"Capitalism isn't here an economic system of inequality but a social form of power and domination... capitalism is the domination of the present by the past." - Barnaby Raine [00:05:13]
"What might it mean to be a good heir? What does it mean to inherit those old ideas in different conditions?" - Barnaby Raine [00:05:59]
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"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." - Adam Tooze [00:26:57]
"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." - Adam Tooze [01:02:18]
"They are in my view the latest innovators in the party form as a form of political power, which is quite distinct from little modern liberals and models in the West." - Adam Tooze [01:19:42]
"I see in Gaza something which meets your standard of Western civilization... but in my reading Western civilization comes with the imperative to make political choices and moral choices." - Adam Tooze [01:37:17]
Speakers & Credentials
Barnaby Raine (Host): Scholar, writer, and host of Tribune Magazine's Postscript podcast. He researches political thought, history, and Marxist philosophy, focusing on the history of the left, anti-colonialism, and social emancipation.
Adam Tooze (Guest): Professor of History and Director of the European Institute at Columbia University. He is a world-renowned economic historian, author of Crashed and Shutdown, and commentator on global macroeconomics, climate policy, and geopolitics.
1. Executive Summary
The dialogue opens a new podcast series, Postscript, exploring the past and future horizon of left-wing political thought amidst the shifting global order and the perceived decline of Western hegemony [00:00:07].
Barnaby Raine posits that the core modern promise of history—a unified narrative of progress towards universal human freedom stretching from the Haitian Revolution through working-class movements—has fractured due to the systematic disassembly of emancipatory social subjects (e.g., industrial miners, car workers) under neoliberalism [00:03:33], [00:14:25].
Adam Tooze responds by defending an evolving "new liberalism" grounded in John Maynard Keynes's pragmatic, coalitional technocracy, arguing that Keynesianism evolved beyond its 19th-century elitist roots into a dynamic mechanism capable of managing capitalist crises and monetary orders severed from gold [00:18:46], [00:25:44].
The conversation interrogates the limits of climate politics and the Green New Deal, contrasting technocratic top-down industrial policy with grassroots coalitions based on social reproduction, elder care, and environmental justice [00:45:04], [00:53:35].
Tooze challenges rigid concepts of economic growth, arguing that for affluent Western nations, aggregate growth metrics (e.g., 0.8% GDP increases) are statistical noise and that politics must focus on care, distribution, and strategic state direction [01:00:05], [01:01:04].
Turning to geopolitics, the speakers evaluate the rise of China, analyzing the Communist Party of China (CPC) not through Western liberal orientalism or simple adulation, but as a sovereign developmentalist state innovating new forms of party power and green technological dominance [01:18:45], [01:21:19].
Finally, Raine and Tooze debate the fundamental nature of "Western civilization," clashing over whether its historic violent imperial continuity (manifested in settler colonialism and events in Gaza) represents an insurmountable structural limit or a site of ongoing, contingent moral and political contestation [01:30:04], [01:37:17].
2. Chronological Table of Contents
[00:00:07] Introduction: Postscript Podcast & The Decline of Western Hegemony
[00:02:01] The Rupture of Modernity and the Concept of Inheritance
[00:03:33] Marx’s Horizon: Universal Emancipation vs. Modernity
[00:07:02] Defining Freedom: Time, Space, and Individuality
[00:11:05] Disassembly of Emancipatory Subjects & Neoliberalism
[00:16:41] The Keynesian Alternative: Technocratic Ameliorism & Crisis Management
[00:21:13] Re-evaluating John Maynard Keynes: Elitism vs. Radical Monetary Shift
[00:28:46] Class Struggle, Coalitions, and the Professional Managerial Class (PMC)
[00:35:12] Euthanasia of the Rentier and Michał Kalecki's Challenge
[00:39:34] The Biden Administration Macroeconomic Experiment (2020–2021)
[00:44:03] The Green New Deal: Feminist Care Economy vs. Industrial Policy
[00:49:46] Climate Realities, Malthusian Limits, and Growth Absurdities
[01:01:52] Building Coalitions of Power & Hard-Edged Transitions
[01:08:38] Leninism, Globalized Capitalism, and the Shift to Asia
[01:13:24] Engaging Modern China: CPC Sovereignty, Development, & Infrastructure
[01:26:41] Europe's Horizon, Border Policies, and Spatial Coalitions
[01:30:04] Western Civilization, Imperial Continuity, and Gaza
[01:46:07] Deterrence, Hyper-Agency, and the Future of Political Struggle
3. Detailed Thematic Summary
Modernity, Marxist Freedom, and the Loss of Historical Subjects
Modernity’s coherent story of progress spanned from the 1791 Haitian Revolution and the 1789 storming of the Bastille through the workers' movement, anti-fascist victories, and 1970s decolonization [00:03:33].
