalism can also end in a total collapse and chaos. It's up to us to change that. So this is the third rule. And then I come to actually the fourth rule, and this is about the driver in the development. And it has to do with the dialectic, the contradictions in the process.

Starting point is 00:27:12 Each contradiction has two aspects, and these aspects are complement to one another. They both exclude, and they require each other at the same time. So a contradiction is not a contradiction in terms, it's another kind of contradiction. A good example is a planet orbits around the sun. It's a contradiction between gravity and inertia. The force of gravity pulls the planet towards the Sun and the inertia keeps the planet in position and moving it in a forward direction. And if

Starting point is 00:27:54 we turn to human relations Marx provided us with a exemplary contradiction in capitalism, he began his analysis of capitalism in Das Kapital with the commodity. The commodity is the kind of cell in the capitalist society. A commodity is produced by human labor for exchange and this implies a contradiction between use value versus exchange value. Use value stands for the fact that labor in its interaction with nature, resources and energy makes the basis of our life. And exchange value stands for the fact that in capitalism,

Starting point is 00:28:41 commodities are produced with the purpose of profit. And this contradiction, this DNA between use value and exchange value, it is also expressed in labor itself. You know, you have specific labor, use value, people shoot clothes, carpenters make furniture or houses, and so on. And exchange value is the abstract labor, the blood, sweat and tears of the labor power. And we can see it on the market. There's also this contradiction expressed by the buyer who looks for the use value and the seller who looks for the exchange value in the form of money. So you can see how Marx in his analysis of capitalism follows this contradiction in the

Starting point is 00:29:36 sell up through the system becoming more and more complex as it's being unfold. Yeah. So this is the basic elements or basic rule in historical materialism. That everything is interconnected. Everything is a process, is moving. You have the quantity which goes into qualitatively change and you have the dialectic, the contradiction as the driver of the process. Incredible. And I just want to sort of go back and pull on some of the threads of your response there because there are so much rich material.

Starting point is 00:30:19 First of all, I really appreciate you bringing up John Bellamy Foster and you do mention the metabolic rift in your text. And I know that John Bellamy Foster has a lot of great writings in monthly review, which he is the editor of. And I was going to do one of them as a Patreon reading soon. So I think this is a good reminder to keep that on my list. And then I also feel like that idea that you started with and this idea of the metabolic rift and the sort of how capitalism is impacting the entire planet in a way is really captured beautifully by Jason W. Moore in his concept of the capital scene. the capital scene is a much more specific and accurate term in terms of thinking about these geological epics and how it's not humanity as a whole, it is the structure of society that is capitalism that is causing all of these metabolic rifts and whatnot.

Starting point is 00:31:19 Again, thank you for bringing up more on contradiction by Mao and that's definitely an important text And then just to summarize and you did so also at the end of your response But so historical materialism the four components everything is connected causes and effects bounce off of each other And like you mentioned it seems straightforward Until you realize that you often don't use that until you realize that you often don't use that when you're analyzing the world. And it's one of those concepts that seems so straightforward because it makes so much sense, but do we use it?

Starting point is 00:31:51 No, not all the time, or some of us never at all. And then number two, the world is a process, which I really think is a super important one. This idea of quantity and quality and qualitative leaps, and this is something that we dive very deeply into in the episode on dialectical materialism that we did with Josh Sykes. One of the things that I really got from this aspect of historical materialism and dialectics is why reformism doesn't work and how you have to accumulate power.

Starting point is 00:32:21 You can't build reforms that cumulatively build on one another and expect for that to just turn into a qualitative change. You have to build power and there's this sort of qualitative leap which occurs because of the accumulation of power, but not just because of the accumulation of reform. So that's something we get a little bit more deeply into in other episodes. And then also this idea that there are no laws which make socialism inevitably follow capitalism. And this always reminds me, and our listeners are probably going to roll their eyes because I bring this quote up all the time, but Che Guevara's quote, the revolution is not an

Starting point is 00:33:01 apple that falls to the ground when it's ripe. You have to make it fall. I really love that one. I think that it's very relevant. Yeah, and then finally, contradiction. And again, we get way more deeply into contradiction in our dialectics episode. For me, understanding this idea of primary secondary

Starting point is 00:33:20 contradictions was super helpful in understanding how I analyze the world, especially right now in understanding anti-imperialist struggle and building solidarity with the forces that are fighting the primary contradiction, I think is something that's been very relevant to a lot of us who are just coming into this right now with a focus on Palestine. And then of course, yes, exchange value and use value is a great example. And that's a very classic Marxist concept, which I always thought about this series that we're doing on Marxist philosophy as probably being a three-part series. And the third one I wanted to do on exploring political economy specifically.

Starting point is 00:33:59 So looking at Capital Volume One and some of the concepts that you just brought up. So I appreciate you touching on that in your very thorough and rich response to that original question kind of about outlining historical materialism. And there are some ideas that people have probably heard of in passing or touched on when they're looking into Marxism and specifically historical materialism. And one of these ideas is about the base and the superstructure and the relationship between them in a dialectical sense. And I'm wondering if you can just kind of outline that idea and talk a little bit about the base and the superstructure, how they fit into historical materialism, and just maybe some examples that might help people make sense of how these forces play out in the actual physical world. Yeah, sure. Well, very schematic labor, the establishment of the necessities for human survival, food, shelter.

Starting point is 00:35:00 Economics is the base of every mode of production. And this is the base. On this base a superstructure arises. It is the political construction that ensures and organizes that the base works properly. It's the state with all its institutions from nurseries to army. And on top of this, there is ideology, which explains why it has to be like this. So historical materialism says that the base economics determine the superstructure and not one-sided. There's a feedback between base and the superstructure, not one-sided. There's a feedback between base and the superstructure. And the superstructure is very complex. But let me illustrate this dialectic between the base and the superstructure

Starting point is 00:35:55 with some erroneous analysing I have done in the past to make it more clear and to actually to as you asked for how it plays out in the real world throughout the 50s and the 60s and the beginning of the 70s. Actually with the climates in 68 there was this uprising revolutionary anti-imperialist wave washed over the world, inspired by the victory in China and the successful struggle in Vietnam and Cuba, and revolutionary movements appeared across the world. In this decade of the long 60s, from 65 to 75, the principal contradiction in the world was between imperialism led by the US and this nominous anti-imperialist movement and new transitional third world states that tried to build socialism. And my group and I, we anticipated that when they have got this national liberation, they

