Chartbook 458 Postscript - A conversation with Barnaby Raine about politics, economics, continuities of violence and hyper-agency.
“…there’s a lot of talk today about rupture, because there’s a sense that five hundred years of Western hegemony are coming unstuck.” (Barnaby Raine)
Postscript is a new podcast of reflective interviews and discussion from the relaunched Tribune magazine, hosted in London by Barnaby Raine. In this opening episode, it was my pleasure to be in conversation with Barnaby, my former student and dear friend.
This is an excerpt from the transcript of our conversation about history, economics, philosophy and politics.
You can listen to and watch the whole thing here:
Barnaby: Yes, this is exactly what I grapple with. I think the reason the promise of freedom that animated people from the weavers of the 1840s to the anti-colonial revolutionaries of the 1970s — the belief that the arc of history bends toward justice, that the whole world contained the resources to overturn every system of domination and make people free everywhere, freedom not in the narrow liberal sense of non-interference but, the freedom to define oneself, Nina Simone’s sense of freedom, a feeling, an enduring condition — the reason that became less believable is that it was umbilically attached to particular historical subjects: people with a direct experience of unfreedom. Workers who experienced capitalist exploitation. The colonized. Women who experienced patriarchal domination. Those oppressive experiences remain, but the specific texture of experience that generated the idea of its own negation — the idea of a possible freedom — was attached, in Britain, at the start of the twentieth century, to the miners who founded the Labour Party and led our only-ever general strike, and nearly led another in the 1970s; then to car workers, another militant subject. Both are gone now — Britain still makes cars, but with far fewer workers doing it.
Adam: And also the foundation — the Archimedean point from which they could exercise leverage — was real. Very manifest: cars, coal, energy. Exactly. So what I hear you saying is that, at the same historical moment, both the agent of this project of liberation and the standpoint on which it rested became destabilized.
Barnaby: Yes. Absolutely. I read neoliberalism as the concerted disassembly of emancipatory subjects — a project of destroying working-class life-worlds. That’s why Thatcher had to go to war with the miners: they were the social subject that had grounded and organized socialist politics. It’s moving to see those old miners’ banners and the idea of an immanent freedom in people working collectively, socially, under tough conditions. We’re both familiar with Timothy Mitchell’s work on carbon democracy — the importance of miners in creating even democratic cultures. So they had to be destroyed. Anti-colonial revolutionary projects had to be destroyed and defanged by the IMF and the World Bank. There was a concerted disassembly of emancipatory subjects, and so of the standpoint from which a possible freedom could even be imagined.
So the question for us is: in the rubble we now inhabit, what kinds of possible freedom can we imagine? The challenge that comes from a sharp, smart, realist liberalism — and I think a lot of our dialogue has been engaging with this challenge — is: is there any historical guarantee that any concept of total human emancipation should be born out of the mess of our present at all? Can we instead proceed with something less than that?
Barnaby: That leads to a question I want to put to you. Do you understand your own project — including your brief dialogue with the Biden administration in America, and your interest in the politics of contemporary China and its state, its party — as an attempt to find resources of hope that are really resources of technocratic statecraft, rather than a politics of universal human freedom? Do you think my bar is simply too high, and you’re trying to do something grittier and more realist by using existing power to make the world marginally better?
Adam: Setting me personally aside — I’m very moved by the diagnosis of the fragmenting of the historic subjects of universal emancipation. My generation lived through that dismantling; our identities and lives were shaped by it. So yes, that’s fair to say. And I’m also not a person of faith, and I don’t think most people of my kind are — we’re not carried by the promise of any great emancipation. It’s telling that there’s been a revival of religion in certain segments of the British upper-middle and professional class, because one feels the lack of it — especially, I’d say, in the face of the threat of AI, which now intrudes directly into the realm of our own intellectual production.
So yes, I’m attached to a more minimal kind of immanence: what can we do from within the current moment, however we define it? That’s when the “science” comes in — you use whatever tools of statistics, economic analysis, sociology, or anthropology you have to map the terrain and work out what will actually make a difference. A very provisional, ameliorist project — because I’m preoccupied with crisis, with the mere patching of a sinking ship, or a boiler about to explode. That image of management has its own historical legacy, going back to a similar moment: liberalism in its triumphant nineteenth-century form was broken by the catastrophe of the First World War. My reference point — and I think the archetype for people working in the political sphere I’m interested in — is John Maynard Keynes, who explicitly tried to redefine liberalism not merely as a technology of government but as a technology of government defined in relation to the broader trajectory of democracy, including the Labour Party and the general strike. Not a timeless universal project, but a specific historical invention required at a moment when the certainties of the nineteenth century had broken down and his contemporaries hadn’t grasped the scale of the shock.
