Re : Hari @ https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40773 on Tooze. Re: 2.The misreading of Wages of Destruction.
Reassessing the Nazi War Economy and the Origins of the Second World War. <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p281_8.xml>*An Introduction to a Symposium on Adam Tooze* <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p281_8.xml>’s The Wages of Destruction <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p281_8.xml>. Alexander Anievas <https://brill.com/search?f_0=author&q_0=Alexander+Anievas> Wages of Destruction? <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p298_9.xml>*A Reappraisal <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p298_9.xml>. *Karl Heinz Roth <https://brill.com/search?f_0=author&q_0=Karl+Heinz+Roth> Building the Nazi Economy. <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p312_10.xml>*Adam Tooze and a Cultural Critique of Hitler’s Plans for War <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p312_10.xml>. *Paul B. Jaskot <https://brill.com/search?f_0=author&q_0=Paul+B.+Jaskot> The Third Reich as Rogue Regime. <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p330_11.xml>*Adam Tooze’s* <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p330_11.xml> Wages of Destruction <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p330_11.xml>. Dylan Riley <https://brill.com/search?f_0=author&q_0=Dylan+Riley> The Sense of a Vacuum. <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p351_12.xml>*A Response <https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/22/3-4/article-p351_12.xml>. *Adam Tooze <https://brill.com/search?f_0=author&q_0=Adam+Tooze> Via ^ https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/journal/volume-22-issue-3-4-2014/#:~:text=An%20Introduction%20to%20a%20Symposium,Building%20the%20Nazi%20Economy . Did Adam Tooze Ever Respond to Perry Anderson? <https://www.reddit.com/r/CriticalTheory/comments/12qjifn/did_adam_tooze_ever_respond_to_perry_anderson/> Catching up on the New York Magazine profile of Adam Tooze <https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/adam-tooze-profile.html>, I learned about Perry Anderson's critical review of Tooze's work <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii119/articles/perry-anderson-situationism-a-l-envers>, and the response that Tooze planned to write: I have agreed with New Left Review that I will write a piece in response for their Jan/Feb 2020 issue [...] I will use the NLR piece to offer some new points about the history of US hegemony, our current situation and what kind of political and practical opportunities it may or may not offer. I am really grateful for the suggestions that social media friends are making <https://twitter.com/maxkrahe/status/1182961876503801863>. Keep them coming. [...] However, if I am not going to take up space in the NLR for a rebuttal, I do feel the need to respond in a more direct way to Anderson’s specific comments about my work and the intellectual trajectory they map. The blog seems the right place to do this. [...] I am going to structure my response on the blog in a series of postings. Some are easier to do than others and the train of thought that Anderson has unleashed is still unfolding. But as things stand my idea is to write the following pieces: 1: History without structure? 2: The misreading of Wages of Destruction. 3: What is the economy? 4: Explicating The “right liberal” politics of Deluge 5: Europe and the problem of German hegemony Re: I will reserve a discussion of the American themes and the overarching questions of hegemony for the NLR piece. Altogether that makes 6 short pieces. But searching through Tooze's blog archive <https://adamtooze.com/category/blog/> and the NLR's archive <https://newleftreview.org/search?query%5Bauthor%5D=Adam+Tooze>, I was not able to find any of these promised responses. Did they ever get written?" Tooze <https://adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-341-on-thinking-in-medias> : Conducted in the summer of 2024 in Shanghai this interview with Ding Xionfei is the most far-reaching public discussion I have had had about the development of my writing and thinking since Perry Anderson’s review of my work <https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii119/articles/perry-anderson-situationism-a-l-envers>. I want to thank Ding Xiongfei for his remarkable engagement and for permission to republish part of the review that originally appeared in the Shanghai Review of Books in Mandarin <https://www.thepaper.cn/newsDetail_forward_28749135>... ..."