Starting point is 00:37:11 would start to build socialism and they would cut the pipeline of imperialist value transfer to the center and they will create kind of a socialist development in the third world. And this would create a political crisis and thereby a revolutionary situation in our part of the world. This didn't happen. However, national liberation proved easier to obtain than ending the imperialist exploitation and building socialism. The anti-colonial movement was well aware of this problem and that the struggle to develop the forces of production was very necessary if they wanted to continue national liberation

Starting point is 00:37:57 into building socialism. But national self-determination and the ambition to create socialism was often not enough to bring them closer to the goal. And the most important barrier for this was the century-old polarization dynamic caused by unequal exchange in global capitalism. Raw materials and agricultural products produced by low-wager in the Third World was exchanged by industrial products produced by relatively high-wage labor in the imperialist center. And this new born traditional states in the Third World, they could not change that dynamic. They could not simply increase their wage and thereby the price of their raw materials

Starting point is 00:38:50 and agricultural product they supplied to the world market, which was dominated by capitalism. Without the necessary development and diversity of their productive forces, they could not just delink from the world market and produce for the domestic market and in the interest of workers and peasants. Doing that, they were risking throwing their economy into ruin. They had inherited these economic structures under colonialism, which was one sided and monoculture production, which was not designed to serve the interest of the people. So they were stuck with this economy of producing for the world market some agricultural product

Starting point is 00:39:39 and raw materials. And no matter their socialist aspirations and political independence, they slide back to some kind of capitalist economic development in the end. They achieved national independence, but they could not liberate themselves from imperialist exploitation. So the hopes we had were frustrated. And my mistake was that they assumed that the political aspect, the revolutionary spirit and the will could over-determinate the economic base, the power of the capitalist world market. This was the main thing that we put ideology or revolutionary spirit over this power of

Starting point is 00:40:32 the economic base. As it happened, a new global wave came into existence. It was not the world socialist revolution, but neoliberal globalization, because capitalism has still options for expansion. It has still a new spatial fix in the international direction of labor. It was not finished. To formulate it in the language of historical materialism was that the overacting factor that ended the revolutionary wave of the long 60s was the inability of actual existing socialism at the time,

Starting point is 00:41:14 both in the Soviet and the Chinese version, and in the new stage in the Third World. They could not develop their productive forces to a sufficient degree to break the dominance of the global capitalist market. Because of this neoliberal counteroffensive, was able to do what the US Army could not do in Vietnam, put the Third World back on its knees. Because capitalism has not played out his role of developing the productive forces. So this is one example of a kind of mistake which do not take into account the relation between the economic base

Starting point is 00:41:59 and the political role of states and ideology. Thank you. That's such a great example. So we spoke with Dr. Cherise Burden-Stelly recently, and she talked about direct colonialism being sort of like a specific management style of imperialism. But with the end of direct colonialism, that was not the end of imperialism. It was, like you mentioned, a sort of superstructural revolution, which left intact the underlying base beneath that superstructure, which is the economic relations between the core and the periphery, and it left intact all of the different structures that just be they

Starting point is 00:42:45 continue to operate but under different names and in different ways. And this sort of goes back to this idea of how adaptable capitalism is. And especially if you don't have a historical materialist analysis that imbues your your revolutionary work, it can be very easy to miss the actual head of the Hydra, I guess, the main head of the Hydra, which is US imperialism. So thank you so much for that. That was a very, very helpful example. I would like to give you another example of a mistaken analysis.

Starting point is 00:43:22 This has to do with the next phase actually with neoliberal globalization. Actually neoliberal globalization, it had also a kind of what is the dialectic of neoliberal globalization. Well on one side one aspect was transnational capital. Transnational capital have grown and they wanted to get out of the straight jacket of the national state. The national state have kind of, through the 50s and through the 60s, especially in Europe, the national state in terms of social democracy and KC ANG, economy kind of regulated capitalism controlled transnational investment and also regulated rules for the labor market and so on and so forth. And they also taxed the capital to kind of redistribute value and so on.

Starting point is 00:44:27 Capital was getting fed up with this. Once they liked it because this kind of economy had pulled them out of the crisis of the 30s, but now it has turned out from an asset to be a straight jacket for development. They needed to make this news fix. They needed to move industrial production to the global south with lower wages and therefore higher profits. So on one side you have this aspect of transnational capital and on the other hand, you have the national state. And clearly, transnational capital was the dominating side of this contradiction from the 80s and up through the 90s, making this kind of globalised capitalism, where the globalised

Starting point is 00:45:22 production itself. And I actually, you know, I would say that I was very intrigued by the theory by Tony Negri and Richard Hart and the book Empire. And it was written in the late 90s and it was in exactly in the year 2000. And it was the same day I anticipated, you know, like, like I thought that third world anti-imperialism would continue in the 70s. I thought that this neoliberal globalization process would continue and we would end up with this kind of transnational companies which are ruling the world through transnational institutions and maybe even with a globalised bourgeoisie

Starting point is 00:46:16 and a globalised military and police force and so on. And actually today I see Negri and Hart's book as the left-wing version of Futiyama's dream of the end of history. Both parties did not see the dialectic in neoliberalism, and they didn't see the comeback of the national state. And they didn't see that neoliberalism completely changed the economic base of the world system because neoliberalism was America going up, up, up. It was the only superpower. It rolled back the Soviet Union. It opened China, it ruled the world, but suddenly this neoliberal globalization suddenly produced the rise of China and it turned the world completely upside down. This was how you see the dialectic.

Starting point is 00:47:21 Suddenly there's the struggle between the aspects and there's a development of both aspects certainly turns the table and turned the power structure inside the contradiction. And this is an example of this, which I completely ignored at the time, buying the explanation of empire. Yeah, thank you for that. And yeah, so the book Empire, which was written by Antonio Negri and Michael Hart, as you mentioned, and which I first came across actually when I was reading Samir Amin's book, The Liberal Virus, which we actually have a Patreon episode of a reading that I did of a few of those chapters. And so Amin talks about and criticizes the book Empire in his book, and he does so in a lot of detail there. So if anyone wants to dive a bit deeper into it, there is that Patreon episode. But just to sort of summarize here, the book Empire really attempted to sketch sort of a

Starting point is 00:48:27 picture of what they thought would be a post-imperial future, where these multinational corporations and international organizations would kind of like govern the world, and there wouldn't really be any major unipolar empires anymore, like the role of the nation-state would be largely diminished. And like you mentioned, it was the end of history analysis that we might see as the left-wing version of Francis Fukuyama's idea of the end of history, where neoliberal capitalism is kind of the crowning pinnacle and achievement of mankind's development and history will sort of cease to develop as we enter this kind of utopian epic of global capitalism, which is of course an insane thing to kind of think even

