Conducted in the summer of 2024 in Shanghai this interview with Ding Xionfei is the most far-reaching public discussion I have had had about the development of my writing and thinking since Perry Anderson’s review of my work. I want to thank Ding Xiongfei for his remarkable engagement and for permission to republish part of the review that originally appeared in the
" . . . It doesn’t logically follow that just because the expansion of Western influence into Ukraine—whether through the EU or the potential threat of NATO membership—is perceived by Russia as menacing, it then explains the decision to wage an all-out war. "
That is an awful strawman. The 2014 coup? 3,000 civilians killed from 2014-2022 - mostly ethnic Russians? Minsk 1 and 2 being either disregarded or shams to deceive Russia? Zelenensky shutting down opposition media in February 2021? Ukraine walking away from the Istanbul preliminary agreement?
We should expect better from someone of Adam's caliber.
"But where I differ from Mearsheimer is in his simplistic suggestion that having diagnosed the structural causes of tension we also have an adequate explanation of Moscow’s high-risk and brutal decision to invade Ukraine. That simply does not follow. Intellectually, I think that's a sleight of hand."
We can put some meat around those bones, can we Professor Tooze? The future of Russia in Western design was shown to the whole world in the period of 1990-2000, with a complete prostrated Russia, opened for a partnership with the West, but being taken for a ride. Estimates put at about 20 trillion dollars worth of wealth being siphoned out of Russia during this time. And as Professor Sachs reminds us all the time, that was by design, with the west gleeful at Russian immiseration, and not willing to lift a finger.
As such, a westernized Ukraine, with US missiles there to threat Russia, with a Ukraine pumped up with Russophobia (the de-nazification refers exactly to this, because in the Russian memory, Nazi Germany came to USSR to take land and kill all its people - see Generalplan Ost) would have had, as an ultimate objective, returning Russia to the state it experienced between 1990-2000, and furthemore, to not allow a resurgence of Russia, a splitting of that Fedration in pieces (didn't Hillary Clinton say that Russia is too big of a country?) were likely to follow.
It is obvious that you in fact haven't put that much thinking onto the issues of starting wars as you say you did. Russia, puting at limit the developments (remember, Biden promised in June 2021 that there will be no missiles placed in Ukraine, while Blinken said in January 2022 that no, that is not true, the only issue for discussion is the number of missiles, not whether there will be American missiles in Ukraine or not), decided that it was way past time to act. Militarily yes, it was way past time, with a strengthened Ukraine Army and fortified positions, etc. But Russians also had a strengthened economy, which allows them to actually finish this military operation and furthermore, crack the Western nut and the idea of an all powerful US on the Ukrainian anvil.
As such, your arguments are the ones that are sleight of hand, to remove people's gaze from the new Generalplan Ost the Nazi grafted US (yes, there are many library shelves with solidly researched books on the topic) had in store for Russia.
Why the word/idea of sovereignity is the most hated one by the US and the Western oligarchies?
Kinda confused why some self-styled socialists are gushing over this. Suppose it's good in that it shows how "left-liberalism," the extreme social constructivism of Latour, and anti-Marxism gel well together. Thinking "in media res" is just to think like the reformists of yesteryear... Reminds me a little of Bernstein who, as Lenin said, denied the goal of socialism, denied revolutionary class struggle (I heard Adam at a talk deny the entire category of class as relevant for today), denied "the very concept 'ultimate aim.'" These liberal types would have us all stuck in the perpetual middle, tinkering at the edges of the "polycrisis" till we're dead. Enough with vague bundles, hybrids, networks of agents, webs of objects... Bring back history, bring back Marx, bring back dialectical contradiction, bring back revolution. Maybe it's unfashionable among the technocratic, Democrat-friendly intelligentsia but: GWR - Gramsci was right!
"Frankly, I see his stance as an expression of a degenerate academic Marxism that imagines itself perched in some ivory tower, observing the world and understanding the deep structures of history from a privileged vantage point. That is no more or less in medias res. It is just a particularly precious, secluded angle from which to view the world. My own preference is to dispense with that conceit and to own, embrace, tackle and engage with what is everyone’s condition: i.e. being within the system, within the world. We are endogenous to that world."
As someone who is not exactly a Marxist but has a lot of intellectual sympathies with it, this statement seems too broad to me--we are in the middle of the physical universe rather than observing it from a privileged vantage point, does that mean the quest for universal theories of physics is fundamentally misguided? Likewise we are just another branch of the tree of life rather than a privileged species or existing at a privileged point in the history of life, does that mean it's folly to talk about general theories that are supposed to apply to the whole process of evolution like Darwin's?
