Reviewed by Stanley Thomson

Yanggil, yellow-tailed black cockatoo, calls high and piercing in the cooling sky. The mornings become misty—it is Waring on Wurundjeri Country, wombat season, and Sagittarius rises in the south-east after sunset. Little forest bats mark the wounded healer’s ascent to the vault of heaven.

After several brutish centuries of domination by the Global North and nearly a hundred years of United States hegemony, a multipolar world is suddenly in our midst. Neo-China arrives from the future. New Bandungs stir in the South. A bifurcation in the not-yet of our histories emerges, between peace and active development, and belligerent forever war on hothouse Earth. Old familiarities warp and distort, while new geometries of power struggle to assert themselves. Contradictions, principal and secondary, flicker like static on late night TV.

Tectonic shifts in the balance of world power and public opinion define this time of monsters. These are qualitative shifts, which have emerged from the quantitative build up of global trends and events—the fall of the Soviet Union and the westward expansion of NATO, liberalisation of China under Deng Xiaoping, the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centers in New York, America’s wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, the killing of a CEO by Luigi Mangione, the list goes on. In the Global North, leaders and the people alike scramble to parse the flood. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man may at last face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. Times like these call for clarity.

Providing some sizeable measure of that clarity is Torkil Lauesen’s The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism (2024), published by Iskra Books. Over the course of a little over four hundred pages, Lauesen charts a history of the proletarian revolutions and national liberation movements of the past two hundred years and furnishes anti-imperialists in the West with timely strategies for building a socialist world. Concise, engaging, and powerfully broad in scope, The Long Transition is a comprehensive introduction to anti-imperialist history and politics, the shape of the current principal global contradiction, and importantly to the Chinese revolution from its beginnings to the present. It is well suited for fledgling activists and seasoned comrades alike.

Lauesen, now 73, has long supported anti-imperialist movements in the Global South from his home country of Denmark. Actively involved in organising with the Kommunistisk Arbejdskreds, and later a co-founder of the Manifest-Kommunistisk Arbejdsgruppe, he was involved in a series of clandestine operations during the 1970s and 1980s aimed at providing material support to struggles for socialism, particularly to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). These operations included both legal and illegal activities, notably a series of robberies intended to fund organisations such as the PFLP. The most significant of these was the robbery of the Købmagergade Post Office in Copenhagen on November 3, 1988. In the early hours, Lauesen and his associates intercepted a postal transport van delivering cash and valuables. Disguised as police officers, they gained access to the post office’s secure area, overpowered the staff, and seized approximately 9.3 million Danish kroner (about USD$1.4 million) in cash and bearer bonds, along with other valuables. As they attempted to escape, a confrontation with the police ensued, during which a 22-year-old officer, Jesper Egtved Hansen, was fatally shot. ​

Following this incident, Lauesen was arrested on April 13, 1989, and on May 2, 1991, was sentenced to ten years in prison for his involvement in the Købmagergade robbery and related activities. He served his sentence at Vridsløselille Prison until his parole on December 13, 1995. During his incarceration, Lauesen pursued academic studies, earning a master’s degree in political science from the University of Copenhagen in June 1997. In 2000, Lauesen was employed as a district councilor in Copenhagen Municipality, a position he held for several years. Lauesen is a member of the Internationalt Forum, an anti-imperialist organization based in Denmark, and serves on the board of the Arghiri Emmanuel Association.

The struggle and suffering of millions of communists and socialists for the past two hundred years have not been in vain, but are contributions to this long process of creating a better world. 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.”¹

