Hey there gang,

I hope you’re maintaining despite the hellscape. I’m back with an offcut (even by my standards!)

I don’t really follow Adam Tooze and haven’t followed Perry Anderson’s work after his 1984ish short book In The Tracks of Historical Materialism. I have many an opinion on Anderson from the early 60s through the end of the 70s tied to his role at New Left Review and the relationship between NLR under his leadership vs the earlier version of NLR that emerged out of the late 50s libertarian socialist milieu, but I sort of stop caring around 1980, as did every elected official [sad trombone noise]. So of course I wrote a long ass ramble about something Tooze said a while back, like a little over a year ago I think? For various reasons it’s languished in electric limbo since and fallen out of my mind because I was busy seething about other stuff, and then today I saw a Guardian interview with Tooze doing the rounds - I’ve not read the interview since, as I said, I don’t really follow Adam Tooze, I’m just not in his audience (no respect intended…) - which reminded me of this thing. Since shitty first drafts is the name of the game here at Open Mode Industries, LLC, and since this draft is contender for first prize at shittiness (as I remember it anyway, I haven’t reread it - I can barely stand to write this stuff, let alone read it), I figure it’s time to slap it up here, another item in my personal museum of false starts, ill-advised attempts, and dead ends. Do with it as you will! I’ll be back another day to worsen your inbox and cloud your browser tabs. In the meantime, you keep on trucking!

With all due respect,
Nate

ps- If you get this via email, the Buttondown interface tells me it may be truncated in some email clients. If your email doesn’t truncate and you get the full length piece, well, I’m terribly sorry. [Joe Biden voice] It’s out of my hands, folks.

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Liberal Egalitarianism and Object Permanence (Tooze v. Anderson)

 In a recent interview Adam Tooze pushed back on criticisms of his work by Perry Anderson and, following the old principle that the best defense is a good offense, made a range of different kinds of criticisms of Anderson. My initial response to the disagreement was that if these are the two options I have then I’d like to insist on a third, and I will suggest something to that effect below in nodding to the work of Simon Clarke. That said, my sympathies lie more with Anderson than Tooze. More relevantly, some of Tooze’s criticisms of Anderson, if accurate, would apply broadly to elements of Marxism. Furthermore, I suspect that, while Tooze is important respects a singular and phenomenal intellectual, he is also to a nontrivial degree a type, a representative figure of left-liberal political sensibilities. As such, it seemed to me that it might be worthwhile to lay out some thoughts in response to his remarks.

Tower-Dwellers vs. The Profoundly Engaged: What is Politics?

In the interview, Tooze suggested that Anderson is politically disengaged: “I see [Anderson’s] stance as an expression of a degenerate academic Marxism that imagines itself perched in some ivory tower.” Presumably the implication is that this is ironic given that Anderson is a Marxist. I’ll grant that this point has some degree of plausibility for both biographical and contextual reasons. These happen to be reasons that I’m interested in, so I’ll say a little more about why this is a somewhat plausible way to understand Anderson, though I ultimately think it’s a limited understanding.

First, biographically. Anderson has long been criticized for being insufficiently activist in character. This was a matter of massive dispute beginning the early 1960s when Anderson became the editor of New Left Review. Anderson’s editorship coincided with some big changes both internally and externally. For its first twelve issues, edited by Stuart Hall, the publication had been in magazine format and aimed at the rank and file of what at the time was a fairly effervescent activist left. As editor Anderson shifted the publication to something like its current format, a journal aimed at left academics and left intellectuals who might as well be academics (I mean that in the least dismissive way possible, being myself to a degree hard to overstate the product of time spent around autodidacts and movement intellectuals of that sort in the early to mid 2000s). Those changes in format happened to coincide with an eventual downturn in the activist left, a downturn that lasted several years. Anderson and his fellow NLR editors were regularly criticized for their decisions in this period and afterward, criticisms I’m fairly sympathetic to, with the gist being that they weren’t sufficiently politically engaged in an activist sense.

Having partially conceded Tooze’s criticism of Anderson as disengaged, two important caveats are in order. The first is that I think the criticisms posed by Tooze differ substantially than points made by (actual) left critics of Anderson. Tooze suggests the difference between himself and Anderson is that he is politically active and Anderson isn’t. There is some degree of a criticism along those lines in remarks by early new leftist stalwarts like Stuart Hall and Tom Wengraf, but there is also a crucial difference, in that they recognized Anderson’s role in building and sustaining left intellectual institutions, namely NLR and Verso. While there are many in the Marxist tradition about whom one could say they have been far more directly embedded in activist milieus, combative movements, and revolutionary organizations than Anderson, it remains true that Anderson did absolutely heroic work in building and sustaining far left specifically intellectual institutions, above all New Left Review and Verso, projects which whatever else one might say do self-consciously and laudably seek to play roles in the larger ecosystem with activist efforts. To call him an ivory tower academic without seriously qualifying the point is simply unreasonable in light of that activity.

First the biographical and individual, now the contextual. As I noted, the changes in NLR that Anderson brought about coincided with a downturn in the UK left. While I’m sympathetic to the implication by Wengraf and other critics that NLR and Anderson went too far away from an activist direction, it also seems plausible to me that if NLR had simply carried on the same as it had under Hall, the movement downturn would have meant the end of the publication. While I would never deny my own love for left trainspotting, this history has some analytical value in that it draws out the context-determined character of left politics, which has some bearing on what to make of Tooze’s dismissal of so-called ivory tower Marxists. To make this clearer, let me jump from the 1960s back to the contemporary.

