# Liberalism or communism? with ADAM TOOZE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFeZ8VF7Hlw

[00:07] Welcome to Postcript, conversations on the past and future of the left amid the slow death of Western civilization.
[00:15] For a generation, we've been told about endings.
[00:20] We've been postmodern, post historical, post-industrial, post ideological, post-p political, post structuralist, post socialist, and before it all, postcolonial.
[00:29] But in a world still scorched by capital and empire, politics now returns in the declining West with its old social subjects in crisis.
[00:44] The results are mostly frightening, but at its most hopeful, a new political imagination seeks to decolonize, decommodify, degrow, even abolish the social relations that take our space and time from us and set us against each other.
[01:02] The left once believed in progress.
[01:05] Now our challenge is to repair
[01:08] and care for broken life worlds.
[01:11] As people fight in the ruins over which pasts to revive, industry, empire, or both, it's time instead to write a savage civilization's postcript, reflecting aresh on which traditions of thought and action might help to orient us in uncertain times.
[01:31] So, Postcript is a new podcast of reflective interviews and discussion from Tribune magazine hosted in London by me Barnaby Rain with regular guests and friends like Adam Tus who's with me today.
[01:43] Adam, welcome.
[01:45] Yeah, it's great to be here.
[01:46] So, I think um even though I had much that I wanted to ask you, um you were curious as we were discussing the idea for the podcast about what the whole plan was.
[01:56] So, what were your uh what were your curiosities?
[01:58] I mean, I'm not coming into this entirely cold.
[02:00] I've been kind of, you know, listening to your ideas over the last couple of months as they've been taking shape.
[02:07] And I mean, one of the things that struck me
[02:09] is that you like to frame this project as a matter of of inheritance of a kind of of a legacy.
[02:15] And you know, when when when you put it that way, one of the questions has got to be what happened?
[02:21] Like, did somebody die? Like what was it that created this moment of transfer the very least from generation to generation?
[02:28] But I think you have a much broader and deeper kind of sense of a of a break.
[02:33] So I wanted to ask you about that first of all to tell our listeners, our viewers like what where you see that that rupture as as being.
[02:40] M well we have much talk today about rupture because we have the sense that 500 years of western hegemony um are are coming unstuck and that for the first time in a long time people in not only a place like Britain but even a place like the USA are beginning to talk about themselves as some kind of periphery rather than some kind of global core.
[03:03] Um uh and and as China opens itself up to visa-free
[03:09] travel, Brits are going there to peer in and discover what the new civilization might be like in much the same way maybe as Africans came and reported on on Britain in the 1920s and 30s.
[03:18] Um so there's a sense of a of a very very enormous uh passing of a baton that I think we'll talk about today.
[03:25] But I think that actually follows an earlier kind of uh crisis and rupture.
[03:30] I think that from roughly the end of the 18th century to the end of the 20th, there was some kind of coherent idea of modernity.
[03:37] From the revolution of slaves in Haiti to the fall of the Berlin wall, there was some kind of sense that um um and of course the the the the lesser important but still important revolution of Parisians at the Bastile.
[03:53] There was some kind of sense um that uh the conscious mastery by human beings over history was a possibility.
[04:00] That people could control their environment and a concept of freedom that involved people vanquishing all those forces and
[04:11] powers that dominated and subjugated people and defining themselves outside all conscription to hierarchies.
[04:17] defining themselves as free individuals was actually Marx's horizon.
[04:22] Um, much forgotten.
[04:24] Um, and so I think there was a there was a sense of a of a story of progress that stretches from slave uprising through to the formation of the workers movement through to the victories over fascism and then formal colonialism, the construction of the welfare state and the new international economic order.
[04:46] Um in the 1970s there was a there was a push a sense that you could narrate yourself as part of a progressive story of human beings taking control of their history and in that story um Marx I think is a central figure and he's connected to 20th century feminism and antic-colonialism um which were also about people trying to take control of their history and trying to define themselves outside fixed social hierarchies.
[05:11] Capitalism isn't here an economic system of
[05:14] inequality but a social form of power and domination.
[05:18] Um that people that Markx wanted people to free themselves from.
[05:19] Mark said in the communist manifesto that capitalism is the domination of the present by the past.
[05:25] Um and and communism allows the present to dominate itself for us to define ourselves.
[05:29] So I think there was a there was a definite kind of possibility which I think people now find much harder to believe in.
[05:36] Yeah.
[05:38] Um, and I can talk about why, but I think I think that I'm interested in asking what have we lost and in escaping the in escaping nostalgia.
[05:47] What have we lost?
[05:49] Not just by trying to dip back into those beautiful ideas of the past, but what might it mean to,
[05:56] as David Scott, anthropologist at Columbia that I'm very influenced by, puts it, he always asks, what might it mean to be a good heir?
[06:02] What does it mean to inherit those old ideas in different conditions?
[06:08] I mean the horrifying thing is that that language if you watch like business news like I do as part of my who I am in the
[06:14] world like that's the that's the language of wealth passing intergenerationally.
[06:18] What does it mean to be a good heir is something that UBS in Zurich is very interesting to educate you in.
[06:24] But that's obviously not the the project here.
[06:26] the and I I think it would be really interesting for you to just say a bit more about what this inheritance might be.
[06:33] I heard in in in that in that beautiful um flow you just had there, you know, this moment where you said this thing that's often underestimated in Marks this appeal to freedom.
[06:46] Mhm. Mhm. Um that if I understand you right is a is a key element of what you see as something that needs to be recuperated, inherited, salvaged um from the wreckage of this moment.
[06:57] Mhm. Yes. I mean firstly my connection to the language of inheritance is not through uh Zurich bankers but is through a world that some people would associate with bankers which is growing up as a Jew.
[07:12] Yeah.
[07:13] um where the question was um where
[07:15] Tradition is talked about obsessively.
[07:17] And the question of tradition is not just how do we repeat what was done in the past, that's a dead tradition.
[07:24] But how do we exist in dialogue with the past, um, and and work out what it means to um, uh, to to renew and update, um, for the present, uh, the the gifts, the buried treasure that we've been handed from the past.
[07:39] And I think the concept of freedom is a is a very tricky example of this.
[07:44] Because I think that freedom is Marx's central hope.
[07:47] It's not actually very surprising when you realize that he comes out of a tradition of German idealism of people like Hegel for whom freedom is the highest goal.
[07:56] But obviously in the 20th century, uh, Cold War construction, it's easily forgotten that freedom was Marx's central project.
[08:03] Yes, because it's substituted by progress or development or economic growth, God help us, or modernization or moving from one stage of history to the next or some sort of vision of development like that, right?
[08:15] And what
[08:17] you're saying is no, there was always this other in fact higher and more powerful dynamic which was about which was about this the quest for for freedom.
[08:25] Well, I think that Marx's freedom is situated within a belief in progress and I think that's one of the things that I'm trying to grapple with.
[08:32] I think we can have the same kind of belief in that that Marks had.
[08:36] It's not the the idea of progress that he's sometimes associated with of extremely fixed to determined historical stages.
[08:41] Um but I think what's so rich about his thinking is that um he thinks that the kinds of freedom that we can have depend on the historical moment in which we're situated.
[08:53] Something he takes again from that German tradition.
[08:55] And I have been obsessed with this paragraph from his Grundas 18578 notebooks where he talks about the kind of freedom that is thinkable for British factory workers and the kind of freedom that is thinkable for enslaved people on plantations in Jamaica.
[09:09] And he doesn't say that one is better than the other actually, but he thinks that they're different.
[09:12] So our question is what would freedom look like in 2026?
[09:15] Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. and and um to
[09:18] to for me to be a Marxist today can't mean thinking that it's the same as what it was in 19th century industrial Britain.
[09:25] Um but I think it has three faces in 19th century industrial Britain that are very rich.
[09:28] Markx thinks about freedom as free time.
[09:31] Yeah.
[09:32] Um he's very very keen on stressing that real wealth is free time that real freedom is free time.
[09:37] Uh he thinks about freedom as a certain experience of space.
[09:39] He thinks that what capitalism has made possible by constructing the world market is a kind of cosmopolitan existence where we're not limited by the parochial question of where we are.
[09:49] We can be really global individuals, all-rounded individuals.
[09:55] Um, and he thinks that freedom is free individuality, which means defining ourselves rather than being limited by our placement in social hierarchies.
[10:01] The opposite of individuality is not being sociable or being in community.
[10:05] It's being hierarchically defined.
[10:07] So those three freedoms, free time, free space, free individuality, Markx thinks that capitalist production makes possible.
[10:13] It gives us the machines with which we could do less labor.
[10:15] It gives us the world market with which we could be
[10:18] cosmopolitan rounded individuals.
[10:21] Um but capitalism holds back.
[10:23] It it it conscripts us to endless more and more and more labor where we could be having more free time.
[10:27] It um it has a global division of labor where uh where people in some parts of the world are compelled to produce one thing only rather than allowing us to be rounded in our experience of the whole world.
[10:38] So he thinks that the overcoming of capitalism is necessary to fulfill a kind of freedom which is imminent which is present within capitalism itself.
[10:46] My question for us is, is there a kind of freedom which is imminent to our world?
[10:51] Um, or more pessimistically, is there something about Marx's 19th century world that meant that some kind of freedom was imminent to it?
[10:55] And perhaps something so ambitious as universal human freedom is not imminent to our world today.
[11:02] because that was going to be my third question is so we've defined the moment um of transition that the the death that means the inheritance is necessary and you've given this beautiful account of what that inheritance might be.
[11:18] what's the problem you know why is it
[11:20] difficult to be a good heir
[11:22] and that surely is the the the question
[11:25] that you've moved to at the end there
[11:27] which is
[11:28] does a does a good heir have to be free of doubt
[11:31] Does a good does a good heir simply have to believe?
[11:34] Or could you be a good heir and actually raise that frankly vetigenous scary kind of question
[11:38] which is but what if what if that 19th century promise was time bound?
[11:47] Mhm.
[11:48] And what if a stark clearheaded the realistic if I may say so approach to 2026 leads one to really bleak conclusions
[11:57] that surely is also one of the to be an heir of a hopeful tradition.
[12:00] How does one have to situate oneself to do it justice and to be true to it?
[12:05] Also presumably a deep question for those people of faith as well.
[12:11] Um yes I this is exactly the thing I
[12:21] grapple with.
[12:24] So I think that the reason that the promise of freedom that so animated people from um weavers in the 1840s to anti-colonial revolutionaries in the 1970s which really was a a belief that the world tended that the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.
[12:43] a belief that the whole world um had within it the resources to overturn every system of domination and make people free everywhere.
[12:52] Um freedom not just in this limited kind of liberal sense of non-inference but but but uh freedom to define oneself and um Nina Simone's kind of freedom, a feeling um um an enduring condition.
[13:06] Um um I think that the reason that that became less believable is because it was utterly umbilically attached to particular historical subjects to people yes who had an experience of unfreedom workers who had an experience of of capitalist exploitation the colonized um
[13:21] women who had an experience of patriarchal domination.
[13:24] Um, these oppressive experiences remain, but some of the texture of that experience that created the idea of its negation, the idea of a possible freedom in Britain here was attached at the beginning of the 20th century to miners who set up the Labour Party, formed our only ever general strike, nearly led us on another general strike in the 1970s.
[13:42] Um, was attached then in the 70s to car workers, militant subjects.
[13:46] Well, both miners and car workers and the life worlds that were built around them are now gone.
[13:50] Yeah, Britain still produces cars but with far fewer workers doing it.
[13:53] And also the foundation, right, the Archimedian point, the point from which they could exercise leverage was real.
[13:58] Exactly.
[13:59] Was was very very was very manifest cars energy.
[14:03] Exactly. And so then the what I hear you saying is that the jointly at the same moment both the agent of of this project of liberation and the standpoint or the the sort of the pande which they rest and stand both of those feel
[14:22] destabilized in the current moment.
[14:23] AB and and connectedly.
[14:25] Yes.
[14:25] You know it's it's the it's I read neoliberalism as the concerted disassembly of emancipatory subject.
[14:31] Yeah absolutely.
[14:32] So it's a project in destroying working-class life worlds.
[14:34] That's why Thatcher had to go to all with the miners in Britain.
[14:37] They were the social subject that had grounded and and been the kind of organizing core of socialist politics.
[14:42] Um um very inspiring when you see those old miners banners and you see this idea of a kind of imminent freedom.
[14:49] You see people working in tough conditions um collectively, socially.
[14:55] We're both familiar with Tim Mitchell's work on carbon democracy, the the importance of miners in creating even democratic cultures.
[14:59] So they had to be destroyed.
[15:01] anti-colonial revolutionary projects had to be destroyed and defanged by the IMF and the World Bank.
[15:07] um uh there was a concerted disassembly of emancipatory subjects and so of the standpoint from which to imagine a possible freedom and so the question for us is in the rubble that we inhabit what kinds of possible freedom can we uh imagine and you're right the challenge that
[15:24] comes I think to that attempt to rebirth a socialist or a communist politics.
[15:29] the challenge that comes from a kind of um sharp smart realist liberalism and I think a lot of our dialogue has been engaging with this challenge is the question.
[15:36] Well, is there any historical guarantee that there should be any concept of total human emancipation uh born within the mess of our present at all?
[15:44] Um, and can we um can we instead proceed with something less than that?
[15:53] So a question I think that takes us to a question I want to ask you which is um um do you understand your project in um um being in dialogue with governments, you know, even briefly with the Biden administration in America.
[16:14] um in your interest in in the the politics of contemporary China and its state, its party um as being about a an attempt to
[16:25] find resources of hope that might be resources of technocratic statecraft and are not a politics of universal human freedom.
[16:33] Do you understand?
[16:33] Do you think my my uh bar is too high and you're trying to do something more gritty and realist by using existing power to make the world better?
[16:44] I mean, you know, setting me personally aside,
[16:48] I think that I'm very I'm very moved by the diagnosis of the fragmenting of the historic subjects of universal emancipation.
[17:02] And um I think that's an incredibly powerful reality.
[17:05] Aa I mean um my generation lived through that dis this dismantling and our entire identities and lives were shaped by that dismantling.
[17:14] And so I think yeah it's absolutely fair to say and I'm also not somebody and I think the vast majority of people of my ilk are not people of faith.
[17:21] We're not we're not carried by the promise of any great emancipation.
[17:26] Um I think it's quite telling that there's been a revival of religion as I understand it in certain segments of the British upper middle class and professional class because you one feels the lack of it.
[17:36] Um uh if I may you know if I may say so it's it's it's quite profound especially in the threat of face of threat of AI and you know these these technologies which now intrude directly into the realms of our own production.
[17:51] Um and so yes, I would agree.
[17:53] I think I'm quite attached to a more minimal kind of imminence, a more minimum kind of okay, what is it that we can do from within?
[18:00] What is it that with from within the current moment, however you define it?
[18:05] And that's then when the science bit comes in and you have to use whatever technologies of statistics or economic analysis or sociology or anthropology or whatever it is that you have at your disposal to map that terrain.
[18:16] What is it that we can do here that will make a useful that will that will make that will make a clear a difference in some sense and and a very provisional in that
[18:27] sense coping a very provisional ameliorist project very often in the current moment um because I'm very preoccupied with crisis mere patching of a sinking ship or a boiler that's about to explode like um that kind of image of management um which has a historic legacy too which goes back to a similar moment because liberalism in its triumphant form was broken by the great catastrophe of World War I.
[18:56] And my reference point and I think it's fair to say the archetype for folks operating at the kind of in the kind of political sphere that I'm interested is somebody like John Maynard Kanees who very explicitly exactly in the terms that you described it tried to redefine a liberalism a project of it's not merely a technology of government.
[19:21] What's so impressive about it is that it's a technology of government defined in relation to the broader trajectory of democracy as he saw it very much.
[19:29] including the Labour Party very much.
[19:31] including the general strike and and not.
[19:34] as a timeless universal project but as a specific historical invention required.
[19:40] at the moment where the old certainties of the 19th century had broken and contemporaries hadn't really in his terms understood understood the scale of the shock.
[19:52] And if there's one thing that his politics is committed to, it's the shaking people awake.
[19:58] Not merely to apocalypse and the inevitability of it, but to the necessity to recognize how fragile the world is and therefore the urgency of shaking off old superstitions and trying to control the bits which are controllable, which in his terms are things like macroeconomics and money and so on.
[20:12] And that I that I think is still very much, you know, if you think about the climate question or or PE or issues like that.
