Torkil Lauesen’s book The Long Transition: Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism presents an ambitious yet ultimately mixed analysis of Marxist political movements, tracing the historical trajectory of socialist struggles from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. While his arguments are often well-articulated and his criticisms insightful, they are also interwoven with sectarian biases and logical inconsistencies.
Identifying with the Western Maoist left, Lauesen frames his study as a historical exploration of significant Marxist movements that have deliberately sought to intervene in political and economic development under capitalism. His optimism in perceiving these struggles as part of the “long transition” to socialism is justified, considering the ongoing efforts to tackle the crises and contradictions inherent in capitalist accumulation, property relations, imperialism, and violence.
The book is divided into three main parts. The first establishes Lauesen’s theoretical framework, emphasizing his methodological approach to historical analysis. The second, which constitutes the majority of the book, selectively examines pivotal moments in socialist history from the revolutions of 1848 in Central Europe to contemporary China. The final section assesses these historical developments and speculates on a socialist “endgame” that could prevent global war or ecological disaster. Lauesen cautions that if capitalism remains dominant by 2050, the economic and social crises stemming from climate change could trigger capitalism’s collapse and threaten much of human civilization under catastrophic conditions.
Lauesen’s theoretical foundation, as outlined in the first part, rejects moralistic interpretations of history. Instead, he emphasizes how subjective actions interact with historically conditioned possibilities, drawing on Marx’s assertion that humans make history, but not under conditions of their choosing. Lauesen highlights the “principal contradiction of capitalism”—its struggle to reconcile productive forces with existing relations of production. He depicts capitalism as an imperialist world system that relies on a hierarchical division of labor and value transfers from the global periphery to the core. However, his analysis is inconsistent and often contradicts the principles he initially presents.
The second part, which covers chapters four to eighteen, examines socialist thought and actions from 1848 onward, including the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution, and the Chinese Revolution. Chapters four to seven focus on the political developments that led to the Paris Commune, the First International, and the rise of the Second International, spanning the period from 1848 to 1917. Chapters eight to twelve explore the Russian Revolution, Lenin’s leadership, the formation of the Comintern, and Stalin’s era, detailing the early to mid-twentieth century. Chapters thirteen to eighteen investigate China’s revolutionary history while briefly discussing other national liberation movements. These chapters also include occasional commentary on various mid-twentieth-century national liberation struggles.
Marxist theory and practice evolved significantly during and after the 1848 crises, as socialist and communist revolutionaries recognized capitalism as a global system necessitating an international political movement for effective class struggle. They sought independence from the bourgeoisie by forming independent political parties with cross-border alliances. The Paris Commune reinforced the understanding that gaining state power required the development of productive forces to serve the people.
Marx and his associates also realized that a revolutionary state could not exist in isolation; it had to navigate both supportive and hostile international forces. This period saw the social democratic movement fracture into revolutionary and reformist wings. By 1875, the Gotha Program signaled the German Social Democratic Party’s (and with it the Second International’s) reformist trajectory, favoring parliamentary power, reconciliation with nation-states, and at times, tacit support for colonialism. These social democrats believed that capitalism’s contradictions would naturally lead to socialism, dismissing the need for direct intervention. In contrast, Marx argued for active engagement in anti-colonial struggles, national liberation movements, and anti-racist programs by forming alliances with oppressed peoples to achieve true socialist transformation.
A significant weakness in Lauesen’s argument arises in his discussion of imperialism and racism. Lauesen criticizes the Second International’s failure to confront the imperialist structures of capitalism, noting its reliance on a Eurocentric perspective that viewed capitalism and colonialism as civilizing forces. They mistakenly perceived the development of production forces and relations through imperialism as beneficial to the colonized nations. He emphasizes how social democratic movements in Europe and North America were influenced by national chauvinism, reinforcing exploitative global hierarchies. However, his analysis takes a contentious turn when he discusses settler colonialism in the U.S., relying heavily on a single source (J. Sakai’s Settlers), which leads to other questionable conclusions about this era. (The information he extracts from Sakai contains historically inaccurate data.)