Starting point is 00:49:20 when that book was written. I mean, you have to just erase huge swaths of the earth to think that capitalism had reached a stable endpoint in 1992. But to bring the conversation back to dialectical contradiction, so if I understand you correctly, you're essentially saying that you and along with many others during the 1970s and early 80s, thought that perhaps part of the vision laid out in empire might be likely, it might be where the world is headed and that the nation state might fade away sort of into the dustbin of history and be replaced by this sort of transnational corporation run world with the emergence of like an international bourgeoisie that didn't really have any allegiance or ties to a nation. And I mean, you can't see how

Starting point is 00:50:14 that vision might seem likely during like the rise of neoliberalism. But then yeah, the contradiction that emerged during the rise of neoliberalism, which you referred to and which caught you by surprise, was that this growth of neoliberalism and the rise of the power of transnational corporations actually created a new contradiction, which was the economic rise of China. Because as the United States pushed to open China, open them up to the global market, China actually became a significant world power. And it didn't do so in the same model as the United States, but it did so in a way that has socialistic characteristics, let's say, and namely the centrality of the state.

Starting point is 00:51:02 And so then all of a sudden you have the nation-state become an entity with significance and power again, undoing the original trajectory of neoliberalism, which had seemed to be undoing that significance and the power of nation-states. And so, like you said, this turned the world upside down. And in dialectics, this is sort of the development of both aspects of the contradiction between the economy and economic forces and nation states, so the base and the superstructure, and how one aspect of the contradiction actually develops through the other aspect and how these things are processes which impact each other and in impacting each other can completely change the nature of the original power struggle.

Starting point is 00:51:53 So yeah, I hope that was sort of a helpful encapsulation. And yeah, I would love to maybe spend just a little bit more time unpacking some of the core concepts and terms of historical materialism. And I do think maybe a good place to start, especially because you've brought the term up several times now, would be to unpack this idea of the forces of production or the productive forces. It's one part of the primary contradiction that we spoke about earlier. And I think that's probably a good starting point.

Starting point is 00:52:31 Maybe afterwards we can explore this idea of the role that the productive forces play in relation to another concept, which we'll get more into, which is the relations of production. But for now, I'm wondering if we can, yeah, maybe spend some time. If you could describe what we mean when we talk about the forces of production. Well, the forces of production is the instrument, the tools which we use. It's the technology.

Starting point is 00:53:02 It's the knowledge of how to use the technology. It's also science. A good example is the basic for neoliberal globalization was not only the policy of Reagan and the policy of Margaret Thatcher privatization and opening up the national states. A precondition for neoliberal globalization was also development in the productive forces in terms of communications, in terms of handling big amounts of information, the computer, the cell phone, all that stuff. Without this, you could not make neoliberal globalization because you could not control on distance the production. And also there was huge development in the technology of transport.

Starting point is 00:53:59 A very good example is the introduction of the standard container. It revolutionized transport, bringing down the transport cost by 99% because you could easily load and reload a container from a ship before you have different kinds of boxes and sacks and all kinds of material. Now you just put it all into a container and you have equipment in harbors and airports and all kinds of reloading places, which is specially made to reload this kind of containers. So the standard container was one of the big conditions actually for globalized production. You see this huge container ships going from Asia through the Suez Canal, symbolizing the significance of this actually rather simple invasion.

Starting point is 00:54:57 So this is what I mean with the productive forces and why they are so important. the productive forces and why they are so important. You're listening to an Upstream Conversation with Torquil Lawison. We'll be right back. Okay. Here we go. I'm just a fine Why am I feeling so blue? When I look like how I've been lied to But I shouldn't have to Defend my reasons for being with me I'm just a fine

Starting point is 00:55:36 Why am I feeling so blue? When I look like how I've been lied to But I shouldn't have to Defend my reasons for being with you I'm just feeling what the world has got to do with you I just want to show up for you, for me In this forgotten I said I've been tired of trying to be a human being

Starting point is 00:56:38 I'm just feeling the wound I still have to do it here I'm just feeling perfect, it's burning on the news Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah

Starting point is 00:57:18 Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Wake, wake my dreams Like a dream, burning up Wake, wake your mind If you try, try and have me I have to work, get things done I guess work was way too late

Starting point is 00:57:58 I could only be a fucking friend I'm your friend, keep fighting I'm just you I have to deal with you I'm just feeling it, burning on the news I'm just feeling it, what do I have to do with you? That was Gloom by Heavy Lifter. Now back to our conversation with Torquil Lawison. Okay, so now we have an idea, a basic idea of what the forces of production are, which I think for me, the very essence of historical materialism is rooted in the idea of materialism and material reality so.

Starting point is 00:59:27 When we think about like why human societies develop in certain ways we have to always start at sort of the root which is you know like when you think about humans. about humans, what defines us as a species is that we make tools and that we are social. And the very primary foundation of our tool making and our sociality is it's very straightforward and simple, it's to acquire food and shelter, right? So like those needs come before anything else. So when we analyze the development of human society, we do really have to start with the material basis, with the basics. And this is sort of the epiphany that Marx had, and the root of his discovery, that it's not ideas which drive society fundamentally, it's that our material reality drives our ideas. And of course there is feedback between the two, thinking dialectically, but the primary motor of society's development is material reality.

Starting point is 01:00:37 And as Marx and Engels wrote in a critique of political economy, quote, it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. So I'd like to sort of build on that idea a little further, especially now that we've outlined the significance of the forces of production. And as you demonstrated, how the development of the shipping container was just as important, if not more important, than the rise of neoliberal politicians like Thatcher and Reagan, who we tend to view sometimes as the cause of neoliberalism,

Starting point is 01:01:19 when really they were just figureheads, right? They were part of the superstructure, and they popped up more as a result of these changes and developments in the forces of production. So then again, we have the base and superstructure dialectic. So we can see these policymakers, these figureheads as guiding and formalizing a process

Starting point is 01:01:40 which really was already underway. But yeah, so now we have, I think, a much more firm grasp and understanding of what the productive forces are and the role that they play. And so you write in your book, The Long Transition, quote, if we look at society as a whole, the fundamental contradiction is between the development of the productive forces and the relations of production. And so I'm wondering now if you can unpack for us what the relations of production are, and in doing so, maybe you can talk a little bit about how the relations of production and the forces of production are in sort of this ultimate

Starting point is 01:02:26 contradiction with one another. Sure. Well, the relation of productions stands for the relation that humans enter into when they are using their productive forces. First and foremost, they concern property relations. The relation of production is how the production is distributed, how the social product is organized, who decides what to produce, how and when, and it's also the rules of how that production shall be distributed between humans. In capitalism the means of production are privately owned. The owner of capital decides what and how

Starting point is 01:03:15 much shall be produced and under what condition. The production is made for profit appropriated by capital. The rule of distribution is the law of the market. Whoever has money can consume. No money, no consumption. In a socialist mode of production, the division of labor and rules of production and distribution are inseparable. They are an interweaved process set up by a decision-making body, which is tasked with the planning of the economy. The plan asks, what are the priorities of our needs? What are our human and natural resources?