Marx defined capitalism not simply as an economic metric of inequality, but as a totalizing social form of power where the past dominates the present [00:05:13]. True communism represents the present dominating itself, allowing individuals to define their own destinies [00:05:25].
Marxist freedom operates on three distinct axes outlined in the 1857–1858 Grundrisse:
Free Time: Real wealth defined as time unburdened by necessary labor [00:09:35].
Free Space: A cosmopolitan, global existence transcending parochial regional limits [00:09:41].
Free Individuality: Self-definition outside enforced social and class hierarchies [00:09:53].
Neoliberalism functioned as a deliberate, political disassembly of emancipatory social subjects [00:14:25]. Margaret Thatcher’s warfare against the National Union of Mineworkers in the 1980s was designed to obliterate the specific working-class life worlds that served as the material Archimedean point for socialist leverage [00:13:35], [00:14:37].
The loss of key material leverage points—such as coal mining and manufacturing production—destabilized both the political agent of liberation and the physical standpoint from which human emancipation could be conceptualized [00:13:48], [00:14:09].
Keynesianism, Coalitions, and the Professional Managerial Class
In contrast to grand socialist emancipation, Keynesianism offers a provisional, ameliorist project of crisis management and macroeconomic patching [00:17:53], [00:18:38].
John Maynard Keynes formulated his early doctrines in the 1920s after observing the severe intellectual failure and fecklessness of the British capitalist elite during World War I [00:21:47], [00:22:22].
Keynes sought to shift the socialization of investment away from short-sighted private business elites to enlightened state technocrats [00:22:35], [00:23:00]. However, his early worldview suffered from deep Late-Edwardian elitism, relying on Oxbridge elites to manage both working-class trade unions and capitalists [00:23:17], [00:23:51].
Keynesianism evolved radically in the 1970s following the uncoupling of global currencies from the gold standard, opening unprecedented terrain for fiat monetary experimentation and state intervention [00:25:44], [00:26:57].
Liberal technocracy has historically never achieved major political goals independently; it relies inherently on coalitions [00:31:36]. Neoliberalism succeeded by fracturing the mid-century alliance between the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) and organized labor, luring the PMC into alignment with financial capital and the City of London during the Tony Blair/New Labour era [00:31:08], [00:31:52].
Macroeconomic Experiments: From Bidenomics to the Green New Deal
In response to the 2020 US socioeconomic crisis and the Black Lives Matter uprisings, left-leaning economists inside the Democratic Party utilized Tooze’s historical analysis of the 2008 Obama administration's undersized stimulus to push for massive state intervention [00:39:38], [00:40:03].
The Biden administration enacted a $2 trillion macroeconomic stimulus in 2021, deliberately using Black male unemployment figures as the central indicator for Federal Reserve monetary overheating rather than standard central bank metrics [00:40:15], [00:40:27].
Opposition immediately emerged from orthodox figures like Larry Summers, who weaponized cost-of-living inflation fears to enforce traditional monetary tightening and restore labor market discipline [00:40:15], [00:40:33].