[20:19] um or the great shift in power from the west to Asia that shaking awake that effort to shake people the mainstream conversation out of the.
[20:29] complacency that things are continuing
[20:32] on in the say the neoliberal mold of the
[20:34] last half century
[20:36] and then in the next step thinking about
[20:38] what possibilities there might be for
[20:40] for government for uh action and as
[20:43] collectivities and with the instruments
[20:45] of power that's you know that's that's
[20:48] for me the project but we we where you
[20:50] and I really intersect and what has made
[20:52] our conversations so fruitful over many
[20:54] years now is this common sense that both
[20:57] the Asian and the standpoint are in this
[21:00] particular moment that we're in in flux.
[21:02] Mhm. So let's grapple with that
[21:05] Keynesian politics. Um um you see it
[21:09] seems to me that um
[21:13] Kanes is not a victor of the 20th
[21:15] century that the future that he imagined
[21:17] at the end of World War I became a kind
[21:19] of future past. He he he says at one
[21:22] point in the 1930s in Britain for the
[21:25] rest of the century ordinarily we'll
[21:26] have labor governments. Um, and he
[21:29] imagined, which of course didn't come to
[21:32] pass, and he imagined that the end of
[21:35] World War I forced him to re-evaluate
[21:37] his uh politics of of loyalty to the
[21:41] British imperial bourgeoisi in quite an
[21:43] interestingly limited sort of way.
[21:46] So before World War I, he had thought
[21:47] that the the British capitalist class
[21:51] were agents of progress and and could be
[21:53] trusted. He has an amazing example of
[21:55] the situatedness the ch of his of his
[21:57] thinking.
[21:58] He makes before World War I his famous
[21:59] argument about um uh uh higher rates of
[22:03] uh spending uh when you redistribute
[22:06] income to to to lower uh income groups
[22:09] as an argument for not redistributing
[22:11] income to lower groups. He says, you
[22:12] know, if poorer people have money, they
[22:14] spend it on ice cream today. If if
[22:16] capitalists have money, they build
[22:17] railways. So in the 19th century, you
[22:18] can trust the capitalist class to make
[22:20] wise investments. That whole world is
[22:21] blown up by World War I. Yeah.
[22:23] And he sees the idiocy of the British
[22:24] capitalist class and of its politicians.
[22:27] And it seems to me what he tries to
[22:28] construct
[22:30] is a politics that would shift those
[22:33] capitalists from the private sector to
[22:35] the public sector.
[22:36] That they should be running the British
[22:37] state.
[22:38] Yeah. The direction of investment to
[22:39] make it more concrete should shift from
[22:42] Yeah. what are in the end feckless,
[22:44] irresponsible, short-sighted,
[22:47] conservative in the worst possible way
[22:50] business elite in Britain. the hardfaced
[22:52] men that did well out of the war and the
[22:53] panicky people in the stock market to
[22:55] some other body which of course he
[22:57] imagines himself in charge of
[22:58] well precisely so he wants the
[23:00] socialization of investment there's a
[23:01] lot of the Keynesian project that's much
[23:03] more radical than postwar what Joan
[23:05] Robinson called bastard Keynesianism
[23:07] um he wants the socialization of
[23:08] investment he wants the state to be he
[23:10] talks about a planned domestic economy
[23:11] even um but um who does he want to be
[23:14] running that state um people like him uh
[23:17] itonians and others um
[23:19] there's still that 19th century elitism
[23:21] that's completely unbroken in him and
[23:23] you know doesn't differentiate between
[23:25] working-class people in trade unions who
[23:27] he also thinks they really have a clue
[23:29] and and business people who really have
[23:32] no no excuse but are also clueless
[23:34] but he and he even internal I mean his
[23:36] you know his early work on Indian
[23:37] currency and finance uh treats equal
[23:40] contempt for the Tory uh
[23:42] short-sightedness that would pillage
[23:44] India and Indian economics that wants
[23:46] national self-determination no he wants
[23:48] liberal enlightened British statesmen to
[23:50] run to run Indians lives for them and I
[23:52] think he kind of domesticates that
[23:54] politics then when he thinks about the
[23:55] the British working class so there's
[23:57] there's a there's a profound elitism
[24:00] he says of course famously the class war
[24:03] will find me on the side of the educated
[24:04] bourgeoisi his goal is to stop that
[24:06] confrontation from happening
[24:08] so he doesn't have to make that painful
[24:09] choice which he thinks is determined by
[24:12] his class background and by his by this
[24:14] attitude by this this a effect of
[24:16] contempt ultimately because how could he
[24:19] be on the side of the TU you see
[24:21] is that a um you know is that a very
[24:25] limited kind of political project really
[24:27] is my question in one sense
[24:29] clearly it clearly is and I I mean I
[24:31] think I think this is you know I I find
[24:34] I find those essays of gaines in the
[24:36] 1920s and 30s both this is before he
[24:39] writes his famous economics book which
[24:41] is a general theory which comes out in
[24:42] 1936 which I can't really recommend as
[24:45] light reading to anyone watching this
[24:46] show but uh essays in persuasion which
[24:49] are a collection of essays from the late
[24:50] 20s are, you know, anyone who reads a
[24:53] newspaper can can digest and appreciate,
[24:55] I think, these texts. They're
[24:56] fascinating. Um, but they are very
[24:58] limited politics. Yes, it's really a
[25:00] kind of late Edwwardian kind of
[25:02] translation into the 20th century. And I
[25:04] think one would have to say that if you
[25:06] want to own this Keynesian legacy in
[25:08] some way, you either you take it to a
[25:10] very general level, at which case far
[25:13] from being the losers of the 20th
[25:14] century, we're all Keynesian now in some
[25:17] sense. Or you go, which I find even more
[25:20] attractive to a position which says that
[25:22] Keynesianism went through successive
[25:23] iterations and its most radical was
[25:25] really in the 1970s because Keynesianism
[25:28] was dancing in a what used to be a
[25:30] telephone box, right? It was operating
[25:31] within a very very constrained
[25:33] circumstance.
[25:35] To be technical about this, it's
[25:36] operating within a currency system which
[25:38] even if it is moving away from gold is
[25:40] ultimately tied to the gold backing of
[25:42] the currency. And an underrated break in
[25:44] human history at the civilizational
[25:46] world historic level is in the early 70s
[25:48] when all the major currencies of the
[25:50] world are separated from gold. Something
[25:52] that he had long argued for because he's
[25:54] a strong conventionalist. You know, gold
[25:56] is no different than law for instance,
[25:58] right? We shouldn't fetishize it as a
[26:00] substantive thing. And that opens up a
[26:03] realm of radical experimentation in
[26:06] economic policy and then also new
[26:08] repressive efforts to shut that freedom
[26:10] down. And I think you know in the same
[26:12] way was as one would want to grant to
[26:15] Marxism originally a theory of the
[26:16] mid-9th century shaped as you're saying
[26:18] in the 1850s in the first encounter with
[26:20] Victorian industrialism
[26:23] a afterlife which constantly innovates
[26:26] um Keynesianism can be I think seen as
[26:28] running along with it in some sense and
[26:31] the smarter and stronger Keynesians are
[26:33] constantly as liberals should really and
[26:36] those who are worth taking seriously
[26:38] have always done in the 20th century
[26:40] measuring ing themselves against their
[26:42] serious intellectual antagonist which is
[26:44] various types of updated Marxism.
[26:47] And so to my mind the Keynesianisms of
[26:50] the 1970s which are actually embracing
[26:52] the options of a monetary order which is
[26:57] no longer tied to gold um are the ones
[26:59] which are truly inractive and
[27:00] interesting for us now. Um so so that's
[27:04] where I you know the you're right that
[27:06] that historic canes in some sense is a
[27:09] period piece and a rather limited kind
[27:12] of politics. Um but that's not where it
[27:15] stopped. I mean to my mind one of the
[27:17] most amazing essays in those collections
[27:18] of the 20s is where he says like
[27:20] liberalism will have a brilliant future
[27:22] if it could address you know various
[27:23] technical issues to do with monetary
[27:25] policy and in addition two questions the
[27:28] drug question and the sex question. And
[27:30] if we can speak about drugs and sex, you
[27:32] know, we're going to be in the political
[27:35] mainstream. And and you know, you tell
[27:36] me Keynesianism lost in the 20th century
[27:38] on the 21st century. No, he saw those
[27:41] questions um and their centrality and
[27:43] makes an emphatic
[27:45] democratic case for saying,
[27:48] you know, if you think that, you know,
[27:50] your average working-class woman can't
[27:52] handle talking about sex, you haven't
[27:53] met any. You don't understand how
[27:56] central these concerns are. No one there
[27:58] is appalled about talk about abortion.
[28:00] We need to embrace and talk about this.
[28:03] And if you don't take seriously people's
[28:04] need for escape from mundane reality in
[28:08] various types of narcotics, again, you
[28:10] don't really understand life. And he was
[28:11] a man after all who understood the
[28:13] pleasures of life in complex ways. So
[28:17] that I think is another element of this
[28:19] new liberalism, shall we say, this
[28:21] reinvention of a 19th century tradition.
[28:23] And it's not just those particular
[28:24] claims, but that meta move in general.
[28:26] That's interesting, right? That is
[28:28] saying as history and times change, we
[28:31] need to continuously broaden. So I think
[28:33] of ecology in the environmental
[28:34] politics, which again is a kind of
[28:36] liberal domain to a considerable extent
[28:38] from the 60s onwards as the next
[28:40] frontier. Which is why the humiliation
[28:44] and the modesty and the disaster in some
[28:46] senses of western environmental policy,
[28:48] the failure really to grasp the climate
[28:50] problem with due force is yet another
[28:53] disappointing iteration of of this
[28:56] canism.
[28:58] So you don't think that the the the
[29:02] crises of the 1970s
[29:04] involved
[29:06] various groups that Keynesians would
[29:09] hope to manage
[29:12] whether that's workers with their pay
[29:14] claims or whether that's the colonized
[29:19] um saying that actually they didn't want
[29:20] to be managed they wanted to take charge
[29:22] of the historical process. Oh, I'm sure
[29:24] that's what exactly what's happening,
[29:26] but the managers still get to do the
[29:28] managing thing, right? So then the
[29:29] question is how is those how are those
[29:31] two different visions of the world going
[29:32] to relate to each other? And
[29:34] neoliberalism exploited and the
[29:36] right-wing truly conservative backlash
[29:38] exploited the breakdown of that
[29:40] relationship. Um so my liberalism is is
[29:43] another I think crucial thought and this
[29:46] is what's so interesting about Kan's is
[29:48] he's he has hegemonic aspirations but he
[29:52] fully understands that the world his
[29:54] world is highly confined and that again
[29:57] is a kind of central position.
[29:59] As much as you know upper middle class
[30:01] educated people of which I am the
[30:03] bonafide descendant right tend to think
[30:06] of themselves as the universal class
[30:08] it's definitely not true it's crazy
[30:09] right it's it's mad it's m it's a mad
[30:11] pretention it can only be sustained at
[30:13] the idealistic level whereas the marxian
[30:16] claim to constitute a universal out of
[30:19] material reality is far more compelling
[30:21] to me so stuck in the position that
[30:24] folks like myself are in the question
[30:26] then is how do you do politics and it
[30:28] has to be coalition
[30:29] It has to be that's why I'm here like it
[30:31] has to be coalition right in the complex
[30:33] coalition that currently is configured
[30:35] around Tribune around fix like yourself
[30:37] like and that's something that Kane's
[30:38] understood and it's about making those
[30:40] coalitions work and that's what he's
[30:41] saying you know if the if the coalitions
[30:43] break down and we end up on either sides
[30:45] of the barricades this just goes to
[30:48] because I'm going to end up shooting
[30:49] people on the other side that I actually
[30:51] want to be in coalition with and that's
[30:53] what I see the 1970s as being the
[30:55] breakdown of that of that coalition and
[30:58] I'm Not blaming the insurgents who like
[31:00] who are tired to hell of being managed
[31:02] by Keynesians by any means. I far more
[31:05] obvious I think is the fact that there's
[31:07] a surrender essentially by the
[31:09] professional middle class
[31:10] to the lure of neoliberalism because
[31:13] though it wasn't our vision of the
[31:15] 40s50s and 60s did we do well out of it
[31:17] by by by by heck we did over the last 50
[31:20] years right so there was a kind of
[31:23] betrayal of a coalition on the part of
[31:25] the professional managerial class people
[31:27] in the US refer to this as the PMC right
[31:30] um of that coalition um and Yet in
[31:34] liberalism's modern history, it has
[31:36] never ever ever ever ever achieved any
[31:39] of its major goals under its own steam.
[31:41] Right? It has always essentially relied
[31:43] on coalitions. And the problem are from
[31:46] the 70s onwards is it ends up in
[31:48] coalition with story of the Labour
[31:50] Party. You end up in coalition with the
[31:51] city of London, right? You end up with
[31:52] the Tony Blair synthesis. And there's
[31:55] smart Keynesian technocrats all around
[31:57] Gordon Brown and people I love and care
[32:00] about and doing the right thing, but de
[32:02] facto in coalition, not any longer with
[32:04] organized labor and the social
[32:06] democratic project of rebuilding
[32:07] Britain, but with the city of London.
[32:09] And we see the consequences of that
[32:11] after 2008 because you just can't get
[32:13] the wheels back on the bus.
[32:14] Yeah. One way of thinking about the the
[32:16] long crisis that we're in that set in in
[32:18] the 1970s and 80s is that those
[32:20] emancipatory subjects that Markx
[32:23] imagined as having imminent within their
[32:25] experience of domination a vision of a
[32:27] possible freedom were too few um uh in
[32:32] the global north. um the miners and the
[32:35] car workers and um young unemployed
[32:38] black men and women in inner cities um
[32:40] were too few and and um gay people being
[32:44] beaten up by the police to constitute a
[32:47] a collective subject that could claim
[32:51] hegemony in a society like Britain and
[32:52] where they might have been in the
[32:53] majority in the global south. they were
[32:55] not strong enough um in the face of
[32:57] global northern power because the upper
[33:00] sections of that working class
[33:03] who bought their own council houses
[33:04] under thatcher
[33:06] um and then sold them and moved to the
[33:07] suburbs and then bought shares when
[33:09] Telid was privatizing infrastructure.
[33:11] the upper sections of that working
[33:12] class, the lower sections of the middle
[33:14] class who were in alliance with the
[33:16] working class in the great 1951 election
[33:18] in Britain where the Labour Party lost
[33:19] but got more votes than ever before
[33:21] because it won so many votes from from
[33:23] salaried professional workers. Thatcher
[33:25] was able to break that coalition.
[33:27] Well, don't don't make it so much a
[33:28] matter of sociology merely.
[33:30] It's a it's a deliberate I mean this is
[33:32] brilliant of Stuart Hall's analysis of
[33:34] Thatcherism, right? This is a deliberate
[33:35] project. Hegemany doesn't just consist
[33:37] of offering people treats and telling
[33:39] them good stories. It consists in
[33:41] breaking your enemies.
[33:43] And and I don't I wouldn't don't think I
[33:45] would start by saying that coalition of
[33:47] workingclass power was weak. I would say
[33:50] it was very very strong. So strong that
[33:53] it necessitated a rearrangement of
[33:55] conservative politics. A whole bunch of
[33:57] really rather weird alliances in the US
[33:59] case between neoliberalism and outright
[34:01] neoonservatism. evangelical right-wing
[34:03] politics end up in bed around Bill
[34:05] Clinton in the 1990s. Things that don't
[34:07] go like Tony Blair is a bizarre
[34:10] phenomenon, you know, of this kind of
[34:11] movement, a kind of conservative neo
[34:14] theological politics in alignment with
[34:16] Kenzian managerialism. A whole variety
[34:18] of rather forced coalitions are
[34:21] necessary to to block and stop. I'm not
[34:24] saying there was a revolution in the
[34:26] offing, [snorts] but there was more
[34:28] movement. there was more scope for
[34:29] movement and there was more
[34:30] counterveailing power than at any point
[34:33] in the west since the immediate
[34:35] aftermath of World War II and the
[34:37] immediate aftermath of World War I.
[34:38] Right? So I think there were those three
[34:40] great moments and in each case the story
[34:43] I think shouldn't be you know that
[34:45] Keynesianism or you know Arthur
[34:47] Skargill's vision of the British slave
[34:49] movement just sort of died a natural
[34:50] death and then neoliberalism took over.
