Episode
Socialism: The Finale – What’s Left?
- Podcast
- Origin Story
- Published
- Dec 20, 2025
- Duration seconds
- 5988
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/origin-story-5452720/episodes/socialism-the-finale-what-s-left/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/origin-story-5452720/socialism-the-finale-what-s-left.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
Welcome to the finale of Origin Story season eight: the story of socialism. Thanks to everybody who has followed our most ambitious season yet, especially those whose support has enabled us to make it. We left the narrative in 1991, with the collapse of the USSR and the so- called “end of history”. This week we’re not telling a new story but looking back on the whole season to reflect on the evolution of socialism over the last two centuries and where it might go from here. We begin by catching up with socialism since 1991, as China embraced “market socialism”, Latin America’s ‘Pink Wave’ rose and fell, and the Western left all but gave up on its dream of building a new economic model. Was the left forced to fight for small victories because the possibility of bringing down capitalism had slipped away? We then return to the beginning of the season and ask if all the most important strands of socialism, from violent revolution to utopian communes, existed in some form by the time Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto in 1848. Can socialism be strictly defined or is it a broad tradition encompassing multiple different visions? And how does it relate to communism, left-wing populism or social democracy? We explore some of the obstacles that repeatedly prevent socialists from achieving their goals, including factions, personality cults, cranks, authoritarians and the romance of defeat — most of which were recently illustrated by the fiasco of Your Party. Finally, we take stock of socialism’s achievements, including many of the rights we now take for granted. Has socialism been more successful as a means of critiquing and moderating capitalism than replacing it? So, what is socialism? Can one word really describe Xi Jinping, Kim Jong Un, Zarah Sultana and Zohran…