The only Latour I have read is his book Science in Action, and I think in that book he does seem to end up expressing a strong skepticism about any such purported general theory being more than a matter of human conventions (for example he scoffs at the idea that any scientific theories have much predictive value outside of the specific data they were constructed to account for in retrospect), though some articles I've read might suggest he moderated his position later, maybe in part because he didn't want to concede too much to climate skeptics. But I wonder if you would likewise feel this sort of skepticism about general theories in the natural sciences, or if you think there is something unique about human history that makes general theories impossible, or if it's more just a matter of practical difficulties e.g. not being able to look at multiple independent runs of human history to get a better sense of which patterns are more lawlike and which are more contingent (Jared Diamond talks about this kind of problem in part of an epilogue to his own book of big ideas about lawlike patterns in history, but offers some suggestions about weaker forms of evidence: https://www.d.umn.edu/~tbacig/cst1010/chs/diamond.html ). In the latter case it would really be those specific sort of difficulties that are the problem IMO, not general observations about us being part of the world we are trying to explain.
I agree Meirsheimer’s “realism” is false. It’s really just “prejudice” at its core. And he himself ultimately knows it, unable to endorse the logical consequences of realism for the Palestinians in Gaza.
BTW, I am disappointed at your silence about the Gaza genocide.
True, but A Tooze seems to be more self-reflecting than many commentators that are published in the Western mainstream media. Still, I wish he would speak up for the Palestinians more.
After all, a historian surely has a responsibility to learn lessons from the past genocides under European settler colonialism and help the current generation avoid repeating past errors.
True but why him? After all I doubt that more than 1 in 5 journalists or historians don't fully understand what is going on in Gaza. I just listened to BBC World Service news, the way they talk of the most recent Israeli attack on a Gazan hospital makes it all crystal clear with very very little reading between the lines (though they do quote Israel as saying there was a legitimate military target).
Frankly I'd guess 1 in 2 politicians understand what is going on - it is that obvious. (and 95% of Adam's readers)
Why not me - all I do is trot along to a march every couple of months - don't even chant.
Surely the consequences of Realism are for the rest of the world. It is those that support Israel who are largely responsible and they will have to carry that reality into the rest of the century when there will be massive blowback.
Wishing Adam all the best in his recovery. My aortic aneurism gets measured yearly as Adam's probably was. He is doing a great service in even speaking from the IC as awareness is raised. My old boss John Mack did that this year in television interviews on his cognitive disability. Thank you.
Regarding Ukraine, Russia, and the West, I never found Putin’s claim to Ukraine as historical to be a satisfying reason. I also never found to West’s push into Ukraine to support a democracy at the risk of violence to be reasonable, either. Personally I feel that both the West and Russia are competing for the same thing , which happens to go through Ukraine to be more plausible. That particular secret seems to be so elusive.
I'd also pick up on how Adam describes the ware and "The act of launching the Russian military across Ukraine's borders, risking mayhem and massive loss of life, requires other explanations."
UN estimate of civilian deaths is 15k. I would argue Russian military deaths are 100k-130k. Ukrainian military deaths are 1 million (+/- 20%).
Double or half any of those numbers, but what is certain is that this is the most Civilian Friendly war in History.
Of course you have to do your own research QAnon style to see that, as no one will assist us.
Likewise military historians of the future will find supreme irony.
Zelensky spent much of 2021 promising a military intervention to retake Donbas. The rhetoric ever since April 2022 has all been about retaking Donbas in a Ukrainian attack on Russia. The CIA warnings of a Russian invasion clearly weren't taken seriously by Kiev which lined up almost all its army outside Donbas in positions prepared with nato guidance designed to shell Donbas [ie precisely Not where Russia invaded not least because any attack there would trigger more shelling of civilians.]
I'd argue that the confidence of Nato/Kiev/US that a conflict with a Superpower could be maintained was those shelling positions that Nato prepared. Even today, 3 years on, Russia is only now breaking through the deepest levels.
Equally from a Russian point of view no attack on Ukraine was conceivable without a plan to insert enough fresh artillery in between the Ukrainian lines and Donbas civilians with superior fire power. (The only other conceivable plan would be a withdrawal of civilians from Donbas - a political nightmare and US would simply declare victory).
So if the CIA prediction of an attack (which no one mentions today) were not an actual prediction what were they? Surely they were preparing the media for a False Flag attack by Russia or LPR/DPR on the Ukrainian shelling positions wich even the OSCE reported has rapidly increased their firing rate on civilians in the week immediately before the SMO. The Flase Flag would trigger the long prepared attack on Donbas.