Starting point is 01:04:03 And what are our human and natural resources and what are our technology? And the plan then determines who is going to produce, what is necessary to fulfill the needs and how to do it. The essence of a planned economy is decisions on investment production and distribution are political and determined beforehand, upstreams and not as a result of the capitalist market downstreams. This means that there exists the possibility of a democracy far more advanced and substantial than bourgeois parliamentary democracy in which the core economic decisions are in the hands of a minority, the owners of capital. Liberal political democracy can modify or regulate these private decisions to a certain degree.

Starting point is 01:04:55 But the capitalist economy is the main framework of society and its law sets certain limits on the decision of liberal democracy because capitalist accumulation have to be secured and go on. So in a capitalist economy the relationship between production and consumption is actually turned upside down. The size of the production and the type of goods are decided by market forces. Human needs are only valid if they can be backed up by purchasing power. And it is this private exchange that determines the future division of labor taken by independent decisions on the level of individual capitalists.

Starting point is 01:05:45 Nothing is produced without the expectation of it being sold, and anything will be produced if it can't be sold. There may be idle hands and under-neutralized resources on one hand, and an urgent need for food and clothing and shelter on the other hand. But these two cannot meet each other if there is not consumption power. In capitalism, the purchasing power is not just a matter of distribution of the product. It is the very condition of its scale and the nature of the production. You know it's a very common experience

Starting point is 01:06:26 that you can get the goods you want if you have the money, but you cannot always get money for the goods you have. And we have become very accustomed to this as a natural way of economics, but to make production dependent on consumption is really turning things upside down. In capitalism the problem is marketing a saleable product. In socialism the limited factor for fulfilling needs is the ability to produce. So the most advanced technology and effective governance enhance this ability, which is to transform humans' needs via political process and planning into priorities of production and rules of distribution.

Starting point is 01:07:17 So, you have this very different working of the capitalist mode of production and the socialist production. And this is actually what defines the difference. Hmm. Incredible. Yeah. I think that's a really, really helpful illustration of sort of how the relations of production differ between capitalism and socialism.

Starting point is 01:07:43 And you actually have a chapter in your book that is titled, What is the difference between capitalism and socialism? And one of the major takeaways, I think, for me here is that I think we often focus on the contradiction between worker and boss, right? Like when we think about what defines the relations of production under capitalism. But you also put an emphasis, and I think this is really important, on the capitalist market and the way that societies distribute what they produce. And you actually write about this in a very interesting way in the long transition. So I'll just read from your text here. This is a quote from the book, quote, the ownership of the means of production can take

Starting point is 01:08:36 different collective forms to facilitate worker control and a fair distribution of income. However, collective ownership alone does not cancel the capitalist dynamic. Cooperatives and publicly owned companies within a market economy still function within the logic of capitalism. In an economy dominated by market relations, the producer's collective or privately organized production is inevitably motivated by competition to lower production costs and expand production to capture a bigger share of the market. Those who fail to do so will be threatened by a lower income or bankruptcy. And so that's a very interesting point. I think when we, when we look at the contradictions between the,

Starting point is 01:09:32 the relations of production under capitalism, and another interesting way to think about the dynamic between the relations of production and the forces of production is through contradiction. And it's essential here, I think, to note the forces of production is through contradiction. And it's essential here, I think, to note the forces of production are actually the dominant aspect of that contradiction. And this, I think, is really important to understand. And I want everybody listening to really remember that, because in terms of what we're about to get into next, this is one of the most important aspects I think of historical materialism and Marxism, how the forces and relations of production interact over time to develop society. And I think here I actually want to pull a quote from

Starting point is 01:10:20 Josh Sykes who we had on for the dialectical materialism episode. So this is a quote from his book, quote, Each historical mode of production is defined by the level of the development of its productive forces and the corresponding relations of production. As the productive forces develop to higher levels, eventually the relations of production that at first encouraged and accelerated their development begin to hold them back, and those relations of production must be changed in order for the productive forces to be able to develop further." And so that is from Josh's excellent book, The Revolutionary Science of Marxism-Leninism. And I think this is the real nut of how Marx's conception of revolution and transition works. And so let's actually put it in Marx's words himself.

Starting point is 01:11:21 So in a contribution to the critique of political economy, Marx writes, At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure." End quote. And so this idea the transformation of the whole immense superstructure."

Starting point is 01:12:06 And so this idea is sort of conceived by some as the Feder thesis, which essentially says that revolutions happen when the relations of production hold back the development of the productive forces. So like in capitalism, capitalism was great at developing certain technologies, but at some point, the profit motive and private property began to actually hinder the development and distribution of the technologies. So the relations of production under capitalism began to hinder the technologies that we need. And so the idea is that eventually the relations of production will have to change in order to accommodate this need for these technologies.

Starting point is 01:12:54 And it was the same in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. So the relations under feudalism, specifically, they tied source to the land in a way that hindered the development of the productive forces. So industry needed mobile workers, a sort of proletariat, who were not tied to the land of some lord. So yeah, I'm wondering if maybe you can talk a bit about this idea of the Fedor thesis and the transition from feudalism to capitalism and from capitalism to socialism in the framework of historical materialism.