[34:52] No, they were they were they were they
[34:55] were they were fought down. They were
[34:57] broken. they were they were victimized
[34:59] uh not victim that makes them too
[35:01] passive as well. They were the object of
[35:03] class struggle.
[35:04] Um and then on the other hand of course
[35:06] there was the privatization campaign. So
[35:08] it was this double movement that was
[35:10] that was very powerful. But didn't
[35:11] Kanes's vision and of course you know
[35:13] people on the left like to tout Kletk's
[35:17] mal Kletk's famous 1943
[35:20] um challenge to Kanes on on the politics
[35:23] of full employment that that um Kane's
[35:26] very ambitious vision.
[35:27] Yeah.
[35:28] Um required a kind of naivity about
[35:30] capitalist interests. His vision in the
[35:32] 1930s was more ambitious than the
[35:34] so-called Keynesian civilization that we
[35:36] got because it involved not just
[35:37] redistribution. I mean for one thing it
[35:39] involved redistribution on a global
[35:40] scale. He wanted the world bank
[35:42] institutions to be much more radical
[35:43] than than they were. Um it involved
[35:45] redistribution and the socialization of
[35:48] investment of banking. Um and at some
[35:52] points negative money, money that
[35:53] decreases in value over time. Um so that
[35:56] people are disincentivized from
[35:58] hoarding. It becomes impossible to hoard
[35:59] money. So he imagined therefore the
[36:00] euthanasia famously of the Rontier. I
[36:03] think of capitalism. I I think Kanes
[36:05] does have a vision of the end of
[36:06] capitalism. of capitalism is capital
[36:07] accumulation.
[36:09] The the the the moderation of his
[36:11] politics is not that he loves
[36:12] capitalism. It's that he loves the the
[36:14] people who've run British capitalism and
[36:16] he wants them to become loyal servants
[36:18] of the state.
[36:18] He loves he loves he loves a certain
[36:21] idealized vision of the potential
[36:23] development of 19th century high gilded
[36:27] age Victorian and Edwwardian upper
[36:29] middle class civilization.
[36:30] Totally.
[36:30] That is what he sees as what is worth
[36:32] preserving. In other words, the
[36:34] Oxbridge, you know, he sees himself as
[36:36] the heir of lock expit and and and that
[36:40] British intellectuality that goes back
[36:42] to the 17th and 18th century and he
[36:45] wants to see that a kind of it's not ne
[36:48] Elizabethan but it's that kind of vision
[36:50] and that is threatened by the
[36:53] circumstances of the 20th century by the
[36:56] power of organized labor which has a
[36:57] very different culture in his view
[37:00] perhaps no culture at all really and the
[37:02] even worse phenomenon which is the is
[37:04] the is the the just the horror of the
[37:07] British capitalist class which is just
[37:09] brainless headless he talks for good
[37:11] reason about animal spirits right it's
[37:13] just swims one way or the other
[37:15] so that is that is what he wants to
[37:17] rescue but that is
[37:19] that is him right and and I think that
[37:22] you can detach from him a politics of
[37:26] the reinvention of liberalism the
[37:28] politics of a coalition with social
[37:30] democracy which doesn't which doesn't
[37:31] doesn't have to remain within the
[37:33] confines of that very particular that
[37:35] very particular uh Bloomsbury Cambridge
[37:38] kind of version um though that has
[37:40] considerable cultural power and KKI
[37:42] though is really I can never remember
[37:44] whether it's Kleskiok or Ki I always get
[37:46] told off one way or the other by my
[37:47] Polish friends the the
[37:50] his point is really fundamental and
[37:52] powerful because what he adds back in is
[37:54] class struggle right what he adds back
[37:55] in is that it's not by accident that
[37:59] Kane's the the door to Kanesian
[38:02] intervention ism opens when the
[38:04] capitalist class sees that it needs
[38:06] rescuing, right? That it sees it needs
[38:08] collective action.
[38:10] Um, but no one should mistake that for a
[38:12] permanent alliance, right? One because
[38:14] as soon as something like full
[38:16] employment and normal profit uh and
[38:18] accumulation conditions are restored,
[38:20] you would expect those same groups to
[38:22] begin to worry about things they call
[38:24] euphemistically overheating. This is the
[38:27] thing you'll hear in B central bank
[38:29] talk. The economy is running too hot. we
[38:31] need to cool it down by which what they
[38:34] actually mean is we need to raise
[38:35] unemployment and in America we've even
[38:38] reached the point where racialized
[38:40] categories of unemployment are
[38:42] legitimately discussed in this context.
[38:43] So the question literally becomes how
[38:46] high does the rate of male black
[38:47] unemployment have to be for us in the
[38:50] bond market not to worry about the
[38:52] economy running too hot. It's as
[38:54] explicit as that because in their
[38:56] progressivism, the central bankers
[38:59] realized that the single most powerful
[39:01] indicator of the state of the economy
[39:02] was blackmail unemployment. Last in
[39:05] first out, this is your indicator. And
[39:07] so that became the the kind of nub of of
[39:10] of this kleskian struggle over the
[39:14] management of capitalism under
[39:16] conditions of tension. And as a kind of
[39:19] left, I would say, well, yeah, fair
[39:21] enough, comrade. That's absolutely
[39:22] right. So, we have to be attentive at
[39:23] those moments and push back and argue
[39:25] and find a new coalition and not just
[39:27] kind of rest on our laurels and go,
[39:29] "Hey, they love us because we saved them
[39:30] in 2008 and whatever, but keep the
[39:33] argument going, which is one of the
[39:35] reasons why I was willing to engage or
[39:36] it wasn't really a choice on my part,
[39:38] why I was engaged by the Biden people
[39:40] because they seriously kind of left
[39:43] Social Democratic Forces and the
[39:44] American Democratic Party wanted to
[39:46] learn lessons from the Obama
[39:48] administration and I was one of the
[39:50] people that really synthesized the
[39:51] narrative of the disappointment of the
[39:53] Obama administration and it centered on
[39:55] this question of how big did we go with
[39:57] the stimulus, how much is too much and
[39:59] we literally enacted the entire colleian
[40:01] drama with people citing my work and
[40:03] others work to say under Biden in 2021
[40:06] we should go really the phrase was we
[40:08] should go big and they went big we went
[40:10] big over you know close to $2 trillion
[40:12] in stimulus and what happened
[40:14] immediately Larry Summers and co emerged
[40:18] on the stage to say what you're
[40:20] overheating the economy we need to cool
[40:21] things down whereas we had actually
[40:23] persuaded the Fed to look at black male
[40:25] unemployment as their key indicator of
[40:27] whether the economy was running hot or
[40:28] not. And the Fed managed this through.
[40:31] So then what came instead was the
[40:33] politics of uncertainty, the politics of
[40:35] the cost of living, the inflation crisis
[40:37] that were exploited mercilessly against
[40:40] that effort to rescue America from what
[40:43] in 2020 was a devastating social crisis.
[40:46] folks in Europe don't appreciate just
[40:48] how dramatic the disintegration of
[40:50] American politics in 2020 was and Black
[40:53] Lives Matter of course surfaced but it
[40:55] was that was as it were the epicenter of
[40:57] a much more comprehensive crisis um in
[41:00] American politics which culminated with
[41:02] Jan 6 and so on. So anyway, that is the
[41:06] I to my mind my Keynesianism isn't much
[41:09] as I appreciate much as I'm a historian
[41:11] and much as I appreciate and love the
[41:13] deeply historical reading of what he was
[41:15] about
[41:16] you know for it to be live at all and
[41:18] not just a sitting duck for criticism it
[41:20] has to be this evolving metapolitics
[41:22] so I I understand that there's a you
[41:24] know you're drawing this important
[41:26] distinction as you say I'd want to do
[41:27] this with marks between a historical
[41:29] individual and a tradition
[41:31] and and within that then as people do
[41:33] with Marxism, what Joan Robinson called
[41:36] the bastardized, as it were, the
[41:38] conformist form of Keynesianism, which
[41:40] slides well away from what Keynes
[41:42] himself said back towards essentially
[41:44] conformity to a mere managerialism, the
[41:46] smallest guy
[41:47] to to a third position, which is a kind
[41:51] of a Keynesianism which is radical. You
[41:53] insist as far as the end of capitalism.
[41:56] I
[41:57] that's fine. I but I mean I think his
[41:59] version of that is so weird that in some
[42:01] senses we're twisting him by saying that
[42:03] because it's not really anyway it's not
[42:05] a fully socialist vision but it's
[42:06] certainly one of radical transformation
[42:08] and that third position is the one I
[42:11] guess I would personally for what it's
[42:12] worth be most interested in.
[42:14] He does in the 1930s call it a socialist
[42:16] vision.
[42:16] Yeah. But you're like a you're you're a
[42:18] text rat. You're like an archive rat
[42:20] even far more than I am.
[42:22] Um
[42:22] you're an intellectual historian at some
[42:24] level and I'm an economic historian.
[42:26] [laughter]
[42:29] Does
[42:32] you see I I I have wanted to suggest
[42:35] that there's a there's a kind of limit a
[42:37] structural limit in the in the
[42:39] tradition.
[42:40] Yes.
[42:40] Which is a kind of managerialism that um
[42:45] sees like a state.
[42:46] There's like a bone in it. It's like a
[42:48] tasty meal with a bone in it. And the
[42:51] bone in the Keynesian dish is definitely
[42:54] this managerialism. You call it a
[42:55] structural limit. Yeah,
[42:56] I would say it's like a boat. It holds
[42:58] the whole thing together.
[42:59] Yeah. I mean I in 19256 he goes to the
[43:03] Soviet Union and loves it.
[43:05] Absolutely.
[43:05] And he loves it because he sees what he
[43:07] regards as the great achievement of 19th
[43:09] century civilization which is the
[43:11] ballet. He's married for Exactly. He's
[43:13] married a Russian ballerina. Um and um
[43:17] um it would seem to me that in the
[43:19] crisis of the 70s 80s including in the
[43:21] downfall of the Soviet Union um people
[43:24] don't want to be managed. And that one
[43:27] of the problems is that managing people
[43:28] sort of works as long as it works as
[43:30] long as you can deliver the goods when
[43:32] you can't deliver the goods. If your
[43:33] only claim has been we're delivering the
[43:34] goods to you, what you've lost, which is
[43:36] the thing I'm interested in reviving in
[43:37] socialist and communist traditions
[43:39] is a a politics of freedom of a hope in
[43:42] the transformation of human relations.
[43:44] that isn't limited to we'll give you
[43:46] things
[43:48] I guess I want to ask you in that crisis
[43:51] moment of 2020 2021
[43:55] um what you think if there was a missed
[43:58] opportunity what you think an ambitious
[44:00] left Keynesian coalitional with
[44:02] socialist politics let's say in that
[44:04] American emergency at the moment of
[44:06] black lives matter and the pandemic um
[44:10] what could and then and then the coming
[44:11] of inflation which I know you think of
[44:14] very directly as a question of class
[44:15] politics of distributional politics.
[44:17] Um what was the was there a project that
[44:19] was missed that um what could have been
[44:21] done?
[44:22] Yeah, I mean we don't have to
[44:23] hypothesize or speculate about this. It
[44:24] was the the vision of the Green New Deal
[44:27] that emerged from the electoral
[44:28] breakthrough, you know, slightly after
[44:30] Corbyn in the UK that you were so
[44:31] closely involved with um uh after the
[44:34] midterm elections in in the US which is
[44:36] so important for the mood swings. This
[44:38] is everyone should be watching out for
[44:39] this in the course of this year. By the
[44:41] time this show releases, this will be
[44:42] this will be the key in the US. Um
[44:44] because if the Democrats make a
[44:46] breakthrough and in 2018 a left-wing
[44:48] faction within the Democrats made a
[44:49] breakthrough, folks will know Jackabid
[44:52] in Brooklyn. this kind of scene. Um,
[44:54] that opened a window and what it opened
[44:56] a window to I think is really very
[44:58] fundamental and fascinating and goes to
[45:00] this question of the malleability and
[45:02] the openness of this tradition which is
[45:05] a vision of the green new deal which
[45:06] which which in the end of course ended
[45:09] up cut down Keynesianism style to
[45:12] nothing more than green industrial
[45:13] policy
[45:15] um through as a result of very tough
[45:17] bargaining in Congress. Right. American
[45:19] administrations don't govern the way the
[45:21] British governments do with huge
[45:22] parliamentary majorities but started out
[45:26] as the Green New Deal which was a
[45:28] completely comprehensive vision for
[45:30] transformation of American society which
[45:32] also answered the degrowth critique by
[45:35] saying well yes we are going to do
[45:37] industrial policy um for green energy
[45:41] and infrastructure and America needs
[45:43] like proper modern railways for instance
[45:45] and we need housing
[45:47] um but centrally ally and in its main
[45:49] focus was orientated around a feminist
[45:52] politics of care which was not presented
[45:54] as a sort of normative concession or to
[45:56] sort of woke but as a realistic account
[45:59] of what the American working class
[46:02] consists of and what it needs which is a
[46:05] public support for social reproduction
[46:07] because the crisis of the American
[46:08] working class is manifest and real but
[46:10] it doesn't just consist of as they like
[46:12] to put it you know a shortage of good
[46:14] paying bluecollar jobs that's really the
[46:18] downstream of the more fundamental
[46:19] problem which is the conditions of child
[46:22] care um health care and elder care um
[46:26] and add a mental health crisis on top of
[46:28] that and um that's what the the Green
[46:31] New Deal was about right it was it for
[46:33] Europeans because the politics of
[46:35] climate is easier here in the US the
[46:37] politics of climate were attached to
[46:40] this really comprehensive vision which
[46:42] was in really big numbers you were going
[46:45] to go big with this it was trillions of
[46:47] dollars as a budget. Of course, American
[46:49] numbers always over 10 years, so a
[46:50] little less enormous than it first
[46:52] appeared, but macroeconomically
[46:54] relevant. Three, four, five, six, 7% of
[46:56] GDP, like big cold war military
[46:59] spending, but on the transformation of
[47:01] American society. And that, you know,
[47:04] had a Keynesian rationale. We could all
[47:07] do the math on the macroeconomics, and
[47:08] some people were terrified and other
[47:09] people delighted. Um, but it above all
[47:14] refigured what it is that you were
[47:16] trying to do in American society. Would
[47:18] it have produced more growth? Most
[47:19] likely. Would it have reduced
[47:21] unemployment, especially for
[47:22] disadvantaged minorities? Most likely.
[47:24] But above all, it was also just changing
[47:26] the parameters of what we were talking
[47:27] about in economic policy. To the things
[47:28] which so evidently matter to most people
[47:31] in their lives, at least at some point
[47:33] in their biography and for all of us at
[47:36] some point some of these issues really
[47:37] matter.
[47:39] So that that for me is like the concrete
[47:41] the stuff I ended up doing which was
[47:43] like you know where I I didn't really
[47:44] have much direct advisory input but
[47:46] where I was cited and quoted and
[47:48] mobilized was down was again like a off
[47:51] on a different conversation which was
[47:52] how big was the stimulus we can do in 21
[47:56] which didn't have any of those elements
[47:58] that was just checks handed out to
[48:00] people in terms of purchasing power
[48:02] again Keynesians would say okay fine we
[48:04] can live with that that's the Keynesian
[48:06] analytic is is rather are unspecific as
[48:09] to what you spend the money on. If the
[48:10] aim of the game is just to stabilize the
[48:11] macroeconomic ship, then just get the
[48:13] checks out. You know, as you were
[48:15] saying, money that decays over time will
[48:17] do the job. But in the back of that,
[48:19] there was this other project which
[48:20] really had a concrete vision for a
[48:23] really quite fundamental transformation
[48:24] of American society. So climate politics
[48:27] for you becomes not something Keynesian
[48:31] in this narrow uh uh worst sense of a
[48:35] pure managerialism where you can imagine
[48:39] um well it was a Labour party manifesto
[48:41] in 1945 that says the gentleman in
[48:43] Whiteall really knows in matters of
[48:44] nutrition and uh and public health. Um,
[48:47] one can think about a climate
[48:48] Keynesianism as um as the gentleman in
[48:52] Whiteall or or in the Fed um writing the
[48:55] checks and making the decisions.
[48:56] Oh, Beijing.
[48:58] Oh, well, let's get there in a second.