Here is the irony - the SMO called the False Flag bluff and Russia really did invade just as Kiev was about to fake it. Of course directly attacking deeply dugin Ukrainian forces outside Donbas was impossible. So a Russian Rajd came in from north and south with much of the loudest fighting actually West of Kiev (Hostomol airport). Russia had 150k soldiers - not enough to hold Kiev alone. No one should take seriously suggestions that Russia intended to take more territory or even hold all it had. A rapid withdrawal was part of the plan (Russia has consistenly minimised losses by withdrawing early, Ukraine has maximised losses by ordering No Surrender).
This also answers the riddle of Kiev negotiating a peace deal in April. Kiev knew that the real Russian achievement had been getting in superior artillery into Donbas while Ukrainian forces had been distracted by attacks beyond Kiev. The one big advantage Ukraine had was already gone. In fact this was obvious to all the so-called experts but no one dare say (it would be a straight admission of deep Nato involvement, long term planning and a brutal willingness to kill civilians)
Russians seemed to be content to have a neutral Ukraine... The issue is not democracy here, and Russia was not against democracy. On the contrary, the ones against democracy were the US and the Ukronazis they proped in 2014 coup.
The agreement was that Yanukovich leaves and there was supposed to be an early election in 3 months. That was not acceptable to the US, since elections had a bad habit of not going the right direction (in this particular case, the extreme right wing, Russophobic parties, with only 2-5% popular support, could not get a majority, could they?). As such. a coup it was. Zelensky was elected (75% votes) on the promise to make good with Russia. The Ukronazies brought in the security aparatus by the US promised him to hang him on one of the lamposts of the central boulevard in Kiev if he tries to do that...
I understand the mechanics. However, a west leaning Ukraine was never a threat to Russia. An east leaning was never a threat to Europe. When the Wall and the USSR fell, there was an attempt to privatize its state owned resources. However this failed. Why this movement to control Russia which has persisted for these last 30 years, is puzzling. Just as puzzling is the Russian and American attempts to shape the Middle-East. Now that the strategic value of oil is falling, the ongoing exercise is still being fervently pursued, it seems. It feels that there is more being played for than has been ostensibly told. As far as we know, the reward for taking this existential risk, is for that of a liberal world order.
“West leaning” Ukraine would be fine for Russia, if the EU didn’t push a 1000 page agreement with a hidden clause to obey NATO rules. Yanukovich didn’t read it through, but Russia has good lawyers, and it was shown to him. Russia offered Ukraine $15 billion trade partnership with no strings, and the EU was offering the same but with austerity. Ukraine was always worshiping the West (and Russia way back, but not now), and Ukraine is clearly now getting the idea how screwed/disposed it was by the West.
You clearly don’t know what happened when the USSR disintegrated. The state enterprises issued their shares to the workers-owners, but then, the banks froze all people assets, and people began getting their “salaries” in lieu of whatever they manufactured, i.e. if you worked at a metal plant, you might get your salary in “nails,” which you had to sell to recover your money. People were not getting salaries/pensions for months and months, and then the door-to-door agents from the “buyers” came to purchase their shares for next to nothing, and people sold their shares to just put food on the table, and that’s how all the state enterprises shares accumulated in the hands of few oligarchs, so called “privatization.”
Russia itself is "west leaning". The perception of threat, based on historical evidence and not on imaginary things was all too real and not coming from Ukraine being west leaning, but because Ukraine abandoned de jure and de facto the principle of neutrality enshrined in its constitution.
As such, Ukraine decided to not only be pro western, but mostly to define itself as anti-Russian.
After the death of Trotsky, Russians never tried to shape any part of the world. At most, they half heartedly supported some national liberation movements. And Vietnam (a counterballance for both US and China). But they never trully mixed in internal politics.
The "liberal world order" is not the same as the international law, but it is more akin to Calvinball game rules. Liberal world order is providing us Gaza. Liberal world order has unleashed the age of bestiality: https://x.com/malonebarry/status/1871260593249804797
The existential fight is that of sovereign states against the plutocratic conglomerate of US/UK/EU et all.
“After the death of Trotsky, Russians never tried to shape any part of the world.”
What was the USSR, if not exactly this? There are countless examples from the previous century from Korea to Afghanistan to Yugoslavia, to Hungary and so on. More recent and germane to this discussion would be Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ossetia, Syria and the Sahel, to name but a few choice examples, excluding of the current conflict. The idea that Russia hasn’t tried to influence internal politics of other states and by consequence shape geopolitic realities is either ignorant or profoundly delusional.
I cannot come to any other conclusion that this conflict is an attempt to resinstate oligarchic control of Russia per the 1990s. What possible reason was there to sabotage the Istanbul preliminary agreement even if one blames Russia for the invasion (and ignores 2014-2022).
Really? The U.S. didn’t even recognize the USSR until 1933 for Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrowing the democratically elected Interim Government of Russia in Oct 1917, but somehow Lenin’s “gift” of Donbas and other strategic Russian lands in 1919-1920s to the Ukrainian Bolsheviks to buy their support is now legit to pull the US in WW3? Hell, no!