The original vision of the Green New Deal attempted to move beyond mere green industrial policy by centering on a feminist care economy—funding public child care, elder care, and mental health infrastructure as the true core needs of the modern service-sector working class [00:45:04], [00:46:24].
The policy was ultimately trimmed down by US Congressional bargaining into narrow green industrial subsidies (e.g., semiconductor manufacturing and EV plants), failing to address the fundamental social reproduction crisis affecting tens of millions of workers [00:45:09], [00:55:42].
Growth Fallacies, Climate Limits, and Hard-Edged Transitions
Obsessing over 0.8% or 0.5% GDP growth figures in wealthy European nations is an absurdity; for affluent societies, per-capita resource levels already satisfy conditions for human flourishing, making aggregate growth metrics statistical noise [01:01:04], [01:01:22].
The genuine political imperative requires focusing on distribution, quality of life, and public infrastructure rather than chasing mid-20th-century growth rates [01:00:05], [01:01:10].
Environmental politics must abandon pure, empty normativity and embrace a hard-edged, coalitional politics of state power [01:02:03], [01:03:43]. A just transition cannot mean "leaving no one behind"; it requires explicitly defeating blocking interest groups, such as corporate fossil fuel entities, while offering alternative material futures to impacted communities [01:02:18], [01:07:46].
Historical precedent demonstrates market leverage: in 2016, the entire US coal sector could have been nationalized for under $1 billion due to widespread corporate bankruptcies, enabling a planned state-led shutdown [01:06:16].
Global Order, Leninism, and the Reality of Modern China
V.I. Lenin revolutionized political theory by breaking with Western-centric Marxist orthodoxy, recognizing that global capitalism was bound up with imperialism, and linking European industrial politics to anti-colonial peasant struggles in India, China, and Asia [01:09:10], [01:09:42].
China's modern rise reflects Deng Xiaoping's foundational imperative: "development is the hard truth"—a sovereign developmentalist logic directly echoing Joseph Stalin's 1931 warning that USSR state survival depended on rapid industrialization [01:18:45], [01:19:00].
The Communist Party of China (CPC) represents an active, evolving innovation of the party form, constantly recalibrating state power to prevent internal bureaucratization and external capitalist subversion [01:19:27], [01:19:42].
China's massive post-2008 high-speed rail and green technology buildout (e.g., solar manufacturing leadership) was a deliberate, sovereign strategy to capture post-crisis technological waves, outcompete Western capital, and incorporate peripheral regions like Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia [01:20:47], [01:21:43].
Western intellectual reactions to China typically oscillate between two flawed poles: terrified liberal orientalism and naive technocratic adulation. Critical analysis must engage China as a complex, state-led developmentalist power with its own internal contradictions and oppositional cultures [01:14:20], [01:17:30].
Western Civilization, Structural Violence, and Gaza
Barnaby Raine argues that "Western civilization" possesses an irreducible, structural line of imperial violence running from enclosure movements, transatlantic slavery, and colonial genocides directly to the 21st-century destruction of Gaza with US and European backing [01:30:04], [01:31:26], [01:39:42].
Raine contends that technocratic Keynesianism creates a blind spot regarding this core violent culture, requiring a radical socialist politics committed to severing the imperial, civilizational link entirely [01:39:02], [01:52:26].
Adam Tooze counters that viewing Western history purely through a deterministic lens of continuous genocidal logic obscures contingency, moral choice, and historical complexity [01:31:57], [01:32:27].
Tooze characterizes Western military action in Gaza as "liberal militarism"—a standoff, asymmetric doctrine that demonizes the opponent, considers any friendly casualties intolerable, and justifies unlimited destructive force [01:34:42].
Rather than seeking total civilizational severance, Tooze advocates for a contingent, pragmatic politics centered on the immediate containment and minimization of state violence, active coalition-building, and continuous moral resistance [01:48:03], [01:54:36].