[49:00] Um um but you're talking about the Green
[49:04] New Deal as something more radical both
[49:06] at the level of vision of of the kind of
[49:08] society that's involved and at the level
[49:11] of the kind of political subjects that
[49:12] are mobilized. I know we're both keen on
[49:15] um Gabriel Wein's work where in America
[49:17] a city like Pittsburgh goes from having
[49:19] workers in steel to having workers in
[49:21] healthcare and that changes the gendered
[49:23] composition of the workforce, the
[49:24] racialized composition and they're doing
[49:26] both productive and social reproductive
[49:28] work. Um how do you imagine then a
[49:31] climate politics um
[49:34] um
[49:36] activating particular kinds of political
[49:39] subjects beyond just the managerial
[49:41] elites? Well, I mean, I think the
[49:43] climate politics is fascinating because
[49:45] it comes in so many different shades and
[49:47] it also essentially poses the problem of
[49:50] priorities and in a really um
[49:53] disorientating way because
[49:56] you can construct various types of
[49:58] ecological boxism in the mid- 19th
[50:00] century and that's fair and it's there
[50:02] and to be found but broadly speaking I
[50:05] think certainly my reading of marks will
[50:07] be that it was a rebellion against the
[50:08] kind of Malthusian restrainting kind of
[50:10] logic that said really we have more
[50:12] possibilities than so Mthus was the late
[50:16] 18th early 19th century theologian who
[50:18] basically damned the French Revolution
[50:20] as condemned to failure as a result of
[50:23] the inability of food supply to keep up
[50:25] with the fact that people after the
[50:27] revolution would have so much sex they'd
[50:28] have so many babies and we'd live in
[50:30] this theologically ultimately god
[50:33] orained disaster of overpopulation and
[50:36] collapse right and Marxism Marx has no
[50:38] time for this Marx is cognizant of the
[50:41] damage which
[50:43] capitalist growth is doing to nature
[50:46] including of course the human body and
[50:47] some of the most graphic passages in
[50:48] dascapitar but broadly speaking Marxism
[50:51] was an expansive kind of vision
[50:53] cornucopian vision or could be read that
[50:56] way and was generally read that way and
[50:57] then along comes this neo I don't want
[51:00] to call it neo malfusian but this new
[51:02] sense of constraint suddenly in some
[51:03] cases overtly neomalthian from the
[51:05] late60s early 1970s onwards and it it's
[51:08] really difficult to wrap one's head
[51:09] around right the This is part I think of
[51:12] the challenge that we're trying to
[51:14] address or you're trying to address in
[51:15] this series is how do you then imagine
[51:18] the subject if you can't any longer
[51:20] presume just this endless abundance of
[51:22] greater and greater mobilization of
[51:24] natural resources sensibly right you you
[51:27] there's there's huge technological feats
[51:29] still ongoing but we now cannot if we're
[51:33] remotely serious people ignore our best
[51:36] guess that this can't possibly be
[51:39] sustained. It's a vertigenous, utterly
[51:41] unprecedented,
[51:44] scientifically structured view, right?
[51:46] Never before have governments, after
[51:48] all, set out to promise their citizens,
[51:52] grandchildren a livable planet. That
[51:54] that's not a that's a new level of
[51:57] governmental ambition. It's absolutely
[51:59] necessary. I'm not by saying that
[52:00] saying, "Oh, that's ridiculous. You
[52:02] silly, naive people go away." No, that's
[52:04] part of the the terrifying reality that
[52:08] we live in. We can't ignore the sc the
[52:10] science tells us the war. So, so then
[52:12] from that spawn like endless different
[52:14] versions of environmentalism, right?
[52:16] Including a neoliberal version which is
[52:17] the dominant form in the UK and in
[52:20] Europe which is Keynesianism of the most
[52:23] sort of ailiated evaporated thinned out
[52:26] kind which is we will design a market
[52:28] that will take care of this. That's a
[52:29] very Keynesian idea actually to design a
[52:31] market that take cares of that takes
[52:33] care of this but it's the most minimal
[52:35] and we and the promise is you don't have
[52:36] to do any politics at all and you'll get
[52:38] to the right world which turns out to be
[52:40] totally naive. It's a bit like saying
[52:42] regulating the money supply so as to
[52:44] control inflation doesn't involve any
[52:45] politics. It's it's it's the most first
[52:48] level bad faith move because obviously
[52:51] who gets credit decides crucially in
[52:53] capitalism. Likewise, who gets carbon
[52:55] credits decides crucially where we move
[52:57] and what price the carbon credits are
[52:59] charged for. So that was one strand.
[53:01] Another version would be a flatout kind
[53:04] of developmental Keynesianism kind of
[53:07] like you know the national coal just
[53:09] green now. So we'll have a national
[53:10] green board and we'll do investment and
[53:12] we'll build out a national green energy
[53:14] system which I would think of as sort of
[53:17] indispensable. I'm frankly also not
[53:19] against carbon pricing. I just think we
[53:21] should be clear about what its politics
[53:23] are. This is I'm a Keynesian and I just
[53:25] am wide open on the different
[53:26] instrumentalities that we use, but I
[53:28] think we should be clear about politics.
[53:29] And then the third, you're absolutely
[53:31] right. Yeah. The Green New Deal in the
[53:33] original American version does imply the
[53:36] very self-conscious construction of a
[53:39] new subject. And and part of that, of
[53:42] course, is legacy American civil rights
[53:45] politics going all the way back to the
[53:46] 1960s. Part of that is the rainbow
[53:48] coalition of people like Jesse Jackson
[53:49] from the 1980s onwards. And then there's
[53:51] this new definition of climate exposed
[53:54] environmentally at risk groups which
[53:56] comes out of the environmental justice
[53:57] movement in the US. Also rather stronger
[53:59] in the US than in Europe from the 1980s
[54:01] onwards because of the so stark
[54:04] hierarchies of environmental risk
[54:06] between especially black communities and
[54:08] the rest of American the rest of the
[54:09] white population in so-called cancer
[54:11] alley in Louisiana. there are just these
[54:13] sacrifice zones largely with largely
[54:16] black populations which have just been
[54:18] subject to huge risk. You put all of
[54:20] that together and you get this idea of
[54:21] frontline communities. And the frontline
[54:23] communities are one of the things which
[54:25] AOC
[54:26] um um you know the radical
[54:28] representative from New York um and her
[54:32] kind of think you know brains trust
[54:35] formulated as an idea of this new agent
[54:38] this new subject of of progressive
[54:41] politics
[54:42] and it unfortunately it was torn apart
[54:45] that vision. Um, so it totally conforms
[54:47] to your
[54:49] broader scheme is that we have the
[54:50] capacity to imagine actors like this
[54:53] and no one should ever admit the
[54:55] argument that that's utopian merely or
[54:58] or some exercise in naivity. No, because
[55:01] that's actually a better description of
[55:02] the American working class than the one
[55:04] that actually came out of this by 2223
[55:07] because it is comprehensive and diverse
[55:09] and complex and largely in the service
[55:10] sector and not necessarily terribly
[55:12] material intensive. But it is not
[55:14] currently in its current configuration
[55:16] polit as politically powerful as narrow
[55:18] interests of those who are mobilizing
[55:21] key swing states and qu swing districts
[55:24] around you know the members of the
[55:26] United workers or the prospect of
[55:29] re-industrializing Ohio. Um so you end
[55:32] up with these in their own terms close
[55:35] to deniialist kind of visions of saving
[55:38] the American working class by building
[55:39] chip factories which it just doesn't it
[55:42] doesn't add up. couple of thousand
[55:43] people in a chip factory. The problem of
[55:44] the American working class is problems
[55:46] of tens of millions of people
[55:47] who can't afford
[55:50] you know what for a rich society should
[55:52] just be the basics of affordable
[55:54] housing, health care, transport, elder
[55:58] care.
[55:59] In the 1980s in Britain, the feminist
[56:02] Anna Coot said the the key question is
[56:05] not how do we re-industrialize to secure
[56:07] full employment, but how do we care for
[56:08] and support our children? Uh I I think
[56:11] uh and it is utterly mindbending to me
[56:15] that that does just doesn't cut through
[56:18] like it's it's and and it it's really
[56:20] telling that it has this little purchase
[56:22] in I mean in the UK okay at least at
[56:25] least there was there's elements of an
[56:27] infrastructure of child care but no
[56:29] practically no society on earth let
[56:31] alone any rich society spends as little
[56:34] on childare as the United States and
[56:36] that this doesn't public money that is
[56:38] the private level of course is all
[56:39] manners self provisioning just
[56:41] exorbitant and extraordinary um costs
[56:43] for families in a city like New York
[56:45] which is where Mamani of course gets his
[56:47] momentum from
[56:48] a real social crisis
[56:51] but it's it's I I find I find that I
[56:53] find that wholly convincing as a as an
[56:55] optic on the on the impass of democratic
[56:58] politics under capitalist conditions in
[57:00] the US right now. Yeah. So is there a
[57:02] very broad
[57:05] politics I might even say of a kind of
[57:07] freedom
[57:08] yeah imminent to that emerges out of the
[57:10] experience of climate catastrophe which
[57:13] is rather than a story of industrial
[57:15] progress a claim like capitalism has
[57:20] broken and destroyed the world is
[57:23] breaking and destroying the world um and
[57:25] we want to repair what's broken we want
[57:28] to care for um people who are abandoned
[57:32] um by by de-industrializing never fully
[57:36] post-industrial capitalism in the global
[57:38] north. Um, is there a class politics
[57:41] that assembles
[57:44] people abandoned, people uh declared
[57:47] surplus to requirements um for quite a a
[57:51] radical vision of uh well what's
[57:53] sometimes called degrowth instead of the
[57:57] obsession that we now have from the
[57:58] British state with the idea that
[58:01] returning to mid 20th century or even
[58:04] mid 2000 first decade of the 21st
[58:06] century growth rates is the only way to
[58:08] make anything better. Um
[58:11] do can we think about politics beyond
[58:14] that obsession with growth?
[58:16] Well, I mean to just the first part of
[58:18] your of your question um there was such
[58:20] a project had an aim. It had a life had
[58:23] a beginning had an end and it was broken
[58:25] and it lost in the in the struggles of
[58:28] 2021 2022.
[58:30] You mean the green deal?
[58:31] The green new deal. Yeah. But that was
[58:32] that kind of politics and wanted, you
[58:34] know, credit where credit is due. That
[58:35] was really quite
[58:37] powerfully formulated precisely that
[58:39] position. And on its leftwing, it was
[58:40] also anti-imperialist. And the only
[58:42] people that spoke up against the
[58:44] increasingly evident hawkish turn
[58:47] towards China of the Biden
[58:48] administration in 2021 were not the
[58:50] Greens in Germany or people like that,
[58:51] but the but the squad
[58:54] who two times made an effort to
[58:56] rock what they saw was the escalating
[58:58] sort of militaryindustrial appropriation
[59:00] of the green energy agenda in 21 to to
[59:02] add to their eternal credit like saw
[59:04] this and and said it out loud. Um
[59:08] talking about leftwingers in the US
[59:09] Congress.
[59:09] Yeah, left wingers in the US Congress.
[59:10] the other the squad. Um and um that's a
[59:14] that's a tough that's a tough position
[59:16] to be in that those people have to be
[59:17] brave and they face just vituprative
[59:20] assault and are sustained by communities
[59:22] of voters who are willing to bear the
[59:23] price of the marginalization that goes
[59:25] with voting for those people. So it's
[59:27] it's a it's it's so that isn't an
[59:30] abstract question like I don't have to
[59:32] imagine it. It was there and and it was
[59:34] defeated, but it was real. And I think
[59:36] of Mandani and the mobilization in New
[59:39] York as a as another iteration of an
[59:41] attempt to bootstrap that kind of
[59:42] politics on the degrowth agenda. I mean,
[59:46] my only problem with degrowth really is
[59:48] the label and the political question of
[59:51] how you do it, how you get there. I
[59:53] think it seems to me I mean a evident
[59:56] that for rich societies which by any
[59:59] reasonable standard have already reached
[01:00:01] you know per capita a levels of
[01:00:02] affluence that satisfy the conditions of
[01:00:05] freedom and flourishing the central
[01:00:07] priority is no longer aggregate average
[01:00:09] growth which can be wholly misleading
[01:00:11] because of inequality
[01:00:13] um dramatically so in the US and the
[01:00:16] priority should all be about quality of
[01:00:18] life distribution basic uh the the basic
[01:00:21] infrastructure of social reproduction,
[01:00:23] the mobilization of both the workers and
[01:00:25] the clients, customers in that
[01:00:27] relationship. Um, that's I just that's
[01:00:30] clear, right? And as you say, like why
[01:00:32] would you not mount a democratic
[01:00:33] politics around that central question of
[01:00:35] how do we care? I would say both for our
[01:00:36] children and our elders
[01:00:38] and how do we how do we care for people
[01:00:40] with illness and mental health? Like
[01:00:41] those for me are like
[01:00:43] you answer those questions and like
[01:00:46] we're we're for real. Um the problem is
[01:00:50] and nor is it like debatable
[01:00:53] that that in societies in Europe
[01:00:55] overwhelmingly the rates of growth now
[01:00:57] are so small that you know what you have
[01:00:59] like Rachel Reeves huffing and puffing
[01:01:00] about 0.8% peranom or the Germans going
[01:01:03] to 0. These are barely measurable
[01:01:04] numbers which are rounding errors in
[01:01:07] statistics which you know they mean
[01:01:09] something but they are not supposed to
[01:01:10] mean something at that level. No serious
[01:01:12] economic statistician is going to say
[01:01:14] I'm going to die on the hill of whether
[01:01:15] it was 0.5 or 0.8% growth. It's
[01:01:18] ludicrous.
[01:01:19] So it's it's it's a redux ad absurd. I
[01:01:21] mean they're making themselves laughing
[01:01:22] stock by engaging in this. That's
[01:01:24] clearly not what the reason why it
[01:01:25] matters, however, is that clearly tens
[01:01:27] of millions of people in Britain have
[01:01:29] experienced declining real living
[01:01:30] standards and are really hard up and
[01:01:33] struggling and the cost of living in a
[01:01:34] city like London, even for somebody from
[01:01:36] New York, is completely eyewatering
[01:01:39] and something needs to be done about it.
[01:01:41] And they just reach for this old formula
[01:01:43] of like, well, growth is the answer. And
[01:01:45] it's clearly not. Um but then the
[01:01:49] question is how do you build a coalition
[01:01:51] to on the double side like how do you
[01:01:53] it's the hegemonic project like you've
[01:01:55] got to build your own coalition
[01:01:57] formulate the alternative
[01:01:59] and on the other hand silence the other
[01:02:01] side right this has got to be a politics
[01:02:03] of power it can't be a politics for me
[01:02:05] one of the real you know kind of
[01:02:07] ambiguous turns of of the just
[01:02:09] transition talks into the 2010s which
[01:02:11] came out of the labor movement all over
[01:02:12] the world in the US in South Africa is
[01:02:15] that a just transition cannot be a
[01:02:17] politic politics that leaves the no one
[01:02:18] behind. We've got to leave some people
[01:02:21] behind. There has to be a hard-edged
[01:02:24] politics of coalitions in democracies.
[01:02:26] You don't need 100% consent. You need a
[01:02:28] solid majority that sustains you to push
[01:02:30] through radical change which changes the
[01:02:32] distributional bargain. And your claim
[01:02:34] has al got to be at some level that
[01:02:37] broadly speaking that's justifiable on
[01:02:39] some calculus that applies to a broader
[01:02:41] group. Otherwise, you're really engaged
[01:02:42] in a kind of sectarian politics. But
[01:02:45] that is what's the first is the problem
[01:02:46] of power is the central question right
[01:02:48] and that's a question that has to be
[01:02:50] posed at the level of three levels I
[01:02:52] would say electorally whatever your
[01:02:53] electoral system is you have to play it
[01:02:55] and you have to win it and the democrats
[01:02:56] are at it and we suffer the
[01:02:58] consequences in Britain as well we're
[01:03:01] staring at this reality after the local
[01:03:02] election results of five parties all
[01:03:04] between 16 and 26% with the first pass
[01:03:06] the post system like it's a recipe for
[01:03:09] randomness right so you got to win
[01:03:11] you've got to build political economy
[01:03:12] coalitions So interest groups and then
[01:03:15] you have to you have to you have to get
[01:03:17] at the technocracy. you have to get at
[01:03:19] the inside levers of power and corbinism
[01:03:22] had elements of that kind of project as
[01:03:24] you well know and um but that's that's
[01:03:27] when we say degrowth
[01:03:29] it's got to meet those that standard
[01:03:31] and um currently it doesn't right and
[01:03:34] the politics is very often formulated in
[01:03:36] a rather nakedly normative terms and uh
[01:03:39] I don't have a lot of patience for that
[01:03:42] because I think it also because it's
[01:03:43] formulated as an as an empty normativity
[01:03:46] it can often appear detach from reality
[01:03:48] and that doesn't do the cause any good.