Tsar Alexander II paid a fortune in 1860s to John Hughes, Welsh industrialist and his 100 engineers to come to Donbas to develop coal mines. John Hughes founded Donetsk-city.
Check the US Library of Congress Maps of Europe - 1898, check National Geographic maps of Europe of 1905, there is no Ukraine on the maps. So, pardon, nobody cares about your “feelings” of “Putin’s claim to Ukraine” have “unsatisfying reason.” There are hardcore facts. It’s amazing how poorly educated people feel that they have to impart their ignorance.
The lands are acquired by being won in the wars or purchased like the US did with Alaska and Louisiana. Not by the “gifts” of the Bolsheviks to each other.
On Solow's paradox, in 1982 I joined a Stock Jobbing firm on the London Stock Exchange as one of the first groups of University graduates for some 10 years. 3 or 4 years earlier there had been 100 dealing staff and 300 settlement staff and the main source of new dealers was the flow of young settlement staff who might get a chance on the trading floor.
When I arrived the dealing staff was growing to 150 while the settlement staff was down to 100 (many of them messengers still taking paper to other firms). This was the impact of IT from 1978-82.
I suspect the issue with IT then was a dearth of truly competent IT managers.
With AI the same issue is magnified. Certainly AI allows individuals to take over massive workflows. But they have to be really very very smart AI professionals. Arguably the shift from jobs for average office workers to fewer more expert workers is actually going to be smaller than the shift from Expert workers to true genius workers. AI will end up raising the importance of Human intelligence.
Anderson as "degenerate academic Marxism" has immense affinities with the work of McKenzie Wark (e.g. _Capital is Dead_, a reference to "dead labor"), a mentor of mine, who similarly follows Erik Olin Wright against what she calls "received ideas of a genteel Marxism" (referring to Anderson, Jameson, amongst others). Against this Wark proposes the "low theory" (not unlike Edgerton!) of the poets and artists. The dialectic of history did not play out as it was supposed to, and what we're in is different, strange, weird—and so we need new concepts to defamiliarize ourself from old academic habits of thought. She ends up in a different place than polycrisis, with a "vulgar" (used ironically) Marxism that bears little resemblance to the academic Marxism of the past, and is more similar to French situationism. Nevertheless, the insistence that we are thrown into a world we can scarcely hope to understand from the perspective of some totality handed down by academic tradition is palpable.
Here's a chapter from that book, on climate, which draws from—of all historians—Joseph Needham:
Fascinating, Thankyou. I think the philosopher who originally provided the epistemological-political orientation you describe here - a realism that refuses the comforts of Marxism or ‘Realism’ - goes oddly unmentioned here: Foucault
It is not a measure of wealth accumulation -it is not a stock of wealth.
The amount of creation of actual wealth in China is very tiny.
The amount of wealth creation in the USA and in the top quarter/third of European enterprise is very high.
It is utter fantasy that the amount of money spent is a measure of economic health and human prosperity.
And the Chinese attempts at building sea power -cf USA- are puny.
Super-carrier groups and admirals - where are the Chinese sources of these elements ?
To survive, China has to steal science and tech from everyone else -and pay minimum prices for its imports, and bully most of the rest of world to pay high prices for its low-quality manufactures.
China cannot feed itself and its people must be fed by subsidies from others.
The bottom billion Chinese live at the level of the bottom billion Nigerians -in adequacy of food, shelter, healthcare, education.
Still, it is better for the rest of the world to subsidize China’s existence in its present form than to let it fail -is the obvious judgment that prevails.
Meanwhile, Russian thinking continues to be dominated by the fantasy that Europe and the USA wants to invade it.
Chuckle.
All Europe and USA want is for Russia is to sell its gas and oil and buy high-end goods from Europe from the USA and stop wasting a lot of lives and destroying physical infrastructure.
And Russian tech training and education generally is now very weak, and its populace suffers very bad health conditions -starting with TB, HIV, alcohol and drugs.
China and Russia have a similar blind spots to Germany and Japan in 1945, viz:
They are close to collapse, but cannot quit their respective delusions and anti-Reality projects, preferring to kill and destroy as a way of life.
Well, even if you are right (and you are not), unlike Germany and Japan in 1945, Russia and China in 2024 have means to take a lot of things dear to the West with them as they are collapsing. Which means that you need a completely different toolset to deal with them.
