Liberalism or communism? with Adam Tooze

Yeah, it's great to be here.

What were your curiosities? I mean, I'm not coming into this entirely cold. I've been kind of, you know, listening to your ideas over the last couple of months as they've been taking shape. And I mean, one of the things that struck me is that you like to frame this project as a matter of inheritance, a kind of a legacy. And you know, when when when you put it that way, one of the questions has got to be what happened? Like, did somebody die? Like what was it that created this moment of transfer at the very least from generation to generation? But I think you have a much broader and deeper kind of sense of a break.

But I think that actually follows an earlier kind of crisis and rupture. 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. From the revolution of slaves in Haiti to the fall of the Berlin wall, there was some kind of sense that and of course the lesser important but still important revolution of Parisians at the Bastile. There was some kind of sense that the conscious mastery by human beings over history was a possibility. That people could control their environment and a concept of freedom that involved people vanquishing all those forces and powers that dominated and subjugated people and defining themselves outside all conscription to hierarchies. defining themselves as free individuals was actually Marx's horizon. Much forgotten. And so I think there was a sense 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. In the 1970s 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 Marx I think is a central figure and he's connected to 20th century feminism and anti-colonialism which were also about people trying to take control of their history and trying to define themselves outside fixed social hierarchies. Capitalism isn't here an economic system of inequality but a social form of power and domination. That people that Marx wanted people to free themselves from. Marx said in the communist manifesto that capitalism is the domination of the present by the past. And communism allows the present to dominate itself for us to define ourselves. So I think there was a definite kind of possibility which I think people now find much harder to believe in. Yeah. And I can talk about why, but I think that I'm interested in asking what have we lost and in escaping nostalgia. What have we lost? Not just by trying to dip back into those beautiful ideas of the past, but what might it mean to, 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? What does it mean to inherit those old ideas in different conditions?

Um that if I understand you right is a key element of what you see as something that needs to be recuperated, inherited, salvaged from the wreckage of this moment. Mhm. Yes. I mean firstly my connection to the language of inheritance is not through Zurich bankers but is through a world that some people would associate with bankers which is growing up as a Jew. Yeah. where the question was where tradition is talked about obsessively and the question of tradition is not just how do we repeat what was done in the past that's a dead tradition but how do we exist in dialogue with the past and work out what it means to renew and update for the present the gifts the buried treasure that we've been handed from the past and I think the concept of freedom is a very tricky example of this because I think that freedom is Marx's central hope. 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. But obviously in the 20th century cold war construction, it's easily forgotten that freedom was Marx's central project. 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? And what you're saying is no, there was always this other in fact higher and more powerful dynamic which was about the quest for freedom. 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. I think we can have the same kind of belief in that that Marx had. It's not the idea of progress that he's sometimes associated with of extremely fixed determined historical stages. But I think what's so rich about his thinking is that he thinks that the kinds of freedom that we can have depend on the historical moment in which we're situated. Something he takes again from that German tradition. And I have been obsessed with this paragraph from his Grundrisse 1857-58 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. And he doesn't say that one is better than the other actually, but he thinks that they're different. So our question is what would freedom look like in 2026? Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. and 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. But I think it has three faces in 19th century industrial Britain that are very rich. Marx thinks about freedom as free time. Yeah. Um he's very very keen on stressing that real wealth is free time that real freedom is free time. He thinks about freedom as a certain experience of space. 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. We can be really global individuals, all-rounded individuals. Um, and he thinks that freedom is free individuality, which means defining ourselves rather than being limited by our placement in social hierarchies. The opposite of individuality is not being sociable or being in community. It's being hierarchically defined. So those three freedoms, free time, free space, free individuality, Marx thinks that capitalist production makes possible. It gives us the machines with which we could do less labor. It gives us the world market with which we could be cosmopolitan rounded individuals. Um but capitalism holds back. It conscripts us to endless more and more and more labor where we could be having more free time. It has a global division of labor 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. 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. My question for us is, is there a kind of freedom which is imminent to our world? Um, or more pessimistically, is there something about Marx's 19th century world that meant that some kind of freedom was imminent to it? And perhaps something so ambitious as universal human freedom is not imminent to our world today.