Starting point is 01:13:36 Well, what happens is that on one side, in the beginning, capitalism is very dynamic and it developed the productive forces. But as you mentioned, something happens and in some way, certainly it blocks the development of production. In the transformation from feudalism or pre-capitalist, different kinds of pre-capitalist modes of production to capitalist mode of production. It actually took a very long period and capitalism had the ability to grow inside and alongside

Starting point is 01:14:18 the feudal mode of production. Actually in China, back in the 12th century, there was capitalist production and capitalist market. We also have it in Europe, we have it in the 14th century in Italy, and we have all kinds of beginning capitalist mechanize inside the feudal society. I think that this transformation, it's very difficult for socialism to develop inside capitalism. We see it, there are some kinds of cooperatives

Starting point is 01:14:59 and there are small, especially in the 19th century in the US, there was a lot of small attempts to build small socialist communities, but they cannot flourish, they cannot spread, they cannot move ahead as capitalism could inside the feudal society because of the superstructure of the capitalist state and so on. So it's a very different kind of transformation process. There are different reasons why capitalism is in deep shit now. I mentioned maybe before a very fundamental contradiction in the capitalist mode of production. On one side, capitalism has to expand. It has to expand its accumulation.

Starting point is 01:15:49 It has to grow to generate profit accumulation, have to be accelerated and grow all the time. And in that process, it's put more and more products, commodity out into the market. However, the consumption power created by this production is not able to consume this large amount and even accelerated amount of commodities put into the market. So, capitalism has this recurrent crisis of, you can call it overproduction or under consumption. And this has always been a problem for capitalism. And the historical solution to this problem was colonialism and imperialism,

Starting point is 01:16:39 that you had a super exploitation of the working class in the periphery of the capitalist system, transferring value, turning into consumption power in the center, creating a dynamic development in the center and under development in the periphery. So capitalism, it was needed for So capitalism, it was needed for capitalism to have this steady polarization of the world system in a core and in a periphery in development and underdevelopment in rich countries and in poor countries. This was the solution to this crisis. And one of the reasons why I think that we have reached this period of transformation and revolution is that we now see for the first time that this polarizing tendency or solution to capitalism is broken. We are seeing that now the development of the productive forces in the global south are rising.

Starting point is 01:17:48 We are seeing that South-Thaus trade is going up and North-Thaus trade is going down. We are seeing many things which are blocking this solution, which have given capitalism a breath of life for 200 years, changing at the moment. On top of this, or maybe under this, there's also this contradiction in capitalism that the exploitation of nature have been turned into a problem because we have pollution of the air, we have pollution of the sea, we have pollution of everything and we have also this climate change. So the mode of production is not developing the productive forces. Yes, on one side they are maybe still doing it, but on the other side they have also become destructive in

Starting point is 01:18:45 terms of nature. So we are entering a period of revolution, as you said, because there is this conflict between the development of the productive forces and the mode of production. Yes. And so capitalism has been so adaptable over the last few centuries. And like you talked about capitalism having these sort of perpetual crises, and these really have been happening since the rise of capitalism. You have these hot periods where there's this spark for investment and people throw tons of money into production and they hire workers. And a lot of the time, this is done on credit. And then you get this bubble.

Starting point is 01:19:35 And it happened in the infamous crash of the crash of December of 1825, I believe, which is recounted by Andreas Malm actually in his excellent book, Fossil Capital, which is, I think, sort of the first known structural crisis of industrial capitalism, where cotton merchants couldn't find customers for their cotton. And I think, even on a more broad and large scale, there is just this fundamental contradiction in capitalism where capitalists have to pay workers as little as possible in order for for them to be able to make a profit. And at the same time, capitalism needs workers who under capitalism are also consumers to be able to buy these products. So there's this inability for this contradiction to be resolved. And this has been going on every few years in some shape or form up to the present. I think that the housing bubble and the subsequent

Starting point is 01:20:41 recession of 2008, 2009, perhaps that was the most recent major crisis, and the crisis which capitalism has never fully recovered from, of course, or at least the majority of those of us who are living under it. But in a sense, capitalism has always been able to wriggle its way out of these crises. So it adapts, it conforms in ways that keep the system going while normalizing a whole new level of exploitation and oppression. And like you mentioned, one way that capitalism in Europe was able to continue functioning when if it was a closed system just based in that subcontinent, it might have imploded in on itself at that point, but the way that it was able to continue functioning was that it exported much of its misery to the

Starting point is 01:21:33 periphery and also was able to extract super profits from the periphery. And I actually want to pull up a quote of yours from the book here that I think is really relevant. So I'll just I'll pluck it out and read it here for our listeners. You write quote, the development of colonialism via super exploitation in the periphery generated the value transfer needed to raise the wage level in the center, which was necessary to consume the growing production and thereby realizing the profit of the sale. This was not a cunning plan by capital. It was the result of the development of colonialism

Starting point is 01:22:13 and the struggle of the working class in Europe. In this specific way, history found a way in which the contradiction in the capitalist mode of production could move ahead and continue in the development of its productive forces. It created a dynamic economic development in the center and a permanent crisis in the periphery." And now you're saying that capitalism has sort of run out of places to go and because the periphery is more and more disentangling itself from the world market run by the US and the imperial block that it leads. Capitalism is, as you say, in deep shit. Its breath of life, as you put it, is running out. And to add even more to this, the productive forces under capitalism

Starting point is 01:23:07 are actually destroying the very foundation of life itself on the planet. And so I'm going to ask you about that a little bit more in a second. But first, I think I just I really want to spend just a few more minutes exploring this dynamic of the core and the periphery and why it's so important to view capitalism as a global system, especially in the context of the long transition towards socialism and the end of capitalism. Well, capitalism has always been a global system right from the beginning. The primitive accumulation by the plunder of colonialism and slavery created the capital for the breakthrough of industrial capitalism around the year 1800.

Starting point is 01:23:59 And the continued colonialism and imperialism, as I mentioned, solved the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between the need to expand accumulation to create possibilities for more profit versus the lack of consumption power that realized the profit by the sale. The transfer of value to the imperialist core by superexploitation of the proletariat in the periphery gave this injection of additional consumption power, which realized the profit, hence giving core capitalism a dynamic development and creating underdevelopment in the periphery. So I wanted to read another quote of Marx from Grundgrise and it goes like this. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed and new superior relation of production never replaces the old ones before the material

Starting point is 01:25:07 condition for their existence have been matured within the framework of the old society. Why so? Why so? As long as the capitalist mode of production is dynamic, generating profit, expanding accumulation. So long will it strengthen the power of the ruling class and the hegemonic state in the world system. However, when the mode of production becomes dysfunctional, when development of the productive forces is blocked, then the system is in crisis.

