Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: Am I right in thinking you began your political life as a conservative?

Thomas Meaney: I am a fortunate son of the American empire, born during Reagan’s Second Cold War in the garrison state of South Korea. The dictator Chun Doo-hwan—“our son of a bitch”—lived down the street. I was awoken in the night by sorties of SR-71 Blackbirds overhead breaking the sound barrier. There was a standing plan for my amah to whisk me away to the Taebaek Mountains if the North invaded. My father and grandfather were US Navy veterans. My uncle developed weapons systems and traded arms with Ankara and the Greek junta. You could say the furtherance of the Pax Americana was a given in the family.

The Nebraska of the 1990s, where I spent much of my youth, was a very conservative society. Rush Limbaugh droned in the background. I was a Distinguished Expert in the National Rifle Association, an Eagle Scout, and an aspiring shortstop for the Omaha Royals. I expected to die, or at least be wounded, in service of the country. I wrote a school paper justifying the Vietnam War. In eighth grade, the history teacher taught the tenets of Milton Friedman Thought. One of the things that confused me when I got to college were right-wing students complaining they were losing the culture wars. My impression—not entirely wrong, as it turns out—was that we had won.

DSJ: What was your first exposure to the left?

TM: A communist revolution. I was 19 and living in India, where I was teaching at a school in Banaras. In Kolkata, I met Bengali writers for whom the Marxism of the Communist Party of India was still the lingua franca. It was the unceremoniousness of their communism that made an impression. Then I traveled through Nepal into what I didn’t realize was a hot phase of the Maoist insurgency. I arrived in a western village called Dunai in the wake of the Communists wiping out the local police force, and went to some of the land redistribution meetings the new People’s Governments held in Gurung houses in the areas they occupied. The whole phenomenon seemed so alien that I put it down as a delayed aftershock in Asia that didn’t have anything to do with the post-historical West. None of it really got through to me. Before India and Nepal, the only self-professed communist I had ever met was a guy in high school. Last time I checked, he worked for the State Department.

DSJ: Your work and politics can seem at times difficult to situate. On the one hand, you are on the editorial committee of New Left Review and write for the journal. On the other hand, you seem equally at home writing for mainstream liberal publications. In fact, for going on two years, you have been the editor of Granta, the boomer liberal quarterly par excellence. Is there an intellectual or political through line that holds your involvement with these publications together?

TM: The connection seems natural to me. Granta is above all a literary magazine, with an ambition to show our readers what we think is most alive in contemporary fiction, poetry, memoir, and reportage. Like any instrument of culture, it operates through an alternating process of attention and neglect. We pay attention to writers whose work displays a sense of control and a mastery with language, to prose that simply gives us pleasure. But at the same time, in order to husband our resources, we avoid what we think has been falsely raised up, what we think has been exhausted, what we think is inert on the page.

How does work on a political journal help with any of this? Because it provides a set of antennae about the nature of the time we’re living in, and about where the fault lines of conflicts and interests lie, as well as what fresh alibis the status quo is wrapped up in. To have a strong idea of these things is to have a better sense of where the art you are seeing is coming from and where it sits in the wider culture. Almost all literary movements and styles have some kind of relation to politics, whether acknowledged or not.

To take a classic example: Melodrama was the moral style of the French Revolution; it was, as Peter Brooks says, an aesthetic attempt to reestablish the stakes of the sacred in an increasingly disenchanted world. By transposing the drama of great historical forces to the pathos of private life, a writer like Balzac exposed the contradictions of the postrevolutionary settlement, irrespective of whatever political investment he himself had in its consolidation. A political journal is often more direct at pinpointing where the hypocrisies and sentimentalities in a society lie, and this sense of orientation is useful for a literary magazine.

Have you ever come across Frank Kermode’s History and Value? It’s a study of English literature of the 1930s, when a generation of well-meaning progressives started writing novels and reportage about what they took to be the most urgent political issue of the day: the class struggle, the rise of the proletariat. He focuses on the forgotten English writers in the orbit of Auden and Isherwood. They styled themselves as transgressors; they wanted to violate the frontier of class. The problem, as Kermode shows, is that they tended to be ignorant of the actual class they were trying to write about, and too self-indulgent to learn more. They were bound by their own class limits.

There was also the problem of style: Should they abandon their good bourgeois prose to write about the proletariat? How could you do that without coming off as a pretender? Kermode has his affections for these writers and sympathizes with their predicament, but he is also the first to acknowledge that the work did not stand the test of time. Their books are almost all unreadable now.