yes this is exactly the thing I grapple with. So I think that the reason that the promise of freedom that so animated people from weavers in the 1840s to anti-colonial revolutionaries in the 1970s which really was a belief that the world tended that the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. a belief that the whole world had within it the resources to overturn every system of domination and make people free everywhere. Freedom not just in this limited kind of liberal sense of non-inference but freedom to define oneself and Nina Simone's kind of freedom, a feeling an enduring condition. I think that the reason that that became less believable is because it was utterly umbilically attached to particular historical subjects to people who had an experience of unfreedom workers who had an experience of capitalist exploitation the colonized women who had an experience of patriarchal domination. 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. Um, was attached then in the 70s to car workers, militant subjects. Well, both miners and car workers and the life worlds that were built around them are now gone. Yeah, Britain still produces cars but with far fewer workers doing it. And also the foundation, right, the Archimedian point, the point from which they could exercise leverage was real. Exactly. Was very manifest cars energy. Exactly. And so then what I hear you saying is that the jointly at the same moment both the agent of this project of liberation and the standpoint or the sort of the foundation on which they rest and stand both of those feel destabilized in the current moment AB and connectedly yes you know I read neoliberalism as the concerted disassembly of emancipatory subjects yeah absolutely so it's a project in destroying working-class life worlds. That's why Thatcher had to go to war with the miners in Britain. They were the social subject that had grounded and been the kind of organizing core of socialist politics. Um very inspiring when you see those old miners banners and you see this idea of a kind of imminent freedom. You see people working in tough conditions collectively, socially. We're both familiar with Tim 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 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 imagine and you're right the challenge that comes I think to that attempt to rebirth a socialist or a communist politics the challenge that comes from a kind of sharp smart realist liberalism and I think a lot of our dialogue has been engaging with this challenge is the question. Well, is there any historical guarantee that there should be any concept of total human emancipation born within the mess of our present at all? Um, and can we instead proceed with something less than that? So a question I think that takes us to a question I want to ask you which is do you understand your project in being in dialogue with governments, you know, even briefly with the Biden administration in America. um in your interest in the politics of contemporary China and its state, its party as being about an attempt to find resources of hope that might be resources of technocratic statecraft and are not a politics of universal human freedom. Do you understand? Do you think my bar is too high and you're trying to do something more gritty and realist by using existing power to make the world better?

Mhm. So let's grapple with that Keynesian politics. Um you see it seems to me that Keynes is not a victor of the 20th century that the future that he imagined at the end of World War I became a kind of future past. He he says at one point in the 1930s in Britain for the rest of the century ordinarily we'll have labor governments. Um, and he imagined, which of course didn't come to pass, and he imagined that the end of World War I forced him to re-evaluate his politics of loyalty to the British imperial bourgeoisie in quite an interestingly limited sort of way. So before World War I, he had thought that the British capitalist class were agents of progress and could be trusted. He has an amazing example of the situatedness of his thinking. He makes before World War I his famous argument about higher rates of spending when you redistribute income to lower income groups as an argument for not redistributing income to lower groups. He says, you know, if poorer people have money, they spend it on ice cream today. If capitalists have money, they build railways. So in the 19th century, you can trust the capitalist class to make wise investments. That whole world is blown up by World War I. Yeah. And he sees the idiocy of the British capitalist class and of its politicians. And it seems to me what he tries to construct is a politics that would shift those capitalists from the private sector to the public sector. That they should be running the British state. Yeah. The direction of investment to make it more concrete should shift from what are in the end feckless, irresponsible, short-sighted, conservative in the worst possible way business elite in Britain. the hardfaced men that did well out of the war and the panicky people in the stock market to some other body which of course he imagines himself in charge of well precisely so he wants the socialization of investment there's a lot of the Keynesian project that's much more radical than postwar what Joan Robinson called bastard Keynesianism um he wants the socialization of investment he wants the state to be he talks about a planned domestic economy even um but who does he want to be running that state um people like him um etonians and others um there's still that 19th century elitism that's completely unbroken in him and you know doesn't differentiate between working-class people in trade unions who he also thinks they really have a clue and business people who really have no excuse but are also clueless but he and he even internal I mean his you know his early work on Indian currency and finance treats equal contempt for the Tory short-sightedness that would pillage India and Indian economics that wants national self-determination no he wants liberal enlightened British statesmen to run Indians lives for them and I think he kind of domesticates that politics then when he thinks about the British working class so there's a profound elitism he says of course famously the class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie his goal is to stop that confrontation from happening so he doesn't have to make that painful choice which he thinks is determined by his class background and by this attitude by this effect of contempt ultimately because how could he be on the side of the TU you see is that a very limited kind of political project really is my question in one sense clearly it clearly is and I find those essays of Keynes in the 1920s and 30s both this is before he writes his famous economics book which is the general theory which comes out in 1936 which I can't really recommend as light reading to anyone watching this show but essays in persuasion which are a collection of essays from the late 20s are, you know, anyone who reads a newspaper can digest and appreciate, I think, these texts. They're fascinating. Um, but they are very limited politics. Yes, it's really a kind of late Edwardian kind of translation into the 20th century. And I think one would have to say that if you want to own this Keynesian legacy in some way, you either you take it to a very general level, at which case far from being the losers of the 20th century, we're all Keynesian now in some sense. Or you go, which I find even more attractive to a position which says that Keynesianism went through successive iterations and its most radical was really in the 1970s because Keynesianism was dancing in a what used to be a telephone box, right? It was operating within a very constrained circumstance. To be technical about this, it's operating within a currency system which even if it is moving away from gold is ultimately tied to the gold backing of the currency. And an underrated break in human history at the civilizational world historic level is in the early 70s when all the major currencies of the world are separated from gold. Something that he had long argued for because he's a strong conventionalist. You know, gold is no different than law for instance, right? We shouldn't fetishize it as a substantive thing. And that opens up a realm of radical experimentation in economic policy and then also new repressive efforts to shut that freedom down. And I think you know in the same way as one would want to grant to Marxism originally a theory of the mid-19th century shaped as you're saying in the 1850s in the first encounter with Victorian industrialism an afterlife which constantly innovates Keynesianism can be I think seen as running along with it in some sense and the smarter and stronger Keynesians are constantly as liberals should really and those who are worth taking seriously have always done in the 20th century measuring themselves against their serious intellectual antagonist which is various types of updated Marxism. And so to my mind the Keynesianisms of the 1970s which are actually embracing the options of a monetary order which is no longer tied to gold are the ones which are truly interactive and interesting for us now. Um so that's where I you know you're right that that historic Keynes in some sense is a period piece and a rather limited kind of politics. Um but that's not where it stopped. I mean to my mind one of the most amazing essays in those collections of the 20s is where he says like liberalism will have a brilliant future if it could address you know various technical issues to do with monetary policy and in addition two questions the drug question and the sex question. And if we can speak about drugs and sex, you know, we're going to be in the political mainstream. And you know, you tell me Keynesianism lost in the 20th century or the 21st century. No, he saw those questions and their centrality and makes an emphatic democratic case for saying, you know, if you think that, you know, your average working-class woman can't handle talking about sex, you haven't met any. You don't understand how central these concerns are. No one there is appalled about talk about abortion. We need to embrace and talk about this. And if you don't take seriously people's need for escape from mundane reality in various types of narcotics, again, you don't really understand life. And he was a man after all who understood the pleasures of life in complex ways. So that I think is another element of this new liberalism, shall we say, this reinvention of a 19th century tradition. And it's not just those particular claims, but that meta move in general. That's interesting, right? That is saying as history and times change, we need to continuously broaden. So I think of ecology in the environmental politics, which again is a kind of liberal domain to a considerable extent from the 60s onwards as the next frontier. Which is why the humiliation and the modesty and the disaster in some senses of western environmental policy, the failure really to grasp the climate problem with due force is yet another disappointing iteration of this keynesianism.

