Upstream - [TEASER] Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism: An Introduction

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

This is a free preview of the episode "Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism: An Introduction." You can listen to the full episode by subscribing to our Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/upstreampodcast As a Patreon subscriber you'll get access to at least one bonus episode a month (usually two or three), our entire back catalog of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers—depending on which tier you subscribe to. You’ll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at Patreon.com/upstreampodcast or at upstreampodcast.org/support. Thank you. "Sure, I agree that capitalism sucks—but what's the alternative? We tried socialism in the 20th century and it failed." We've all heard this line from well-meaning friends, family members, or any variety of interlocutors we happen to find ourselves in dialogue with in any variety of contexts. There are a lot of compelling and nuanced responses to this common position, and regardless of what you think of the idea itself, it's an important one for us on the left to be able to answer.  In this Patreon reading series, Robert reads a passage from a book that attempts to answer this question. The passage is the introductory chapter of the excellent new book, The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, by Torkil Lauesen. Published by Iskra Books. What is the response to the idea that socialism is a failed ideology? Why should we see the transition from capitalism to socialism as a long struggle of experiments and struggles that, far from being fruitless, are essential parts of a world-historical struggle that is still playing out? Why is it important to center historical materialism in our analysis of the world? And why should we be more excited than ever at the prospects of human and more-than-human emancipation and thriving in a world organized under socialism? These are just some of the questions we tackle in this reading and analysis of the introductory chapter of The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, by Torkil Lauesen. Further resources: Iskra Books The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, by Torkil Lauesen Hyper-Imperialism: A Dangerous Decadent New Stage, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research Related episodes: Dialectical Materialism w/ Josh Sykes Historical Materialism w/ Torkil Lauesen (coming 12/16) The Exhausted of the Earth w/ Ajay Singh Chaudhary Trans Liberation and Solidarity with Alyson Escalante Everyday Utopia and Radical Imagination with Kristen Ghodsee Prefigurative Politics and Workplace Democracy w/ Saio Gradin and Nicole Wires Upstream is a labor of love — we couldn't keep this project going without the generosity of our listeners and fans. Subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com/upstreampodcast or please consider chipping in a one-time or recurring donation at www.upstreampodcast.org/support If your organization wants to sponsor one of our upcoming documentaries, we have a number of sponsorship packages available. Find out more at  upstreampodcast.org/sponsorship For more from Upstream, visit www.upstreampodcast.org and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Bluesky. You can also subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts.

Hey everyone, Robby here with another episode in our Patreon reading series. And it's been a while since I did one of these episodes. I think it was back in early August, and so I thought it would be a good time to do another one. Now, especially because I know you guys always tell me you appreciate these readings, and I also really do enjoy doing them. And so I'm especially excited for this one. I just got a book in the mail actually by Iskra Books, a non-profit publisher that publishes a lot of incredible radical and socialist texts. And one of their most recent books is the one I'll be reading from today. I'm incredibly excited about it. It's titled,

The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism by Torkill Lausen. I believe that's how you spell his name. He is Danish. One of the edition's three editors is Gabriel Rockhill, who you'll recognize as the author of the book Western Marxism, which we also recently did an episode on. So a lot of cool connections there. But this book, The Long Transition by Torkel Lausen, just arrived recently, and I actually just read the introduction last night, and I was really impressed and blown away, and I immediately thought this would make an

excellent Patreon reading, both as hopefully a sort of compelling teaser that might lead some of you to purchase the book and support Iskra and their really crucial work, but also because we will hopefully be interviewing Torkill in the coming months. I think we're talking about doing an interview in January. So yeah, this could serve as a really good introduction to the book and the upcoming interview. And also I'm getting a sense after reading the introduction that it's a really interesting continuation of the conversation that we had with Gabriel Rockhill, just sort of bringing back the lens a little bit and sort of disconfirming some of the assumptions and some of the assertions about socialism that we unfortunately are inundated with and many of us still hold here in the West. And I also feel like I should just share something before we get started.

So originally, the reading that I had planned was different from what I'll be reading today. It was going to be what came out to be a long, long reading of a recent study that was published actually by the Tri-Continental Institute for Social Research, whom which Vijay Prashad is the executive director. And the research paper was titled, Hyperimperialism, a dangerous, decadent new stage. And of course, that caught my eye. And it's sort of, you know, an extremely granular, but also very expansive research project looking at the decline of Western hegemony. So I read the first third of the paper actually, I recorded it. It took me the better part of like four hours and I knew it was long going in, but I guess I just

didn't really realize how long and I had to make a really hard decision to just abandon it at some point. I was reading through this and just the scroll tab on the right side wasn't moving. And I knew this was going to be too long for reading. So yeah. And also, you know, the length, but it just wasn't working that well, I think, as a reading series, it's a super important study though. So I bring this up because I want to share with you guys how it all played out. And like the hours that I spent reading I feel like I want to at least honor them in a small way by sharing about them but also because you should