Starting point is 01:25:45 However, up through the 20th century, capitalism remained dynamic and developed the productive forces, and the capitalist state remained the dominant political and military power. And hence, that state seeking to develop a socialist mode of production could only establish some kind of transitional mode of production to develop maybe some preconditions for moving towards socialism at a later stage. And to facilitate this and to survive as a state in the world system, they had to establish a corresponding transitional state, which has two main tasks.

Starting point is 01:26:27 To defend the power of the pro-people government and to develop the productive forces to satisfy the needs of the people and take the first steps maybe towards a socialist mode of production. And to accomplish this they have followed all kinds of strategies, sometimes interacting with the dominant capitalist system and sometimes pursuing a strategy of world revolution as in the 60s. And sometimes they have been forced into isolation, as China was during the Cold War or North Korea is now, and their attempts to build socialism was necessary distorted and have even been rolled back by the dominant capitalist state. So we shall not see the Paris Commune or the German Revolution or Soviet Union or China

Starting point is 01:27:20 or the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, or Cuba, or Vietnam, and so on, as a long row of failures, or showing the impossibility of establishing some kind of ideal socialism. It's a long process of resistance against the capitalist mode of production, and preparing the ground and taking some steps in changing the power balance, the political power balance in the world's station system and learning and gaining experience. And in this long process of transition from capitalism to socialism, there have of course

Starting point is 01:28:01 been different stages and different interactions with the capitalist system. And we have to remember that the different visions of socialism and strategies and forms of struggle are linked to different times and places in this long transition process. And each stage has its own main actor and forms of struggle linked to the economic and political contradictions in the system? Yes.

Starting point is 01:28:29 And that is the thesis essentially of your book. And so I appreciate you sort of summarizing that there. And again, I really do want to have you back on the show once I've had a chance to finish the book and we can get way more into all of that that you just summarized and actually maybe trace some of the experiments and examples that you just alluded to. I'm going to move back for a minute to the idea of the Fedor thesis because I want to ask you a question that relates to that and also to this idea of the forces of production under capitalism also being forces of destruction. And one aspect of this that I think might help

Starting point is 01:29:13 illustrate this contradiction is climate change and the development of renewable technologies. So, you know, right now in the United States we're seeing how the distribution and implementation of widespread renewable technology is being hindered because it is just so profitable for the ruling class to continue on with fossil energy. So, that to me is like a very straightforward example of how in order for renewables to become widespread, you would need a social revolution that breaks the chains of the capitalist relations of production in order to free up those technologies and allow them to be implemented in the quantities that we need. So I just wanted to bring that up to set us up for this next question that I have here. For our Patreon, I sometimes do readings where I analyze certain texts.

Starting point is 01:30:13 And actually our last Patreon episode, which just came out a few days ago, was a reading of the introduction of your book, The Long Transition. And just so you know, we've been getting some really great feedback on that. So yeah, people are really appreciating just the introduction to your book and hopefully they will dive in deeper and get the book from Iskra. But one of the readings I did earlier this year was an essay by Kai Heron called Forget Ecomodernism. And I'm going to read a fairly lengthy quote here from that piece because I think it's worth reading and Kai lays out what I think is an important critique, or at least a different perspective of certain interpretations of the Fetter thesis, which I would love to get your thoughts on.

Starting point is 01:30:56 So follow along with me for a few minutes, there's a few quotes here that I'm going to read from. So this is Kai Herron, he says, quote, Marx did indeed write about how capital can fetter production and human development. But Marx and others in the Marxist tradition have also repeatedly observed how capital actively ruins the conditions for a post-capitalist, eco-socialist future through what Ali Qadri has recently called the waste of workers, fixed capital, and ecologies. So skipping a couple paragraphs here, as for the soil, Marx remarks that all progress in

Starting point is 01:31:37 capitalist agriculture is progress in the art not only of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the laborer, but of robbing the soil. All progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the lasting sources of that fertility. Capitalist production, therefore, develops technology and the combining together of various processes into a social whole only by sapping the original sources of all wealth, the soil, and the worker. That's the end of the Marx quote and then back to Kai. Capitalism, in other words, leads to the unevenly distributed ruination of

Starting point is 01:32:17 the worker and non-human nature. By stripping workers of their vitality, freedom, and self-determination, and by undermining the ecological conditions of production, capitalism's metabolic control is undermining rather than laying the groundwork for communism. It is not that the forces and relations of production are coming into contradiction, though this can happen, it is that the totality of capitalist social relations also come into contradiction with and ruin or cannibalize its social and ecological basis. And so what I take from Kai's analysis here is this like deep critique of the idea that

Starting point is 01:33:00 the development of the productive forces will lead to socialism, and that it's not like as simple as, you know, the forces of production being fettered by the relation of production, that it's not through the development of the productive forces that we can break through the chains of capitalism, but that the development of the productive forces under capitalism is actually undermining not just the progress towards socialist society, but it's actually destroying more than it produces or emancipates altogether. And so I know that was a lot there. I'm just going to throw that over to you.

Starting point is 01:33:34 I'm very curious about what you think of Kai's analysis and if you have any reflections or thoughts or you want to push back on any of that. Sure. And I also know about Ali Kadri's book on waste also. I have read that also. And for sure, there's no mechanical and guarantee for the transfer from capitalism to socialism. And one of the reasons is precisely the ecological crisis. And I think that to make this transformation, we are now working under time pressure. If we are not going to achieve it within this century, we are in deep shit.

Starting point is 01:34:16 And I think that we need to reach a point, I think, very fast, and I think around 2050, where another mode of production than capitalism is becoming dominant. And within this century, we have to have a complete change in the world. And this is due to this destruction of capitalism of our environment. The capitalist mode of production has developed the productive forces as a speed never seen in history before. We have seen a growth of the population from 1 billion in 1800 to nearly 8 billion now. And this has been fueled, as you say, by fossil energy and, of course,

Starting point is 01:35:06 also on the constant innovation of new technologies. So capitalism has developed an enormous variety and a volume of projects, but it has also created hunger and misery and war and a world that cannot afford to buy all this product. We can see this contrast actually. We have seen in Southeast Asia, they represent this dynamic development of the productive forces and the development in the Middle East represent this waste perspective of alicade with continuous war and destruction of human and fixed capital and ecology, we have this very big contrast between Southeast Asia and the Middle East.

Starting point is 01:35:55 Actually, I saw that today or yesterday that China now stands for two-thirds of the production of electric cars, windmills and solar energy. In China itself, it's nearly 40% of its energy consumption, which is now wind energy, electricity and solar energy. They will reach their goals of renewable energy long before their original targets. So we see also that actually if the US is continuing to go on black fuel, actually a country like China with the development of productive forces and another political system is capable actually of changing from black fuel to renewable energy.