If there’s one thing his politics is committed to, it’s shaking people awake — not to apocalypse and its inevitability, but to the fragility of the world, and to the urgency of shaking off old superstitions and trying to control whatever is controllable, which in his terms meant things like macroeconomics and money. I think that’s still very relevant — think of the climate question, or the great shift of power from West to Asia — that same effort to shake the mainstream conversation out of its complacency, out of the assumption that things will simply continue in the neoliberal mould of the last half-century. And then, in the next step, to think about what’s possible for government, for collective action, with the actual instruments of power available. That’s the project, for me. And where you and I really intersect — what’s made our conversations so fruitful over the years — is the shared sense that both the agent and the standpoint are, in this particular moment, in flux.
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Barnaby: Is that, in one sense, a very limited kind of political project?
Adam: Clearly it is. I find those essays of Keynes from the 1920s and 30s — before he wrote The General Theory in 1936, which I can’t really recommend as light reading — fascinating. Essays in Persuasion, a collection from the late 1920s, is something anyone who reads a newspaper can digest. But it is a very limited politics — a kind of late-Edwardian sensibility translated into the twentieth century. If you want to “own” this Keynesian legacy, I think you either take it to a very general level, in which case, far from being the losers of the twentieth century, “we’re all Keynesians now” in some sense — or you go, and I find this more attractive, to the position that Keynesianism went through successive iterations, and its most radical form was really in the 1970s, because earlier Keynesianism was dancing, so to speak, in a telephone box: operating within a currency system still ultimately tied to gold (Bretton Woods). An underrated break in human history, at the civilizational level, comes in the early 1970s when the major currencies separate from gold entirely — something Keynes had long argued for, since he was a strong conventionalist about money (gold/money is no different from law; we shouldn’t fetishize it as something substantive). That opens up a realm of radical experimentation in economic policy — and also new repressive efforts to shut that freedom down.
Just as one would want to grant Marxism, a theory shaped in the mid-nineteenth century, in the first encounter with Victorian industrialism, an afterlife that constantly reinvents itself, … One of the most striking essays in those 1920s collections is where he says liberalism will have a brilliant future if it can address certain technical monetary questions — plus two others: the drug question and the sex question. If we can talk about drugs and sex, he says, we’ll be in the political mainstream. So tell me Keynesianism lost the twentieth century.
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Barnaby: In 1925–26 Keynes goes to the Soviet Union and loves it — because he sees, in the ballet, what he regards as the great achievement of nineteenth-century civilization (he’s married to a Russian ballerina, after all). It seems to me that in the crisis of the 70s and 80s, including the downfall of the Soviet Union, people don’t want to be managed. Managing people works only as long as you can deliver the goods; when you can’t, and your only claim has ever been “we’re delivering the goods,” you’ve lost the thing I’m actually interested in reviving in socialist and communist traditions — a politics of freedom, a hope in the transformation of human relations that isn’t limited to “we’ll give you things.”
So in that crisis moment of 2020–21, was there a missed opportunity? What might an ambitious left-Keynesian coalition, with socialist politics, have looked like in that American emergency — Black Lives Matter, the pandemic, and then the coming of inflation, which I know you read directly as a question of distributional class politics?
Adam: We don’t have to speculate — it was the vision of the Green New Deal, which emerged from the electoral breakthrough slightly after Corbyn’s in the UK, after the 2018 US midterms (everyone should watch the midterms this year for exactly this reason — think of AOC’s breakthrough in Bronx). That opened a window onto a vision that, in the end, got cut down Keynesian-style to little more than green industrial policy, …. But it started out as a genuinely comprehensive vision for the transformation of American society — one that answered the degrowth critique directly by saying: yes, we’ll do industrial policy for green energy and infrastructure, proper modern railways, housing — but its central focus was a feminist politics of care, presented not as a normative concession, not as “woke,” but as a realistic account of what the American working class actually consists of and needs: public support for social reproduction. ….
Barnaby: So climate politics, for you, becomes something other than Keynesianism in the narrow, purely managerial sense — the “gentleman in Whitehall knows best,” as the 1945 Labour manifesto put it about nutrition and public health. One version of climate Keynesianism is just the gentleman in Whitehall, or in the Fed, writing the checks and making the decisions. … How do you imagine a climate politics activating political subjects beyond just the managerial elite?