[01:03:50] Like we can't afford to appear out of
[01:03:53] touch with the reality. And the problem
[01:03:55] is it leaves the scene to people like
[01:03:57] Reeves who are going to celebrate 0.8%
[01:04:00] growth which is clearly not.
[01:04:02] You see what I'm saying? We're caught in
[01:04:03] a kind of bad it's not really even a
[01:04:05] dialectic. We're caught in a bad
[01:04:06] standoff
[01:04:08] between a politics of degrowth which
[01:04:10] isn't really a politics
[01:04:11] and a politics of growth which isn't
[01:04:13] really a politics either.
[01:04:16] Yeah. Yeah, I think I would just think
[01:04:17] of the assembly of subjects of of
[01:04:20] interest groups into a kind of coalition
[01:04:23] as involving trying to leave behind
[01:04:26] capitalists as involving trying to
[01:04:28] trying ultimately to leave behind those
[01:04:30] people who inappropriate.
[01:04:32] That's really it's a dangerous thing to
[01:04:33] do and the successful programs of
[01:04:35] transformation have generally involved
[01:04:37] coalitions with some capitalists. So you
[01:04:39] have to pick your partners and um you
[01:04:42] have to find the weak spots and you have
[01:04:44] to find the good victims. And coal for
[01:04:46] instance this is the strategy the hard
[01:04:48] edge strategy of climate is is that
[01:04:52] around 2021 and the Glasgow cop for all
[01:04:54] of its rasmatas and Boris Johnson and
[01:04:56] Mark Carney and all of you know the
[01:04:58] mobilization ofund$133
[01:05:01] trillion dollars of finance. The hard
[01:05:03] edge thing was that a bunch of NOS's and
[01:05:05] a bunch of activists realize that coal
[01:05:07] is a sitting duck.
[01:05:08] And in so far as Britain has really made
[01:05:10] decarbonization, of course, it is the
[01:05:13] the the politics of coal and it's the
[01:05:16] destruction of the NUM
[01:05:18] in the 1980s which opened the door in
[01:05:20] Britain to this ruthless private big
[01:05:23] corporate driven offshore wind. It isn't
[01:05:25] even British companies that are plugged
[01:05:27] into the unbundled privatized British
[01:05:29] electricity system. And so it's a very
[01:05:31] rapid decarbonization by global
[01:05:33] standards. But it is also on the on the
[01:05:36] against the backdrop of that of that of
[01:05:38] that. This isn't neoliberalism as a
[01:05:40] technocracy. This is neoliberalism's
[01:05:42] class. We were saying the destruction of
[01:05:44] the blocking labor coalition. Compare
[01:05:46] and contrast with Germany notionally the
[01:05:48] great leader of green politics in
[01:05:50] Europe.
[01:05:51] Nowhere near as far down the
[01:05:52] decarbonization route. And part of it is
[01:05:55] the rear guard action of a really small
[01:05:57] group of mine workers um who've like
[01:06:00] delayed and and forced a massive delay
[01:06:03] in so I don't think of either of these
[01:06:05] as models.
[01:06:06] Um but uh that's what I would think of
[01:06:09] as being instructive in terms of
[01:06:11] thinking about this this coalition that
[01:06:13] you're talking about. like where are the
[01:06:15] you could have this is a really
[01:06:16] underrated fact in um 2016 when Trump
[01:06:20] came back into power you could have
[01:06:22] bought the entire coal sector in America
[01:06:26] for less than a billion dollars because
[01:06:27] all of the major coal actors were
[01:06:28] bankrupt
[01:06:29] so you could have just nationalized them
[01:06:30] for peanuts I mean this is after all
[01:06:32] part of the politics of the British
[01:06:33] Labor government after 45 as well they
[01:06:35] picked the easy targets which were
[01:06:36] failing industries in the 1920s and 30s
[01:06:38] and you nationalize those risk of course
[01:06:40] is you end up then in public ownership
[01:06:42] of bankrupt businesses So, but if the
[01:06:45] aim of the game is actually to shut them
[01:06:47] down,
[01:06:48] that's the moment to strike because you
[01:06:50] you're not this isn't like as Andreas
[01:06:52] Malm would say the spectacular
[01:06:54] transaction that is involved in the
[01:06:55] emancipation of slaves against
[01:06:57] compensation like this the coal mines
[01:06:59] are the market is telling you worth
[01:07:01] nothing.
[01:07:02] So, nationalize them at that moment and
[01:07:04] shut them down. But then you could think
[01:07:06] of coal miners as as part of as
[01:07:08] increasingly actually being declared
[01:07:09] surplus to requirements part of
[01:07:10] well then what you then of course then
[01:07:12] the constructive politics begins of how
[01:07:14] you then how you then work with those
[01:07:16] comm those communities and it depends
[01:07:18] what sort of mining you're talking
[01:07:19] about. It all becomes very technical
[01:07:20] because we think of mining as 1980s pit
[01:07:23] mining but of course modern mining is
[01:07:24] open is open cast. It's massive. There's
[01:07:27] hardly there's hardly any workers
[01:07:29] involved. It's it's so gigantic in its
[01:07:32] in its scale.
[01:07:34] And the quest, so the question then
[01:07:36] becomes rather than how do we construct
[01:07:38] a hard-edged climate politics that
[01:07:39] leaves behind miners,
[01:07:41] how do we um including in places where
[01:07:45] people have been mining for a long time
[01:07:46] and where their communities are being
[01:07:47] devastated,
[01:07:48] construct a politics that gives people a
[01:07:50] future?
[01:07:51] Absolutely.
[01:07:52] Um
[01:07:52] and that that that exactly a better
[01:07:54] future.
[01:07:55] Yeah. Um and a better one than a future
[01:07:57] that involves destroying people's lungs
[01:07:58] and you know,
[01:07:58] well, a healthier Yeah. I mean this is
[01:08:00] the this is again the kind of material
[01:08:02] politics of climate like the major
[01:08:04] drivers of climate damage
[01:08:07] are ultimately also air polluting and
[01:08:08] like in the west these things become
[01:08:10] separated because of the chronology
[01:08:11] because we deal with the most grievous
[01:08:12] air pollution um which was smog in a
[01:08:15] city like London you know there were
[01:08:16] people were dying literally as a result
[01:08:17] of intense smog and in China of course
[01:08:19] all the way down to the very recent past
[01:08:21] but we deal with it early in the west so
[01:08:23] climate becomes this abstract abstract
[01:08:25] remote perfect for neoliberal
[01:08:26] colonization it's the reason why people
[01:08:28] like me love because it's the most
[01:08:30] abstract problem you could possibly
[01:08:32] imagine, right? It's like gaming the
[01:08:34] development of the global economy in
[01:08:36] terms of CO2 metrics and modeling it
[01:08:38] that way. And that's part of also its
[01:08:40] democratic deficit as a politics. It's
[01:08:42] really hard to get from climate models
[01:08:45] to anything anyone immediately cares
[01:08:46] about. Except if you're living right
[01:08:48] next to a coal fired power station and
[01:08:50] you can see your child is dying from
[01:08:52] asthma and the entire place. My my mom
[01:08:54] grew up in Sheffield like the entire
[01:08:56] place is caked with cold dust. H
[01:09:01] I wonder then if alongside canes we know
[01:09:04] another very different 20th century
[01:09:06] model for thinking about political
[01:09:09] subjects and reinventing socialism which
[01:09:12] is Lenin.
[01:09:13] Yeah.
[01:09:13] Um and one of the differences you know
[01:09:16] Lenin faces
[01:09:18] the historic crisis of a certain kind of
[01:09:21] Marxist optimism in the labor movement
[01:09:23] in places like Britain ascending
[01:09:25] gradually until it reaches such strength
[01:09:26] that it can overthrow capitalism.
[01:09:29] He faces instead a labor movement in
[01:09:30] places like Britain split apart by
[01:09:32] imperialism.
[01:09:33] And he reimagines a political subject
[01:09:36] that includes peasants in Russia,
[01:09:38] workers in Britain and colonized
[01:09:40] peasants too in India and China. Chinese
[01:09:42] nationalist
[01:09:43] Chinese nationalists and yeah um um
[01:09:46] and he sees that world right he's one of
[01:09:49] the first modern thinkers of of the
[01:09:52] global condition of what we call
[01:09:53] globalization and the rather flat
[01:09:55] sociological term and he sees it much
[01:09:56] more dramatically and he realizes the
[01:09:58] weight of Asia in that story as well
[01:10:00] so he he he rethinks the sort of space
[01:10:02] of of politics away from a western
[01:10:05] centric nationalist exactly exactly and
[01:10:07] he also rethinks the time because uh he
[01:10:10] has a sense of the coming of catastrophe
[01:10:12] World War I and it's not just a linear
[01:10:13] story of progress. He's trying to think
[01:10:16] a possible politics um that emerges out
[01:10:20] of the agency of people subordinated and
[01:10:23] dominated by a capitalist world system
[01:10:25] rather than emerging from the standpoint
[01:10:28] of state technocrats and asking who can
[01:10:29] we bring into our coalition and who can
[01:10:31] we is is there a
[01:10:32] or emerging pure fully formed as the
[01:10:35] universal class the proletarian
[01:10:37] as one single universal class
[01:10:38] is the 1848 the kind of Marxist vision
[01:10:41] of that phase.
[01:10:42] Exactly.
[01:10:43] Yeah. He's so I mean just you know like
[01:10:44] I in my middle book my third book which
[01:10:47] which is my like toughest book I think I
[01:10:50] was just strugg I was absolutely
[01:10:51] struggling with Latin because it is so
[01:10:53] struggling from my standpoint because it
[01:10:55] is so incredibly compelling
[01:10:57] and he writes this stuff like blog
[01:10:59] posting it's like he's the first
[01:11:01] substacker if you if you like read his
[01:11:03] if it comes to us that way because if
[01:11:05] you read his works online at marxist.org
[01:11:07] or whatever. You can literally read him
[01:11:09] day by day writing the most brilliant
[01:11:12] political blog ever composed in real
[01:11:14] time. It's it's completely
[01:11:17] it's conjunct analysis.
[01:11:18] It's conjunct analysis. It is in medius
[01:11:20] race as you know in the middle of things
[01:11:22] written from the middle of things
[01:11:24] but constantly searching for the the
[01:11:27] structure. I mean
[01:11:28] yeah I think you know canes and well for
[01:11:31] me the three are Lenin, canes and
[01:11:33] Schmidt. I mean the German the German
[01:11:35] conservative You know, of course, one
[01:11:38] shouldn't worship these individuals
[01:11:39] because there, you know, Grahamshy in
[01:11:40] the notebooks is doing something
[01:11:42] similar. Bin in fact anticipates Lenin
[01:11:44] as Hobson before. But there's a millure
[01:11:46] of commentary which in these figures
[01:11:48] reaches
[01:11:50] well they're in our situation
[01:11:52] like we we not for nothing we model
[01:11:55] ourselves on them because we're in the
[01:11:56] same soup that they're in like 100 years
[01:11:59] down the line. So Lenin in 191213
[01:12:03] finds that Europe is now he says going
[01:12:06] to just experience the reverberations of
[01:12:08] developments in Asia.
[01:12:09] Um
[01:12:10] amazing. Yeah.
[01:12:11] You are someone who has understood that
[01:12:15] world historic provincializing of Europe
[01:12:17] within world capitalism.
[01:12:19] Um
[01:12:20] yeah I'm trying to live it like
[01:12:21] absolutely. Yeah. I'm trying to learning
[01:12:24] Chinese every day. I spent an hour this
[01:12:26] morning like Yeah. Yeah.
[01:12:29] But if the Keynesian hope might be um
[01:12:34] what kinds of um
[01:12:38] managers can one find in China as he
[01:12:41] once found them in the Soviet Union.
[01:12:43] Yeah. Yeah.
[01:12:44] Um who can smooth over the social
[01:12:47] problems of our world. The Leninist hope
[01:12:49] of course was in revolution that
[01:12:52] entangled China and Russia and Britain.
[01:12:55] So it's a different
[01:12:56] Yeah. But Mao back in the picture.
[01:12:58] Sorry. like
[01:13:00] but yes absolutely I mean Maro after all
[01:13:04] is not Lenin in the sense that he is
[01:13:06] even more immous race than Lenin right
[01:13:08] he is in the middle of the struggle um
[01:13:12] so how do so so I I want to ask how your
[01:13:15] liberalism engages
[01:13:18] China now um and thinks about the
[01:13:20] peripheral position increasingly of of
[01:13:23] places like Britain and even America um
[01:13:26] because there are two kinds of obvious
[01:13:29] liberal reactions to the rise of China.
[01:13:32] One is
[01:13:33] to double down on claims that liberal
[01:13:35] democracy involves voting once every few
[01:13:38] years and various kinds of civil
[01:13:40] liberties um and perhaps even you know
[01:13:43] the freedom to organize trade unions
[01:13:44] though there's not that much of that in
[01:13:45] Britain but there's more of it than
[01:13:46] there is in China. Um
[01:13:48] yeah, the consequences of butting up
[01:13:50] against that in China are more grievous.
[01:13:52] Right? So there's a kind of there's a
[01:13:54] there's a terrified view that the end of
[01:13:57] western civilization is going to be the
[01:13:59] rise of something much worse and that
[01:14:00] we'll come to appreciate the limited
[01:14:02] freedoms that liberal democracy has
[01:14:04] afforded in the west. Um and then
[01:14:06] there's another liberal view that I
[01:14:08] think is is in some sense the more
[01:14:10] Keynesian liberal view that is delighted
[01:14:12] by um what seems like a more efficient
[01:14:15] technocratic uh uh management of the
[01:14:18] state in China than has been possible in
[01:14:20] the west for a long time. There's a
[01:14:21] question of whether that's true or a
[01:14:22] kind of racist image of sort of Chinese
[01:14:24] efficient calculating machines. Is that
[01:14:26] the orientalism of the orient?
[01:14:28] Um but there's a kind of adulatory
[01:14:30] liberalism about China. um um as well as
[01:14:34] a highly terrified liberalism about
[01:14:36] China and you're I think sometimes
[01:14:37] associated with that adulatory position.
[01:14:39] Yeah. Know people get people get me or
[01:14:41] in the other one in other words that I'm
[01:14:43] actually just the naive fellow traveler
[01:14:46] of a repressive regime. Right. Right. So
[01:14:48] both No, that's what I mean. That's the
[01:14:49] No, they're both like one one is a one I
[01:14:52] get accused of like under not
[01:14:54] understanding the tech the the in their
[01:14:56] own terms technically deficient Chinese
[01:14:58] solutions and on the other being like
[01:15:01] willfully blind to the repression and
[01:15:03] the violence or indeed even in the
[01:15:04] payoff
[01:15:06] um the the Chinese regime
[01:15:08] and uh I just find it I'm not a big one
[01:15:12] for historical analogies as you know
[01:15:14] because I'm so interested in just the
[01:15:15] protein force of change but nevertheless
[01:15:18] I I mean friends we have been here
[01:15:20] before and there are things we can learn
[01:15:23] from how one navigates this kind of
[01:15:25] space and the obvious analogies
[01:15:27] obviously to to Stalinism and the 1930s
[01:15:30] and the popular front moment and the
[01:15:33] struggles the intellectuals progressives
[01:15:34] around the world went through in that
[01:15:36] moment in defining their position
[01:15:37] including my grandparents
[01:15:39] um and the choices they made of course
[01:15:41] have echoed through my life um which was
[01:15:45] to side with the Soviet Union and indeed
[01:15:46] commit themselves to to its it it's it
[01:15:49] its power and its project. Um
[01:15:52] to spy for it.
[01:15:52] To spy. Yeah. My grandfather was a was a
[01:15:54] KGB uh asset.
[01:15:58] Um
[01:16:00] and and it's just such it's you know
[01:16:03] it's so it makes me so impatient because
[01:16:05] it's just so such poor thinking on both
[01:16:07] sides. It it's and and and it's also so
[01:16:11] blind to actual Chinese history, China's
[01:16:14] own history because you you moved but I
[01:16:16] wanted to insist on Mao so much, right?