What Kermode saw in 1930s class-struggle fiction, you see today in something like “climate fiction” or in other genres that periodically capture the attention of the publishing industry. The same sort of worthiness seems to attach to their efforts, the same sort of guilt, the same sort of op-ed-ification of the fiction. It’s not that I don’t think that literature, or art generally, shouldn’t be political or address contemporary questions. I believe in the existence of the aesthetic—that it has criteria that make it different from other domains of life—but in a particular way. At Granta, we are skeptical of fiction that has too palpable a design upon us. Literature is often most enduring not when it is most saturated with political ideals, but when it is not, and because it is not, it is.

DSJ: Are you now or have you ever been a Marxist?

TM: [Laughs] Of course! To be a Marxist now is to have the luxury of starting way down the line, without pressure to subscribe to some unified Marxism or being shackled to a simple version of the labor theory of value, but with the benefit of the various “post-Marxisms” looking the worse for wear. Sartre put the matter well in Search for a Method: We still live in what Marx identified as the capitalist mode of production, and as long as we continue to live in it, there will be no going beyond Marxism. Everything that happens in our society—war, conquest, science, consumption, love, and child-rearing—are marked by the fact that they happen in capitalist time. To grasp this is to grasp what Marx called “the totality of social relations,” which is obscured by the very nature and interests of the capitalist order that underpins it.

The anti-Marxist today is almost always a pre-Marxist, and a post-Marxist tends to be, at best, a plucky rediscoverer of some thought already contained or suggested in Marxism. Some of the most fruitful developments in Marxism in the past decades have been its threadings with feminist, psychoanalytic, and ecological thought. But even much of what falls under the heading of “vulgar” Marxism continues to have purchase (and “vulgar” Marxism—a disparagement designed to cast shame into the heart of any self-respecting intellectual—was always vulgar in relation to something else; it was more often than not a pointed response to earlier oversophistications or mystifications).

Take, for instance, “primitive accumulation”—the idea that, at various points in history, great masses of peasants and peoples of the earth have been deprived of their possessions, leaving them with only their labor power. As a rough picture of much of the past in many places, this seems inarguable to me. When you drive from, say, Jakarta to Semarang, and you see people with no prospects, completely disconnected from the land, hawking plastic wares by the roadside, it is hard not to believe some great crime has taken place. They are surviving by scraps in the wake of a vast colonial expropriation in the past, and on the periphery of a great maw of consolidated accumulation in the present. Likewise, when you walk through Mayfair in London, amidst all of the empty buildings and apartments, it’s hard not to feel that the city and all its churning of fictitious capital has not been built atop a sediment of labor power it has sucked out from all over the earth to produce monuments of its own magnificence.

When it comes to particularly violent flexes of power by the United States and its allies, basic class considerations can steady one’s vision. What were the Abraham Accords if not partly a way for Israeli and Arab elites to agree to share in their need for (and immiseration of) migrant labor from South Asia in a more rationalized fashion—and in a way that would make Palestinians that much more superfluous for their economic plans, in which Gaza would appear, buffeted by the old Zionist dream of Araberfrei Greater Israel, as ever more mouthwatering real estate for investors and subsidized settlers in the wake of an Israeli war of annihilation?

There is no question the left is today in low water, but many of the dynamics Marx observed still hum away. The rule of “capitalist magnates” has proven more enduring than Marx anticipated, but his insight that its political effects—an ever-increasing concentration of power in the hands of a few—may undermine the conditions for its reproduction has lost none of its force. Of course there are relatively high wage earners and small capitalist magnates who will continue to carry out the interests of big capital, and even make supporting them appear like common sense to many of those below, but how long can that go on? A long time, perhaps. But no matter how remote it may appear, the possibility of communism has not completely vanished; as Fredric Jameson insisted, it is reflected in the repressed or rather inverted utopianism of the capitalist order, and this distinguishes it from other, empty utopianisms that rely on the annunciations of some ethical imperative. One of the primary intellectual duties is to redirect or accelerate the reclaiming of common sense.