Adam: Climate politics is fascinating because it comes in so many different shades, and it poses the problem of priorities in a genuinely disorienting way. You can construct various kinds of ecological Marxism going back to the mid-nineteenth century — that’s fair, it’s there — but broadly speaking, I think Marx’s own thought was a rebellion against the Malthusian logic of restraint. Malthus, the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century theologian, damned the French Revolution as condemned to failure because food supply couldn’t keep pace with the population growth that would follow from the sexual license of a liberated citizenry — a theologically ordained disaster of overpopulation and collapse. Marx has no time for this. He’s fully aware of the damage capitalist growth does to nature, including the human body — some of the most vivid passages in Capital — but broadly speaking, Marxism was a cornucopian, expansive vision, and was generally read that way.
Then along comes a new sense of constraint from the late 1960s and early 1970s, in some cases overtly neo-Malthusian, and it’s genuinely difficult to reconcile. This is part of the challenge this series is trying to address: how do you imagine the emancipatory subject once you can no longer presume an endless abundance of ever-greater mobilization of natural resources? There are still huge technological feats underway, but if we’re remotely serious, we can no longer ignore our best guess that this can’t be sustained. That’s a vertiginous, unprecedented, scientifically grounded realization — never before have governments promised their citizens’ grandchildren a livable planet. That’s a new level of governmental ambition, and I don’t say that dismissively — it’s part of the terrifying reality we live in.
From that realization spring endless different versions of environmentalism. There’s a dominant neoliberal version in the UK and Europe — Keynesianism attenuated to its thinnest, most evaporated form: “we’ll design a market that takes care of this.” It’s actually a very Keynesian idea to design a market that solves the problem, but it’s the most minimal version, and the promise is that you don’t have to do any actual politics — which turns out to be totally naive. It’s a bit like pretending that regulating the money supply to control inflation involves no politics; of course who gets financial credit, and at what price, is a deeply political decision, and the same goes for who gets carbon credits and at what price.
A second strand is a flat-out developmental Keynesianism — a national green investment board, a national green energy system — which I think of as more or less indispensable (I’m not against carbon pricing either; I just think we should be honest about its politics). And the third — you’re right — is the Green New Deal in its original American form, which does imply the self-conscious construction of a new political subject. Part of that draws on the legacy of the civil rights movement going back to the 1960s, part on Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition from the 1980s, and part on a new definition of climate-exposed, environmentally at-risk groups that comes out of the American environmental justice movement — much stronger in the US than in Europe from the 1980s onward, because of the stark hierarchies of environmental risk between Black communities and the rest of the population — the “Cancer Alley” sacrifice zones in Louisiana. Put all that together and you get the idea of “frontline communities,” which AOC and her team formulated as a new subject of progressive politics. …
Barnaby: In the 1980s the British feminist Anna Coote said the key question isn’t how we re-industrialize to secure full employment, but how we care for and support our children.
Adam: It’s mind-bending to me how little that cuts through — even in the UK, at least there’s some infrastructure of childcare, but practically no rich society spends as little on childcare as the United States, and the private cost of self-provisioning is exorbitant, especially in a city like New York, which is exactly the social crisis Mamdani’s momentum comes out of. I find that a wholly convincing lens on the impasse of democratic politics under capitalist conditions in the US right now.
Barnaby: So is there a very broad politics — I might even say a politics of freedom — immanent to the experience of climate catastrophe, which, rather than a story of industrial progress, says: capitalism has broken and is breaking and destroying the world, and we want to repair what’s broken, to care for people abandoned by a de-industrializing, never-fully-post-industrial capitalism in the global North? Is there a class politics that assembles people declared surplus to requirements, for quite a radical vision of what’s sometimes called degrowth — instead of the British state’s current obsession with returning to mid-twentieth or even mid-2000s growth rates as the only route to improvement? Can we think about politics beyond that obsession with growth?
Adam: On the first part — yes, such a project existed, had an aim, had a beginning and an end, and was broken and lost in the struggles of 2021–22.
Barnaby: You mean the Green New Deal?