Unfortunately, Marxism in the Anglophone world today is closer to its lowest ebb than its highest peak when it comes to having a meaningful relationship to collective action. This is a condition that is at best very minimally subject to being changed by anything that any writers put on a page or screen. It’s very reasonable to consider that Marxist intellectual work produced under such conditions bears limits due to those conditions. Anderson himself has written insightfully on the disarticulation of Marxist intellectual work and working-class self-activity and the effects of this disarticulation on that intellectual work. The most cogent version of this writing on his part that I know of is in his Considerations on Western Marxism (I feel compelled to say I have reservations about this book that aren’t relevant here, but it remains an important work worth serious reading), but already in 1965, just a few years into his tenure as editor of New Left Review Anderson was arguing that socialist theory was “increasingly recondite and remote from immediate political struggles” in a way that was bad for both the theory and those struggles. (Anderson, Problems of Socialist Strategy, 222.) At the same time, Anderson stressed that while these context-determined elements were far from preferable, they were precisely context-determined rather than being the result of individual failings.

This is relevant to Tooze’s contrasting himself favorably to Anderson and “degenerate academic Marxism that imagines itself perched in some ivory tower” in terms of engagement. Those degenerates are “playing at history.” They “need to grow up” and stop doing “the kind of boyish stuff people play on computers.” (I have to say, as someone who has written polemically sometimes myself, including about Perry Anderson, I find this a simply astonishing way for Tooze to talk. I didn’t grow up in the same time, place, or class position that Tooze did so I have a different preferred vernacular, which I will beg permission to speak in here for a moment: if Tooze really thinks Anderson is this much of a fucking dipshit, then Jesus Christ, why read or write or even talk about the guy? I don’t get it. I now hereby codeswitch back out of that preferred vernacular, as if tying on a necktie before having to meet with my boss’s boss.) When it comes to engagement, at one level probably anyone could, if willing to be more self-sacrificing, do more good in the world as an activist, but political engagement is an activity we conduct in the actual world in contexts out of our control. We are all far more authored by than authors of the worlds we live in. Furthermore, the worlds we live in are not neutral in relation to what sorts of activities we can carry out, but rather they make some pathways easier and harder than others. This has resonances with Tooze’s remarks on structure and some remarks of Anderson’s on what Anderson called “negative determinism,” both of which I will discuss more below. For now, I would say that if Tooze thinks he is more politically engaged than Anderson, this may well be true, and what seems to be the implication that this is partly a matter of personal virtue may be true as well. But that is not the whole story, because political engagement and disengagement can itself be subject to some degree of investigation and explanation.

Tooze describes his own work as “profoundly engaged,” in contrast to Anderson, whose work is "an expression of a degenerate academic Marxism.” (I will note here that this phrasing suggests the problem is not an individual one on Anderson’s part and that Anderson is representative in some way.) In a short catalog of his own engagement, Tooze lists “technocratic actions” like trying to get global financial institutions to change “how certain figures are calculated” and writing accounts of the global financial crisis of 2008, accounts which ended up being among “the inspirations for the massive second stimulus launched by the Biden administration in early 2021.” 

I read these lines in at least two minds. On the one hand, Tooze is clearly sincere, trying to do some good in the world, and expending a good deal of effort in doing so, so this is clearly some form of political engagement. On the other hand, as someone from a fairly different class background and employment, I found myself struggling to empathize with his remark that his “engagement comes with heavy responsibility.” While it must have been hard work and frightening to shape the narrative of the 2008 financial crisis, I compare that to my father and younger brother, both construction workers, being unemployed for, if memory serves, about two years and facing potential foreclosure and I find myself both unable to empathize and lacking motivation to try to sympathize with Tooze’s “heavy responsibility.” I freely admit these are my own class resentments speaking but I’d insist that when we find some contexts spark such resentments, that tells us something about those contexts, even if other aspects of these contexts (liberal middle class etiquette and the ideology of professional political pluralism dovetail) discourage investigation into what that something is. At the least, if the responsibility that the well-heeled feel in doing their “technocratic actions” is valid to mention then surely the responses of the more down at heel as we live in a world subject to such actions is as well. (Unless of course the validity is a social one determined by the class make up of the audience. It does bear mention, and I’m far from the first to point this out, that Anderson is from an even more rarefied background than Tooze. I’ve felt similar - greater, to be frank - pangs of class resentment on reading various remarks Anderson has made over the years about working class backwardness and need for leadership drawn from the ranks of those born into the bourgeoisie who jumped ship. That strikes me as very much the habitus of people socialized into believing they are meant to rule others. Still, as a Marxist Anderson is at least in a political tradition which has occasionally recognized explicitly its own class make up and taken it as a matter for conscious address in various ways, and by dedicating so much of his life to Marxist and socialist milieus Anderson significantly gave up the opportunities to rule others that he was born into.) But enough of feelings.

A little more analytically, presumably Tooze was paid for at least some of this work, and it facilitated his move from Cambridge to Yale and then Columbia. Anderson too has presumably been paid for his work as a professor and some of his work in relation to NLR and Verso, though it’s also my impression he has at times supported those organizations out of his personal or family wealth. In any case, I would never claim that being paid means work is not politically engaged nor would I deny that well paid work is without its sacrifices and heavy feelings of responsibility. I have many friends working in the labor movement, paid relatively well in terms of annual income, who also carry a great deal of stress and put in a very long hours. I would still claim, however, that the subset of politically engaged activity for which one can get paid, let alone paid well, is smaller than the whole set of politically engaged activity and that very little of the most important and urgent political activity is anything one can get paid for. To be fair, Tooze said nothing actively to the contrary (though often much that isn’t said is important and much that is important goes left unsaid).