Generally, Lauesen’s work ignores the role of racism as a transhistorical, concrete feature of capitalism’s geographical spread and its intensification. He omits readings of key Black Marxist thinkers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Oliver C. Cox, Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, or Ruth Wilson Gilmore, which weakens his argument. Drawing on the history of racial enslavement and, in part, on Marx’s reading of the Irish experience with English racial capitalism and imperialism in Capital, these scholars had already demonstrated how racism facilitated the construction of whole groups of people defined as alien to the polity and thus super-exploitable, enabling accumulation. In that theory, racism is not a force that sustains white power that accrues power or advantage to “white” workers; instead, it is a structural source of super-exploitation and ideological adherence that conditions “white” workers into accepting and thus delaying their freedom from exploitation, a form of class collaboration. Racism was a structural feature of capitalist exploitation rather than merely a byproduct.
By concentrating exclusively on an abstract structuralist theory of world-systems development, Lauesen overlooks capitalism’s concrete racial dynamics both within and across national contexts, ultimately constraining his analysis of socialist movements in Western Europe and North America. He instead depends on the “labor aristocracy” thesis to elucidate the general failures of Western communist parties to instigate revolutions in the post-World War I era.
Lenin initially applied the concept of labor aristocracy to specific conditions rather than as a blanket characteristic of monopoly capitalism. Several historians of the early years of the Comintern observe that Lenin and his allies and successors recognized the impact of national chauvinism and racism in dividing working-class movements and enabling monopoly capitalism to postpone crises. They believed that once the revolutionary situation in Europe had waned, the crucial task for Western Communist Parties was nurturing revolutionary consciousness on a non-chauvinist foundation (at the very least) before a new revolutionary opportunity could arise. This understanding, combined with their support for and defense of the Soviet Union, set them apart from the social democratic forces in their respective countries.
Lauesen’s treatment of what defines a revolutionary situation also reveals inconsistencies. What qualifies as a revolutionary situation? He accurately outlines Lenin’s three-part definition—where the ruling class can no longer govern as before without significantly changing social conditions, the oppressed classes undergo intensified and widespread suffering, and the masses engage in new, independent political struggles on a large scale. However, Lauesen criticizes socialist and communist movements for failing to lead revolutions even when these conditions were absent, presenting a subjectivist revision of this theory despite claiming objectivity.
Furthermore, his tendency to reduce revolutionary struggle to armed insurrection overlooks Lenin’s strategic flexibility and the necessity of specific political conditions for revolutionary action. This misinterpretation undermines Lauesen’s assessment of post-World War I revolutionary movements in Western Europe and North America.
These analytical shortcomings reappear in Lauesen’s discussion of the Comintern and Western European socialism. His conclusion that Western workers (along with Western communist parties) were irredeemably affected by “labor aristocratism” obscures the concrete historical realities of the time. Notably, Lauesen does not engage with the threat of fascism, which he acknowledges as a global menace only in 1933, despite its centrality to political struggles during the interwar period. Ironically, he cites an article by Palmiro Togliatti on colonialism published in 1928. However, he never mentions that Togliatti lived in the Soviet Union for two years after being exiled by Mussolini’s regime. Togliatti lectured on fascist attempts to restructure liberal democratic states to facilitate the development of monopoly capitalism and its imperialist rivalries and ambitions, reigniting the threat of war based on extreme racism and national chauvinism.
Lauesen’s discussions of the Comintern during the early 1920s never refer to its frequent consultations on fascism and its call for European communist parties to develop broad political alliances to fight it. His omission of any reference to Lenin’s pamphlet Left-Wing Communism, An Infantile Disorder further underscores his selective engagement with this period. That pamphlet was published in the spring of 1920, translated into various languages, and distributed to Comintern delegates upon their arrival for the Second Congress. With it, Lenin and the Comintern aimed to rein in the ultra-left positions of some Western European parties that Lauesen undoubtedly would identify as truly “revolutionary.”