Oh, I'm sure that's exactly what's happening, but the managers still get to do the managing thing, right? So then the question is how are those two different visions of the world going to relate to each other? And neoliberalism exploited and the right-wing truly conservative backlash exploited the breakdown of that relationship. Um so my liberalism is another crucial thought and this is what's so interesting about Keynes is he has hegemonic aspirations but he fully understands that the world his world is highly confined and that again is a kind of central position. As much as you know upper middle class educated people of which I am the bonafide descendant right tend to think of themselves as the universal class it's definitely not true it's crazy right it's mad it's a mad pretention it can only be sustained at the idealistic level whereas the marxian claim to constitute a universal out of material reality is far more compelling to me so stuck in the position that folks like myself are in the question then is how do you do politics and it has to be coalition It has to be that's why I'm here like it has to be coalition right in the complex coalition that currently is configured around Tribune around folks like yourself like and that's something that Keynes understood and it's about making those coalitions work and that's what he's saying you know if the coalitions break down and we end up on either sides of the barricades this just goes to because I'm going to end up shooting people on the other side that I actually want to be in coalition with and that's what I see the 1970s as being the breakdown of that coalition and I'm Not blaming the insurgents who are tired to hell of being managed by Keynesians by any means. I far more obvious I think is the fact that there's a surrender essentially by the professional middle class to the lure of neoliberalism because though it wasn't our vision of the 40s50s and 60s did we do well out of it by heck we did over the last 50 years right so there was a kind of betrayal of a coalition on the part of the professional managerial class people in the US refer to this as the PMC right um of that coalition um Yet in liberalism's modern history, it has never ever ever ever ever achieved any of its major goals under its own steam. Right? It has always essentially relied on coalitions. And the problem from the 70s onwards is it ends up in coalition with the story of the Labour Party. You end up in coalition with the city of London, right? You end up with the Tony Blair synthesis. And there's smart Keynesian technocrats all around Gordon Brown and people I love and care about and doing the right thing, but de facto in coalition, not any longer with organized labor and the social democratic project of rebuilding Britain, but with the city of London. And we see the consequences of that after 2008 because you just can't get the wheels back on the bus.