*Ding Xiongfei: *I wonder if you’d be willing to discuss Perry Anderson's piece on you, published in the *New Left Review*. You mentioned that you once drew inspiration from Anderson’s approach for your class on the end of history in the 1990s. However, in his 47-page article published in 2019, where he reviewed *The Wages of Destruction*, *The Deluge*, and *Crashed*—which he viewed as a trilogy—he raised several criticisms. First, he argued there was an anachronism in your understanding of American hegemony, particularly in your portrayal of the Nazi regime’s attitude toward America. Second, he criticized what he called your “situational and tactical approach,” which, according to him, “plunges the reader into the stream of events” while “dispensing with a structural explanation” of your subject’s origins. Third, he linked this approach to your liberal politics, suggesting that your reluctance to engage in structural critique reflects an acceptance of the existing order of things. You once mentioned that you planned to write a response to Anderson, but ultimately didn’t. I’m still curious—how would you respond to him now? *Adam Tooze: *The most puzzling, and in the end, also the most generative element of his remarks about my work has got to do with his opening line, where he associates my left liberalism with what he describes as a situational analysis. He uses this phrase and implies that liberals, because they are complicit with the status quo, must always remain at the surface in their analysis, unable to tackle the underlying structural conditions. His argument implies that if only liberal thought was able to address these structural conditions it would recognize the need for radical change and visa versa. A commitment to radical change would open the path to a deeper understanding of historical structures and processes. It is a familiar left-wing conceit. In contrast, my approach, because I'm a liberal and therefore, as he sees it, also situational or occasional, simply latches onto particular moments. He describes my work as being formulated “*in medias res*, ” in the midst of things. He sees me as a left-liberal with a problem regarding structure, and he views this as a deficiency—a gap, a blind spot in my thinking. I would simply respond that I do have an intellectual problem with structure. But that is not a weakness or simple failure on my part. As our preceding discussion about polycrisis, Latour, Beck etc suggested I have a necessarily incomplete but nevertheless capacious historical explanation for why structure is at this particular moment not transparently given to us. This is necessarily formulate in *in medias res*. And my question back to him would be: how can anyone who considers themselves a Marxist intellectual believe that they think and act in anything other than *in medias res*? How can a materialist imagine they are not *in medias res*? We are thrown into history, living in history *in medias res*—that’s not a choice, nor a methodological stance. It’s our fate; it’s an existential condition. Frankly, I see his stance as an expression of a degenerate academic Marxism that imagines itself perched in some ivory tower, observing the world and understanding the deep structures of history from a privileged vantage point. That is no more or less in medias res. It is just a particularly precious, secluded angle from which to view the world. My own preference is to dispense with that conceit and to own, embrace, tackle and engage with what is everyone’s condition: i.e. being within the system, within the world. We are endogenous to that world. From this perspective, at any given moment, the question is what structures are relevant to our analysis. This is the Latourian move again: you tell me what your crisis is or what your context is, and I’ll tell you who and where you are—or vice versa. Unlike Anderson, I don’t believe the history of the 19th and 20th centuries has already been completely written according to some intellectual canon be it Marxist or otherwise, so that we can simply learn from and extend that narrative into the present. I believe that the challenge of discovering the world at work around us is continuously renewed for us by the drama of modern history and protean change. 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. Far from being some kind of left-liberal sellout, I consider this a more self-reflexive, realistic and, to be honest, more radical position than the one Anderson inhabits. Crucially, though it is of course a privilege to be read by Anderson and he was right to read the middle three of my books – *Deluge*, *Wages* and *Crashed* – as a trilogy, he didn't read the first book. So he doesn't really grasp what I am trying to do. Of the three books he did read, *The Deluge* is the toughest and least forgiving politically. It is a book that offers a nuanced but unorthodox reading of Lenin, a figure I find both fascinating and disturbing. Anderson, in his academic Marxism, pretends to have a deep affinity for Lenin and is correspondingly offended by my critical take. On the other hand, Anderson simply does not seem to understand the argument about global political economy being made in *Deluge* and *Wages*. He takes too lightly an understanding of the balance of global power, which is not rooted in the superficial