In any case, I mean to raise here two matters of Tooze’s politics. First, from his account in the interview, his politics is decidedly a matter of left liberal institutionalism: shaping and influencing policy, “technocratic actions” that more this or that puzzle piece around. I’m viscerally aware that this can have profound effects on ordinary people’s lives, so I don’t want to say it doesn’t matter at all. I’m also viscerally aware of what it’s like to be among the small whose lives get moved around like puzzle pieces by those taking “technocratic actions” from on high, so I do want to say that even as it matters in positive ways it is simultaneously a repetition of some far from ideal aspects of our society. (To perhaps put too fine a point on it, insofar as Tooze’s use of “ivory tower” as epithet indicates a condition of removal from the relevant flow of social life and being out of touch with ordinary people’s lives, well, the kinds of policy circles Tooze points to as the site for his political engagement seem, rightly, to many people at least almost equally so.)

Part of what I am driving at is that among the differences between Tooze’s left-liberalism and any Marxist politics worth the name is that for Marxists those less than ideal aspects of life in capitalist society can and should be eliminated because capitalism can and should be eliminated. Furthermore, for Marxists generally speaking part of the approach to politics is one in which many of the socially small take collective action together in order to produce a social reorganization as part of a process of democratization - and democracy and technocracy have at most a highly mediated relationship.  Anderson is far from the best representative of that latter view within the Marxist tradition, but it’s clear he does hold to some version of that view.

This brings me to my second point about Tooze’s politics, which is that his disagreement with Anderson and the more general remarks he makes as part of that disagreement raises issues of what we mean by politics. For one thing, Tooze’s politics is one of doing what is possible under current conditions. Marxism, on the other hand, is partly about understanding how current conditions bake in constraints on what is possible, in service of pushing back those constraints to expand possibility. I find an analogy from Erik Olin Wright helpful here. Take game play as an analogy for social life. One can have ideas about the best move or strategy under a given set of rules, about the best change to the rules in order to make the game better according to any number of values such as fairness or enjoyability and so on, and about what game to play at all. Left liberals like Tooze are generally focused on the second of these, policies that improve the ‘game’ of society in some relatively justice-promoting way. That’s valuable, but insofar as the ‘game’ of capitalism has injustices and violence baked in to all versions of it, there are very serious limits to what this version of politics can do. Marxism is generally tied to the third kind of conversation in Wright’s typology, in that we want to see an end to the genuinely murderous ‘game’ of capitalism, replaced with a new society where everyone can flourish. (I mean “genuinely murderous” more or less literally. By the way, the points made here via Erik Olin Wright are a compressed form of an argument I made in more detail in my chapter in the Elgar Research Handbook on Law and Marxism. While I still believe what I said there and would like to think the chapter remains worth reading, I have increasingly come to think that I missed an important element, in that this framing in terms of best move, best rule change, best game to play, doesn’t accord sufficient importance to who is making the move, the rule change, or the change of game, and how the change is brought about.)

I’m uncomfortably aware that my saying in effect, ‘this disagreement raises questions about what the word “politics” even means’ sounds like more ivory tower hand-waving, but it is simply true that doing politics in line with Tooze’s outlook as a left-liberal and doing politics as part of a process leading to socialist revolution are significantly different. That the term ‘doing politics’ can apply to both those kinds of activities does as much or more cloud as to clarify matters. We might think in terms of form and content, the content of the politics and the form have a relationship; all politics is not fungible irrespective of content and context. (This is an axe I like to grind with regard to labor law in the US and the replacement of recognition strikes with recognition elections: these are deeply complex collective practices embedded in complex social ecosystems, changing one element alone is impossible.)

Part of what I am fumbling for here is that, to put it a little flippantly, a Martian reading Tooze’s remarks in response to Anderson might reasonably come away thinking the only conscious actors that a left academic can write for and be in dialog with are useless Marxist professors and pragmatic employees of governments and NGOs, with only the latter being actual political actors. That's not the worst possible summary of the present malaise one could have, unfortunately, but a huge underlying presumption behind a lot of Marxism is that another constituency, one of ordinary people taking collective action, can be and sometimes has been constructed. Again, Anderson is not the Marxist tradition’s best example of this aspiration and of practice informed by this aspiration, but his work is clearly informed by some version of that social vision and via NLR and Verso he has made important contributions to building and sustaining institutions which enrich that aspiration and the manifold ways it can be practiced. Tooze’s engaged work is simply not doing this same kind of politics, despite its other merits.

“Perched in Some Ivory Tower” or Trapped There

As I’ve mentioned, Tooze uses “ivory tower” as an epithet against Anderson, in a way that has some limited purchase, with more emphasis here intended on the limitedness. I apologize for this admittedly clunky over-extension of Tooze’s metaphor, but it helps summarize what I mean to do in this section. Insofar as Anderson as a Marxist academic is, as Tooze put it “perched” in this tower, under what conditions did he come to roost here? Are the windows open or barred? Are there other roosts available? And what happens to the bird in this roost - which is to say, what is the role of the tower in the larger social landscape?

Before going there, I will say, I was struck by this particular epithet on Tooze’s part, given his career in Oxbridge and the ivy league. I’d be keen to read an essay in the style and method of Raymond Williams’s Keywords about the term “ivory tower.” From a quick glance at the Oxford English Dictionary the term has long meant a condition of being relatively checked out from the rest of the world, while the implication that an ordinary university is always such a tower seems more recent. Here too Anderson has himself written illuminatingly on the matter.

While he was more empathetic and circumspect than Tooze in his phrasing, Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism could in part be said to have treated it subjects “as an expression of a degenerate academic Marxism.” For Anderson that “degenerate” character was largely the effect of the failure of the revolutions of the early 20^th century to spread and of the ways they went awry, but it’s clear that he thought Marxism’s coming to largely inhabit universities brought significant costs, reinforcing other negative effects of the world-historical defeats of the left. In a sense, some of Anderson’s work can be read as being about Marxism’s adaptation to defeat in ways that don’t serve the aspiration of that defeat’s reversal, and in another sense Anderson can be read as an object lesson in that adaptation.