For the bulk of the text, Lauesen provides an in-depth analysis of pivotal revolutionary movements that have shaped the trajectory toward socialism over the past two centuries. He begins with the Revolutions of 1848, highlighting their role in awakening proletarian consciousness across Europe. The Paris Commune of 1871 is examined as an early, albeit short-lived, manifestation of workers’ power. Lauesen then delves into the Russian Revolution of 1917, marking the first successful establishment of a socialist state, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, emphasising its impact on global anti-imperialist struggles. The decolonisation movements of the mid-20th century are also explored, illustrating the global challenge to colonial and capitalist systems. Finally, he discusses China’s market reforms, analysing them as strategic adaptations within the ongoing socialist project. By weaving these events into a cohesive narrative, Lauesen underscores their collective contribution to the protracted and non-linear transition from capitalism to socialism. As these histories are best appreciated in their full detail, I will leave discussion of them here. Readers will no doubt appreciate them in their fullness—for now I’d like to instead write with and alongside the text, turning towards the present events shaping our world and how we might use Lauesen’s work to analyse them and strategise as anti-imperialists in the Global North.

In The Long Transition, we see an elder of our movement exploring the “tendency to move toward grand theory,” to “assemble the puzzle, get the full picture and understand the process, trying to envision in which direction it is moving.”² Beginning with perspective, method, and concepts, Lauesen gives a succinct explanation of the differences between utopian and scientific socialism in the vein of Engels’ work, and sketches his understanding of historical and dialectical materialism. The definition he provides is one of a practice through which comrades can develop consciousness to not only better analyse the world, but to transform it. Historical and dialectical materialism “is not just a research method. It is the conscious capacity of seeing society as a process and of understanding the direction and the eventual goal of that process,” a tool to develop strategy and praxis, which “produces the theoretical insight that complements the kind of action that changes the world.”³

Building on this foundation, Lauesen details three key components of his analysis: the global perspective that charts capitalism’s bringing-together of the disparate elements of the world, the driver of this process in the contradiction between the development of the productive forces and the mode of production, and finally the principal contradiction. To take the global perspective, we must see capitalism in its historical entirety, as a “multiplicity of cultures and political systems integrated into an extensive division of labor within a single world economy.”⁴ Lauesen relies on anti-imperialist thinkers such as Samir Amin, André Gunder Frank, Giovanni Arrighi, and Walter Rodney to introduce concepts of unequal exchange, underdevelopment, and the creation of global value, arguing that “the combination of globalized value and low wages in the South is the basis for the extraction of super-surplus-value, which generates super-profits for capital and relatively low commodity prices relative to Northern wage levels. The difference between the value of labor and its price, therefore, corresponds to a transfer of value from the South to both capital and labor in the North.”⁵ Contradictions in this system have emerged steadily over the course of the past seventy or so years, a quantitative buildup of changed conditions which now produces the profound qualitative shifts we mentioned earlier.

The path of these developments is long and winding, with many zig-zags. There are periods of apparent stability, and periods of rupture and revolution which are subject to reversal and often roll back. With regards to the contradiction between the development of the forces of production and the mode of production, we see Lauesen return many times over the course of the book to this passage from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy:

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.⁶

This shapes Lauesen’s understanding of the development of colonialism, neo-colonial structures, and imperialist exploitation. Capitalism has ceaselessly sought to acquire new territory for the expansion of its markets, developing the productive forces in the process. But this process has a spatial limit – the planet has finite area and finite resources. As the contradictions within the Global North sharpened after the end of the second world war, neoliberalism was implemented as a spatial fix – a way to kick the can down the road and push out the inevitable problems of the falling rate of profit and overproduction to some undefined future date. But the spatial fix has raised problems of its own. By moving manufacturing processes to the Global South, particularly in China, the North has rapidly developed the productive forces and transferred advanced technology. China, as a chief example, has used this arrangement to modernise their economy and develop their technology, surpassing the United States in 57 of 64 critical technologies.⁷ Two decades ago, the situation was reversed, with the U.S. leading in 60 of 64.

In the North, the hollowing out of the state and the privatisation of key sectors has led to deepening instability, corruption, and austerity for the working class. The cheery mood that followed Fukuyama’s End of History has been swept away by successive financial crises, and by the unwillingness of Western states to respond constructively to the mounting crises of our time. Globalisation is no longer viewed favourably, as the effects of free trade agreements materially register in the lives of millions in the imperial core. Belief in democracy and trust in institutions is in decline, and replacing it are new nationalisms and far-right movements.⁸ This is driving deep divisions, with open class struggle re-emerging as a feature both of consciousness in the North, and as a material fact, from the Black Lives Matter uprisings to the attempted coup on January 6, 2021.