[01:16:17] Because what's so striking about the
[01:16:20] Chinese revolution is they of course see
[01:16:21] the Soviet revolution and its
[01:16:25] defformation under Stalin and Mao's
[01:16:27] entire politics in the 50s60s and the
[01:16:29] cultural revolution is about about
[01:16:31] specific well both diplomatic relations
[01:16:34] with the Soviet Union and threat of
[01:16:35] Soviet invasion and B the analysis that
[01:16:38] one has to fight against
[01:16:39] bureaucratization and the and the which
[01:16:42] leads to
[01:16:44] the this protein catastrophic violent
[01:16:48] and yet also transformative process of
[01:16:50] the cultural revolution without which
[01:16:51] you can't see or think amongst modern
[01:16:53] China.
[01:16:55] Um, and that's where we're going to
[01:16:57] start from, right? And we're not going
[01:16:58] to we're not going to we're not going to
[01:17:00] indulge in a kind of uh this kind of
[01:17:03] external liberalism that says, "Oh my
[01:17:05] god, they don't respect freedoms in the
[01:17:07] same way we do." Or on the other hand,
[01:17:09] like, "Aren't their high-speed trains
[01:17:10] fantastic for heaven's sake?" So, so
[01:17:13] yeah, my my engagement is trying to
[01:17:18] um develop a well a practice of of un
[01:17:22] you know of of of of engaging with China
[01:17:25] including with the regime
[01:17:27] um of deep immersion um in the
[01:17:31] undergrowth of Chinese oppositional
[01:17:33] culture uh which one has to talk about
[01:17:36] carefully because of the people involved
[01:17:39] um which I which I for me serves as a
[01:17:43] constant internal check on my my
[01:17:45] technocratic enthusiasm.
[01:17:48] Um I don't really need I don't think an
[01:17:50] internal check on given my family's past
[01:17:53] on the repression and like that's like
[01:17:55] it's barbarous and I don't have any
[01:17:56] illusions about how somebody like me
[01:17:58] would end up fairing in a system like
[01:18:00] that, right? Um and I that's not because
[01:18:02] I like glorify as a dissident. It's just
[01:18:04] I see what it does to my analoges there
[01:18:06] and the choices they have to make. And
[01:18:08] if you don't want to end up as a
[01:18:09] dissident, what you have to constantly
[01:18:11] navigate and walk that line. And so no,
[01:18:13] the bigger project is to try and
[01:18:14] understand this
[01:18:17] um as this absolutely radical new stage
[01:18:21] of
[01:18:23] this project we've been talking about.
[01:18:25] You know, we start in the 1850s as you
[01:18:27] did at the beginning of our conversation
[01:18:29] and we go through the crisis of the
[01:18:31] 1970s which of course were far more
[01:18:32] violent and transformative and
[01:18:34] existential in China than anywhere else.
[01:18:36] And out of that, to put it really
[01:18:38] crudely, comes the victory, yes, of the
[01:18:42] hard developmentalist
[01:18:45] wing of the CPC. Right? Development is
[01:18:48] the hard truth is Jen Xiaoing's key
[01:18:50] thing. Not I love western markets or the
[01:18:53] rule of law or pluralism or opening up.
[01:18:56] But development is the hard truth. It's
[01:18:59] literally what Stalin says
[01:19:00] to the factory managers in 3132. Either
[01:19:03] we do this or they crush us. That is
[01:19:05] what Denoping is echoing, right? And
[01:19:08] everything that comes after that is a
[01:19:11] continuation of that logic that without
[01:19:13] development you are at the mercy of
[01:19:14] other forces and all the opening up that
[01:19:17] happens. No one in the west should
[01:19:18] exaggerate the extent to which that was
[01:19:20] really a comprehensive surrender or the
[01:19:22] willingness of the CPC, the Communist
[01:19:25] Party to invent itself to course correct
[01:19:29] against what they see is the subversion
[01:19:31] of the autonomy of the party under the
[01:19:33] gigantic socioeconomic transformation
[01:19:35] that they've unleashed. So they are in
[01:19:37] my view the latest innovators in the
[01:19:41] party form as a form of political power
[01:19:43] which is quite distinct from little mod
[01:19:45] liberals and models in the west where we
[01:19:46] have political parties that take turns
[01:19:48] to govern you know or somebody like
[01:19:50] canes would say you know I'm far too I
[01:19:52] think proud a person not to belong to a
[01:19:53] party like I'm a party man and I'm a
[01:19:55] liberal but that's not what being a
[01:19:56] member of the CPC means
[01:19:59] and know I think one could draw
[01:20:00] analogies there to Modi and the BJP and
[01:20:02] RSS as the kind of foundation of that
[01:20:05] kind of project or EDA AK in Turkey all
[01:20:08] of which emerge from the fires of real
[01:20:10] struggles um for power hard not
[01:20:12] struggles and have innovated forms of
[01:20:17] well they're not democratic strictly AK
[01:20:19] and BJP are different but they're
[01:20:21] plebbeit they enjoy absolutely mass
[01:20:23] support they're hegemonic in their
[01:20:25] aspiration for sure these are not merely
[01:20:28] you know repressive um sort of minor
[01:20:31] totalitarian experiments they are
[01:20:33] transformative national projects which
[01:20:35] involve of a reconfiguration of the
[01:20:37] relationship with the state and then yes
[01:20:39] let's talk about the railways
[01:20:41] but but only within the context of
[01:20:43] understanding what that choice was about
[01:20:46] the railway choice in China was made in
[01:20:48] 2008 2009 against the backdrop of what
[01:20:51] they understood as this epic screw up in
[01:20:53] western capitalism this collapse of
[01:20:55] western leadership in the world economy
[01:20:57] and very explicitly you see it said out
[01:21:00] loud the realization that major economic
[01:21:04] crises are followed by major surges in
[01:21:06] technological innovation and again and
[01:21:08] again in modern history and they
[01:21:09] literally do the math. China has missed
[01:21:11] out on these opportunities and this one
[01:21:13] they are not going to miss out on
[01:21:14] because that is the root of their
[01:21:16] subordination. So they see this as a
[01:21:18] sovereigntist project. That's what those
[01:21:20] railways are about. They're about
[01:21:21] building dominance in a certain sort of
[01:21:22] technology and outplaying the Europeans
[01:21:25] and the Japanese who are competing
[01:21:26] there. And that's also true of green
[01:21:27] energy. So those solar panels are not
[01:21:30] just are not just a a um you know just
[01:21:34] an achievement of green energy. They are
[01:21:36] a statement of this project. And yes
[01:21:38] also as many critical anthropologists
[01:21:40] and sociologists will tell you they are
[01:21:42] claims on the territory of Shing Jang.
[01:21:44] They are claims on the Gobi Desert. They
[01:21:45] are projects of incorporation of Inner
[01:21:47] Mongolia into this multithnic Chinese
[01:21:52] state. So am I am I wrong that um uh
[01:21:58] 20th century
[01:22:00] ways of thinking about politics are in a
[01:22:02] kind of crisis now? Because in fact is
[01:22:07] Chinese capitalism
[01:22:10] is it state capitalism or is it not? Um,
[01:22:14] is it the return of central ideas of the
[01:22:18] nation, the state development that were
[01:22:22] 1950s um, Stalinist ideas? And is is the
[01:22:25] postcript
[01:22:27] only of a western centrism to a
[01:22:29] civilization that's just sort of moving
[01:22:31] its center where the choice we face in
[01:22:34] somewhere like Britain is whether we're
[01:22:35] going to leash ourselves chain ourselves
[01:22:38] to a decaying pro state in America or be
[01:22:43] survile instead to an electrification
[01:22:46] state in China which is also doing a lot
[01:22:48] of coal fired power stations um
[01:22:51] um but has a vision of state power um
[01:22:56] controlling markets but involving
[01:22:58] markets um allied to electrification
[01:23:01] rather than to the fossil fuels that are
[01:23:04] running out. I mean I comrade I would
[01:23:06] just simply say uneven and combined
[01:23:07] development both things are true at the
[01:23:09] same time right
[01:23:10] um and I would so they're both true at
[01:23:13] the same time in that um broadly
[01:23:16] speaking to speak of a postcript as far
[01:23:19] as India Turkey China is concerned is
[01:23:22] vastly premature they've only just
[01:23:24] started
[01:23:25] this is they're just opening the second
[01:23:27] century of Chinese communism and they
[01:23:28] mean that for reals
[01:23:30] at the same time I think you're
[01:23:31] absolutely right in your diagnosis of
[01:23:33] the situation of the west And what we
[01:23:35] need to understand is that whereas once
[01:23:38] um you know you could think of I don't
[01:23:40] know the British general strike of 26
[01:23:42] sends ripples through the communist
[01:23:43] international major strategic
[01:23:45] reassessments on the part of of um of
[01:23:49] leaders of the common turn. Um Britain
[01:23:52] will no longer have that kind of
[01:23:54] relevance. Does that for the 60 odd
[01:23:56] billion people who live on this island
[01:23:58] mean that is relevant? Of course not.
[01:23:59] It's just a local
[01:24:01] it's a local problem with intense local
[01:24:03] significance. And of course because of
[01:24:04] its history a wider appeal and a wider
[01:24:08] interest and it becomes microcosmic and
[01:24:10] yet and fascinating
[01:24:12] um and in the case of the Europeans and
[01:24:15] the Americans equipped as they are with
[01:24:17] very very powerful levers of power I
[01:24:18] mean um that that crisis is matters to
[01:24:22] everyone right America's crisis is to an
[01:24:24] extent everyone's crisis
[01:24:26] um but at the same time yes there is a
[01:24:29] project in Asia the only hesitation
[01:24:31] there would be to I'd urge you not to
[01:24:33] think of that as the extension of the
[01:24:34] 20th century, our history, right? We
[01:24:37] really need to open ourselves to new
[01:24:39] categories, new chronologies. Um
[01:24:43] and also of course to the internal
[01:24:46] critique of that project because because
[01:24:49] for
[01:24:51] you know many many tempted to say most
[01:24:54] rightthinking
[01:24:56] Chinese critical intelligent people that
[01:24:59] I know there is a profound
[01:25:01] disappointment that this should be the
[01:25:03] outcome right this was never and I think
[01:25:06] you were telling me about Hobs's famous
[01:25:08] response to Ignatia right people can see
[01:25:10] this on YouTube where Nazi doing the
[01:25:12] liberal is kind of challenging him on
[01:25:13] his view on Stalinism and Hosworth says
[01:25:15] yeah do you even think this was you know
[01:25:17] only the most naive thought this was
[01:25:19] actually the socialist paradise those
[01:25:20] who of us who thought hard thought of
[01:25:22] this as necessary and better than the
[01:25:24] alternatives and essential as a lever
[01:25:26] against fascism which meant the end of
[01:25:28] the world and that is the spirit in
[01:25:31] which I approach Chinese green
[01:25:32] technology not in the sense that you
[01:25:34] know one sort of surreners to CPC logic
[01:25:38] apart from everything else it's such a
[01:25:40] nationalist project you can't even I
[01:25:41] mean I said this in the LB lecture you
[01:25:43] can't become you know if you wanted to
[01:25:44] be its fellow traveler they not
[01:25:46] accepting offers it's not it doesn't
[01:25:48] operate that way that the Chinese
[01:25:50] Communist Party in it current is is not
[01:25:53] the Marauist party of the 60s
[01:25:56] um so what are the parameters
[01:25:59] for a future
[01:26:02] politics in your view that understands
[01:26:04] the decline of American power that
[01:26:07] doesn't seek desperately to arrest it
[01:26:08] which seems to be the only thing that
[01:26:10] European an states are interested in
[01:26:12] doing at the moment, shoring up NATO, um
[01:26:14] hoping that their western alliance can
[01:26:16] remain. Um what are the contours of an
[01:26:19] alternative politics that doesn't lament
[01:26:21] the decline of uh Western civilization?
[01:26:24] Um sees the move in the center of
[01:26:26] gravity, isn't so stareyed about China
[01:26:29] because they're building lots of
[01:26:30] railways, um uh but is more connected
[01:26:32] instead to those kind of new left
[01:26:34] critiques within China. Um, is there a
[01:26:38] kind of alternative horizon there?
[01:26:40] Well, I'm smiling at you in part because
[01:26:41] you know that when you say, you know,
[01:26:43] what is the framework for me,
[01:26:45] Europe is the only conceivable space in
[01:26:48] which that could be realized. This is
[01:26:49] not wholeheartedly and unapologetically
[01:26:51] endorse like everything the current EU
[01:26:53] in its existing form stands for. But to
[01:26:56] put it another way, the UK in existing
[01:26:59] form cannot be a meaningful unit of that
[01:27:01] kind of project, right? it just
[01:27:04] um and that becomes more evident by by
[01:27:06] the day I would argue. Um and you might
[01:27:09] say that's maybe not the priority but um
[01:27:12] if you ask me like where that space for
[01:27:15] an alternative politics and I took it in
[01:27:17] the spatial direction which was one of
[01:27:18] the options you opened up earlier on
[01:27:20] that certainly is is where is where I
[01:27:23] invest my you know heartbroken hopes
[01:27:26] is in that project. Um and then I do
[01:27:30] think it's a it's a kind of new type of
[01:27:33] pick and mix. It's you know following
[01:27:35] again the template of 1920s Keynesianism
[01:27:38] before its solidification into the
[01:27:40] general theory and technocracy in the
[01:27:42] 50s and 60s.
[01:27:44] It is a question about what is a gender
[01:27:46] and what is not a gender and how do we
[01:27:48] articulate those elements and this
[01:27:51] entire conversation we've been having
[01:27:53] about how you find coalitions how you
[01:27:56] build powerful coalitions around key
[01:27:59] projects of the most of the most of the
[01:28:01] most urgent kind and for me in recent
[01:28:04] years that's been thinking about climate
[01:28:06] change and the energy transition but I
[01:28:08] would I would I would strongly suggest
[01:28:11] that that obviously needs to extend to a
[01:28:13] variety of other domains. And I I know
[01:28:16] one of the areas where you and I differ
[01:28:18] most
[01:28:19] um most deeply around the EU is is
[01:28:22] immigration policy and the and the
[01:28:24] ghastly fortress Europe policy that the
[01:28:26] EU pursues to which I would want to
[01:28:29] counterpose a Keynesian politics of of
[01:28:32] investment um um in this comprehensive
[01:28:36] sense so as to reduce the zero sum. In
[01:28:41] other words, to provide a context in
[01:28:43] which one can handle racism and
[01:28:44] xenophobia in a more constructive way
[01:28:46] because you you you you
[01:28:49] alleviate the distributional struggles
[01:28:51] which which provide provide rocket fuel
[01:28:53] for the for the xenophobes and the
[01:28:55] racists.
[01:28:56] And I you know I I'm I'm out and proud
[01:28:58] on that and I think that you there
[01:29:00] should be a uh it is one of the great
[01:29:02] and outstanding
[01:29:04] challenges for Europe whether narrowly
[01:29:06] conceived as EU or Britain. Our
[01:29:08] relations with Western Asia and Africa
[01:29:11] are the frontier of of a challenging
[01:29:14] politics of the future. And that has to
[01:29:16] go hand inhand with greater openness,
[01:29:18] consistent struggle against racism,
[01:29:20] tacit or otherwise, and this
[01:29:24] comprehensive politics of sustainable
[01:29:26] living that we've been talking about.
[01:29:27] You see here I actually think we get to
[01:29:28] the nub because one of the differences
[01:29:30] between Kanes and Lenin.
[01:29:31] Yes.
[01:29:32] Lenin says everyone should read Kanes's
[01:29:34] economic consequences of the peace, his
[01:29:36] denunciation of the Versail treaty. And
[01:29:38] Lenin says because if you read it you'll
[01:29:40] become a Bolshevik even though Kanes
[01:29:41] wasn't himself because Lenin says Kanes
[01:29:44] has documented the savagery with which
[01:29:45] the victorious powers uh behaved at the
[01:29:48] end of World War I. Kanes of course
[01:29:49] thinks that there's this very open
[01:29:51] contingent space that that those states
[01:29:53] could do otherwise and Lenin has a much
[01:29:55] more fixed account um of how European
[01:29:57] capitalists will behave and I think it's
[01:29:59] there in in that idea of Europe as
[01:30:01] something recoverable you know to me
[01:30:02] Europe is Europe originates the very
[01:30:04] idea of Europe is like the most violent
[01:30:06] idea in world history
[01:30:08] um and and it's no coincidence that a
[01:30:12] European Union is oriented as a fortress
[01:30:15] is oriented in a common agricultural
[01:30:17] policy to impoverish African farmers.