Adam: The Green New Deal, yes. … On the degrowth agenda: My only real problem with “degrowth” is the label, and the political question of how you get there. It seems evident to me that for rich societies that have already reached, by any reasonable per-capita standard, a level of affluence sufficient for freedom and flourishing, the central priority should no longer be aggregate average growth — which can be deeply misleading given inequality (dramatically so in the US) — but quality of life, distribution, the basic infrastructure of social reproduction, mobilizing both workers and the “clients” of that relationship. That’s clear. So why wouldn’t you build a democratic politics around the central question of how we care — for children, for elders, for people with illness or mental-health needs? Answer those questions and we’re for real.
The problem — and it’s not really debatable — is that in Europe growth rates are now so small that we are de facto in a post-growth world anyway. … the question is how you build a coalition — it’s a hegemonic project, you have to build your own coalition, formulate the alternative, and on the other hand silence the other side; this has to be a politics of power.
One of the genuinely ambiguous turns in the “just transition” discourse that came out of the global labour movement in the 2010s — in the US, in South Africa — is the idea that a just transition can leave no one behind. It can’t. We’ve got to leave some people behind. Democratic politics of coalition doesn’t require a hundred percent consent; you need a solid majority sustaining you to push through radical change to the distributional bargain, and your claim has to be, at some level, that this is justifiable on some calculus that applies to a broader group — otherwise you’re engaged in a kind of sectarian politics.
But the first and central question is the problem of power, posed at three levels: electorally, whatever your system, you have to play it and win it — the Democrats are living the consequences of that, and Britain is staring at the same thing after local election results split five parties between sixteen and twenty-six percent under first-past-the-post, a recipe for randomness. You have to build political-economy coalitions — interest groups — and you have to get at the technocracy, the inside levers of power (Corbynism had elements of that project too). Degrowth, as currently formulated, doesn’t meet that standard — it’s often couched in a rather naked normativity that ends up looking detached from reality, and we can’t afford to look out of touch, because that just leaves the field to people like Reeves celebrating 0.8% growth. We’re caught in a bad standoff between a politics of degrowth that isn’t really a politics, and a politics of growth that isn’t really a politics either.
Barnaby: I’d think of assembling those interest groups into a coalition as ultimately involving leaving behind the capitalists — those who appropriate.
Adam: That’s a dangerous thing to attempt, and the successful programmes of transformation have generally involved coalitions with some capitalists. You have to pick your partners, find the weak spots, find the “right victims.” Coal is the paradigm case — the hard-edged strategy around 2021 and the Glasgow COP, for all its razzmatazz with Boris Johnson and Mark Carney and the mobilization of $133 trillion in notional finance, was that a coalition of NGOs and activists realized coal is a sitting duck. Insofar as Britain has genuinely decarbonized, that’s downstream of the destruction of the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1980s, which opened the door to a ruthless, privatized, corporate-driven offshore wind sector — not even British companies, plugged into an unbundled, privatized electricity system. So it’s rapid decarbonization by global standards, but against the backdrop of the destruction of that blocking labour coalition – neoliberalism not as ideology but as class politics. Compare Germany, notionally the great leader of European green politics — nowhere near as far down the decarbonization path, in part because of the rearguard action of a small but effective group of coal-mining unions who’ve delayed and massively slowed the transition. I don’t think of either of these as a model.
But it’s instructive for thinking about the coalition you’re describing: where are the weak spots? In 2016, when Trump first came to power, you could have bought the entire American coal sector for less than a billion dollars, because every major coal company was effectively bankrupt. …
Barnaby: I wonder if, alongside Keynes, there’s another very different twentieth-century model for reinventing socialism and rethinking political subjects — Lenin. Lenin faces the historic crisis of a certain Marxist optimism — the labour movement in a place like Britain ascending gradually until it’s strong enough to overthrow capitalism. Instead he faces a labour movement split apart by imperialism, and reimagines a political subject that includes Russian peasants, British workers, and colonized peasants in India and China, Chinese nationalists too.
Adam: He’s one of the first modern thinkers of the global condition — what we now flatly call “globalization,” though he saw it far more dramatically, and grasped the weight of Asia in that story early on.
Barnaby: He rethinks the space of politics away from a Western-centric, nationalist frame — and rethinks its time too, because he has a sense of the coming catastrophe of the First World War, not just a linear story of progress. He’s trying to think a possible politics that emerges from the agency of people subordinated by a capitalist world-system, rather than from the standpoint of state technocrats asking who can be brought into a coalition — rather than the proletariat emerging fully formed as a single universal class, the way the 1848 Marxist vision has it.