definitely check out that paper and you'll see like there are a lot of overlaps actually in today's reading I think especially about the rise of the BRICS countries and the sort of inevitable decline of the US-led global capitalist order that we are currently witnessing. But this paper gets into a lot of interesting details, so please check it out. But for now, we're going to be reading the introduction chapter to Torquil Lawson's The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, published, of course, by the terrific Iskra books. And again, please check out Iskra, check them out online. They have a really, really beautiful collection of books. And

if you're the kind of person who really loves the like touch and feel of a book, their books are beautiful. And you can you can really tell that like every aspect of them was put together with the utmost care and this introduction is Really powerful. I think you're gonna love it and at the time of this recording I haven't actually read any more of the book than just this introduction So I'm really looking forward to getting deeper into it and I hope that you guys get something out of this and it compels you to also get the book and And I hope that you guys get something out of this and it compels you to also get the book and yeah, stay tuned for our upcoming interview with Torkel.

But for now, let's get into the introduction. Let me begin on a personal note, my motivation to write this book. I've been studying the political economy and history of capitalism since the late 1960s, collecting a pile of puzzle pieces of information. When one gets old, there is a tendency to move towards grand theory. One wants to assemble the puzzle and get the full picture and understand the process, trying to envision in which direction it is moving. Most of my writing has been concerned with critiquing capitalism and imperialism.

Sometimes I've been challenged with this question. Quote, I share your critique of capitalism, but what about the alternative? There have been many attempts to build socialism in the past, but they have not been very successful, neither in terms of delivering material goods nor democracy. In this book, I respond to this line of argument. When one tries to write the history of the efforts to build socialism, one writes not only against hundreds of years of the European sense of superiority and anti-communism, but also against the disillusioned socialists whose ideals have been betrayed.

And just as a quick aside, I really love how Torquil is framing that as sort of the attacks against socialism, or maybe attack might be too strong a word in certain circumstances, but the attacks and let's say criticisms of socialism come from both sides, right? There's the internal ones that are coming from other socialists, those people who say that the USSR isn't real socialism, or that China isn't really socialist, or that they're authoritarian, and those kinds of critiques that sort of end up dismissing the whole socialist project, like actually existing socialism as a whole. And then of course, there's the rampant anti-communism, the propaganda that we've all been spoon-fed for our entire lives from every different facet of our lives, from media to education, like formal education to informal education,

all over the place. Anti-communism is just rife in our society. And so socialists really do face like a barrage of critique and attack from all sides. So I really appreciate the author just naming that upfront and really stating that this is a book that's a response to that. Okay, let's get back to the book. However, the establishment of socialism is not some kind of ingenious social engineering. Socialism is developed based on technology and knowledge, the productive forces of capitalism. When the capitalist mode of production, or the way it manages society, stands in the way of the development of the productive forces, then the transformation to socialism becomes possible.

And just a quick aside, this is a historical materialist analysis when Torquil talks about the mode of production or the relations of production, fettering the development of the productive forces. This is something we got into pretty deeply into previous readings. And by the time this is out, I think that our episode on historical materialism with the terrific Joshua Sykes will be available. Sometimes it's a little hard with the coordinating the scheduling of stuff and when I record stuff, but I'm pretty sure that should be available for you to check out on the public feed if you want to dive deeper into historical materialism and the science really of Marxism,

Leninism. And if it's not out already, then it will be out soon, hopefully. Okay, let's get back to the book. However, the establishment of socialism is not some kind of ingenious social engineering. Socialism is developed based on technology and knowledge, the productive forces of capitalism. When the capitalist mode of production, the way it manages society, stands in the way of the development of the productive forces, then the transformation to socialism becomes possible. How is this contradiction expressed?

In the form of structural, political, and economic crises, and in the current destruction of the foundation of human life itself. These crises give rise to class struggles, which contain within them the transformative power towards socialism. Industrial capitalism has now lasted for 200 years and is reaching a turning point where it has become a serious burden for the development of humanity on earth. Unfortunately, we have inherited more than just technology and scientific knowledge from capitalism. Its culture of selfishness and greed will not simply disappear,

nor will the ecological problems it has created. Socialism is not destined to succeed capitalism. Capitalism can collapse in a brutal, chaotic endgame of wars and natural disasters. To avoid this is our task, and to accomplish that task, we must fulfill the transition to socialism. To do this, we need to learn from the past and mobilize, organize, and develop a strategy for future struggles.