Anderson’s polemical sparring partner E.P. Thompson wrote even more stridently about universities than Anderson did, in one of the pair’s under-noticed shared perspectives. He rolled his eyes at the "innumerable Marxist academicisms" that proliferated over the mid-twentieth century, both cause and effect of some people radicalizing in relative isolation on campus, in "a somewhat enclosed and autonomous process, with no direct correlation with other sectors of society” and with little to no “experience of mass political activity." (Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 1978,184) One result was "removing socialist theory from a political to an academic context.” (Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 1978,401.) In a remark Anderson could have written, Thompson stressed that this was not an individual failing but was rather “a necessary consequence of the determinations of our time." (Thompson, Poverty of Theory, 1978,183-184)

In my view, since the time Thompson wrote in both the UK and the US the social distance between university campuses and the rest of life has narrowed significantly in large part due to rising rates of educational attainment, with cuts and rising costs of education further narrowing that distance in other ways, though all of these changes are unevenly (because hierarchically) distributed. It remains the case, however, that universities as one of the major homes to Marxism is a significantly qualified good since it is a home as much limiting as it is anything else.

As someone with a particular sort of professor job that is nearly entirely (and over time, increasingly) teaching-focused, university teaching looms large in my mind. I will take the prerogative of mentioning two critical remarks on university teaching. I think these are worthwhile for getting at the larger pro-systemic role of universities as well, which is to say, something analogous to what goes for teaching in these quotes goes for professional scholarship (to be very clear, my own included) and the other activities of university professors and other university employees. Very generally all of us in capitalist society are enlisted, regardless of our intentions, in the reproduction of capitalist social relations, which involves both the reproduction of the society we live in and the reproduction of this society’s capitalist character. My remarks here and the quotes below are an effort to indicate some of how this more general involvement plays out in the specific settings of universities (There are some tensions and frictions and different possible futures as well, of course, but the anti-systemic character of all of those is often overestimated - especially when it comes to people in universities essentially playing the parts we are supposed to play within those institutions. That overestimation is the flip side of underestimating the enormity of the task of getting out of capitalism via social revolution. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will, as the saying goes.)

The philosopher Raymond Geuss once described his job as philosophy professor as follows: “I have always held to be a mildly discreditable day job, that of teaching philosophy at a university. I take it to be discreditable because about 85 percent of my time and energy is devoted to training aspiring young members of the commercial, administrative, or governmental elite in the glib manipulation of words, theories, and arguments. I thereby help turn out the pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres that our economic and political system uses to produce the ideological carapace that protects it against criticism and change.” (Geuss, A World without Why)

The sociologist Tom Wengraf, a former member of the New Left Review editorial board in the 1960s, describes the history education he received (and soon abandoned)  at Oxford in the late 1950s similarly:

“basically it was for training higher civil servants to man the Home Office in order to put down popular uprisings. (...) I could see what it was doing. Everybody took the point of, ‘How do we deal with these dangerous people?’ I’m exaggerating slightly but that’s the mind-set that you are inducted in and a lot of people did go into the Home Office and so I thought this was pernicious, very pernicious indeed. And so that alienated me ... I mean, yeah, it’s not that I rejected history as such but that sort of history. I suppose it would now be a proponent of history of resistance rather than history of social control. But at that time it was just what you did and what you studied and it was the study of the rebels and their suppression. You could of course take any political point you did but the overwhelming point of view in the documents and everything else you were studying, not the only documents but the overwhelming thing was about managers of the Tudor period onwards” (https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-artslaw/history/cccs/Interview-Transcripts/Tom-Wengraf.pdf)

As someone who teaches in an undergraduate legal studies program with the majority of my students doing on to law school, I don’t at all exempt myself from Geuess and Wengraf’s remarks on the limitations of what academic instruction accomplishes and the purposes it is pressured to serve. And as I said, analogous limitations are involved in all university-based activities, at least those that are claimable on CVs.

I realize this may seem like detours within detours, but I bring it up in part as another way to get at Tooze’s insistence that he is more engaged than Anderson (and this not out of any need to defend Anderson, who can clearly take care of himself and has no need of support from the likes of me, but because the type of criticism of Anderson is one more broadly used against Marxists). As I said, the meaning of politics and the kinds of practice implied in Tooze’s case vs. in Anderson’s are significantly different and the social contexts they (and we) inhabit are not neutral with regard to all of those meanings and practices. To put it very simply, Tooze’s political practice is more compatible with the incentives involved in an academic career and the larger social world we all currently live in than the kinds of political practice involved in being a socialist revolutionary.

I bring up this discussion of universities as well because I do think there is a rational kernel to relative unease over Marxism’s academicization that it behooves us to talk frankly about, and because it can help contextualize the existence of the exchange between Anderson and Tooze: it’s easy to not notice but the fact that such an exchange even occurred tells us something about the world we live in.

Marxists working as academics are situated within the complex interaction of at least two kinds of processes, processes which I understand via terms from Raymond Williams. Briefly, Williams argued that in the actual world whatever is dominant or hegemonic is never fully and stably so. It is both internally dynamic - arguing with itself, so to speak, due both to the jockeying for position of those involved and even more so to the need for the dominant to continue to respond to ongoing changes in the social world - and responsively dynamic due to challenges it faces in dealing with that over which it dominates. The latter, the dominated, Williams typologized into the alternative, meaning roughly that which is out of step with the dominant but not dangerously so, and the oppositional, which has more potential to threaten the dominant. Williams stressed emphatically that none of this was to be understood statically but rather as tensions and frictions in motion over time, partly as a matter of setting limits and exerting pressures.

With that in mind, one of the processes in which we Marxist academics find ourselves constantly mid-stream is that of the uptake of currently non-dominant ideas into the dominant - incorporation, in Williams’s terms. A second such process in which we are also in the middle of (a strong wind, in addition to the stream, so to speak) is that of the working out of whether a current set of alternative ideas and practices will become oppositional, or vice versa. Again, none of these positions are stable and static.