Well, don't make it so much a matter of sociology merely. It's a deliberate I mean this is brilliant of Stuart Hall's analysis of Thatcherism, right? This is a deliberate project. Hegemony doesn't just consist of offering people treats and telling them good stories. It consists in breaking your enemies. And I wouldn't start by saying that coalition of working-class power was weak. I would say it was very very strong. So strong that it necessitated a rearrangement of conservative politics. A whole bunch of really rather weird alliances in the US case between neoliberalism and outright neoconservatism. evangelical right-wing politics end up in bed around Bill Clinton in the 1990s. Things that don't go like Tony Blair is a bizarre phenomenon, you know, of this kind of movement, a kind of conservative neo theological politics in alignment with Keynesian managerialism. A whole variety of rather forced coalitions are necessary to block and stop. I'm not saying there was a revolution in the offing, but there was more movement. there was more scope for movement and there was more countervailing power than at any point in the west since the immediate aftermath of World War II and the immediate aftermath of World War I. Right? So I think there were those three great moments and in each case the story I think shouldn't be you know that Keynesianism or you know Arthur Scargill's vision of the British labor movement just sort of died a natural death and then neoliberalism took over. No, they were fought down. They were broken. they were victimized uh not victim that makes them too passive as well. They were the object of class struggle.

Yeah. Um required a kind of naivety about capitalist interests. His vision in the 1930s was more ambitious than the so-called Keynesian civilization that we got because it involved not just redistribution. I mean for one thing it involved redistribution on a global scale. He wanted the world bank institutions to be much more radical than they were. Um it involved redistribution and the socialization of investment of banking. Um and at some points negative money, money that decreases in value over time. Um so that people are disincentivized from hoarding. It becomes impossible to hoard money. So he imagined therefore the euthanasia famously of the rentier. I think of capitalism. I think Keynes does have a vision of the end of capitalism. of capitalism is capital accumulation. The moderation of his politics is not that he loves capitalism. It's that he loves the people who've run British capitalism and he wants them to become loyal servants of the state.

Totally. That is what he sees as what is worth preserving. In other words, the Oxbridge, you know, he sees himself as the heir of Locke Hume and that British intellectuality that goes back to the 17th and 18th century and he wants to see that a kind of it's not Elizabethan but it's that kind of vision and that is threatened by the circumstances of the 20th century by the power of organized labor which has a very different culture in his view perhaps no culture at all really and the even worse phenomenon which is just the horror of the British capitalist class which is just brainless headless he talks for good reason about animal spirits right it's just swims one way or the other so that is what he wants to rescue but that is him right and I think that you can detach from him a politics of the reinvention of liberalism the politics of a coalition with social democracy which doesn't have to remain within the confines of that very particular that very particular Bloomsbury Cambridge kind of version um though that has considerable cultural power and Kalecki though is really I can never remember whether it's Kalecki or Kalecki I always get told off one way or the other by my Polish friends the his point is really fundamental and powerful because what he adds back in is class struggle right what he adds back in is that it's not by accident that Keynes the door to Keynesian interventionism opens when the capitalist class sees that it needs rescuing, right? That it sees it needs collective action. Um, but no one should mistake that for a permanent alliance, right? One because as soon as something like full employment and normal profit accumulation conditions are restored, you would expect those same groups to begin to worry about things they call euphemistically overheating. This is the thing you'll hear in central bank talk. The economy is running too hot. we need to cool it down by which what they actually mean is we need to raise unemployment and in America we've even reached the point where racialized categories of unemployment are legitimately discussed in this context. So the question literally becomes how high does the rate of male black unemployment have to be for us in the bond market not to worry about the economy running too hot. It's as explicit as that because in their progressivism, the central bankers realized that the single most powerful indicator of the state of the economy was black male unemployment. Last in first out, this is your indicator. And so that became the kind of nub of this kaleckian struggle over the management of capitalism under conditions of tension. And as a kind of

left, I would say, well, yeah, fair enough, comrade. That's absolutely right. So, we have to be attentive at those moments and push back and argue and find a new coalition and not just kind of rest on our laurels and go, "Hey, they love us because we saved them in 2008 and whatever," but keep the argument going, which is one of the reasons why I was willing to engage, or it wasn't really a choice on my part, why I was engaged by the Biden people, because they seriously, kind of left Social Democratic Forces and the American Democratic Party wanted to learn lessons from the Obama administration and I was one of the people that really synthesized the narrative of the disappointment of the Obama administration and it centered on this question of how big did we go with the stimulus, how much is too much. And we literally enacted the entire Keynesian drama with people citing my work and others' work to say under Biden in 2021 we should go really, the phrase was we should go big, and they went big. We went big, over, you know, close to $2 trillion in stimulus, and what happened immediately? Larry Summers and co emerged on the stage to say what you're overheating the economy, we need to cool things down, whereas we had actually persuaded the Fed to look at Black male unemployment as their key indicator of whether the economy was running hot or not. And the Fed managed this through. So then what came instead was the politics of uncertainty, the politics of the cost of living, the inflation crisis that were exploited mercilessly against that effort to rescue America from what in 2020 was a devastating social crisis.