Starting point is 01:36:49 I think that there are these two sides of the development of capitalism in this developing the productive forces but also the destructive force. We have also the development of the productive forces, it also includes the development of weapons. And we also see this contradiction here. And another huge danger in this transition process is the risk of a nuclear war, which could create what's called a nuclear winter, which will also mean the end of the world as we know it. So for sure there is this on one side, this destructive element in the development of the productive forces. But I also see the other aspect that actually with our technology, we have

Starting point is 01:37:42 the ability to build another world because another world is also the South's needs for food and hospitals and schools and housing. We have the technology to produce this. Twenty years ago, there was so much talk about that it was impossible to produce enough food to feed the population of seven or eight billion, but now it is possible actually. But I think that as we are approaching this end struggle of capitalism, the conflict will be very dangerous and the end game will be a very dramatic period. Mao called imperialism a paper tiger and he said that we should build our strategy of this thinking that it was a paper tiger. But

Starting point is 01:38:34 on the other hand, he said it is also a living tiger, a real tiger that kills people and we should build our tactical thinking on this. So in our struggle, we must be careful not be adventurous in our actions. As a global nuclear war will be a catastrophe, but neither should we give in to the imperialist threats. But again, we do not have all the time in the world as the destruction of the ecosystem and the climate of the planet is accentuated by capitalism turning into a geopolitical confrontation. You know, this COP meetings, there are no, in this hostile atmosphere which is now creating international relations, there's a very slim chance of reaching any consensus about what to do.

Starting point is 01:39:29 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it is, it does very much feel like this very unfortunate race against time that all the technology that I was alluding to earlier, renewable technology, clean technology, that was created under capitalism, but at the same time we are destroying as we create, right? And so like which will which will come first? The creation and the transformation or the destruction and it's yeah it's an interesting time to be alive for sure. And I just also wanted to cite Jason Hickles research specifically his paper how much growth is required to achieve good lives for all and I know you cite Jason a few times so far I'm only on chapter 5 of your book right now so I haven't made it

Starting point is 01:40:15 too far yet but you cite Jason a few times in in your book and he does talk about in that paper how it would be possible for everybody on the planet to have what he refers to as a good life, and that's just not like some subjective idea of a good life. It's based on certain metrics, using only 30% of current global resource and energy use. So it is possible. It is very much possible.

Starting point is 01:40:42 It's just a matter of getting there. And it's not only a matter of consumption materials. It's a way how life is organized. It is more common consumption than individual consumption, and it's changing our imperial lifestyle to something different. And so it's not possible to give all the world the lifestyle of Denmark or the United States. It's a change of lifestyle. Yeah, and I mean, there's so much wasteful consumption

Starting point is 01:41:18 and so much unneeded. You know, we believe we've been sort of trained and propagandized to believe in all of these different forms of happiness and forms of well-being that actually, oftentimes, not only do they not make us better off or happier or even content, they actually have the opposite effect. And they only cause more alienation. They cause us to retreat into our little individual consumptive habits. And yeah, it's like, I think one of the greatest tragedies has been this trick of consumption, of unnecessary consumption that was imposed on us all and has sort of led to a lot of us believing that we need these things and believing in capitalism when in reality it's really having the opposite effect and it's making our lives worse.

Starting point is 01:42:06 And that transition is not easy and very complicated. You can see it how 40 lot of neoliberalism. It's not only a policy, it's getting into our blood and our bones and our minds. And changing this is a very complicated process also. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It operates on a cellular level. And I think one of the most fertile grounds for combating it is through, at least for me, is through fiction, through poetry, through music, just even things like going on hikes. It's like reconnecting with the natural world around us. It's reconnecting with people in a way that I feel like, I don't know what it's like in Denmark, but people have

Starting point is 01:43:05 become so isolated here in the United States. You know, we have the loneliness epidemic. We have so much loneliness. So many young people are feeling so estranged from society, so alienated from the world around them. And I know this might sound a little cliche, but I do really think it just a lot of it has to do with reconnecting with each other, reconnecting with certain parts of ourselves that have been in hibernation, and reconnecting with the natural world around us. So I think that's one huge component of it, at least. So as we kind of get close to my last few questions here, I'm gonna ask you sort of,

Starting point is 01:43:48 we often hear in the Marxist world, we hear phrases like, oh, that's an idealist analysis, or you've fallen into idealist thinking. And what one might feel is the ultimate insult coming from a Marxist. So can you talk a little bit about what that actually means and how the Marxist form of analysis differs from that of, say, anarchism or liberalism?

Starting point is 01:44:15 Well, I will say that an idealist analysis is not taking into account the rule of historical and dialectic materialism as I have this example that, for instance, the will and the revolutionary spirit is not enough to make a revolution. Certainly it is necessary, but you have to have a revolutionary situation. And this is defined by a deeper economic and political structure. So not taking into account the economic base and this contradiction between the productive forces and mode of production, this is idealistic. And I also mentioned this is another example that you are making a political or economic analysis from a narrow

Starting point is 01:45:07 nationalist perspective or national perspective, not taking into account the imperialism and the global perspective. Another example is the critic of the various examples of attempts to develop socialism for not being able to realize some kind of ideal socialism without taking into account the economic, political, military dominance still of the capitalist economic system. Also another mistake which is often done is that you copy paste strategies, practices and tactics from one place and another historical situation to another. The core of any historical materialism is the specific and concrete analysis of the place and the time.