I’m hardly an adept in the finer points of Capital like some of my friends, but just to confine ourselves to the study of history: In almost every field, when you look at what the Marxist or Marxisant or “radical” historians have done, what they have been or are debating, it’s often incomparably richer and more commanding than the liberal historiography: classical antiquity (Geoffrey Ste. Croix, Peter Rose); medieval Europe (Rodney Hilton, Christopher Wickham); early modern England (Christopher Hill, Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Robert Brenner); the French Revolution (Georges Lefebvre, Michel Vovelle); modern Europe (Eric Hobsbawm, Perry Anderson); the American Civil War and Reconstruction (W.E.B. Du Bois, Barbara Fields); modern Southeast Asia (Syed Farid Alatas, Jim Glassman); Modern Africa (Walter Rodney, Claude Ake, Ruth First, Rahmane Idrissa); India (D.D. Kosambi, Ranajit Guha, Susobhan and Sumit Sarkar); US foreign relations (the Kolkos, Arno Mayer, Marilyn Young, Anders Stephanson, Tim Barker), etc. It’s comical that the snake-oil historians and Great Ideas peddlers of the pop-up academies of the American right think they have an intellectual tradition that can contend with this one, and the cleverer among them know it. As for liberal history-writing in the 20th century, there seems to be little question that it was at its most formidable, its most “vital,” when it felt itself under pressure from Marxism, or when it was more transparently parasitic on it. One of the stories of our time may be Marxism’s revenge on societies that thought they had killed it off.

DSJ: The China issue of Granta laid out a very distinctive understanding of contemporary Chinese literature. You went so far as to make the case that previous generations of translators of Chinese had in some sense obscured the reception of modern Chinese writing. Can you say more about what you meant by that?

TM: Imagine if Chinese readers experienced American literature in the way we have been led to experience theirs—that is, through the prism of “dissidence,” in which the “dissident” writers are elevated, and “state” writers are considered collaborators with totalitarianism. In 1995, the leading Anglo translator of Chinese fiction, Howard Goldblatt, published an anthology of stories in translation called Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused. He set out very explicitly to find Chinese equivalents for the oppositional writers of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. But why should Chinese writers be judged on how closely their careers resemble that of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn?

Our literary interpreters of China draw a crude line between writers in Chinese who were either “transgressive” or not. This all came to an amusing head in 2012, when Mo Yan won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Goldblatt, Mo Yan’s translator, as Nikil Saval showed in a remarkable piece in the London Review of Books, had marketed Mo as a major opposition figure to the Chinese state, when in fact Beijing couldn’t have been more pleased that he had won the prize. Many Chinese writers with state-sanctioned positions write books that go on to be banned by the government. Many of the finest writers in the country, from Yu Hua to Shuang Xuetao, might not consider themselves in the political opposition, any more than Marilynne Robinson or Richard Ford are dissenters from the US state project. This does not mean they are anything like instruments of the CCP. The filter of dissidence is very rarely helpful for looking at the literature of any country, especially one that is increasingly viewed as an enemy in other quarters.

DSJ: You started a series with Verso with Tariq Ali and Adom Getachew called “Southern Questions.” What is this about?

TM: In 1959, the director of the CIA, Allen Dulles, declared that decolonization—what he called at the time “the emergence of these new states”—would ultimately be viewed by historians as more significant than the Cold War. Our series takes the same line. The books revisit crucial episodes at the end—or during the reconfiguration—of Western empire in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere, but in a fleet-footed way that avoids encrustations of piety and any undue hallowing of the postcolonial bourgeoisies and elite nationalists. Each of the books, in its own way, takes up some of the strategic questions that Gramsci first aired in his “Notes on the Southern Problem.” To view the world constantly from the perspective of the North is intellectual self-sabotage. “Southern Questions” is meant to swivel the attention of readers back to the peoples of the South. The series reckons forthrightly with the possibilities, political choices, and constraints that anti-colonial intellectuals, movements, parties, and states faced in the postwar period, and how that period links up to contemporary realities.

DSJ: Let’s zoom out a bit. As you know, liberals and the left are in a major state of soul-searching right now—progressive politics has not been this embattled since the 1930s, in the lead-up to the Second World War. In the search for answers as to how this has happened, as most obviously illustrated by Trump’s return to office, there are myriad suggestions regarding what is to blame—neoliberalism, gerontocracy, fascism, American imperial decline, etc. Where do you stand in your diagnosis? Or to put it differently, is there something being overlooked in these discussions?