Part of what universities do, structurally or systematically, is foster the playing out of those two processes in various ways, and Marxists in universities are no exception. One takeaway from this is that local institutional victories like the forcing of some ideas into the curriculum can simultaneously be part of the process of rendering those ideas less oppositional. To put a related takeaway very simply, insofar as Marxist academics are succeeding, it’s worth asking if they are succeeding as academics, or as Marxists, whether those two kinds of success are the same or different in that specific context, and what social and political conditions the different answers indicate. This is pertinent to Anderson, who is arguably one of the anglophone world’s most successful Marxist academics. Again, I want to stress that none of this is static but is all fairly volatile in historical perspective. At the same time, it seems to be the case that much of the time Anderson has represented (and he is far from alone in this, I don’t exempt myself from the point, nor is this intended as a moral judgment) Marxism and socialism as alternative culture aspiring to oppositional (and often aspiring notionally more than in any activist practice) rather than being robustly oppositional. 

As I said, I raise these points in part to contextualize the fact of Tooze and Anderson even having their disagreement in the first place. For all his limits, both individual and more importantly contextual, Anderson remains a sincere left intellectual seeking, in his contextually limited available sphere of influence, to criticize the dominant ideology in service to left aspirations and goals. At the same time, he stands at a kind of junction point between the left as alternative/oppositional and the dominant culture, with no real option other than to live out that tension to the best of his abilities. This is part of why Tooze responds to Anderson.

Of course, it’s obvious that Tooze responds because Anderson is relevant - or was anyway; calling him an ivory tower expression of Marxism’s degeneration doesn’t indicate a robust respect for Anderson’s future work (though again I’d stress Williams’s insistence on dynamism and the future’s significant openness). What I’ve been trying to do is situate Anderson’s relevance in a way that doesn’t stop at the obvious. I do so as well to situate Tooze. The processes I mentioned via Williams require ongoing work, and some of that work is on Tooze’s to-do list, so to speak, and that of people like him. None of this is to imply insincerity or cynicism but rather to indicate to some degree where in the dynamic social machinery Tooze and Anderson are located.  (Noam Chomsky’s famous remark to a journalist is apposite here:  “I don't say you’re self-censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you're saying. What I’m saying is that if you believed something different you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnFUWrjr25A)

Structure, Liberal Egalitarianism, and Swimming with the Tide

I’m aware that in the last section I’ve done something that is a perennial favorite activity of many of us Marxist academics, namely tisking at Marxist academics. Doing so lets each of pretend to be one of the good ones. I’m also aware that having done so it may now seem discordant that I am going to turn around and heap praise on a Marxist academic work. If these seem like contradictions, fair enough - in this wrong life it’s hard to know if there is a right choice to be made! In any case, let me once again say that all of you ought to read Tony Smith’s book Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism. (I’ve reviewed it at Legal Form alongside Søren Mau’s excellent Mute Compulsion and Jack Copley’s excellent Governing Financialization and I mention it all the time here at Open Mode so I won’t rehearse my arguments for why you ought to read it. I’ve given you the pearls, swine, now make your own choices. [Please excuse my failing sense of humor.]) I mention Smith’s book because it seems to me it applies directly to Tooze, and because I think that giving some degree of close attention to Tooze can help enrich what we can make of the book.

Tooze seems clearly to be a liberal egalitarian. In brief, liberal egalitarianism is a general term for the best and furthest left kinds of positions that can be held without a Marxist theory of capitalism. Marxists are pessimists about capitalism, believing that any capitalism will always involve forms of subordination which are intrinsically unacceptable and which produce further harms in ways that are dynamic and predictably unpredictable (i.e., we can be sure that over time society will be afflicted with unpleasant surprises, ones that play out in ways that are retroactively unsurprising because they follow capitalism’s general and harmful social logic.)

Liberal egalitarians, on the other hand, tend to come in two general flavors, or two switch between two modes. One is optimistic about the possibility of eliminating harms that occur in capitalist societies without abolishing capitalism and pessimistic about human capacity to do better than capitalism - ie, that anti-capitalist aspirations and attendant social practices as impossible and thus misguided. In their optimistic mode, liberal egalitarians emphasize that capitalism is not intrinsically harmful but rather only specific kinds of capitalism are. With sufficient state regulation and organization of the polity, the idea goes, capitalism can become a society that is fundamentally good, where everyone can flourish. Or at least everyone can flourish as much as is humanly possible: the optimism and the pessimism shade into each other. If we can’t do better than capitalism, then the best possible capitalism is the best we can do, so liberal egalitarians are dedicated to the project of achieving the best possible capitalism. Above I used an analogy from Erik Olin Wright to characterize the difference between the kinds of politics Tooze is engaged in and the kinds of politics that seem to me to follow from pursuit of socialist revolution: liberal egalitarians like Tooze want to change the rules, Marxists want a different game altogether.

As I said, Smith’s book is very good and you should read it post-haste. That said, the book is organized as a comparison of various explicit and worked out accounts of the world by academic liberal egalitarian theorists. This is very valuable work as it helps us critically analyze other sorts of liberal egalitarians, though that analysis is more downstream from the book than something the book priorities itself. That critical analysis must involve awareness that many actually existing liberal egalitarians are nowhere near so systematic or explicit as the theorists the book analyzes. In an important respect that can be treated as a shortcoming of those other liberal egalitarians, but as is often the case in capitalist society what is a shortcoming from a critical perspective is a benefit in terms of being useful within and rewarded by this world.