Adam: Exactly. My third book — my toughest book — I was genuinely struggling with Lenin, struggling from my standpoint, because he is so incredibly compelling. He writes like he’s blogging — the first Substacker, really, if you read him at marxists.org: you can read him day by day, writing the most brilliant political commentary in real time,
Barnarby: it’s conjunctural analysis,
Adam: written in medias res, from the middle of things, but constantly searching for the underlying structure. For me the three figures are Lenin, Keynes, and Carl Schmitt, the German conservative — though one shouldn’t worship individuals; Gramsci in the notebooks is doing something similar, Bukharin anticipates Lenin, and Hobson anticipates Lenin before him. But there’s a milieu of thought reaching across these figures that speaks to our situation, because we’re in the same soup they were in, a hundred years down the line.
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Barnaby: So I want to ask: how does your liberalism engage with China now, and think about the increasingly peripheral position of places like Britain and even America? There are two obvious liberal reactions to the rise of China. One doubles down on the claim that liberal democracy means voting every few years, various civil liberties, even the freedom to organize trade unions — not that there’s much of that left in Britain, but more than in China
Adam: — and the consequences of bucking that in China are far more severe.
Barnaby: So there’s a terrified liberal view: the end of Western civilization will bring something much worse, and we’ll come to appreciate the limited freedoms liberal democracy afforded us. And there’s another, more Keynesian liberal view, delighted by what looks like a more efficient technocratic management of the state in China than the West has managed for a long time — though there’s a real question of whether that’s true, or just an Orientalist image of efficient, calculating Chinese machines. You’re sometimes associated with that second, adulatory position.
Adam: People accuse me of one or the other — either not understanding the technical deficiencies of Chinese solutions on their own terms, or being willfully blind to the repression, the violence, or indeed the payoff of the Chinese regime. I’m not one for historical analogies, because I’m so interested in the sheer protean force of change — but there are things we can learn from having been here before. The obvious analogy to Stalinism in the 1930s, the Popular Front moment, the struggles progressive intellectuals went through in defining their position then — including my grandparents, whose choice was to side with the Soviet Union and commit themselves to its power and its project.
Barnaby: To spy for it.
Adam: My maternal grandfather was, in fact, a KGB asset.
Adam: It makes me so impatient. It makes me impatient, because I think both sides of the current debate involve such poor thinking, and it’s so blind to actual Chinese history. What’s striking about the Chinese Revolution is that it saw the Soviet Revolution’s deformation under Stalin directly, and Mao’s entire politics in the 50s, 60s, and the Cultural Revolution is about fighting against bureaucratization — that catastrophic, violent, and yet also transformative process of the Cultural Revolution, without which you can’t think or see anything about modern China at all. So that’s where I start: not the external liberal reflex of “they don’t respect freedoms the way we do,” nor the equally shallow “aren’t their high-speed trains fantastic.” My engagement is trying to develop a practice of engaging with the China, including with the regime, of deep immersion with Chinese oppositional culture, which serves as a constant internal check on my own technocratic enthusiasm. …. So the bigger project is understanding this as an absolutely radical new stage of the story we’ve been discussing since the 1850s. The crisis of the 1970s was far more violent and existential in China than anywhere else, and out of it comes, to put it crudely, the victory of the hard developmentalist wing of the Communist Party — Deng Xiaoping’s “development is the hard truth,” not love of Western markets or the rule of law or pluralism. It’s literally what Stalin said to factory managers in 1931–32: either we do this, or they crush us. That’s what Deng is echoing, and everything after is a continuation of that logic. No one in the West should exaggerate the extent to which the opening-up was a comprehensive surrender, or underestimate the willingness of the Party to reinvent itself against what it sees as the subversion of Party autonomy by the socioeconomic transformation it has itself unleashed. In my view they’re the latest innovators in the party-form as a mode of political power — quite distinct from the little liberal parties in the West that merely take turns governing. I’d draw analogies to Modi’s BJP and the RSS, or Erdoğan’s AK Party in Turkey — different in degree of formal democracy, but all emerging from real struggles for power, and all enjoying genuinely mass, plebiscitary support. These aren’t merely minor totalitarian experiments; they’re transformative national projects reconfiguring the relationship with the state.