TM: The destruction of official communism at the end of the Cold War opened up more problems than it solved for American power. From Lenin’s call for self-determination to Mao’s expropriation of landlords, the US had been in the perpetual position of parrying communist thrusts. Everything from Wilson’s Fourteen Points to the New Deal to civil rights to modernization theory to NASA’s moon landing can be seen as a response to the communist challenge. “Americans should be told,” Fanon once wrote, “that if they want to fight communism they must, in certain sectors, adopt Communist attitudes.” And so they did in some sectors, as in the occupation of postwar Japan, where the US military introduced land reforms more extensive than Castro’s in Cuba. But already by the 1970s, for the “West,” the Soviet foe was almost too good to be true. It did a magnificent job of delegitimizing collective ideals, and as long as it was around, those ideals had less of a chance of undergoing renewal elsewhere, even if they continued to regulate and discipline the capitalist order’s own political imagination.

China, for its part, was the first major power to withdraw its ambitions from the world-historical stage. Mao himself ended the export of peasant revolutions. China has never presented the ideological challenge that the Soviet Union did. So today, one has to look for oppositions within the West itself. It has often been suggested that the more effective challenges to neoliberal/neoconservative hegemony have come from the political right, in the form of nationalism, skepticism of forever wars, and flirtations with industrial policy. But those elements have so far turned out to be only extensions of neoliberal hegemony and for the most part remain fully compatible with it, even if they were to go beyond the level of rhetoric. The supposed dissenters on the right in fact contribute to the sense that there is a vibrant, ideologically diverse right-wing public sphere that poses a threat to the established order, when all of this is quite comfortably happening within the bounds of the old.

DSJ: Your work is mostly concerned with the past and the present, but what kind of futures do you see unfolding for the world?

TM: There was an extraordinary moment of international class coordination in the 1990s and early 2000s. Washington, Beijing, Moscow, and Brussels all agreed—despite their mounting geopolitical tensions—that they wanted their capitalists to get richer, that they no longer faced real threats from their working populations, and that they would help each other in the other great cause of the day, “counterterrorism,” which in practice meant killing and repressing Muslims the world over, whether in Xinjiang, Iraq, or Chechnya. Muslims were the ideal target for fine-tuning the emerging world order because they had no major power base of their own; their wealthiest members in the Gulf had no interest in upsetting the status quo. What is fascinating is how quickly this order broke down. One can point to cracks like the Iraq War, Putin’s 2007 Munich speech, the 2011 Libya intervention, or even further back to the Yugoslav wars, which Beijing and Moscow took to be a grisly preview of coming attractions.

Never genuinely threatened by “terrorism,” untroubled by rebellions of workers at home, the states superintending the 21st-century world economy found their hold on power jeopardized by the very success of the globalized capitalism whose ascendancy they oversaw, as powerful fractions of their ruling classes came to see themselves as unmoored from anything so constrictive as a national interest, however notional. Each state still believed it needed to enrich its elites—that was never in doubt—but there was a question now of which faction of the elite to enrich, and which to cast aside. Major purges were conducted in almost all the major states of the order. The purges were most drastic in China, where Xi in 2020–22 had to prove that the country would resist the liberal script of the business class overpowering the party. Putin conducted his purge more indirectly via the Ukraine war, which neatly separated out his capitalist loyalists from more Western-oriented capitalists in the upper strata around him. Trump, too, has done a purge, to the extent that one even can in the US, where capitalists, to a much greater degree, control the state. Trump had to confine his purge to the US bureaucracy; no major capitalists were threatened or fled the country (though the loyalty oaths extracted from the likes of Zuckerberg made for good television).

The other thing I see emerging is China developing a monopoly on state-backed science, especially climate science—one of Xi’s rumored successors when I was last in China was Chen Jining, the climate scientist who is now the party secretary of Shanghai—while the US will continue to excel in the carnival of recognition and continue to corner the market on identitarian innovation and mimetic desire. This is not a minor form of soft power, though it is one that the US itself barely understands. Meanwhile, the US has so thoroughly financialized itself that it has great difficulty producing basic military hardware, while it commits headlong to a kind of Green New Deal in reverse: the reorganization of its energy infrastructure and capital allocation in order to guarantee wealth transfers to investors in large language models, and to cover the shame of not having developed more socially beneficial innovations.

The last major rearrangement of global fortunes was the Second World War, the best thing—if you hadn’t died in it—that ever happened to American wage earners, and the best thing that ever happened for American technology. It’s doubtful that a war with China would result in a similar uplift, considering not only the obstacles to social mobilization on such a scale but the sheer amount of firepower that could be involved.