The Reference Vault
4. Data & Figures
Data Point
Value
Context
Timestamp
Historical Hegemony Horizon
500 Years
Historical period of Western global dominance currently coming unstuck
Marxist Freedom Triad (Free Time, Free Space, Free Individuality) [00:09:28] Synthesis: Derived from Marx's Grundrisse, this framework locates human emancipation not in market consumption choices or formal legal equality, but in three physical and temporal coordinates. Capitalist automation generates the machine infrastructure capable of reducing labor, yet capital artificially reinvests that efficiency into endless work obligations. Applying this model to the contemporary macro landscape demonstrates that despite immense technological wealth, modern service and gig workers suffer extreme temporal poverty, spatial confinement, and hierarchical identity conscription. True freedom requires reclaiming aggregate time from capital accumulation.
Euthanasia of the Rentier & Keynesian Investment Socialization [00:22:35], [00:36:02] Synthesis: Formulated by John Maynard Keynes, this framework argues that market capitalism inherently fails when private asset owners (rentiers) hoard capital or direct it into unproductive speculative ventures rather than real economic development. To correct this, the state must socialize the direction of investment and drive interest rates low enough to eliminate unearned financial returns. In the context of modern green transitions, relying on private capital incentives fails to resolve systemic crises; the state itself must directly direct capital to guarantee infrastructure reproduction.
Kaleckian Business Cycle Dynamics [00:35:21], [00:37:54] Synthesis: Based on Polish economist Michał Kalecki’s 1943 political essay, this model posits that industrial capital resists state-enforced full employment policies not because full employment is economically impossible, but because it undermines class discipline. When workers no longer fear unemployment, factory and workplace hierarchy breaks down. In 2021, this precise dynamic manifested when central bankers and financial commentators (e.g., Larry Summers) demanded interest rate hikes to end wage growth and "cool down" labor leverage under the guise of controlling inflation.
Developmental State Sovereignty ("Development is the Hard Truth") [01:18:45] Synthesis: Re-articulated by Deng Xiaoping following the Cultural Revolution, this principle treats economic and technological development as an existential geopolitical shield against foreign subjugation. Rather than viewing market liberalization as an end in itself, the state utilizes capitalist market mechanisms as instrumental tools to build national capacity, master strategic industrial sectors (such as high-speed rail, photovoltaics, and batteries), and maintain state sovereignty against Western hegemony.
Liberal Militarism & Standoff Warfare [01:34:42] Synthesis: A structural conceptualization of how liberal democratic states conduct high-technology warfare. To protect its domestic democratic legitimacy, the state treats any casualties among its own forces as politically unacceptable. It compensates by deploying total asymmetric, standoff firepower (bombardment, drone strikes, automated targeting), framing the enemy as completely uncivilized. This ideological framework morally absolves the state of catastrophic civilian casualties, viewing them as the inevitable consequence of the opponent's inherent unreasonableness.
6. Anecdotes
Africans Visiting 1920s Britain vs. Westerners Visiting Modern China [00:03:09] Context: To illustrate the historic inversion of global core and periphery. Raine notes that as Western power declines, British citizens travelling visa-free to modern Chinese mega-cities experience the exact same civilizational awe and dislocation that African observers felt when visiting imperial London in the 1920s.
John Maynard Keynes and the Russian Ballerina [00:43:05] Context: Tooze shares Keynes’s 1925 visit to the Soviet Union to highlight his paradoxical worldview. Keynes admired the Soviet state's preservation of high 19th-century culture (specifically the Imperial Russian Ballet, from which his wife Lydia Lopokova emerged), seeing managerial technocracy as a way to safeguard bourgeois cultural achievements rather than build proletarian rule.
The 2016 Coal Sector Bankruptcy Opportunity [01:06:16] Context: To demonstrate how state power can execute radical industrial policy at minimal cost. Tooze highlights that when Donald Trump assumed office in 2016, the entire US coal market was virtually bankrupt and could have been nationalized by the federal government for under $1 billion, allowing for an organized, state-managed shutdown.