Alongside the rapid development of the productive forces and the fracturing of stability in the imperial core has come a new mood in the Global South. Sovereignty and self-determination are the watchwords of this new mood, which has seen countries long under the yoke of the U.S. and EU countries assert their right to their material resources, their political independence, and their rights to operate without coercion on the international stage. Thailand bypassed the United States to secure the release of hostages taken by Hamas, opening dialogue with Qatar and Egypt.⁹ Indonesia banned exports of raw nickel to stimulate Indonesian industries such as refining and battery manufacturing.¹⁰ Namibia’s President, Hage Geinob, recently condemned their former German colonial masters for supporting Israel’s genocide of the Palestinian people, saying that “Germany cannot morally express commitment to the United Nations Convention against genocide, including atonement for the genocide in Namibia, whilst supporting the equivalent of a holocaust and genocide in Gaza.”¹¹ Increasingly, countries in the Global South, emboldened by China’s trajectory and the alternative financial and development frameworks emerging through BRICS and BRI, are standing up and saying “no” to the North.

The development of the productive forces of China and other countries in the Global South signals not only a shift in dynamics within capitalism, but also enhances the material conditions for the development of socialism. On devious roads for more than a hundred years, capitalism is finally approaching a dead end.¹²

This brings us to the third component of Lauesen’s analysis—the principal contradiction. In order to develop a comprehensive enough understanding to be able to intervene in the stream of history, we must hone our ability to identify and study the primary contradiction in any given phenomenon. Following Mao’s method as outlined in On Contradiction, “we must investigate both aspects, and struggle between them to decide which way the contradiction will move.”¹³ Lauesen discusses the shift in the global principal contradiction, from the neoliberal-era contradiction between transnational capital’s globalization project and the nation state’s attempts to regulate capitalism, to the “new emerging principal contradiction between the forces which want to uphold U.S. hegemony and the forces which seek a multipolar world order, headed by China. Transnational capital in the Global North is forced by the changing winds in the world-system to join with nationalist and conservative political forces in the North.”¹⁴

Under the second Trump presidency, the world has been given front row seats to view these uneasy new alliances forming. Four of the five richest men in the world attended Trump’s inauguration to prostrate before their new head of state.¹⁵ Corporate representatives from Walmart, Pfizer, Microsoft, Ford, Google, Goldman Sachs, Toyota, General Motors, Bank of America, and AT&T were also present. The combined total wealth in the room reached some 1.35 trillion, enough to immediately end world hunger and poverty.¹⁶ Within Trump’s cabinet, hawkish conservative realists like Elbridge Colby float “speculative, first-best” grand strategies that seek to maintain U.S. hegemony through the sabotage and denial of China, and the building of an “Asian NATO” with countries like Japan, Taiwan, Australia and South Korea.¹⁷ Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, flies to Japan to carry them out.¹⁸

Transnational capital is in a double-bind. It requires the nation state to protect its operations, the profits from which depend on the global production chains and markets developed through the neoliberal era. But increasingly, the nation states of the North are turning to protectionist measures and forms of economic and military aggression that undermine and dismantle those same markets and chains of production. “U.S. policy is becoming self-destructive; it shatters the world market, upon which America has built its power since the end of the Second World War.”¹⁹ These contradictions will only become more pronounced as Trump pursues so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on major U.S. trading partners, in a misguided attempt to re-shore manufacturing and stimulate the U.S. domestic economy.²⁰ An escalating trade war on a global scale is one potential outcome, with China, Canada and the European Union advancing greater retaliatory measures.