Folks in Europe don't appreciate just how dramatic the disintegration of American politics in 2020 was and Black Lives Matter of course surfaced, but it was, that was as it were the epicenter of a much more comprehensive crisis in American politics which culminated with Jan 6 and so on. So anyway, that is the, to my mind, my Keynesianism isn't, much as I appreciate, much as I'm a historian and much as I appreciate and love the deeply historical reading of what he was about, you know, for it to be live at all and not just a sitting duck for criticism, it has to be this evolving metapolitics.

That's fine. I, but I mean I think his version of that is so weird that in some senses we're twisting him by saying that, because it's not really, anyway, it's not a fully socialist vision, but it's certainly one of radical transformation, and that third position is the one I guess I would personally, for what it's worth, be most interested in.

Yeah. But you're like a, you're, you're a text rat. You're like an archive rat even far more than I am. You're an intellectual historian at some level and I'm an economic historian.

There's like a bone in it. It's like a tasty meal with a bone in it. And the bone in the Keynesian dish is definitely this managerialism. You call it a structural limit. Yeah, I would say it's like a bolt. It holds the whole thing together.

I mean, in 1925-26 he goes to the Soviet Union and loves it.

And he loves it because he sees what he regards as the great achievement of 19th century civilization, which is the ballet. Exactly. He's married, he's married a Russian ballerina. Um, and, um, it would seem to me that in the crisis of the 70s, 80s, including in the downfall of the Soviet Union, um, people don't want to be managed. And that one of the problems is that managing people sort of works as long as it works, as long as you can deliver the goods. When you can't deliver the goods, if your only claim has been we're delivering the goods to you, what you've lost, which is the thing I'm interested in reviving in socialist and communist traditions, is a politics of freedom, of a hope in the transformation of human relations that isn't limited to we'll give you things.

Yeah, I mean, we don't have to hypothesize or speculate about this. It was the vision of the Green New Deal that emerged from the electoral breakthrough, you know, slightly after Corbyn in the UK that you were so closely involved with, um, uh, after the midterm elections in, in the US, which is so important for the mood swings. This is, everyone should be watching out for this in the course of this year. By the time this show releases, this will be, this will be the key in the US. Um, because if the Democrats make a breakthrough, and in 2018 a left-wing faction within the Democrats made a breakthrough, folks will know, Jamaal Bowman in Brooklyn, this kind of scene. Um, that opened a window, and what it opened a window to, I think, is really very fundamental and fascinating and goes to this question of the malleability and the openness of this tradition, which is a vision of the Green New Deal which, which, which in the end, of course, ended up cut down Keynesianism style to nothing more than green industrial policy.

Through, as a result of very tough bargaining in Congress. Right? American administrations don't govern the way the British governments do with huge parliamentary majorities. But started out as the Green New Deal which was a completely comprehensive vision for transformation of American society which also answered the degrowth critique by saying, well yes, we are going to do industrial policy, um, for green energy and infrastructure, and America needs, like, proper modern railways, for instance, and we need housing, um, but centrally, and in its main focus was orientated around a feminist politics of care which was not presented as a sort of normative concession or to sort of woke, but as a realistic account of what the American working class consists of and what it needs, which is a public support for social reproduction, because the crisis of the American working class is manifest and real but it doesn't just consist of, as they like to put it, you know, a shortage of good-paying blue-collar jobs. That's really the downstream of the more fundamental problem, which is the conditions of childcare, um, healthcare, and eldercare, um, and add a mental health crisis on top of that, and, um, that's what the Green New Deal was about, right? It was, for Europeans, because the politics of climate is easier here, in the US the politics of climate were attached to this really comprehensive vision which was, in really big numbers, you were going to go big with this, it was trillions of dollars as a budget. Of course, American numbers always over 10 years, so a little less enormous than it first appeared, but macroeconomically relevant. Three, four, five, six, 7% of GDP, like big Cold War military spending, but on the transformation of American society.

And that, you know, had a Keynesian rationale. We could all do the math on the macroeconomics, and some people were terrified and other people delighted. Um, but it above all refigured what it is that you were trying to do in American society. Would it have produced more growth? Most likely. Would it have reduced unemployment, especially for disadvantaged minorities? Most likely. But above all, it was also just changing the parameters of what we were talking about in economic policy, to the things which so evidently matter to most people in their lives, at least at some point in their biography, and for all of us at some point some of these issues really matter.

So that, that for me is like the concrete, the stuff I ended up doing, which was, like, you know, where I didn't really have much direct advisory input, but where I was cited and quoted and mobilized was down, was again, like, a different conversation, which was how big was the stimulus we can do in '21, which didn't have any of those elements, that was just checks handed out to people in terms of purchasing power. Again, Keynesians would say, okay, fine, we can live with that. That's the Keynesian analytic, is, is rather unspecific as to what you spend the money on. If the aim of the game is just to stabilize the macroeconomic ship, then just get the checks out. You know, as you were saying, money that decays over time will do the job. But in the back of that, there was this other project which really had a concrete vision for a really quite fundamental transformation of American society.