Starting point is 01:46:03 concrete analysis of the place and the time. And you have to take this as the first thing that you need to have this concrete analysis, specific analysis, and not just talking in general and abstract terms like bourgeoisie and working class and anti-imperialism and imperialism. You have to put movements, you have to put specific economic developments and so on in place, not being abstract. One of the most standout quotes that I've read recently by Lenin is actually, he writes, that which constitutes the very gist, the living soul of Marxism, is a concrete analysis of a concrete situation. And I think about this a lot in terms of how many on the Western left reject

Starting point is 01:46:53 Hamas or parts of the Palestinian resistance movement or the broader axis of resistance in general and how just this idea that because these resistance forces don't operate necessarily with like socialist relations or that, you know, they're not cooperatively run and they don't practice sociocracy, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that they're not movements or they're not organizations that we should be in solidarity with or that we should support. And for me, this really misses the idea of the concrete analysis for a concrete situation

Starting point is 01:47:28 and looking at the material foundation out of which these resistance movements came out of and the primary contradiction that they are fighting, which is US imperialism. So yeah, I think that would be for me, a form of how sort of idealist thinking has permeated a lot of the Western left's ideas of how we should support and relate to the Palestinian resistance movement led by Hamas. for you. I just want to ask real quick if there's anything that I missed here or any components of historical materialism that I haven't asked you about yet, which you'd like to include before we wrap up. You can take this or you cannot, but maybe there is the connection between being and

Starting point is 01:48:19 consciousness. And I think that basically that classes react on basis of their interest. You know, maybe this lack of international solidarity in the working class between North and South, it is grounded in different immediate interests. The huge support for NATO by the majority of the population in Europe, and maybe the backing of Trump in the US. It is somehow grounded in the belief that NATO is the best security for maintaining our lifestyle and our freedom. So I don't believe in the concept of false consciousness created by media or brainwashing as something enduring over decades and even centuries because if you accept this, you basically reject materialism because it could be overruled by this kind of created false

Starting point is 01:49:24 consciousness. However, this interest is in the short and in the middle run, and in the longer perspective, of course, there is a possibility for change when you have this deepening of the economic and political and ecological crisis in the world system. When they can see that what they are supporting is not the solution, then there is the possibility for change. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Starting point is 01:49:54 So I think that we've talked about this. It's sort of imbued lots of our conversation, especially at the beginning, but I'd like to sort of end by hearing your thoughts on how we can apply some of the concepts of historical materialism to our current struggles and sort of why it's important to have a solid grounding in this stuff to inform the way we analyze like current events and how we shape our struggles for liberation and and like you just mentioned how to not fall into like erroneous or incorrect analysis. Yeah let's take the example of the Palestine struggle. We have the need to

Starting point is 01:50:39 have a solid analysis in order to develop a strategy of resistance from which we can find out what to do, what praxis should be, what we shall do tomorrow, next week and next year. So we have this analysis, strategy, praxis and of course feedback and a learning process from praxis. And we cannot just look at and start from what is going on inside Gaza and the West Bank here and now. We have to see the struggle in the long historical perspective in order to understand the current situation. We have to evaluate history because it has an impact on our future strategy. What we think and what we learned of history, it has an impact on our strategy and hence the future.

Starting point is 01:51:33 Is there something to be learned from the defeats and the success? And the struggle will not be settled in the new future. We need to have a long-term strategy for the struggle. Often we focus on what to do tomorrow, and we have intense discussions about long-time visions and how the state should be and blah, blah, blah. But I think we need to focus on the middle range, the one to five year perspective, because in that range of time, we can make some kind of reliable predictions and make some kind of solid plans. We need to see the struggle in the global perspective.

Starting point is 01:52:19 A condition for the strength and even survival of the Israeli state is US hegemony and material support. So we need to look at this contradiction between the decline of US hegemony and the rise of China and a multipolar world system. It will be the important framework for any analysis and strategy for the liberation of Palestine. We need to see the struggle in Palestine as part of this endgame of capitalism. We also have to look at the regional perspective.

Starting point is 01:52:55 The Palestinian struggle has always been closely linked to the Arab world. The struggle for Palestine and a solution of the Palestine national question has to be found in a broader Arab transformation process. The struggle in Lebanon, in Jordan, in Syria, in Iraq and the Gulf state and in Egypt is linked closely to the Palestinian struggle and visa versa. Because the enemy of Palestine is Israel and Israel is the watchtower and the battleground for imperialism and the rule of the Arab world. There's a lot of truth in the old slogan that our enemy is imperialism, Zionism, and the

Starting point is 01:53:39 Arab reactionary. And if we move to the Palestinian perspective, the problem for imperialism is not a Palestinian state as such. It is no problem if the Palestinian state would be like Jordan or any other Mickey Mouse state. The problem is that a Palestinian state is antagonistic and even rules out a Zionist settled state and this state is the imperialist gatekeeper of the important corridor between Asian production and European and North

Starting point is 01:54:15 American consumption. So the problem of the struggle is not a Palestinian state the problem is that the Palestinian state is anticonism to the state of Israel. Finally, as a Marxist and implicating also a communist, the national question of Palestine for me is linked to the social question. My statistical perspective is a socialist Palestine and a socialist Arab world. For sure a liberal pro-Western state or an Islamic state, it is not in my interest. I cannot specify a strategy for the resistance. It's up to the Palestinians to develop it. For sure, they cannot repeat and continue the military strategy from October 7th. They cannot repeat that next year or in the spring.

Starting point is 01:55:14 They have to develop a new military strategy and a political strategy for the next phase of the struggle. And from our side, I will support a strategy that combines this national struggle with the social question, because there's no national liberation without a social liberation. That's what I've learned from the from the 70s. And so I will support the communist or social fractions within the resistance. communists or social fractions within the resistance. You've been listening to an upstream conversation with Torkel Lauesen, an activist and writer from Denmark who has spent the last 50 years

Starting point is 01:55:58 immersed in the study and praxis of historical materialism. His most recent book is The Long Transition Toward Socialism and the End of materialism. His most recent book is The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, published this last November by Iskra Books. Please check the show notes for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode. Thank you to Heavy Lifter for the intermission music and to Carolyn Rader for the cover art. Upstream theme music was composed by Robert. If you want to dive deeper into some of the ideas explored in this episode, please check out our episode from June of 2024 with Josh Sykes on dialectical materialism.

Starting point is 01:56:38 We also have a Patreon episode where Robert reads and analyzes the introduction to Torquil's book, The Long Transition. We plan on having Torquil back on the show next year to get more deeply into the topics discussed in his book, so stay tuned for that. Upstream is almost entirely listener-funded. We couldn't keep this project going without your support. There are a number of ways that you can support us financially. You can sign up to be a Patreon subscriber, which will give you access to bonus episodes, at least one a month, but usually more, at patreon.com forward slash upstream podcast. You can also make a tax deductible recurring or one-time donation on our website at upstreampodcast.org

Starting point is 01:57:28 forward slash support. Through this support, you'll be helping keep Upstream sustainable and helping us to keep this whole project going. Socialist political education podcasts are not easy to fund, so thank you in advance for the crucial support. And for more from us, please visit UpstreamPodcast.org and follow us on Instagram, Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads and Facebook for updates and post-capitalist memes at Upstream Podcast. You can also subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite

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Upstream - Historical Materialism w/ Torkil Lauesen

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