" . . . It doesn’t logically follow that just because the expansion of Western influence into Ukraine—whether through the EU or the potential threat of NATO membership—is perceived by Russia as menacing, it then explains the decision to wage an all-out war. "
That is an awful strawman. The 2014 coup? 3,000 civilians killed from 2014-2022 - mostly ethnic Russians? Minsk 1 and 2 being either disregarded or shams to deceive Russia? Zelenensky shutting down opposition media in February 2021? Ukraine walking away from the Istanbul preliminary agreement?
We should expect better from someone of Adam's caliber.
No, yours is the awful strawman.
"But where I differ from Mearsheimer is in his simplistic suggestion that having diagnosed the structural causes of tension we also have an adequate explanation of Moscow’s high-risk and brutal decision to invade Ukraine. That simply does not follow. Intellectually, I think that's a sleight of hand."
We can put some meat around those bones, can we Professor Tooze? The future of Russia in Western design was shown to the whole world in the period of 1990-2000, with a complete prostrated Russia, opened for a partnership with the West, but being taken for a ride. Estimates put at about 20 trillion dollars worth of wealth being siphoned out of Russia during this time. And as Professor Sachs reminds us all the time, that was by design, with the west gleeful at Russian immiseration, and not willing to lift a finger.
As such, a westernized Ukraine, with US missiles there to threat Russia, with a Ukraine pumped up with Russophobia (the de-nazification refers exactly to this, because in the Russian memory, Nazi Germany came to USSR to take land and kill all its people - see Generalplan Ost) would have had, as an ultimate objective, returning Russia to the state it experienced between 1990-2000, and furthemore, to not allow a resurgence of Russia, a splitting of that Fedration in pieces (didn't Hillary Clinton say that Russia is too big of a country?) were likely to follow.
It is obvious that you in fact haven't put that much thinking onto the issues of starting wars as you say you did. Russia, puting at limit the developments (remember, Biden promised in June 2021 that there will be no missiles placed in Ukraine, while Blinken said in January 2022 that no, that is not true, the only issue for discussion is the number of missiles, not whether there will be American missiles in Ukraine or not), decided that it was way past time to act. Militarily yes, it was way past time, with a strengthened Ukraine Army and fortified positions, etc. But Russians also had a strengthened economy, which allows them to actually finish this military operation and furthermore, crack the Western nut and the idea of an all powerful US on the Ukrainian anvil.
As such, your arguments are the ones that are sleight of hand, to remove people's gaze from the new Generalplan Ost the Nazi grafted US (yes, there are many library shelves with solidly researched books on the topic) had in store for Russia.
Why the word/idea of sovereignity is the most hated one by the US and the Western oligarchies?
Kinda confused why some self-styled socialists are gushing over this. Suppose it's good in that it shows how "left-liberalism," the extreme social constructivism of Latour, and anti-Marxism gel well together. Thinking "in media res" is just to think like the reformists of yesteryear... Reminds me a little of Bernstein who, as Lenin said, denied the goal of socialism, denied revolutionary class struggle (I heard Adam at a talk deny the entire category of class as relevant for today), denied "the very concept 'ultimate aim.'" These liberal types would have us all stuck in the perpetual middle, tinkering at the edges of the "polycrisis" till we're dead. Enough with vague bundles, hybrids, networks of agents, webs of objects... Bring back history, bring back Marx, bring back dialectical contradiction, bring back revolution. Maybe it's unfashionable among the technocratic, Democrat-friendly intelligentsia but: GWR - Gramsci was right!
"Frankly, I see his stance as an expression of a degenerate academic Marxism that imagines itself perched in some ivory tower, observing the world and understanding the deep structures of history from a privileged vantage point. That is no more or less in medias res. It is just a particularly precious, secluded angle from which to view the world. My own preference is to dispense with that conceit and to own, embrace, tackle and engage with what is everyone’s condition: i.e. being within the system, within the world. We are endogenous to that world."
As someone who is not exactly a Marxist but has a lot of intellectual sympathies with it, this statement seems too broad to me--we are in the middle of the physical universe rather than observing it from a privileged vantage point, does that mean the quest for universal theories of physics is fundamentally misguided? Likewise we are just another branch of the tree of life rather than a privileged species or existing at a privileged point in the history of life, does that mean it's folly to talk about general theories that are supposed to apply to the whole process of evolution like Darwin's?
The only Latour I have read is his book Science in Action, and I think in that book he does seem to end up expressing a strong skepticism about any such purported general theory being more than a matter of human conventions (for example he scoffs at the idea that any scientific theories have much predictive value outside of the specific data they were constructed to account for in retrospect), though some articles I've read might suggest he moderated his position later, maybe in part because he didn't want to concede too much to climate skeptics. But I wonder if you would likewise feel this sort of skepticism about general theories in the natural sciences, or if you think there is something unique about human history that makes general theories impossible, or if it's more just a matter of practical difficulties e.g. not being able to look at multiple independent runs of human history to get a better sense of which patterns are more lawlike and which are more contingent (Jared Diamond talks about this kind of problem in part of an epilogue to his own book of big ideas about lawlike patterns in history, but offers some suggestions about weaker forms of evidence: https://www.d.umn.edu/~tbacig/cst1010/chs/diamond.html ). In the latter case it would really be those specific sort of difficulties that are the problem IMO, not general observations about us being part of the world we are trying to explain.