This is in part to say, my sense is that often liberal egalitarianism in its two flavors or modes exists less as robustly theorized – which is to say, explicitly argued and subject to dispute – and instead as implicit assumptions. That implicitness does some important work by making these matters harder to argue with: the degree to which an individual, group, or milieu has a shared political outlook that is left implicit is the degree to which that collectivity can avoid or minimize both external criticism and internal disagreements. In terms of the ‘change a rule’ vs ‘change the game’ metaphor, this is to say that it’s often less that there is an argument for one vs. other and more that one is to an important extent rhe only option considered worth taking seriously or conceptually available - such that’s it not in any meaningful sense an option. (Thatcher was far from alone in thinking there is no alternative.)  Again thinking of Williams’s emphasis on dynamism and the work involved in cultural/intellectual processes of this type, it seems to me that some of the time, there are theories, phrases, though-stopping cliches, habits of mind, and so on that actively help preserve the implicit character of these assumptions (again not cynically, but in important respects the fact that these processes work through sincere actors is for the worse). I think we can see some of this in the interview with Tooze. 

The interviewer uses a term Tooze seems fond of, namely ‘polycrisis’. I must say, I balk at that term, since the implication seems to be that there are poly- and mono-crises, when the latter is a contradiction in terms. As something that occurs in the world a crisis, insofar as it is a crisis, is mobile and far-reaching, not confined to any one tranche. A crisis rendered mono, so to speak, is at most a crisis averted via successful management. That is to say, crisis already implies poly. On the other hand, the implication of the term might be less a matter of processes in the world and more a matter of ways of thinking about crisis, something along the lines of ‘in the bad old days they thought of crises two-dimensionally and monochromatically while today we appreciate them in color and three d.’ If the latter, that’s simply the enormous condescension of posterity assuming that its reductive impatience with past thinkers contains information about those thinkers.

I am here being unfair: people need terms to think with, Tooze is laudably driven to think and attempts to do so in service of egalitarian values, so he made himself a term with which to think, reasonably enough. Still, tools have limits. Tooze recognizes this to an extent, saying that polycrisis has “somewhat diffuse outlines” and “is clearly somewhat facile conceptually,” though he immediately pivots to noting that this somewhat diffuse facile concept still has some purchase on important developments in the world, since “it captures the unraveling of a familiar pattern of power—namely, that of the unipolarity of an American-centered age.” He then pivots immediately to rejecting a different Marxist view, so the recognition of the limits of the concept does not, in this immediate context anyway, prompt conceptual work to reduce those limitations.

 I want to underline, as I tried to indicate above, that what is a limitation from a critical perspective can be from an uncritical or affirmative perspective a positive feature. (I recall again Geuss’s remark about “pliable, efficient, self-satisfied cadres” skilled at “glib manipulation of words.”) This is part of why limited perspectives tend to proliferate and to be sustained in capitalist society. Simon Clarke made an observation along these lines in his account of the history of economic thought, noting that explanatory power and ideological use are separate categories and some of the time the decline of the former increases the latter in ways that benefit specific disciplines, approaches, fields, schools of thought, etc. Along similar lines working class life and class struggle is in important respects a holistic affair, a totality the pieces of which influence each because they form each other’s context (if that sounds overly abstract think about a week when you’ve been short on rent, short on sleep due to stress, short on hours at work and dealing with a short-tempered supervisor, a child you love is having trouble at school, and then find you’ve over drafted your bank account: those factors compound and interact to become a shitstorm greater than the sum of its parts, and that reality at the individual level both scales upward and has analogs in collective life), and yet as John Holloway notes that totality “is fragmented through state administration into distinct problems for the functionally defined branches of state activity - problems for the Department of Health and Social Security, problems for the Department of Education and Science, problems for the Department of the Environment etc.” There isn’t a holistic administrative location to deal with the whole set of problems, and dealing with problems in series is simultaneously an additional burden, demoralizing, and demobilizing because permitting less opportunity to notice and act together about the similarities of our conditions. Each of those administrative units sees only a fragment of the whole picture, and usefully so for the people in charge of those units and for the larger political processes of social stabilization and class pacification that those units help produce. I mean these as examples to underline that, despite the utopian naivete of we book-lovers, information and truth aren’t always power, stupidity and ignorance are often actively both rewarded and cultivated.

I don’t mean here to suggest in the slightest that Tooze is stupid or ignorant, far from it. My point is that in a social world with those dynamics it is not only unsurprising that high powered, influential, and well compensated academic intellectuals can have limits in their grasp of social dynamics, but furthermore some of the time there are processes that encourage and select for such limits. Again I want to stress what I’m not saying: Tooze’s limits are not cynical nor is there any conspiracy. But imagine Tooze tomorrow became the sort of anarchist who celebrated and sometimes committed acts of so-called propaganda by the deed and began to call for repetition of Luigi Mangione’s actions. Surely there would be consequences. Tooze could well decide to take those consequences if he thought such a call was the right thing to do - I’m not implying any failure of character or other individual defect on Tooze’s part - and that would both signal to others like Tooze to be more careful and have reverberating effects on the myriad institutional decisions that over time serve to decide who in the world gets to serve in the role of well-compensated influential public intellectual and research scholar. Again, Chomsky is on point. To paraphrase: I’m sure everyone is sincere in their beliefs, but if they didn’t believe as they do, they would be far less likely to be in the seats they’re in.

Walter Benjamin famously distinguished Marxist approaches to the past from other more institutionally rewarded approaches. The latter, he stressed, empathize “with the victor,” with “those who currently rule,” rulers “who march in a “triumphal procession” stepping over or upon “those who are sprawled underfoot.” Regardless of their manner of victory, for Benjamin, the ruling class are always the heirs of prior rulers, and part of what they inherit is the apparatus of the state - a machine of subordination - and the terrain of class society - a landscape of various forms of domination - both of which are littered with rubble and human remains, often literally so. While not every individual historian who writes in officially rewarded ways empathizes with each individual ruling victor, those modes of history still “benefit the current rulers,” Benjamin wrote. Marxists, on the other hand, seek to move “as far away from this as measurably possible.” The point of this imagery is in part to draw out the literal violence that this social world generates implacably, violence obfuscated in the fragmented forms of knowledge that aid rule, and to orient Marxists - to borrow Williams’ terms - away from any willingness to aid the dominant and instead toward an aspiration toward the oppositional. This is not a trivial nor merely a rhetorical difference but has direct bearing on scholars’ modes of investigation, interpretation, and explanation, and the questions and problems chosen and not chosen.