The emerging tariff regime is best understood as an intensification of imperial crisis management through economic violence. Far from a strategy for national rejuvenation, the tariff program functions as a class weapon wielded by the U.S. state on behalf of monopoly capital—shifting the burden of economic stagnation onto workers and peripheral economies through inflation, disrupted supply chains, and coercive trade policy. The tariffs were not designed to restore industrial capacity or employment but to discipline economic rivals, extract tribute, and reassert imperial authority.²¹ In this sense, they are not a deviation from neoliberal globalization, but its militarised continuation under conditions of hegemony in decay.²² As supply chains fracture and dollar hegemony is challenged by dedollarisation, particularly among BRICS states, the empire turns inward, lashing out at both domestic workers and external competitors in a desperate bid to forestall systemic decline.

Yet this hyper-imperialist maneuver is dialectically generative. While cracks emerge in the North, nations in the periphery and semi-periphery look toward China and multipolarity. Recent trilateral meetings between the trade ministers of Japan, South Korea, and China signal that even stalwart allies of the United States are seeking alternative arrangements to preserve the stability of their economies.²³ As Israel’s U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinian people continues and expands further into surrounding countries, and as the U.S. itself doubles down on internal repression and fascistic policy, the new mood in the Global South consolidates and strengthens.²⁴ Officials in the North are aware of this, but seem unable to stop it. “We have definitely lost the battle in the Global South. All the work we have done with the Global South [over Ukraine] has been lost … Forget about rules, forget about world order, they won’t ever listen to us again.”²⁵

The “end of history” is, itself, ending. In liminal times, contradictions sharpen and crises of legitimacy and material stability emerge in the capitalist system.²⁶ Significant opportunities are emerging for anti-imperialists in the North. Popular struggles for climate justice, anti-war coalitions, and the Palestinian solidarity movement attest to the resentment for the status quo and the desire for a just world simmering under the surface of our everyday activities. Lauesen suggests a form of “realistic optimism”, one that takes “into account the structural crises and instability of global capitalism, as well as the hundreds of millions of new proletarians in the Global South who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains,’ and are becoming ever more conscious of their power.”²⁷

The eternal question remains—in light of all this, what is to be done? Lauesen gives us a few cogent suggestions:

• Support a multipolar world system against U.S. hegemony to promote a more peaceful and democratic world, with an empowered and reformed United Nations.
• Support the Global South’s struggle for a more equal world against the West, which has ruled the world through colonialism and imperialism for the last five hundred years.
• Support the countries and movements developing socialism, to end the exploitation of humans and the destruction of planet earth.²⁸

In addition to this, Lauesen compels us on the Western left to be more than “passive bystanders,” to make sure that the North is “no safe hinterland for imperialism, which means struggle against right wing national chauvinism, racism, and imperialist political and military intervention.”²⁹ We must engage in and lead anti-war movements, and promote workers’ struggles along global production chains. Anti-imperialists must be active in the climate movement, working towards the building of a class conscious, class based internationalist lens of climate justice, over the false “climate solutions” of reformist and social democratic tendencies. We must materially support socialist movements and states, not only in words, but in deeds.

Understanding and correctly analysing the conditions and contradictions of our moment and relaying this knowledge among the people is key. We must build strong, resilient, dynamic, revolutionary anti-imperialist organisations with an orientation towards taking power. This will involve building the confidence and clarity of the people, building trust and reciprocity, showing up when it matters. We must build alternative cultural spaces, and enter the cultural spaces dominated by the right and the mainstream liberal-capitalist interpretations of the world. Working towards peace and active development, in the direction of multipolarity and socialist transition, so that “our grandchildren have to go to a museum to see what a gun looked like.”³⁰

We should be mindful, however, that proletarian revolutions are not guaranteed to occur simply because capitalism is off balance. Socialist consciousness in the North is patchy and uneven, often mired in imperialism and white supremacy, and lacking in the experience of revolutionary activity. Lauesen approaches the end of The Long Transition by asking us to meditate on how best to meet these challenges, how to prepare in our organisations for how the global struggle will develop over the next two to five years: “What should our strategy be? How can I, and my organization, fit into the analysis of the objective and subjective forces of transition? What kind of support can we deliver? How can we best be a cogwheel in the big machine of transformation from world capitalism towards socialism?”