Well, I mean, I think the climate politics is fascinating because it comes in so many different shades, and it also essentially poses the problem of priorities in a really, um, disorientating way, because you can construct various types of ecological Marxism in the mid-19th century, and that's fair and it's there and to be found, but broadly speaking, I think, certainly my reading of Marx, will be that it was a rebellion against the kind of Malthusian restraining kind of logic that said really we have more possibilities than, so Malthus was the late 18th, early 19th century theologian who basically damned the French Revolution as condemned to failure as a result of the inability of food supply to keep up with the fact that people after the revolution would have so much sex, they'd have so many babies, and we'd live in this, theologically, ultimately God-ordained disaster of overpopulation and collapse, right? And Marxism, Marx has no time for this. Marx is cognizant of the damage which capitalist growth is doing to nature, including, of course, the human body, and some of the most graphic passages in Das Kapital, but broadly speaking, Marxism was an expansive kind of vision, cornucopian vision, or could be read that way, and was generally read that way.

And then along comes this neo, I don't want to call it neo-Malthusian, but this new sense of constraint suddenly, in some cases overtly neo-Malthusian, from the late 60s, early 1970s onwards, and it's really difficult to wrap one's head around, right? This is part, I think, of the challenge that we're trying to address, or you're trying to address in this series, is how do you then imagine the subject if you can't any longer presume just this endless abundance of greater and greater mobilization of natural resources, sensibly, right? You, there's, there's huge technological feats still ongoing, but we now cannot, if we're remotely serious people, ignore our best guess that this can't possibly be sustained. It's a vertiginous, utterly unprecedented, scientifically structured view, right? Never before have governments, after all, set out to promise their citizens' grandchildren a livable planet. That, that's not a, that's a new level of governmental ambition. It's absolutely necessary. I'm not, by saying that, saying, 'Oh, that's ridiculous. You silly, naive people, go away.' No, that's part of the terrifying reality that we live in. We can't ignore the science tells us the war.

So, so then from that spawn, like, endless different versions of environmentalism, right? Including a neoliberal version, which is the dominant form in the UK and in Europe, which is Keynesianism of the most sort of attenuated, evaporated, thinned-out kind, which is we will design a market that will take care of this. That's a very Keynesian idea, actually, to design a market that takes care of this, but it's the most minimal, and the promise is you don't have to do any politics at all and you'll get to the right world, which turns out to be totally naive. It's a bit like saying regulating the money supply so as to control inflation doesn't involve any politics. It's the most first-level bad faith move, because obviously who gets credit decides crucially in capitalism. Likewise, who gets carbon credits decides crucially where we move and what price the carbon credits are charged for. So that was one strand.

Another version would be a flat-out kind of developmental Keynesianism, kind of like, you know, the national coal just green now. So we'll have a national green board and we'll do investment and we'll build out a national green energy system, which I would think of as sort of indispensable. I'm frankly also not against carbon pricing. I just think we should be clear about what its politics are. This is, I'm a Keynesian, and I just am wide open on the different instrumentalities that we use, but I think we should be clear about politics. And then the third, you're absolutely right. Yeah. The Green New Deal in the original American version does imply the very self-conscious construction of a new subject.

And, and part of that, of course, is legacy American civil rights politics going all the way back to the 1960s. Part of that is the rainbow coalition of people like Jesse Jackson from the 1980s onwards. And then there's this new definition of climate-exposed, environmentally at-risk groups, which comes out of the environmental justice movement in the US, also rather stronger in the US than in Europe, from the 1980s onwards, because of the so stark hierarchies of environmental risk between especially Black communities and the rest of American, the rest of the white population, in so-called Cancer Alley in Louisiana. There are just these sacrifice zones, largely with, largely Black populations, which have just been subject to huge risk. You put all of that together and you get this idea of frontline communities. And the frontline communities are one of the things which AOC, um, um, you know, the radical representative from New York, um, and her kind of think, you know, brains trust, formulated as an idea of this new agent, this new subject of progressive politics.

No, because that's actually a better description of the American working class than the one that actually came out of this by '22-'23, because it is comprehensive and diverse and complex and largely in the service sector and not necessarily terribly material intensive. But it is not currently, in its current configuration, as politically powerful as narrow interests of those who are mobilizing key swing states and swing districts around, you know, the members of the United Auto Workers or the prospect of re-industrializing Ohio. Um, so you end up with these, in their own terms, close to denialist kind of visions of saving the American working class by building chip factories, which it just doesn't, it doesn't add up. Couple of thousand people in a chip factory. The problem of the American working class is problems of tens of millions of people who can't afford, you know, what for a rich society should just be the basics of affordable housing, healthcare, transport, eldercare.