 This brings me to Tooze on structure. Tooze asserts in the interview that “at any given moment, the question is what structures are relevant to our analysis.” This is in one sense inarguable, but insofar as capitalism truly does structure our lives, and the effects of that structuring are incredibly urgent and unjust, it’s hard to imagine a situation prior to the end of capitalism where analysis informed by Marx’s account of capitalism is no longer relevant. Perhaps it’s not relevant to all individual analyses of all subjects, but it remains among the set of analyses that left scholars with an appropriate sense of responsible commitment ought to be conducting. Tooze adds “I don’t start from the premise that I already know what the structure is, because I think that’s an open question—history is still unfolding in dramatic ways, continuously producing new realities and new forms of knowledge that subvert previous understandings.” This is again inarguably true in one sense, but in another it is simply a statement of refusal to really think critically about capitalism (as opposed to thinking within capitalism, in this or that pocket or corner or period of time). To put it another way, Tooze frames the remark as a matter of openness and expansiveness but it is actually a matter of not being willing to consider certain frameworks, questions, subject matters, and conclusion. (Similar is true of some of the descendants of Critical Legal Studies in the United States, as I argued in reply to Karl Klare. https://legalform.blog/2020/11/30/capitalism-law-and-critical-theory-a-reply-to-karl-klare-nate-holdren/ Unseemly as it is, I will recall the point I made there about Klare: consider all of this apparently open-minded appeal to the need to not presume that we know how things and to be willing to let the world surprise us and so on. Now imagine you live in the mid 19th century United States and are applying that sensibility to plantation slavery and the slave trade. In that context, this sensibility is not critical but apologetic. While the abolition of  plantation slavery in the United States in the 19^th century was a profound social and moral advance, it is also true that analogous forms of depraved injustice continue, and new forms are continue to be generated, in capitalist society since. In relation to those systemic evils the ostensibly open posture is ultimately no less uncritical and apologetic.)

 If capitalism really exists in the way we say it does as Marxists - that is, as a society subordinated to what Marx called the self-valorization of value - then someone who lacks a concept of capital in that sense just fails to understand the society we're in. (This is a compressed summary of Tony Smith’s wonderful book.) Tooze’s remarks suggest that this lack of understanding is some kind of methodological virtue: he suggests that he holds to “a more self-reflexive, realistic and, to be honest, more radical position than the one Anderson inhabits.” As I’ve tried to indicate, Tooze is not entirely wrong to suggest his view is more virtuous in an sense. After all, virtue is contextual. Being a Marxist or having helped organize a union is qualifying in some setting, and disqualifying in many others, especially professionally. I have no doubt that Tooze’s views are superior to Anderson’s relative to the contexts he’s in and the modes of politics of which his engaged scholarship is a form of enacting, and in important respects Tooze’s disagreement with Anderson is really about a difference of evaluation related to those contexts and what is useful in those context. That is in part to say, if one is going to be situated in an institutional setting, solving problems local to that setting in a way that pleases institutional authorities, or if one is going to parachute into such settings for such purposes, then a bigger picture view like that offered by Marx and Marxism just isn't any use.

Part of what I am trying to get at is that when people insist on conducting investigation at a specific level of abstraction or degree of concreteness - which is what Tooze’s emphasis on being ‘in medias res’ is  - it does a kind of political work in two or three ways simultaneously. It brackets out kinds of problems that can’t be dealt with via “technocratic actions,” problems which if not so bracketed out would render the technocrat cadre - borrowing Geuss’s terms - less “pliable, efficient, [and] self-satisfied.” It also helps those cadre, like Tooze and those for whom his work is a political resource (Geuss again) “to produce the ideological carapace” that insulates capitalism.

Simon Clarke offered an important analysis of empiricism as a kind of meta-ideology that fosters playing useful roles in relation to pre-existing ideologies. In other words, empiricism as an ideological position serves to make its adherents into conduits for hegemonic perspectives. Whenever scholars think that they simply work with the facts as they are and have no theoretical outlook, they are misunderstanding themselves, for their inquiries remain theory-laden, but that theory-ladenness exists in a way opaque to them, in the form of unexamined assumptions. As Clarke puts it, “the kinds of concepts and assumptions that are most easily taken for granted, that are felt to need critical examination the least, are those of the dominant intellectual tradition and the dominant ideology it expresses.” The empiricist who attempts letting “the facts speak for themselves” then easily ends up instead “letting the dominant ideology speak through the facts.” (138-139.)

Tooze might deny being an empiricist in this sense and assert that he in fact has a theory. Wasn’t Latour a theorist, after all? But Clarke’s point is not that empiricists are theory-less. Instead the problem is two fold: epistemologically, they’re insufficiently self-reflexive about which theories they implicitly hold and so end up more likely to hold bad ones, and politically, they’re prone to being too much of a piece with the dominant ideology - they empathize with the victors, in Benjamin’s terms, or might as well. That is to say, generally speaking since the most immediately ready to hand theories tend to be system-conforming and so there ends up being a risk of scholarship serving as conduit through which a version of the dominant common sense speaks. I suspect this is harder to understand in the present because the dominant culture today is divided against itself - we’ve just seen an election where the Democrats called Trump a fascist, while disagreeing with themselves about what to do about that, ultimately opting to do very little, other than continue to murder Palestinian children. Those and related conflicts among political elites and the reverberating conflicts they foster and draw from throughout other social locations have real human stakes and yet at the same time those conflicts are to a significant degree the form taken by the reproduction of the dominant common sense and its crowding out of competitor positions - especially when the left's in such disarray. (This is why the fact that Tooze has, to his credit, been politically engaged such that he’s been a partisan within some fights against other political actors is not counter-evidence to his being situated within the dominant culture, because the dominant culture is to a significant degree an ongoing set of fights among rulers over who shall rule and how, fights which occur above and to some degree trample upon “those who are sprawled underfoot.”) This is analogous to how members of the capitalist class over time to significant degree engage in a fratricidal war among themselves, in the form of competition and sometimes literal war. That conflict is very bloody and sincerely waged, and yet is also significantly the form through which the capitalist class is reproduced over time specifically as a class.