And then, let’s talk about the railways — but only in the context of understanding what that choice was about. The railway decision in China was made in 2008–09 against the backdrop of what the Party understood as an epic collapse of Western economic leadership. There’s an explicit, stated-out-loud recognition that major economic crises are followed by major surges in technological innovation, again and again in modern history, and that China had missed these waves before and wasn’t going to miss this one, because missing them is the root of China’s historical subordination. They see this as a sovereigntist project — that’s what the railways are about: building dominance in a specific technology, out-competing Europe and Japan. The same is true of green energy — those solar panels aren’t just an achievement in decarbonization; they’re a statement of the same project, and, as critical anthropologists and sociologists point out, also a claim on the territory of Xinjiang, on the Gobi Desert, on the incorporation of Inner Mongolia into a multiethnic Chinese state.
Barnaby: So am I wrong that twentieth-century ways of thinking about politics are now in a kind of crisis — is Chinese capitalism state capitalism or not, is it the return of 1950s Stalinist ideas of nation and development, and is the “postscript” only a story of Western centrism giving way to a civilization simply moving its center — such that the choice facing somewhere like Britain is between chaining ourselves to a decaying petrostate in America or being servile to an electrification state in China, which is also building plenty of coal-fired power stations, but has a vision of state power controlling and allying with markets rather than fossil fuels that are running out?
Adam: I’d simply say: Comrade, it’s uneven and combined development. Both things true at once. To speak of a “postscript” as far as India, Turkey, or China are concerned is vastly premature — they’re only opening the second century of Chinese communism, and they mean that for real. At the same time, you’re right about the West’s situation. Once, the British General Strike of 1926 sent ripples through the Communist International, prompted major strategic reassessments by Comintern leaders. Britain will never again have that kind of relevance. Does that matter to the sixty-odd million people who live on this island? Of course — it’s a local problem with intense local significance, and because of its history, a wider, almost microcosmic fascination. But America and Europe are still equipped with genuinely powerful levers of power, so America’s crisis is, to an extent, everyone’s crisis.
At the same time, there is a project in Asia — my only caution would be: don’t think of it as an extension of our twentieth century. We really need new categories, new chronologies. And also the internal critique of that project — because for many, arguably most, right-thinking, critically-minded Chinese intellectuals I know, there’s a profound disappointment that this is the outcome. This was never — and I think of Hobsbawm’s famous response to Ignatieff, when the liberal Ignatieff challenged him on Stalinism on camera — Hobsbawm says: do you even think the most sophisticated of us believed this was actually a socialist paradise? Those who thought hard about it thought of it as necessary, better than the alternatives, essential as a lever against fascism, which would have meant the end of the world. That’s the spirit in which I approach Chinese green technology …
Barnaby: So what are the parameters for a future politics, in your view, that understands the decline of American power without desperately trying to arrest it — which seems to be the only thing European states are currently interested in, shoring up NATO, hoping the Western alliance can somehow endure? What are the contours of an alternative politics that doesn’t lament the decline of Western civilization, that sees the shift in the centre of gravity, isn’t starry-eyed about China just because it’s building lots of railways, but is more connected to the new-left critiques emerging within China itself? Is there an alternative horizon there?
Adam: I’m smiling, because when you ask me for my framework — Europe is the only conceivable space in which that could be realized. Not that I wholeheartedly endorse everything the existing EU stands for, but to put it another way: the UK, in its current form, cannot be a meaningful unit for that kind of project — and that becomes truer by the day. You might say that’s not the priority, but if you ask me where the space for an alternative politics lies, taking the spatial direction you opened up earlier, that’s where I invest my — heartbroken — hopes. And I think it has to be a new kind of pick-and-mix, following the template of 1920s Keynesianism before it solidified into technocratic General Theory orthodoxy in the 50s and 60s: a genuine question about what belongs in the coalition and what doesn’t, how you articulate those elements. We’ve been talking throughout about how you find and build powerful coalitions around the most urgent projects — for me in recent years, that’s meant climate change and the energy transition — but that clearly has to extend to other domains too.
One area where you and I differ most sharply on the EU is immigration policy, the grim “Fortress Europe” approach the EU pursues, which I’d want to counterpose with a genuinely Keynesian politics of investment — in this comprehensive sense — to reduce the zero-sum dynamic, because it’s the distributional struggles that provide the rocket fuel for xenophobes and racists. I’m out and proud on that: it’s one of the great outstanding challenges for Europe, whether narrowly conceived as the EU or as Britain — our relationship with Western Asia and Africa is the frontier of a challenging future politics, and it has to go hand in hand with greater openness, a consistent struggle against racism (tacit or otherwise), and this comprehensive politics of sustainable living we’ve been discussing.