I agree Meirsheimer’s “realism” is false. It’s really just “prejudice” at its core. And he himself ultimately knows it, unable to endorse the logical consequences of realism for the Palestinians in Gaza.
BTW, I am disappointed at your silence about the Gaza genocide.
He's talked about Gaza a lot, particularly in his podcast Ones and Tooze.
Hope he writes about his thoughts on the Gaza genocide. Should be interesting. Especially its relationship with European settler colonialism.
Thanks, glad to hear that.
Talked around genocide in his blog, not got there, while he was quite explicit about nazi settler colonialism as long term knowing policy in Wages.
But you can't really blame him for that - he writes in the FT.
True, but A Tooze seems to be more self-reflecting than many commentators that are published in the Western mainstream media. Still, I wish he would speak up for the Palestinians more.
After all, a historian surely has a responsibility to learn lessons from the past genocides under European settler colonialism and help the current generation avoid repeating past errors.
True but why him? After all I doubt that more than 1 in 5 journalists or historians don't fully understand what is going on in Gaza. I just listened to BBC World Service news, the way they talk of the most recent Israeli attack on a Gazan hospital makes it all crystal clear with very very little reading between the lines (though they do quote Israel as saying there was a legitimate military target).
Frankly I'd guess 1 in 2 politicians understand what is going on - it is that obvious. (and 95% of Adam's readers)
Why not me - all I do is trot along to a march every couple of months - don't even chant.
Surely the consequences of Realism are for the rest of the world. It is those that support Israel who are largely responsible and they will have to carry that reality into the rest of the century when there will be massive blowback.
the trouble with realism is the ism part
Wishing Adam all the best in his recovery. My aortic aneurism gets measured yearly as Adam's probably was. He is doing a great service in even speaking from the IC as awareness is raised. My old boss John Mack did that this year in television interviews on his cognitive disability. Thank you.
Regarding Ukraine, Russia, and the West, I never found Putin’s claim to Ukraine as historical to be a satisfying reason. I also never found to West’s push into Ukraine to support a democracy at the risk of violence to be reasonable, either. Personally I feel that both the West and Russia are competing for the same thing , which happens to go through Ukraine to be more plausible. That particular secret seems to be so elusive.
I'd also pick up on how Adam describes the ware and "The act of launching the Russian military across Ukraine's borders, risking mayhem and massive loss of life, requires other explanations."
UN estimate of civilian deaths is 15k. I would argue Russian military deaths are 100k-130k. Ukrainian military deaths are 1 million (+/- 20%).
Double or half any of those numbers, but what is certain is that this is the most Civilian Friendly war in History.
Of course you have to do your own research QAnon style to see that, as no one will assist us.
Likewise military historians of the future will find supreme irony.
Zelensky spent much of 2021 promising a military intervention to retake Donbas. The rhetoric ever since April 2022 has all been about retaking Donbas in a Ukrainian attack on Russia. The CIA warnings of a Russian invasion clearly weren't taken seriously by Kiev which lined up almost all its army outside Donbas in positions prepared with nato guidance designed to shell Donbas [ie precisely Not where Russia invaded not least because any attack there would trigger more shelling of civilians.]
I'd argue that the confidence of Nato/Kiev/US that a conflict with a Superpower could be maintained was those shelling positions that Nato prepared. Even today, 3 years on, Russia is only now breaking through the deepest levels.
Equally from a Russian point of view no attack on Ukraine was conceivable without a plan to insert enough fresh artillery in between the Ukrainian lines and Donbas civilians with superior fire power. (The only other conceivable plan would be a withdrawal of civilians from Donbas - a political nightmare and US would simply declare victory).
So if the CIA prediction of an attack (which no one mentions today) were not an actual prediction what were they? Surely they were preparing the media for a False Flag attack by Russia or LPR/DPR on the Ukrainian shelling positions wich even the OSCE reported has rapidly increased their firing rate on civilians in the week immediately before the SMO. The Flase Flag would trigger the long prepared attack on Donbas.