None of this is to speak against empirical inquiry, to be clear. Tooze is off-base in suggesting that “the history of the 19th and 20th centuries has already been completely written” for Marxists. Lenin famously wrote that Marxism was all about empirical inquiry, writing that “the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism [is] a concrete analysis of a concrete situation. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jun/12.htm.) A Marxist account of capitalism doesn’t replace empirical inquiry. It informs that inquiry, helping formulate the questions asked and interpret the findings. Tooze’s rejection of Marxism is in part a matter of ruling out certain kinds of questions and interpretations of empirical findings, tied to his liberal egalitarianism.

 Because this is easily misunderstood and that misunderstanding is propagated regularly by anti-Marxists, I want to stress what structure means in a little more detail here, beyond simply asserting the value of empirical inquiry. Here too Anderson is insightful. He wrote in 1965 that "historical and structural context (...) prescribes the norms and options” available to actors in that context.

 This is not “a linear historical determinism, which prescribes” in any positive sense.  It is rather that there is a certain negative determinism, which never produces any one possibility, but always eliminates several. History, in this sense, operates a permanent selectivity, which rigorously delimits the field of possibilities at any given moment.” This perspective is not unique to Anderson. Raymond Williams offered a similar understanding, one enthusiastically embraced by Anderson's polemical sparring partner EP Thompson, a non-determinist sense of determination, understood as “the setting of limits and exertion of pressure.” This is what structure means for any reasonable Marxist and to be blunt to lack such an understanding sounds a good deal to me like lacking object permanence, to remain always in media res, in the middle of things, with only a limited sense of why these particular things, why the middle is this specific way, how these things are patterned in ways like others that have come before, and without any aspiration to have those patterns stop recurring. Instead the best we can get is "a sort of future of perpetual liberal crisis management,” as Tooze puts it.

 I’ll stop in a moment. Before I do, I want to make the implicit plug I’ve made for the work of Simon Clarke an explicit one. Clarke is notable here in part for having himself been a critic of Anderson’s account of capitalism and crisis in British history. (These are deep and murky waters beyond what either my personal capacities or available time will permit me to explain to readers. I can only say that Clarke’s account, submitted to New Left Review but never published, synthesizes a great deal from his other work, making it methodologically rewarding, and also illuminates a lot about the history of capitalism in Britain and more generally. https://web.archive.org/web/20221231103237/https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/nlr.pdf The interested reader could also consult Anderson’s “Figures of Descent,” to which Clarke’s essay was intended as a competitor account - https://newleftreview.org/issues/i161/articles/perry-anderson-the-figures-of-descent - and Ellen Meiksins-Woods critical account of Anderson’s writings on capitalism and British history and the critical responses to those writings - https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/2310-the-peculiarities-of-the-english-and-the-decline-of-britain-ellen-meiksins-wood-on-the-nairn-anderson-thesis-and-the-bourgeois-paradigm. One thing that becomes clear in these various writings is the degree to which Marxism is absolutely not a tradition of people who believe they have everything figured out but rather a tradition full of people arguing vociferously about intense differences that occur within a shared framework - itself often significantly a subject of dispute regarding which elements are vital and which can be discarded - with those argument all animated in part by the urgently felt need to escape the death machine that is capitalism and to do so specifically in an emancipatory manner.)

Marxism as a tradition of theory is valuable, and at the same time the tendency to reduce Marxism to being little more than a tradition of theory is pernicious - Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism is good on this point despite its flaws; the same goes for Thompson’s Poverty of Theory, which Anderson praised (despite disagreements) as Thompson’s clearest statement of his own theoretical outlook. Empirical investigation matters in part because it can subject theories to intellectual tests, in part because it can be theory generating itself, and in part because capitalism has a tendency to novel repetitions of longstanding patterns of violence and injustice: old poisons in new bottles, and sometimes new poisons as well. That means it’s important to understand new developments.

Clarke’s account of capitalism as a system prone to crises is very intellectual generative for its emphasis on the kinds of production of horrific novelty and new forms of recurrence of old patterns of violent injustice. His book Keynesianism, Monetarism, and the Crisis of the State is his most worked out combination of theorizing and empirical historical inquiry. Others of his students - Peter Burnham being a major example, Graham Taylor another - have gone far in this direction as well, as have people farther down the lineage, so to speak. I would especially flag Jack Copley's wonderful book Governing Financialization as a superb example. Ultimately it’s that entire lineage rather than Clarke’s work alone that I wish to recommend here. They are, in my view, able to accommodate the kinds of empirical inquiry Tooze succumbs to and yet to do so without lapsing into an ideologically empiricist mode. These works and others like them address the concrete and to some degree singular particularities that are the stuff of ordinary non-Marxist historical inquiry, while also situating those particularities in a larger interpretive and explanatory framework that helps us draw comparisons and develop more sophisticated and accurate analyses. It also matters that this work is resolutely anti-capitalist, focused on the need for a different game, and helps us to situate intellectuals who focus only on rule-changes within the capitalist social world of which they are unwitting products and conduits.