Tooze’s Childhood in 1970s West Germany [01:41:35] Context: Tooze shares his background growing up in West Germany as an English speaker during the initial inclusion of non-German migrant children in public schools. He uses this personal story to ground his perspective on European border politics, arguing that European identity must undergo continuous transformation to overcome entrenched racial hierarchies.
7. References & Recommendations
Books & Texts
Grundrisse (1857–1858) by Karl Marx [00:09:00] – Marx's foundational economic notebooks detailing the temporal and spatial concepts of freedom.
The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels [00:05:25] – Cited for its definition of capital as the domination of the present by the past.
Essays in Persuasion (1931) by John Maynard Keynes [00:24:50] – Highlighted by Tooze as Keynes's most readable political essays addressing monetary reform, sex, and societal change.
The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) by John Maynard Keynes [00:24:40] – Keynes's foundational economic treatise on macroeconomic state interventions.
Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919) by John Maynard Keynes [01:29:36] – Cited alongside Lenin's critique of the Treaty of Versailles.
Carbon Democracy by Timothy Mitchell [00:14:56] – Referenced regarding the material power of energy systems (coal vs. oil) in shaping modern democratic worker movements.
People & Intellectuals
David Scott [00:05:59] – Columbia University anthropologist noted for formulating the concept of being a "good heir" to historical emancipatory traditions.
Michał Kalecki [00:35:21] – Polish Marxist economist who analyzed the political discipline constraints of full employment policies under capitalism.
Joan Robinson [00:23:05] – Cambridge economist who coined the term "bastard Keynesianism" to describe post-war orthodox economic dilution.
Stuart Hall [00:33:35] – Cultural theorist cited for his analysis of Thatcherism as a deliberate project to break working-class hegemony.
Gabriel Winant [00:49:15] – Historian author of The Next Shift, cited for detailing Pittsburgh's industrial shift from steelworkers to healthcare workers.
V.I. Lenin [01:09:10] – Bolshevik leader cited for globalizing political analysis beyond Western industrialism to include Asian anti-colonial struggles.
John Maynard Keynes [00:19:08] – British economist whose evolving doctrines form Tooze’s primary model for pragmatic statecraft.
Larry Summers [00:40:15] – Former US Treasury Secretary who led orthodox opposition against Biden's 2021 stimulus expansion.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) [00:54:27] – US Representative who helped champion the Green New Deal and frontline environmental justice frameworks.
Eric Hobsbawm [01:25:06] – Marxist historian cited regarding his defense of Soviet state necessity against fascist collapse.
Historical Events & Movements
The Haitian Revolution (1791) [00:03:45] – Cited as the foundational moment of modern universal human freedom struggles.
The UK Miners' Strike (1984–1985) [00:13:38] – The defining confrontation where Thatcherism destroyed organized labor's material core in Britain.
Nixon Shock / End of Bretton Woods (1971–1973) [00:25:44] – The uncoupling of world fiat currencies from gold that opened modern monetary experimentation.
The Green New Deal & Build Back Better (2018–2021) [00:44:31] – Legislative push in the US attempting to combine climate transition with care economy investments.
2021 COP26 Climate Summit (Glasgow) [01:04:56] – Global summit illustrating the gap between private finance commitments and actual industrial phase-outs.
Geopolitical & State Institutions
Communist Party of China (CPC) [01:18:45] – Analyzed as an evolving party form managing rapid technological development and sovereign industrial statecraft.
The US Federal Reserve [00:40:27] – Evaluated regarding its temporary adoption of targeted employment metrics during 2021.
National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) [01:05:16] – British labor union whose defeat enabled the privatized buildout of UK energy grids.
European Union (EU) [01:26:47] – Discussed as a necessary spatial scale for progressive European politics despite its restrictive border policies.
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