By neglecting Lenin’s call for multiple forms of struggle, including alliances with non-Communist forces, and dismissing the Comintern’s strategic compromises as mere “revisionism,” Lauesen distorts the historical role of communist parties in anti-fascist struggles and, consequently, a clearer picture of the interwar period in Europe.
The challenge of fostering an anti-racist, anti-imperialist consciousness among European and Euro-American workers, while organizing a multi-racial, multinational working class, depends on recognizing the contradictions within and between social formations. Lauesen’s failure to address these issues misrepresents history and may weaken working-class movements both nationally and internationally.
The failure to acknowledge monopoly capitalism as a developmental stage, to consider capitalism’s racial dimensions, and to address capitalist development solely at the world system level distorts the Comintern’s historical role in Western Europe and North America. In this way, Lauesen diminishes the importance of specific political struggles that are vital for organizing and advancing the working class, a crucial aspect of Left-wing Communism.
The final six chapters of Part Two examine socialist construction in the Soviet Union and China. Lauesen generally praises Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP) for its pragmatic approach to economic development but criticizes Stalin’s leadership for its violent internal purges, bureaucratic structure, and “revisionist” aim of “peaceful coexistence” following World War II. However, his critique of Stalin sharply contrasts with his more lenient assessment of Mao’s policies, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. For example, Stalin’s assertion about the necessity of building socialism in one country is taken out of context and compared unfavorably to Mao’s contentious call for “self-reliance,” which justified the break of the beneficial alliance with the Soviet Union.
Indeed, after two decades of materially supporting the Chinese revolution, the Soviets displayed arrogance toward China in the 1950s, suggesting they could best dictate the pace and direction of China’s liberation and development. China’s response, fueled by resentment over Soviet interference and directives, strained the historical friendship between the two countries even further. Lauesen rightly asserts that the conclusion of that alliance was disastrous for the longer-term transition toward socialism and each country’s internal political and economic development. He argues that socialist construction necessitates multinational formations and extensive geographical alliances across political units as the only effective strategy to counter the violence of the global capitalist system. However, the exceptions to this principle are applied inconsistently, reflecting Lauesen’s retention of sectarianism.
Lauesen’s analysis of China’s socialist development is among the most substantial and valuable aspects of his book. He acknowledges, explores, and assesses the complexities surrounding many historical developments of class struggle in China, as well as the debates and differences within the Communist Party of China from its formation to the present day, and China’s pragmatic shifts in economic and political policy. He delves into the political complexities of the various classes and movements within the Chinese political system, providing the flexibility and dynamism that Lauesen believes were lacking in the Soviet Union. He views the harsh period of “self-reliance” under Mao in the 1950s and the engagement with neoliberalism under Deng as a “historical structural unity,” each representing necessary strategic points that have proven to be foundational for Chinese socialism. However, his limited direct engagement with contemporary political economy in Chinese scholarship restricts the depth of his analysis and suggests a need for further study.
The book’s concluding section summarizes and evaluates Lauesen’s historical analysis while speculating on future socialist strategies. However, this part is repetitive and lacks focus, introducing new material that creates logical inconsistencies with earlier sections. A more concise and coherent conclusion could have significantly improved the book’s overall impact. Despite its valuable insights, Lauesen’s work ultimately suffers from sectarianism, historical oversimplifications, and theoretical inconsistencies. His reluctance to engage with Black Marxist thought, rigid application of structuralist analysis, and ideological biases undermine his arguments. While the book contributes to ongoing debates on socialist strategy, its limitations highlight the need for a more nuanced and inclusive approach to Marxist history and theory.
The Long Transition: Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism
By Torkil Lauesen
Iskra books (2024)
$20.00 paperback. (Free PDF available at IskraBooks.org)
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