[01:30:19] Um um it has a necolonial relation to
[01:30:22] its own internal periphery to Greece and
[01:30:25] Italy and Ireland even. Um and um
[01:30:29] and I think there was a moment at which
[01:30:32] you sort of grappled with that and came
[01:30:34] out on the right side as far as I'm
[01:30:36] concerned which is in grappling with the
[01:30:38] genocide in Gaza
[01:30:40] where um uh Western civilization shows
[01:30:45] the scale of its brutality with support
[01:30:48] from the Biden administration writing
[01:30:50] the checks who you had previously sort
[01:30:52] of talked to before this moment with
[01:30:54] support from of course the whole
[01:30:55] political establishment in Germany.
[01:30:57] Um um and you know, some people read it,
[01:31:02] some critics on the American right, I
[01:31:04] think implicitly see see the violence in
[01:31:06] Gaza as a sort of Jewish problem. Others
[01:31:09] read it as I I read it as as uh not a
[01:31:12] Jewish problem, but a western
[01:31:13] civilization problem. Reiterating
[01:31:15] Theodore Herzel, founder of Zionism,
[01:31:17] wrote admiringly to Cecil Roads.
[01:31:19] Reiterating the the great British
[01:31:21] colonist of Southern Africa,
[01:31:23] great not in a nice sense. To me, the
[01:31:25] violence written into an idea like
[01:31:27] Europe is there in the killing fields of
[01:31:30] Gaza, and you, a liberal, chose to say,
[01:31:34] "Okay, most of the liberals are doing
[01:31:36] something barbaric in supporting this
[01:31:38] genocide or being silent about it."
[01:31:41] Um, it's really interesting
[01:31:44] because I think my response would be
[01:31:47] that I mean, you posed it, just to
[01:31:49] paraphrase, as a Jewish problem or a
[01:31:51] Western civilization problem. I don't
[01:31:54] know why you don't just simply say it's
[01:31:55] a political problem and that would be my
[01:31:58] position.
[01:31:58] Yeah.
[01:31:59] Um I don't buy I understand that Western
[01:32:02] civilization is continuously invoked to
[01:32:05] justify appalling terror and violence
[01:32:08] and has historically been.
[01:32:11] Um but that's only one use of the term
[01:32:13] and only one possibility in its
[01:32:15] development.
[01:32:17] And the same is true for Europe.
[01:32:20] And I guess I'm fairly committed to a
[01:32:23] project of transformation and
[01:32:25] fungeibility and change and openness
[01:32:29] that however also and this is what we're
[01:32:30] seeing in Israel can also of course
[01:32:33] include terrifying escalations towards
[01:32:36] ever greater levels of violence
[01:32:38] and that's after all what we've seen in
[01:32:40] the Zionist project in the last 20 to 30
[01:32:42] years with Netanyahu emerging as this is
[01:32:44] in no way to downplay the fact that it
[01:32:46] was a settler colonial project from the
[01:32:48] beginning and those are commonly if not
[01:32:50] always violent because of their inherent
[01:32:52] logic. But nevertheless, let's just
[01:32:54] grant that Gaza is is a whole new level
[01:32:57] of absolutely manifest up their
[01:32:59] destruction. In the same way as I would
[01:33:01] say, you know, in the green technology,
[01:33:03] green technology placed a bet on the
[01:33:04] fungibility of energy technology and we
[01:33:06] got Chinese solar, we also got fracking,
[01:33:08] right? You know, if we if we believe in
[01:33:10] this kind of openness of history, then
[01:33:12] we then we have to credit
[01:33:14] um the possibility of total disaster,
[01:33:17] which is clearly where we're at. And um
[01:33:21] but but but I don't do that from a kind
[01:33:24] of deterministic point of view. I do
[01:33:25] that from a kind of constant
[01:33:26] contingency, a matter of constant
[01:33:27] choice. So for my for me, since it's
[01:33:30] very difficult for me to meaningfully
[01:33:31] dissociate myself from Western
[01:33:32] civilization, I think of it as a kind of
[01:33:34] everyday project of it not being bad.
[01:33:36] Like it's an everyday project to wake up
[01:33:38] and be a decent human being, to not be a
[01:33:40] sexist, racist,
[01:33:42] horror, to listen to critiques when they
[01:33:44] happen and to take them seriously. And
[01:33:46] in this case, it wasn't hard. Right.
[01:33:48] This was an opportunity to totally fail
[01:33:50] and it was crucial not to fail.
[01:33:52] Yeah.
[01:33:52] Not in any very dramatic way and I don't
[01:33:54] describe to myself any degree of it was
[01:33:56] just like not failing. Right. People say
[01:33:58] it's great It's just not
[01:34:00] failing. Do not fail at this moment of
[01:34:02] critical judgment where whether or not
[01:34:04] you can tell the difference between
[01:34:06] disaster and something in any way
[01:34:08] defensible is just on it's just you know
[01:34:11] the jud like it's right there in front
[01:34:13] of you.
[01:34:14] So that's that for me is the whole
[01:34:16] thing. we were talking about it like you
[01:34:17] know politics is always the weighing of
[01:34:19] means and ends that never stops and of
[01:34:21] course I recognize as a historian of
[01:34:23] World War II um you know and an
[01:34:26] appreciate of the work of somebody like
[01:34:27] David Ejertton I recognize in the
[01:34:30] particular type of war that Israel was
[01:34:31] fighting in Gaza even to call it a war
[01:34:34] the operation they were conducting the
[01:34:37] distinctive hallmarks of what I've
[01:34:38] called liberal militarism right this is
[01:34:40] standoff militarism where you demonize
[01:34:43] and the enemy you basically establish
[01:34:45] lish a logic where any casualty on your
[01:34:47] side is excessive and that then
[01:34:49] justifies any amount of violence to
[01:34:51] suppress the opponent who in their
[01:34:53] unreasonleness is endlessly confirming
[01:34:54] that they deserve to be destroyed. So on
[01:34:57] like no one can no one in Britain can
[01:34:59] distance themselves from that because
[01:35:00] that is the war that we waged from
[01:35:02] around here against Germany in the later
[01:35:04] stages of World War II. And in that
[01:35:05] context I don't disapprove of it.
[01:35:08] I own the violence and I don't think we
[01:35:09] should disapprove of it. You can make
[01:35:11] judgments about whether it was a
[01:35:12] reasonable way of using those resources
[01:35:14] or putting in World War II in World War
[01:35:16] II is
[01:35:17] No, no, no. But it's a matter of
[01:35:19] judgment. Like is, you know, in the
[01:35:20] struggle against fascism.
[01:35:22] Yeah.
[01:35:22] Do I believe in machines that kill
[01:35:24] fascists? Yes, I believe in kill
[01:35:25] machines that kill fascists.
[01:35:26] In the in Gaza, we're talking about the
[01:35:29] illegitimate imposition of a settler
[01:35:32] colonial project that dates to the late
[01:35:34] 19th early 20th century in the 21st
[01:35:36] century. And we say no. Full stop. No,
[01:35:39] not not in my name, not with my support,
[01:35:42] not with my tax dollars, not with my
[01:35:44] acceptance, and not with my approval.
[01:35:46] And nor will I be silent and just sort
[01:35:47] of stand by.
[01:35:48] But World War II is a kind of
[01:35:49] dangerously powerful image because it's
[01:35:51] so exceptional.
[01:35:52] Yes. But it is the tech that it is. But
[01:35:55] when you say western civ, if you're
[01:35:57] looking at when you say and this is our
[01:35:59] kind of war, that's the genealogy.
[01:36:02] It just so happened that the British
[01:36:03] Empire in World War II and French
[01:36:05] imperial power conscripting lots of
[01:36:07] colonized people it then didn't want to
[01:36:08] free happened to be fighting something
[01:36:10] that most of us now regard as so
[01:36:11] thoroughly even worse that we can now
[01:36:13] affirm that war. Even though at the time
[01:36:15] when you say happened, I would say not
[01:36:16] by accident.
[01:36:17] Not by accident.
[01:36:18] No.
[01:36:20] There was something written into the
[01:36:21] logic of Western civilization that meant
[01:36:22] that Britain was better than Germany and
[01:36:25] fought Germany. I mean, there was
[01:36:26] there was something written into the
[01:36:27] logic of historical development that
[01:36:29] placed fascism and Nazism in the
[01:36:33] relationship to British imperial
[01:36:35] liberalism that they were in in the 30s
[01:36:37] and 40s. That was in no way by accident.
[01:36:40] And it is the derailment of the more
[01:36:42] radical project of democracy in the
[01:36:43] Vimmer Republic and its backlash shift.
[01:36:45] I mean this is we should yeah we could
[01:36:47] do three more episodes on this but no I
[01:36:49] don't buy the accidentalism at all
[01:36:51] because that that justifies in your case
[01:36:53] the kind of you enclose World War II in
[01:36:56] a little bubble and say well that's to
[01:36:57] that's the good war the last good war
[01:36:58] and Brits shouldn't argue with the last
[01:37:00] good war and in terms of the political
[01:37:02] health and the culture of Britain it
[01:37:04] would probably be better if we did
[01:37:05] forget World War II because it makes
[01:37:06] people sick sack and sick
[01:37:08] but I was going the other route I was
[01:37:10] going the Bomber Harris route
[01:37:11] yeah sure
[01:37:12] which is which is actually to say
[01:37:15] no What I see in Gaza is something which
[01:37:17] meets your standard of western
[01:37:19] civilization. This is precisely the kind
[01:37:21] kind of war. But in my reading, Western
[01:37:25] civilization comes with the imperative
[01:37:28] to make political choices and moral
[01:37:31] choices associated with those politics.
[01:37:33] It doesn't guarantee that you get it
[01:37:35] right or you get it wrong. And all too
[01:37:37] often and throughout as long as that
[01:37:39] term has been in use, it has more often
[01:37:42] than not opened up the door to disaster.
[01:37:45] But that doesn't mean that that that's a
[01:37:48] useful way for thinking about what that
[01:37:50] disaster is there at that moment.
[01:37:53] But I I think that there's a pretty
[01:37:56] thoroughgoing continuity in this thing
[01:37:59] called Western civilization from
[01:38:00] there are continuitities within it.
[01:38:02] Yeah, it's multiple. It's braided. It
[01:38:05] has many different facets. But there is
[01:38:07] undoubtedly I'm agreeing with you. There
[01:38:08] is one continuity that leads to that.
[01:38:11] But frankly, people have a hard time.
[01:38:13] Think of the last group of settler
[01:38:15] colonials that did a Gaza. Not really in
[01:38:19] the full view of the global press with
[01:38:22] Oh, I think it's I think it's
[01:38:23] exceptional and extraordinary the scale
[01:38:24] of the savagery.
[01:38:26] Yeah.
[01:38:26] In part,
[01:38:28] but it's unusual in part because it's so
[01:38:30] self-discrediting. You'd think in light
[01:38:32] of those continuities like somebody in
[01:38:35] the PR department be saying we this is
[01:38:37] enough. This has got to end.
[01:38:38] Unless if you can secure the support of
[01:38:40] the White House, the PR doesn't matter.
[01:38:41] Which makes this which makes this which
[01:38:44] makes this not just generic western civ
[01:38:47] but something else something more
[01:38:49] complex
[01:38:51] well I think so there's a danger in
[01:38:52] flattening out the conjuncture with all
[01:38:54] of its many things going on into one
[01:38:55] story but the reason I want to to to
[01:38:57] prize out one story
[01:39:00] is because I think that the kind of
[01:39:03] black box of of Keynesianism is the
[01:39:07] might be the the the the structural
[01:39:10] limits
[01:39:11] you want to put a black box of western
[01:39:13] serve against my black box of western
[01:39:14] keynism.
[01:39:15] Well, I think yeah, I think that there's
[01:39:18] a um there's a structural limit in the
[01:39:21] in the kinds of politics that has been
[01:39:25] produced by, you know, in this country
[01:39:27] here in Britain, people who drove
[01:39:28] peasants off the land um to make them
[01:39:30] landless workers, then went to Africa
[01:39:33] and kidnapped people and transported
[01:39:35] them and and enslaved them to work for
[01:39:36] free. Um some of his descendants went to
[01:39:39] the Americas and genocided lots of
[01:39:40] people. I think that that continual
[01:39:42] history that leads up to King Leopold's
[01:39:45] killing fields in the Congo, leads up to
[01:39:47] Agent Orange and Napal destroying people
[01:39:48] in in and lives in Vietnam, leads up to
[01:39:51] the killing fields of Gaza, is only one
[01:39:53] aspect of a story of Western
[01:39:54] civilization that also included, for
[01:39:55] example, the creation of the modern
[01:39:56] labor movement. Absolutely.
[01:39:58] But um but it is such a violent story.
[01:40:02] Yeah. Um and the the the imperialists
[01:40:06] and capitalists who have been part of
[01:40:08] that story are so peculiarly violent in
[01:40:11] their you know the British culture of
[01:40:13] the of the stiff upper lip which can
[01:40:15] plan torture and genocide and then have
[01:40:17] high tea. Yeah.
[01:40:18] Is so contemptuous. Shivanand the great
[01:40:21] British Marxist said European
[01:40:23] civilization is peculiarly contemptuous
[01:40:25] of human love and human life. I think
[01:40:27] there is something peculiarly violent in
[01:40:30] that culture which in my great tragedy,
[01:40:32] you know, a thing I bemoone as a Jew is
[01:40:34] that the Israelis sort of Zionism has
[01:40:36] taken that from the West and tried to
[01:40:37] own it wholesale and abandon what I
[01:40:39] think was our different culture. Um, of
[01:40:40] course, the major tragedy of Zionism is
[01:40:42] for Palestinians, not for Jews, but
[01:40:43] that's my personal uh tragedy. But um um
[01:40:46] I I I think that there is something so
[01:40:48] violent in that
[01:40:50] that that there's a limit to this
[01:40:52] openness, this fungeibility. Um, I think
[01:40:55] that yes, you know, you could get EU
[01:40:56] politicians to uh to agree some kind of
[01:40:59] Marshall plan that would ease the
[01:41:00] conditions that are producing
[01:41:01] anti-migrant politics. But the idea of
[01:41:04] Europe, the idea of Western civilization
[01:41:06] in which there's this peculiarly
[01:41:08] rational enlightened core of the world
[01:41:10] um that should be the center of the
[01:41:13] world.
[01:41:13] I think there's just a violence built
[01:41:15] into that and we need a politics that
[01:41:17] really steps outside it.
[01:41:20] Well, I don't I see I don't I don't
[01:41:22] disagree with you. I mean, I think
[01:41:23] there's clearly a violence built into
[01:41:24] it. Um, I mean, I don't look at, but I'm
[01:41:28] a I'm I'm raised a migrant, right? In
[01:41:31] Germany, I'm coded as a migrant.
[01:41:35] I'm a person with migrant background.
[01:41:37] Um, and I grew up with the first cohort
[01:41:39] of non-German children that we
[01:41:42] incorporated. Literally, my year was the
[01:41:43] first year that any of us would join
[01:41:45] German schools. And the total
[01:41:47] transformation of German society, well
[01:41:50] not total but the dramatic
[01:41:51] transformations especially of urban
[01:41:52] Germany over the course of my lifetime
[01:41:54] is one of the great wonders of my of my
[01:41:57] life. And to find myself now as like one
[01:41:59] of the senior figures of the migrant
[01:42:01] intellect bizarre migrant intellectual
[01:42:03] community was literally the first grow
[01:42:04] of kids to be taken into schools has
[01:42:06] been very formative for me. So I don't
[01:42:08] I'm the last person [clears throat] who
[01:42:10] would want to argue with you that
[01:42:13] European culture as it was understood,
[01:42:16] you know, I'm old enough to remember
[01:42:17] when it really was literally still
[01:42:19] colonial. Forget about postc colonial.
[01:42:22] Um it needs ongoing transformation. But
[01:42:25] I would just I would just see that not
[01:42:27] as you know the in the insurmountable
[01:42:31] limit of my Keynesianism. I would just
[01:42:33] say that's, you know, I would add that
[01:42:35] to the list of of, you know, drugs, sex,
[01:42:39] and multiculturalism or drugs, sex, and
[01:42:42] take your f the interculturalism or that
[01:42:46] would be on that list of, and I I would
[01:42:49] completely agree with you that it's,
[01:42:51] you know, I'm going to go and spend the
[01:42:52] summer in Berlin because I feel
[01:42:54] comfortable there as a migrant. I know
[01:42:58] you laugh at me when I say this.