But it's, it's, I, I find, I find that, I find that wholly convincing as an optic on the impasse of democratic politics under capitalist conditions in the US right now. Yeah.

Well, I mean, to just the first part of your question, um, there was such a project, it had an aim, it had a life, had a beginning, had an end, and it was broken, and it lost in the struggles of 2021, 2022.

The Green New Deal. Yeah. But that was that kind of politics and wanted, you know, credit where credit is due, that was really quite

Powerfully formulated precisely that position. And on its leftwing, it was also anti-imperialist. And the only people that spoke up against the increasingly evident hawkish turn towards China of the Biden administration in 2021 were not the Greens in Germany or people like that, but the squad who two times made an effort to rock what they saw as the escalating sort of military-industrial appropriation of the green energy agenda in 2021. To add to their eternal credit, they saw this and said it out loud.

Talking about leftwingers in the US Congress. Yeah, left wingers in the US Congress, the squad. That's a tough position to be in; those people have to be brave and they face vitriolic assault and are sustained by communities of voters who are willing to bear the price of the marginalization that goes with voting for those people. So it's not an abstract question; I don't have to imagine it. It was there and it was defeated, but it was real. And I think of Mandani and the mobilization in New York as another iteration of an attempt to bootstrap that kind of politics on the degrowth agenda. I mean, my only problem with degrowth really is the label and the political question of how you do it, how you get there. I think it seems evident that for rich societies which by any reasonable standard have already reached per capita levels of affluence that satisfy the conditions of freedom and flourishing, the central priority is no longer aggregate average growth, which can be wholly misleading because of inequality.

Dramatically so in the US, and the priority should all be about quality of life, distribution, the basic infrastructure of social reproduction, the mobilization of both the workers and the clients, customers in that relationship. That's clear, right? And as you say, why would you not mount a democratic politics around that central question of how do we care? I would say both for our children and our elders and how do we care for people with illness and mental health? Those for me are like—you answer those questions and we're for real. The problem is, and nor is it debatable, that in societies in Europe overwhelmingly the rates of growth now are so small; you have Rachel Reeves huffing and puffing about 0.8% per annum or the Germans going to 0. These are barely measurable numbers, which are rounding errors in statistics; they mean something but they are not supposed to mean something at that level. No serious economic statistician is going to say, 'I'm going to die on the hill of whether it was 0.5 or 0.8% growth.' It's ludicrous.

So it's a reductio ad absurdum. I mean, they're making themselves laughing stock by engaging in this. That's clearly not— the reason why it matters, however, is that clearly tens of millions of people in Britain have experienced declining real living standards and are really hard up and struggling, and the cost of living in a city like London, even for somebody from New York, is completely eye-watering, and something needs to be done about it. And they just reach for this old formula of, like, 'Well, growth is the answer.' And it's clearly not. But then the question is: how do you build a coalition? On the double side, it's the hegemonic project; you've got to build your own coalition, formulate the alternative, and on the other hand, silence the other side. Right? This has got to be a politics of power; it can't be a politics for everyone. One of the real, you know, kind of ambiguous turns of the just transition talks into the 2010s, which came out of the labor movement all over the world, in the US, in South Africa, is that a just transition cannot be a politics that leaves no one behind. We've got to leave some people behind. There has to be a hard-edged politics of coalitions in democracies. You don't need 100% consent. You need a solid majority that sustains you to push through radical change which changes the distributional bargain. And your claim has got to be, at some level, broadly speaking, justifiable on some calculus that applies to a broader group. Otherwise, you're really engaged in a kind of sectarian politics. But that is—the first is the problem of power is the central question, right? And that's a question that has to be posed at three levels, I would say: electorally, whatever your electoral system is, you have to play it and you have to win it, and the Democrats are at it, and we suffer the consequences in Britain as well; we're staring at this reality after the local election results of five parties all between 16 and 26% with the first-past-the-post system—it's a recipe for randomness, right? So you got to win; you've got to build political economy coalitions, so interest groups. And then you have to get at the technocracy; you have to get at the inside levers of power, and Corbynism had elements of that kind of project, as you well know. But when we say degrowth, it's got to meet that standard, and currently it doesn't, right? And the politics is very often formulated in rather nakedly normative terms, and I don't have a lot of patience for that because, I think, it's formulated as an empty normativity, it can often appear detached from reality, and that doesn't do the cause any good. Like, we can't afford to appear out of touch with reality. And the problem is it leaves the scene to people like Reeves who are going to celebrate 0.8% growth, which is clearly not. You see what I'm saying? We're caught in a kind of bad—it's not really even a dialectic. We're caught in a bad standoff between a politics of degrowth which isn't really a politics, and a politics of growth which isn't really a politics either.