Barnaby: Here I think we actually get to the nub of it — one of the differences between Keynes and Lenin. Lenin says everyone should read Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, his denunciation of the Treaty of Versailles — Lenin says if you read it, you’ll become a Bolshevik, even though Keynes himself wasn’t one, because Keynes documented the savagery with which the victorious powers behaved at the end of the First World War. But Keynes thinks there’s a genuinely open, contingent space in which those states could have done otherwise, whereas Lenin has a much more fixed account of how European capitalists will behave. And I think that’s there in the very idea of Europe as something recoverable — to me, the idea of Europe is one of the most violent ideas in world history. It’s no coincidence that the European Union is a fortress, that its Common Agricultural Policy impoverishes African farmers, that it has a neocolonial relationship even to its own internal periphery — Greece, Italy, Ireland. And I think there was a moment where you grappled with that and came out, as far as I’m concerned, on the right side: in grappling with the genocide in Gaza, where Western civilization showed the scale of its brutality, with the support of the Biden administration writing the checks — the administration you’d previously engaged with — and the support of the entire German political establishment. Some critics on the American right implicitly read the violence in Gaza as somehow a “Jewish problem.” I read it as a Western-civilization problem. Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, wrote admiringly to Cecil Rhodes, the great British colonizer of Southern Africa — admiringly in no nice sense. To me the violence written into the idea of Europe is there in the killing fields of Gaza, and you, a liberal, chose to say that most liberals were doing something barbaric in supporting this genocide, or being silent about it.
Adam: It’s interesting — you posed it as a Jewish problem or a Western-civilization problem; I’d simply say it’s a political problem. I understand that “Western civilization” gets continuously invoked to justify appalling terror and violence, and has historically been used that way — but that’s only one use of the term, one possibility in its development, and the same is true of “Europe.” I’m fairly committed to a project of transformation, fungibility, openness — which can also, as we’re seeing with Israel, include terrifying escalations toward ever greater violence. That’s what we’ve seen in the Zionist project over the last twenty or thirty years, with Netanyahu emerging — in no way downplaying that it was a settler-colonial project from the start, and that such projects are almost always violent given their inherent logic. But let’s grant that Gaza is a whole new level of manifest destruction. … — if we believe in that kind of openness in history, we have to credit the possibility of total disaster too, which is clearly where we are. But I don’t approach that from a deterministic standpoint — I approach it as a matter of constant contingency, constant choice. Since it’s very hard for me to meaningfully dissociate myself from Western civilization, I think of it as an everyday project of trying not to be complicit in something bad — an everyday project of waking up and trying to be a decent human being, not a sexist, not a racist, listening to critiques when they happen and taking them seriously. In this case it wasn’t hard. It was an opportunity to totally fail, and it was crucial not to fail — not in any especially dramatic way; it was, as people say, just “not failing.” Right there in front of you was a test of whether you can tell the difference between disaster and something in any way defensible.
Politics is always a weighing of means and ends that never stops, and, as a historian of the Second World War who admires David Edgerton’s work, I recognize in the particular kind of war Israel fought in Gaza — if you can even call it a war — the distinctive hallmarks of what I’ve called “liberal militarism”: stand-off militarism, in which you demonize the enemy, establish a logic where any casualty on your own side is by definition excessive, which then justifies unlimited violence to suppress an opponent whose very “unreasonableness” confirms it deserves destruction. No one in Britain can distance themselves from that logic, because that’s the kind of war we waged against Germany in the later stages of the Second World War, and in that context I don’t disapprove of it — I own the violence. You can debate whether it was a reasonable use of resources, but it’s a matter of judgment: in the struggle against fascism, do I believe in machines that kill fascists? Yes.
In Gaza we’re talking about the illegitimate imposition, in the twenty-first century, of a settler-colonial project dating to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And there I say: no. Full stop. Not in my name, not with my support, not with my tax dollars, not with my acceptance or approval — and I won’t be silent about it either.
Barnaby: But the Second World War is a dangerously powerful image precisely because it’s so exceptional. … it just so happened that the British Empire in World War II, and French imperial power conscripting colonized people it had no intention of freeing, happened to be fighting something we now regard as so much worse that we can retroactively affirm that war.
Adam: I disagree. I don’t buy the accidentalism at all. There was something written into the logic of Western civilization that meant Britain would end up on the “better” side, fighting Germany — something written into the logic of historical development that placed fascism and Nazism in the relationship they had to British imperial liberalism in the 1930s and 40s. That was in no way accidental. Nor, is the derailment of the more radical democratic project of the Weimar Republic and the backlash against it accidental.