The Northern working classes are looking for answers to the problems they face, and are apparently willing to accept the cartoonish depictions offered to them by the far-right of a special type. However, despite the difficulty, socialist consciousness and the confidence to use it in the transformation of the world can be nurtured. It can grow rapidly and deeply into the cracks in the imperialist concrete. Take a walk around any city block, and you will see green shoots bursting up from the subterranean, challenging the integrity and the finality of the world capitalism has built.

It is Waring on Wurundjeri Country. The morning dew evaporates in sheets of mist. Yanggil calls high and piercing in the cooling sky, signalling the change, carrying messages on the wind. Sagittarius rises in the south-east after sunset, and little forest bats mark the wounded healer’s ascent to the vault of heaven.

Freedom is a pure idea. It occurs spontaneously and without instruction. Random acts of insurrection are occurring constantly throughout the galaxy. There are whole armies, battalions that have no idea that they’ve already enlisted in the cause. Remember that the frontier of the Rebellion is everywhere. And even the smallest act of insurrection pushes our lines forward.

And remember this: the Imperial need for control is so desperate because it is so unnatural. Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle. Oppression is the mask of fear. Remember that.

And know this, the day will come when all these skirmishes and battles, these moments of defiance will have flooded the banks of the Empires’ authority and then there will be one too many. One single thing will break the siege.

Remember this: Try.³¹

Reference List

1. Torkil Lauesen, The Long Transition Towards Socialism and the End of Capitalism (Seattle: Iskra Books, 2024), 2. ↩︎
2. Ibid, 1. ↩︎
3. Ibid, 15. ↩︎
4. Ibid, 19. ↩︎
5. Ibid, 16. ↩︎
6. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm ↩︎
7. https://www.aspi.org.au/opinion/critical-technology-tracker-two-decades-data-show-rewards-long-term-research-investment ↩︎
8. https://thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ten-theses-on-the-far-right-of-a-special-type/ ↩︎
9. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/30/relief-as-thai-hostages-return-home-amid-fears-for-those-still-held-in-gaza ↩︎
10. https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/glimpse-indonesia-s-nickel-policy ↩︎
11. https://nournews.ir/en/news/161263/Namibia-president-rebukes-Germany’s-support-for-Israel-in-genocide-case ↩︎
12. Lauesen, The Long Transition, 323. ↩︎
13. Ibid, 323. ↩︎
14. Ibid, 326. ↩︎
15. https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2025/01/20/billionaires-worth-a-combined-12-trillion-attended-trumps-inauguration-heres-who-was-there-from-musk-to-bezos/ ↩︎
16. https://www.wider.unu.edu/publication/new-estimates-cost-ending-poverty; https://www.oxfamamerica.org/explore/stories/how-much-money-would-it-take-to-end-world-hunger/ ↩︎
17. https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=1730 ↩︎
18. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKm4QARi16w ↩︎
19. Lauesen, The Long Transition, 325. ↩︎
20. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/1/world-markets-on-edge-as-trump-prepares-for-liberation-day-tariffs ↩︎
21. https://www.yanisvaroufakis.eu/2025/02/21/donald-trumps-economic-masterplan-unherd/ ↩︎
22. https://thetricontinental.org/studies-on-contemporary-dilemmas-4-hyper-imperialism/ ↩︎
23. https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-china-japan-agree-promote-regional-trade-trump-tariffs-loom-2025-03-30/ ↩︎
24. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/03/23/immigrant-women-hell-on-earth-trump-ice-detention/82029368007/ ↩︎
25. https://www.ft.com/content/e0b43918-7eaf-4a11-baaf-d6d7fb61a8a5 ↩︎
26. https://redantcollective.org/2025/03/06/the-widening-gyre-when-the-centre-cannot-hold-the-left-must-be-bold/ ↩︎
27. Lauesen, The Long Transition, 359. ↩︎
28. Ibid, 359. ↩︎
29. Ibid, 359. ↩︎
30. Ibid, 359. ↩︎
31. Andor, Episode 12 – Rix Road, 2022 ↩︎