That's really a dangerous thing to do, and the successful programs of transformation have generally involved coalitions with some capitalists. So you have to pick your partners and you have to find the weak spots and you have to find the good victims. And coal, for instance—this is the hard-edge strategy of climate—is that around 2021 and the Glasgow COP, for all its razzmatazz, and Boris Johnson and Mark Carney, and all the mobilization of $133 trillion dollars of finance. The hard-edge thing was that a bunch of NGOs and a bunch of activists realized that coal is a sitting duck. And insofar as Britain has really made decarbonization, of course, it is the politics of coal and it's the destruction of the NUM in the 1980s which opened the door in Britain to this ruthless private big corporate-driven offshore wind. It isn't even British companies that are plugged into the unbundled privatized British electricity system. And so it's a very rapid decarbonization by global standards. But it is also against the backdrop of that. This isn't neoliberalism as a technocracy. This is neoliberalism's class war—the destruction of the blocking labor coalition. Compare and contrast with Germany, notionally the great leader of green politics in Europe, nowhere near as far down the decarbonization route. And part of it is the rear-guard action of a really small group of mine workers who've delayed and forced a massive delay, so I don't think of either of these as models. But that's what I would think of as being instructive in terms of thinking about this coalition that you're talking about. Like, where are the—you could have—this is a really underrated fact: in 2016 when Trump came back into power, you could have bought the entire coal sector in America for less than a billion dollars because all of the major coal actors were bankrupt, so you could have just nationalized them for peanuts. I mean, this is after all part of the politics of the British Labor government after 1945 as well; they picked the easy targets which were failing industries in the 1920s and 30s, and you nationalize those. Risk, of course, is you end up then in public ownership of bankrupt businesses. But if the aim of the game is actually to shut them down, that's the moment to strike because you're not—this isn't like, as Andreas Malm would say, the spectacular transaction that is involved in the emancipation of slaves against compensation; like, the coal mines are—the market is telling you worth nothing. So, nationalize them at that moment and shut them down. But then you could think of coal miners as part of—as increasingly actually being declared surplus to requirements. Part of—well, then what you—then of course then the constructive politics begins of how you then work with those communities, and it depends what sort of mining you're talking about. It all becomes very technical because we think of mining as 1980s pit mining, but of course modern mining is open-cast. It's massive. There's hardly any workers involved. It's so gigantic in its scale. And the question then becomes: rather than how do we construct a hard-edged climate politics that leaves behind miners, how do we, including in places where people have been mining for a long time and where their communities are being devastated, construct a politics that gives people a future?

Absolutely, and that exactly—a better future. Yeah, and a better one than a future that involves destroying people's lungs and, you know, well, a healthier—yeah. I mean, this is again the kind of material politics of climate; like, the major drivers of climate damage are ultimately also air polluting, and like in the West these things become separated because of the chronology, because we deal with the most grievous air pollution, which was smog in a city like London; you know, people were dying literally as a result of intense smog, and in China of course all the way down to the very recent past, but we deal with it early in the West, so climate becomes this abstract, remote, perfect for neoliberal colonization; it's the reason why people like me love it because it's the most abstract problem you could possibly imagine, right? It's like gaming the development of the global economy in terms of CO2 metrics and modeling it that way. And that's part of also its democratic deficit as a politics. It's really hard to get from climate models to anything anyone immediately cares about, except if you're living right next to a coal-fired power station and you can see your child is dying from asthma, and the entire place—my mom grew up in Sheffield, like, the entire place is caked with coal dust.

Um, and one of the differences—you know, Lenin faces the historic crisis of a certain kind of Marxist optimism in the labor movement in places like Britain ascending gradually until it reaches such strength that it can overthrow capitalism. He faces instead a labor movement in places like Britain split apart by imperialism. And he reimagines a political subject that includes peasants in Russia, workers in Britain and colonized peasants too in India and China. Chinese nationalists—and yeah—and he sees that world, right? He's one of the first modern thinkers of the global condition of what we call globalization in the rather flat sociological term, and he sees it much more dramatically and he realizes the weight of Asia in that story as well. So he rethinks the sort of space of politics away from a Western-centric nationalist perspective, exactly, and he also rethinks the time because he has a sense of the coming of catastrophe, World War I, and it's not just a linear story of progress. He's trying to think a possible politics that emerges out of the agency of people subordinated and dominated by a capitalist world system, rather than emerging from the standpoint of state technocrats and asking who can we bring into our coalition and who can we—is there a—or emerging pure fully formed as the universal class, the proletariat, as one single universal class, is the 1848 kind of Marxist vision of that phase.

Yeah, I'm trying to live it like absolutely. Yeah, I'm trying to learning Chinese every day. I spent an hour this morning like, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Um, who can smooth over the social problems of our world. The Leninist hope, of course, was in revolution that entangled China and Russia and Britain. So it's a different—yeah. But Mao back in the picture. Sorry.

But yes, absolutely, I mean, Mao after all is not Lenin in the sense that he is even more in medias res than Lenin, right? He is in the middle of the struggle.