Here is the irony - the SMO called the False Flag bluff and Russia really did invade just as Kiev was about to fake it. Of course directly attacking deeply dugin Ukrainian forces outside Donbas was impossible. So a Russian Rajd came in from north and south with much of the loudest fighting actually West of Kiev (Hostomol airport). Russia had 150k soldiers - not enough to hold Kiev alone. No one should take seriously suggestions that Russia intended to take more territory or even hold all it had. A rapid withdrawal was part of the plan (Russia has consistenly minimised losses by withdrawing early, Ukraine has maximised losses by ordering No Surrender).
This also answers the riddle of Kiev negotiating a peace deal in April. Kiev knew that the real Russian achievement had been getting in superior artillery into Donbas while Ukrainian forces had been distracted by attacks beyond Kiev. The one big advantage Ukraine had was already gone. In fact this was obvious to all the so-called experts but no one dare say (it would be a straight admission of deep Nato involvement, long term planning and a brutal willingness to kill civilians)
Russians seemed to be content to have a neutral Ukraine... The issue is not democracy here, and Russia was not against democracy. On the contrary, the ones against democracy were the US and the Ukronazis they proped in 2014 coup.
The agreement was that Yanukovich leaves and there was supposed to be an early election in 3 months. That was not acceptable to the US, since elections had a bad habit of not going the right direction (in this particular case, the extreme right wing, Russophobic parties, with only 2-5% popular support, could not get a majority, could they?). As such. a coup it was. Zelensky was elected (75% votes) on the promise to make good with Russia. The Ukronazies brought in the security aparatus by the US promised him to hang him on one of the lamposts of the central boulevard in Kiev if he tries to do that...
I understand the mechanics. However, a west leaning Ukraine was never a threat to Russia. An east leaning was never a threat to Europe. When the Wall and the USSR fell, there was an attempt to privatize its state owned resources. However this failed. Why this movement to control Russia which has persisted for these last 30 years, is puzzling. Just as puzzling is the Russian and American attempts to shape the Middle-East. Now that the strategic value of oil is falling, the ongoing exercise is still being fervently pursued, it seems. It feels that there is more being played for than has been ostensibly told. As far as we know, the reward for taking this existential risk, is for that of a liberal world order.
“West leaning” Ukraine would be fine for Russia, if the EU didn’t push a 1000 page agreement with a hidden clause to obey NATO rules. Yanukovich didn’t read it through, but Russia has good lawyers, and it was shown to him. Russia offered Ukraine $15 billion trade partnership with no strings, and the EU was offering the same but with austerity. Ukraine was always worshiping the West (and Russia way back, but not now), and Ukraine is clearly now getting the idea how screwed/disposed it was by the West.
You clearly don’t know what happened when the USSR disintegrated. The state enterprises issued their shares to the workers-owners, but then, the banks froze all people assets, and people began getting their “salaries” in lieu of whatever they manufactured, i.e. if you worked at a metal plant, you might get your salary in “nails,” which you had to sell to recover your money. People were not getting salaries/pensions for months and months, and then the door-to-door agents from the “buyers” came to purchase their shares for next to nothing, and people sold their shares to just put food on the table, and that’s how all the state enterprises shares accumulated in the hands of few oligarchs, so called “privatization.”
Russia itself is "west leaning". The perception of threat, based on historical evidence and not on imaginary things was all too real and not coming from Ukraine being west leaning, but because Ukraine abandoned de jure and de facto the principle of neutrality enshrined in its constitution.
As such, Ukraine decided to not only be pro western, but mostly to define itself as anti-Russian.
After the death of Trotsky, Russians never tried to shape any part of the world. At most, they half heartedly supported some national liberation movements. And Vietnam (a counterballance for both US and China). But they never trully mixed in internal politics.
The "liberal world order" is not the same as the international law, but it is more akin to Calvinball game rules. Liberal world order is providing us Gaza. Liberal world order has unleashed the age of bestiality: https://x.com/malonebarry/status/1871260593249804797
The existential fight is that of sovereign states against the plutocratic conglomerate of US/UK/EU et all.
“After the death of Trotsky, Russians never tried to shape any part of the world.”
What was the USSR, if not exactly this? There are countless examples from the previous century from Korea to Afghanistan to Yugoslavia, to Hungary and so on. More recent and germane to this discussion would be Transnistria, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ossetia, Syria and the Sahel, to name but a few choice examples, excluding of the current conflict. The idea that Russia hasn’t tried to influence internal politics of other states and by consequence shape geopolitic realities is either ignorant or profoundly delusional.
I cannot come to any other conclusion that this conflict is an attempt to resinstate oligarchic control of Russia per the 1990s. What possible reason was there to sabotage the Istanbul preliminary agreement even if one blames Russia for the invasion (and ignores 2014-2022).
Really? The U.S. didn’t even recognize the USSR until 1933 for Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrowing the democratically elected Interim Government of Russia in Oct 1917, but somehow Lenin’s “gift” of Donbas and other strategic Russian lands in 1919-1920s to the Ukrainian Bolsheviks to buy their support is now legit to pull the US in WW3? Hell, no!