The purpose of analyzing the attempts to build socialism is not just to understand the world as it is, but to develop the strategies to produce the world as it should be." And just as a quick aside, of course, this is hearkening to the famous quote by Karl Marx, the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point is to change it. And that is really the very gist of revolutionary Marxism, like the point of it, right? Challenging the world and changing it. And as Torquil is laying out here, doing so from like an empirically positioned perspective, from a scientific perspective. And we'll get into this a little bit more further down in the

introduction, but we're really approaching revolution and we're approaching our analysis from a scientific perspective here, looking at the conditions as they materially exist and examining how socialism can grow out of those material conditions, not bequeathed from above in the way that certain utopian or idealist thinkers sort of conceptualize it, but out of the existing material conditions that we currently live in. And that's a really important perspective to hold onto when we think about actually existing socialist projects. And so Torkel will get into that deeper as we move along.

So let's get back into it. To see the struggle for socialism as a long process of global transformation since the mid-19th century is also somehow comforting on a psychological level for an old man. The struggle and suffering of millions of communists and socialists for the past 200 years have not been in vain, but are contributions to this long process of creating a better world. And as an aside, when I first read the title of this book, I knew exactly what it was going to be about. And it is about this important perspective of growing socialism as a long transitionary process. We are so quick to call projects like the USSR or China absolute failures and that they disprove the theory of communism and socialism, et cetera, et cetera. But it's important to remember, like, if you look at

the USSR, the amount of time that the USSR had to develop socialism was minuscule. It was minuscule. And when you think about previous revolutionary transitions, like the transition from feudalism to capitalism, that took centuries. Right? That took centuries. You can debate it, but it really did begin happening in many ways in certain aspects of it. When serfs began escaping from their lords and

the lands that they were tied to in like the 12th and 13th centuries or somewhere around there. And there wasn't a full blown transition to capitalism globally until like the 19th century, right? So these things take centuries. So when we're talking about these projects and these experiments with socialism, we have to keep that in mind. And I really love that thesis of this book. Okay, let's get back into it. To be part of this process, a tiny cogwheel in the machinery of transformation,

and give it a little push in the right direction, seems to be the meaning of life. Not founded in some religion or a belief in life after death, but founded in historical materialism and the meaning of life before death, to hand over a world more equal and in balance with nature to future generations. The problem for the next generation, however, is that we are running out of time. Our task as the subjective forces is to work for transformation of the system into a more democratic and equal world order in balance with nature in the next several decades. And just a quick note, when he says the subjective forces, that's us, and this is sort of in

contrast with the more objective forces, right? The historical, the world historical forces that are at play beyond the control or the power of any individual or any group of people. But the world historical proletariat or the world historical people that are rising up against capitalism, there is subjectivity in that. And this reminds me a little bit too of Che Guevara's famous quote, the revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe, you have to make it fall. And again, so we're thinking about this dialectically, right?

There are the objective forces where capitalism is collapsing on its own just because of the very nature of the way that it organizes society. And then there are individuals like us who are helping to hasten its fall. And this actually also reminds me of a quote by the terrific Mike Davis in his book, Old God's New Enigmas. Rest in peace. History cannot be rewound or stopped, but it can be fast forwarded. And I really like that quote too, it's sort of again playing with this idea that we both do and don't have control over the historical forces that are at play in the world that we live in. Okay, let's get back to the book.

In this book, I examine the major revolutionary attempts from 1848 to the present to see what can be learned in terms of building an organization and developing political and economic strategies. There are many revolutions and struggles that I do not cover, or which are only mentioned in passing, due to space constraints of a book that is already long. To see the transition as a long and global process is not only a matter of theory, it also has practical political implications. The current lack of confidence in socialism is to a great extent due to the disappointment with the experiences of socialism in the Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam, Mozambique, and so on. However, these experiences were not experiences of socialism. They were a series of efforts to build socialism within the sea of capitalism. In fact, only Stalin claimed that socialism was established in the Soviet Union in 1936.

These transformations towards socialism have taken place within the framework of and in dialectical relations with capitalism. The different stages of the development of capitalism have had a huge impact on the attempt to build socialism, and the attempts to build socialism have modified the development of capitalism. I have described the history of capitalism in my book, The Global Perspective. However, in this book, I focus instead on socialism itself to draw some lessons for the development of a strategy for the coming struggle. The quest for socialism is as old as capitalism, and the idea of a society without exploitation

is much older. This was a clip from our Patreon episode, Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism, an introduction. You can listen to the full episode by becoming an Upstream Patreon subscriber. As a Patreon subscriber, you will get access to at least one bonus episode a month, usually two or three, our entire back catalogue of Patreon episodes, early access to certain episodes, and other benefits like stickers and bumper stickers depending on which tier you subscribe

to. You'll also be helping to keep Upstream sustainable and allowing us to keep this project going. Find out more at patreon.com forward slash Upstream podcast.