… for the political health and culture of Britain, it might actually be better if we forgot the Second World War a bit, because it makes people saccharine and complacent. But I was taking the other route — the Bomber Harris route, so to speak: to say that what I see in Gaza is, indeed, reminscent of our way of war. … In my reading, though, Western civilization comes with an imperative to make political and moral choices in relation to that inheritance. It doesn’t guarantee you’ll get it right, and all too often … it’s opened the door to disaster. Politics is the key.
Barnaby: I think there’s a pretty thoroughgoing continuity in this thing called Western civilization, though
Adam: — there are continuities within it. But, it’s multiple, braided, many-faceted — t … you would have a hard time coming up with the last settler-colonial project that did something like Gaza in full view of the global press. I think it’s exceptional, extraordinary in scale, in part because it’s so self-discrediting — you’d think, given those continuities, someone in the PR department would be saying “this has to end.” …
Barnaby: Well — there is a structural limit in the politics produced, here in Britain, by people who drove peasants off the land to make them landless labourers, then went to Africa, kidnapped people, transported and enslaved them for free labour; whose descendants went to the Americas and committed genocide there. That continuous history — leading to King Leopold’s killing fields in the Congo, to Agent Orange and napalm destroying lives in Vietnam, to the killing fields of Gaza — is only one aspect of a story of Western civilization that also produced, for instance, the modern labour movement.
But it’s such a violent story — and the imperialists and capitalists in that story are so peculiarly violent, that British culture of the “stiff upper lip” that could plan torture and genocide and then sit down for high tea. There’s something so contemptuous in it. As E.P. Thompson, the great British Marxist, put it: European civilization is peculiarly contemptuous of human love and human life. I think there’s something peculiarly violent in that culture, which — and this is the great tragedy I mourn as a Jew — Zionism has taken wholesale from the West, abandoning what I think of as our different culture. Of course the major tragedy of Zionism is Palestinian, not Jewish — but that’s my own, personal grief. I think there’s a violence built into that “openness” and “fungibility” that has a limit. You could get EU politicians to agree to some kind of Marshall Plan to ease the conditions producing anti-migrant politics, but the idea of Europe, of Western civilization, as this peculiarly rational, enlightened core of the world that ought to be the world’s center — there’s a violence built into that idea, and we need a politics that steps outside it entirely.
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Adam: You’re right to sense that this is really the nub of our difference. Because I see exactly what you are saying. But I think your reading of culture’s effects is far too deterministic. Is Pete Hegseth, with his crusader tattoos, a legitimate, predictable product of a certain strand of Western Christianity? Absolutely — he wears it on his sleeve, he says it himself. Is it necessary? Obviously not — we haven’t had someone quite that insane in the Defense Department before, and plenty of people in the Pentagon thought he was manifestly unsuited to the job. It’s the result of a chain of contingent events that led to that point. So — is it a mere accident that Hegseth ended up in that position at this particular moment? No, I’d concede the situation is overdetermined; we’re not talking about a bonkers lottery in which Donald Trump and his merry band of crusaders end up in power. That’s not a mere lottery result — you can trace lines of determination. But are they necessary? Is this the normal mode in which American power functions? Did every prior administration, faced with the prospect of attacking Iran alongside Israel, think “that looks cool, I’d love to fight that war” and then hold back for another year because, remember, there’s the Strait of Hormuz, remember the Carter Doctrine? I won’t say restraint was the norm — but up to this point, everyone coming out of white Western civilization who’s held power in the Pentagon has, no doubt, had “wet dreams” about fighting a crusader war and has gone that is a “wet dream” that is not what we are going to do. What we urgently need to explain about the current moment — I gave a lecture at the New School a year or two ago about this, calling it “hyper-agency” — is why a bunch of men with such wet dreams, whether it’s Netanyahu’s project of total revision of the region’s boundaries, or Elon Musk going to Mars, or Trump simply living out the fantasy in real time, or Hegseth — are now actually exercising the power to act on them. That’s the urgent question. I wouldn’t for a second deny that any of this is somehow alien to Western civilization — that would be completely unhelpful. But it’s a question of self-regulation: up to this point, everyone in their right mind in that system has been able to tell the difference between a white crusader fantasy and something they’re actually going to do.
Fascinating and thought provoking as ever. I think you underestimate the importance of growth though. The rising tide produced by growth eases policy choices, including on distributional issues.
Thanks a lot for posting this comprehensive talk!