[01:42:59] Of course, I laugh at you because you're
[01:43:00] a white guy. guy.
[01:43:01] But but but I am a non You don't have
[01:43:04] the experience of living as a non-native
[01:43:06] speaker.
[01:43:06] Mhm.
[01:43:07] When I open my mouth, other migrant
[01:43:09] people know. And that's weird. And
[01:43:11] Germany's migrant communities,
[01:43:13] Ukrainian, Russian, Polish. No, no, no.
[01:43:14] You're all about owning your standpoint.
[01:43:16] I'm not. But I'm like,
[01:43:17] your standpoint here is a very
[01:43:18] privileged one.
[01:43:19] No, no, of course it is hugely. But what
[01:43:21] I'm saying is that that experience I not
[01:43:25] for a second. Come on. Like deny that.
[01:43:26] It's evidently the case. But the the
[01:43:29] point is that I don't I don't for a
[01:43:32] single second dig in my heels and refuse
[01:43:34] your argument that there is something
[01:43:36] there are boundaries to European
[01:43:38] national identities in particular
[01:43:42] and European identity in general on the
[01:43:44] axis of black white and Islam and the
[01:43:47] rest that need fundamentally overcoming
[01:43:51] and renegotiating.
[01:43:53] And
[01:43:54] in part what I'm saying is that I h I I
[01:43:56] I I I think I understand that in my
[01:43:59] bones not because I belong on the other
[01:44:01] side for heaven's sake but that I have
[01:44:03] this odd experience of being on the
[01:44:05] other side of the barricades the
[01:44:08] Keynesian scenario we keep coming back
[01:44:09] to and actually being on the other side
[01:44:11] irreducibly actually on the other side
[01:44:13] never actually really belonging to the
[01:44:16] white sure but this is where your
[01:44:18] category of western civilization is too
[01:44:20] broad and too and too lumpy on the other
[01:44:22] side of a national divide which is
[01:44:24] really which is really profound and and
[01:44:27] that so I'm I'm really just finding an
[01:44:30] elaborate and personal way of saying I
[01:44:31] agree with you and that that involves
[01:44:34] violence is is evident and that that
[01:44:35] violence needs constant attention
[01:44:39] constant calling out constant
[01:44:40] problematization that Europe should
[01:44:42] never simply be allowed to stand for
[01:44:44] anything good by itself qua Europe you
[01:44:48] won't find any opposition for me on that
[01:44:50] school it needs to demonstrate that it
[01:44:52] means something and can mean something
[01:44:54] else and I'm not given up on that
[01:44:55] project of it demonstrating that's all
[01:44:56] I'm really saying and I don't see any
[01:44:58] other to go back to your original
[01:44:59] question like where between China in the
[01:45:01] US once we get into the g geopolitical
[01:45:03] sphere you know what's your bet like
[01:45:06] standalone UK doing some lexit thing
[01:45:08] come on like
[01:45:10] no not standalone UK but the idea that
[01:45:14] the problem with multiculturalism is
[01:45:16] that not all cultures are equal
[01:45:18] and actually there is one culture
[01:45:20] well I I I I don't don't don't go there.
[01:45:23] I don't hang any. That's just the tag.
[01:45:25] If it canes was writing that manifesto
[01:45:27] in the 1980s, he would probably have put
[01:45:29] multiculturalism there.
[01:45:30] No, but he but he thinks the culture
[01:45:33] that that has to be vanquished. The one
[01:45:36] culture that that that uh that is so
[01:45:38] thoroughly destructive is the culture in
[01:45:41] this country, the British ruling class
[01:45:43] is the culture of the people who run
[01:45:44] Western civilization.
[01:45:45] He obviously can't.
[01:45:46] He obviously can't engage that. And
[01:45:48] that's the culture that's produced
[01:45:49] that's produced the genocides. But I
[01:45:51] mean he but that's a fair point but you
[01:45:53] are bringing us back to dear old Kanes.
[01:45:55] But but that's a fair point but you
[01:45:57] would have to also to grant to him that
[01:45:59] he had a really complicated and fraugh
[01:46:03] relationship to that culture.
[01:46:04] Sure. Sure. And I guess because I'm
[01:46:06] really asking about you and about us and
[01:46:07] about the future. Um um
[01:46:12] when Iran thinks now about the challenge
[01:46:16] in engaging with America of restoring
[01:46:18] deterrence by showing that they are able
[01:46:21] to strike against America so that so
[01:46:24] that the United States gets the message
[01:46:27] and doesn't freely uh attack Iran. I
[01:46:31] think that the Iranians are faced with a
[01:46:33] challenge, a problem that maybe they
[01:46:35] can't treat the Americans like a
[01:46:37] rational uh civilization because there's
[01:46:40] a peculiar pathology. There's a peculiar
[01:46:43] kind of condition of supremacist
[01:46:45] domination
[01:46:46] which is intrinsic to a culture forged
[01:46:50] by stealing other people's land,
[01:46:52] kidnapping and enslaving other people.
[01:46:53] So I think there's some kind of long
[01:46:55] continuity where there's a cultural core
[01:46:57] of of this thing called western
[01:46:59] civilization which sure is flattening to
[01:47:01] make that the whole story of the world
[01:47:02] that we live in right there's lots of
[01:47:04] other kinds of things going on in the
[01:47:05] world that we inhabit but I think that a
[01:47:07] central challenge of politics in this
[01:47:10] period of the decline of western
[01:47:12] civilization
[01:47:13] is to think how that
[01:47:15] class project of the people who have run
[01:47:17] the west for hundreds of years and there
[01:47:19] is some continuity kane talks about it
[01:47:21] going a line going back to John lock
[01:47:23] people who've run the West and who have
[01:47:24] a set of kind of profoundly ingrained
[01:47:27] world views, a worldview in which some
[01:47:29] people matter and other people don't.
[01:47:31] Um um
[01:47:32] but I mean you were you were right to
[01:47:34] sense that maybe here really is the nub
[01:47:35] of it
[01:47:36] because I I mean I see exactly what
[01:47:39] you're saying, but I just think that
[01:47:42] that reading of cultures effects
[01:47:45] is far too deterministic and I it's far
[01:47:48] too deterministic. Like is Pete Hexth
[01:47:51] with his crusading tattoos
[01:47:54] a legitimate quote unquote predictable
[01:47:58] product of a certain strand in Western
[01:48:00] Christianity? Absolutely. He wears it on
[01:48:02] his sleeve, right? He literally says it.
[01:48:05] Is it necessary?
[01:48:07] Obviously not. Because we haven't had
[01:48:09] somebody quite that insane in the
[01:48:11] defense department before and large
[01:48:12] numbers of people in the Pentagon
[01:48:14] thought he was manifestally unsuited to
[01:48:16] the job. and it is the result of a chain
[01:48:18] of situations which have led us to that
[01:48:21] point. Now, is it a mere accident? So,
[01:48:23] to go back to your side of the argument
[01:48:24] that Pete Hath has ended up in that
[01:48:26] position at this moment, no, I would
[01:48:27] concede that it's not because this
[01:48:29] situation is overdetermined and we're
[01:48:30] not just talking about like a kind of
[01:48:32] bonkers lottery in which, you know,
[01:48:35] Donald Trump and his merry bunch of of
[01:48:37] crusaders end up in power. That's not a
[01:48:39] mere lottery result. You can trace lines
[01:48:42] of determination, but are they
[01:48:44] necessary? Is this the normal mode in
[01:48:46] which American power functions? Did
[01:48:48] every other administration up to this
[01:48:49] point or look at the prospect of
[01:48:51] attacking Iran and doing this thing with
[01:48:53] Israel and go, "Well, that looks cool.
[01:48:55] God, I'd really like to fight that war.
[01:48:57] Oh, no, another year. We're not doing
[01:48:59] that." Because you know what? Down the
[01:49:00] line there's this move the Iranians
[01:49:01] could make, which is to close the
[01:49:03] straits of Hormuz, and that really
[01:49:05] wouldn't be good. Remember the Carter
[01:49:06] doctrine? And so that is I'm not going
[01:49:09] to say that's the norm. I'm just going
[01:49:11] to say that up to this point everyone
[01:49:14] else coming out of white western
[01:49:16] civilization that was in power in the
[01:49:18] Pentagon has no doubt had wet dreams
[01:49:20] about fighting this crusader war and
[01:49:22] gone that was a wet dream but that is
[01:49:24] not what I'm actually going to do and
[01:49:26] the what we think we need to urgently
[01:49:28] explain about the current moment
[01:49:31] [clears throat] in this lecture I gave
[01:49:32] at the new school a year or two back I
[01:49:33] talked about hyper agency like why is it
[01:49:36] that a bunch of dudes with wet dreams be
[01:49:38] it Netanyahu's project of like total
[01:49:40] revision of all the boundaries or Elon
[01:49:42] Musk going to Mars or Donald Trump just
[01:49:44] living the thing the whole time and
[01:49:46] Hexath why are they currently exercising
[01:49:48] the power they are that is an urgent
[01:49:50] question um but I don't think and and at
[01:49:54] no point would you deny that any of
[01:49:56] those are sort of alien to the western
[01:49:58] civilization that's completely unhelpful
[01:50:01] but it's a question of self-regulation
[01:50:03] and
[01:50:05] up to this point everyone in their right
[01:50:06] mind has been able to say be a able to
[01:50:08] tell the difference between a white
[01:50:11] crusader Christian wet dream and
[01:50:13] something they're actually going to do.
[01:50:14] Right. So, there's a highly contingent
[01:50:16] question about how um you get the Trump
[01:50:21] administration
[01:50:22] invading Iran when Netanyahu has been
[01:50:24] asking American administrations to
[01:50:25] invade Iran for for quite some time and
[01:50:27] they haven't done it. So, so you have to
[01:50:29] understand a lot more than one
[01:50:31] continuous story of Western
[01:50:33] civilization.
[01:50:33] Do is reduce all of that to Western
[01:50:35] civilization and it's logic.
[01:50:36] Totally. I agree with you. But the Biden
[01:50:40] administration grown-ups in the room
[01:50:41] were were writing the checks for
[01:50:43] Israel's genocide in
[01:50:44] G. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they they ran
[01:50:45] it through. And I think this No, they
[01:50:48] got there by stages, right? I
[01:50:49] I think I think it waswame and Krummer
[01:50:51] who said um America is such a land of
[01:50:54] luxury. It's a one party state. You've
[01:50:56] just got two of them. Um like there is
[01:50:59] there is a certain degree of um still
[01:51:02] true. It truly isn't true anymore.
[01:51:04] That's a that's an overly benign
[01:51:06] description of American state. and
[01:51:07] reassuring
[01:51:09] um that is not the world that we're in.
[01:51:11] America is much much closer to the five
[01:51:13] or six party system that we've currently
[01:51:15] got in the UK contained within two
[01:51:17] parties by virtue of the of the first
[01:51:19] pass the post system inherited from the
[01:51:21] UK and maintained because it suits
[01:51:23] incumbents but it's really a six party
[01:51:25] European style system entained with that
[01:51:28] with a faction in the middle fully
[01:51:31] conforming to that kind of vision of
[01:51:33] basically just turnt
[01:51:35] in the management of putoaucracy
[01:51:38] but both on the left mercifully and on
[01:51:41] on the right in multiple different
[01:51:43] positions. I think there are different
[01:51:44] things on offer right now.
[01:51:46] But there's a there's a a thin line of
[01:51:48] continuity around genocide that goes
[01:51:50] back to the founding of the United
[01:51:52] States.
[01:51:54] The US is clearly founded on genocide.
[01:51:56] Yeah. I mean, like most white settler
[01:51:57] colonial projects. So, so my question is
[01:52:01] whether in this moment, especially when
[01:52:05] we have politics we're told, divided
[01:52:06] into economic issues versus culture
[01:52:08] wars, whether actually there's a kind of
[01:52:11] um a way of refusing that divide with a
[01:52:14] politics of freedom that says we want
[01:52:15] people to have the time to care for
[01:52:16] their loved ones. We want people to have
[01:52:18] space for their kids to play in. We want
[01:52:20] people to have decent lives. And that
[01:52:22] identifies a culture that has to be
[01:52:24] vanquished in order for that to be the
[01:52:25] case, which is this violent culture um
[01:52:29] that's been there for hundreds of years
[01:52:30] in not everyone in the West, but in the
[01:52:32] people who drove peasants off the land
[01:52:34] and kidnapped people for slavery. And
[01:52:36] that there is some thin line of
[01:52:38] inheritance that connects that to what's
[01:52:40] happening now in Gaza. Doesn't mean that
[01:52:41] you can understand what's happening now
[01:52:43] in Gaza only by that story. You also
[01:52:45] have to understand a lot of contingent
[01:52:46] things that mean that uh that that
[01:52:48] Netanyahu is prime minister in Israel
[01:52:49] rather than someone else. that mean that
[01:52:50] Trump is president in the US rather than
[01:52:51] someone else. But that that continuity
[01:52:53] is the thing that has to be broken. And
[01:52:55] that thing that has to be broken is is
[01:52:58] is blackboxed, as I say, by a by a
[01:53:00] technocratic politics that thinks that
[01:53:01] we can we can make alliances with
[01:53:04] sections of the ruling class in in the
[01:53:06] West.
[01:53:06] Look, I mean, I'm not going to be
[01:53:07] defensive of a thin line of genocidal
[01:53:09] continuity. If you want to go snap that
[01:53:10] and wage war against it, like, you know,
[01:53:12] be my guest. Obviously that is that's a
[01:53:15] pri I mean whether it's however the
[01:53:17] priority in the project of building
[01:53:18] coalitions that can exercise power in a
[01:53:20] progressive way I would be much more
[01:53:22] skeptical about that. I'm not sure that
[01:53:23] that civilizational cultural project is
[01:53:27] necessarily where I would start. H
[01:53:29] how can [clears throat] it not be?
[01:53:31] Um because um because the because the
[01:53:36] question is what we're aiming for and
[01:53:37] again this goes back to the very
[01:53:38] beginning of the conversation because um
[01:53:42] in
[01:53:43] The only reason I can see why you would
[01:53:45] make it the priority is you're aiming
[01:53:47] for some sort of total emancipation from
[01:53:49] the violence of the past. And so if
[01:53:51] there is this genocidal thread that runs
[01:53:53] through, clearly there cannot be any
[01:53:55] total emancipation from the violence of
[01:53:57] the past without severing that. Whereas
[01:53:59] if you assume that the aim of the game
[01:54:01] in a violent world which has been hither
[01:54:04] to in our history violent is to move to
[01:54:06] a better place with less violence then
[01:54:09] there are maybe other ways of containing
[01:54:11] and minimizing the threat which is real
[01:54:14] from that genocidal strain and that I
[01:54:17] take to be you know just in terms of
[01:54:19] your spelling out and on your and on
[01:54:21] your in your terms if you went all the
[01:54:24] way very back to the beginning of our
[01:54:25] conversation that would be another way
[01:54:26] of formulating what I see is you know
[01:54:29] you asked me right at the beginning if
[01:54:30] the project is this radical freedom Adam
[01:54:32] what is your politics if your project is
[01:54:34] the end of violence of this type what is
[01:54:36] my politics my politics is the
[01:54:38] minimization of that kind of violence
[01:54:40] it's containment
[01:54:42] knowing it seeing it learning to
[01:54:44] understand it learning to spell it out
[01:54:45] loud absolutely all of that but not in
[01:54:48] the first instance um prioritizing the
[01:54:51] cultural struggle that aims at the
[01:54:52] severing of that link
[01:54:54] well Adam this is a great way to start a
[01:54:57] series uh thinking through the scale of
[01:55:02] what's wrong in our world and uh what
[01:55:05] those of us who want a better world have
[01:55:07] to put right and how. Um I find it very
[01:55:11] useful to be in discussion with you. So
[01:55:13] I hope you'll be back and we'll have
[01:55:14] more chats.
[01:55:16] Um and um uh keep your eye out or your
[01:55:19] ears out uh viewers and listeners for
[01:55:22] our next episode. Um this has been
[01:55:24] postcript hope after history. Thanks so
[01:55:27] much for listening and watching.