attachment to American power that he attributes to me ad hominem. He suggests I have some romantic infatuation with America whilst ignoring altogether the undergirdings of my analysis. Crucially, these combined Stephen Broadberry’s productivity analysis, Angus Maddison’s OECD GDP data set, and David Edgerton’s research on the British economy. Anderson ignores all this and this is not by accident. Anderson’s entire biography has been crafted around a particular telling of British power in the 20th century, which David Edgerton and I have unhinged. A history of Germany in the 20th century from an economic point of view always implies a history of Britain and visa versa. Anderson is simply deaf to all this. Not to put to fine a point on it, his understanding of European political economy is stuck in the 1960s and 1970s and Britain's declinist narrative of that period. This is precisely one of those instances in which our understanding of “structure” shifts with historical change. The economic history work to which Anderson turns a blind eye, produced in the 1990s and 2000s fundamentally revises the declinist script for Britain on the one hand and the anachronistic view of Nazi Germany as an industrial power house, which I revised in *Wages*. In the end one the main reason for not diverting to writing a lengthy academic reply to Anderson is not my impatience with the superficiality of his out of date historical critique, but the fact that he is right. His critique more than anything else has fueled my deliberate and relentless focus on thinking and engaging in intellectual and political action *in medias res*. So far from being a quiescent politics, my work is deeply and profoundly engaged. This ranges from writing a real-time history like *Shutdown* that was fed by dozens of real-time public meetings in 2020-2021, to technocratic actions—such as the “Campaign against Nonsense Output Gaps, ” which targeted central bank policy in Europe and the IMF and led to changes in how certain figures are calculated—to more macroscopic interventions. For instance, the narrative of the 2008 crisis and its aftermath, the inadequate Obama stimulus etc, which I helped memorialize and monumentalize in *Crashed,* was one of the inspirations for the massive second stimulus launched by the Biden administration in early 2021. So, when academic leftists ask, “Where’s your politics? ” I know exactly where mine is. My question to them is: where’s yours? This engagement comes with heavy responsibility. The Biden stimulus experiment may not end well. Despite the amazing macroeconomic numbers and the promise of a “soft landing”, Larry Summers may be proven right and Harris may lose because of popular resentment about inflation that has been falsely attributed to Biden. But accepting that responsibility is what follows from being in medias res, being in the game, trying to change the conversation. This has been a process of learning on my part as well. In academic historical leftist circles, there’s a temptation to endlessly replay the chess moves of classical revolutionary periods—the Comintern, the CCP’s alignment with the Nationalists, the decisions of the German Republic during the early Weimar years. In *The Deluge*, I indulged in that historical game myself. In the historical reenactment I played out the role of a hard-nosed, Keynesian, left-liberal unafraid to accept responsibility for violence. I regret that I indulged in that historical time warp myself. Not because I adopted a position different from that approved of by Anderson, but because I indulged in the game at all, and thus opened the door to his critique. I allowed myself to slide out of the more urgent domain of the present into the time-warped present of the academic ivory tower, in which now is 1924 and 1924 is now. I allowed myself to be sucked into an unproductive argument about a history that is no longer ours. This, I have come to feel, is a kind of escapism. If we were in a revolutionary moment that would be one thing. But we are absolutely not. So, very little is gained for understanding present-day politics by engaging in a historical Disneyland where we cosplay as Lenin, Trotsky, Wilson, imagining who we would have been and what we would have done. That’s playing at history. It’s the kind of boyish stuff people play on computers. We need to grow up. There’s too much at stake in the world right now. Things are too urgent. We need to be in the present, as best we can, fully engaged *in medias res*. The challenge as I see it, is precisely to center our thoughts in the present, to be as much in medias res as we possibly can be. Precisely because of the tug of nostalgic role play amongst other things, that is not easy..." -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#40778): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/40778 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/117927517/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