Tsar Alexander II paid a fortune in 1860s to John Hughes, Welsh industrialist and his 100 engineers to come to Donbas to develop coal mines. John Hughes founded Donetsk-city.
Check the US Library of Congress Maps of Europe - 1898, check National Geographic maps of Europe of 1905, there is no Ukraine on the maps. So, pardon, nobody cares about your “feelings” of “Putin’s claim to Ukraine” have “unsatisfying reason.” There are hardcore facts. It’s amazing how poorly educated people feel that they have to impart their ignorance.
The lands are acquired by being won in the wars or purchased like the US did with Alaska and Louisiana. Not by the “gifts” of the Bolsheviks to each other.
Thank you Adam, reading your work is always enlightening. Wishing you the best in your recovery. Happy New Year
Thankyou - very interesting.
On Solow's paradox, in 1982 I joined a Stock Jobbing firm on the London Stock Exchange as one of the first groups of University graduates for some 10 years. 3 or 4 years earlier there had been 100 dealing staff and 300 settlement staff and the main source of new dealers was the flow of young settlement staff who might get a chance on the trading floor.
When I arrived the dealing staff was growing to 150 while the settlement staff was down to 100 (many of them messengers still taking paper to other firms). This was the impact of IT from 1978-82.
I suspect the issue with IT then was a dearth of truly competent IT managers.
With AI the same issue is magnified. Certainly AI allows individuals to take over massive workflows. But they have to be really very very smart AI professionals. Arguably the shift from jobs for average office workers to fewer more expert workers is actually going to be smaller than the shift from Expert workers to true genius workers. AI will end up raising the importance of Human intelligence.
Anderson as "degenerate academic Marxism" has immense affinities with the work of McKenzie Wark (e.g. _Capital is Dead_, a reference to "dead labor"), a mentor of mine, who similarly follows Erik Olin Wright against what she calls "received ideas of a genteel Marxism" (referring to Anderson, Jameson, amongst others). Against this Wark proposes the "low theory" (not unlike Edgerton!) of the poets and artists. The dialectic of history did not play out as it was supposed to, and what we're in is different, strange, weird—and so we need new concepts to defamiliarize ourself from old academic habits of thought. She ends up in a different place than polycrisis, with a "vulgar" (used ironically) Marxism that bears little resemblance to the academic Marxism of the past, and is more similar to French situationism. Nevertheless, the insistence that we are thrown into a world we can scarcely hope to understand from the perspective of some totality handed down by academic tradition is palpable.
Here's a chapter from that book, on climate, which draws from—of all historians—Joseph Needham:
https://publicseminar.org/2014/10/accelerate-and-intertia/
Fascinating, Thankyou. I think the philosopher who originally provided the epistemological-political orientation you describe here - a realism that refuses the comforts of Marxism or ‘Realism’ - goes oddly unmentioned here: Foucault
The Basics:
GDP is a measure of cash flow, for good or bad.
It is not a measure of wealth accumulation -it is not a stock of wealth.
The amount of creation of actual wealth in China is very tiny.
The amount of wealth creation in the USA and in the top quarter/third of European enterprise is very high.
It is utter fantasy that the amount of money spent is a measure of economic health and human prosperity.
And the Chinese attempts at building sea power -cf USA- are puny.
Super-carrier groups and admirals - where are the Chinese sources of these elements ?
To survive, China has to steal science and tech from everyone else -and pay minimum prices for its imports, and bully most of the rest of world to pay high prices for its low-quality manufactures.
China cannot feed itself and its people must be fed by subsidies from others.
The bottom billion Chinese live at the level of the bottom billion Nigerians -in adequacy of food, shelter, healthcare, education.
Still, it is better for the rest of the world to subsidize China’s existence in its present form than to let it fail -is the obvious judgment that prevails.
Meanwhile, Russian thinking continues to be dominated by the fantasy that Europe and the USA wants to invade it.
Chuckle.
All Europe and USA want is for Russia is to sell its gas and oil and buy high-end goods from Europe from the USA and stop wasting a lot of lives and destroying physical infrastructure.
And Russian tech training and education generally is now very weak, and its populace suffers very bad health conditions -starting with TB, HIV, alcohol and drugs.
China and Russia have a similar blind spots to Germany and Japan in 1945, viz:
They are close to collapse, but cannot quit their respective delusions and anti-Reality projects, preferring to kill and destroy as a way of life.
Well, even if you are right (and you are not), unlike Germany and Japan in 1945, Russia and China in 2024 have means to take a lot of things dear to the West with them as they are collapsing. Which means that you need a completely different toolset to deal with them.