"For Tooze, this Marx – the ‘empirical’ Marx – anticipates his own brand of grounded contemporary history" (1)
But "Ultra-Marxist" surely doesn't fit. I see him as social democrat and as devoted Keynesian.
I have not read his books, but think I should. He seems to be one of the most creative intellectuals and historians at the moment.
Tooze is one of the most famous Marxist historians in the world. Iirc, he used to go to all the Marxist historian conferences (Historical Materialism, he writes for New Left Review, etc.)
Wages of Destruction is one of the best economic history books of the 20th century. Everything after that isn't good. I would read more about what historical Marxists believe. If you actually read what he is saying very carefully, you would realise that his view of how economic growth occurs is significantly different to the one that exists in reality. Part of that is empiricism (Marxists were the arch empiricists, they viewed their theories as grounded in a deep understanding of statistics and data...this is obviously ridiculous in retrospect but this view of "scientific Marxism" was pervasive at the time).
If you don't know much about economic history, I would read Mokyr/McCloskey, anything that has a vaguely coherent account of how economic growth actually occurs.
Lately Adam Tooze has been writing too much, his Javelin Chartbook post on Substack for example is ridiculous. But probably everyone has bad days.
I lived in West Berlin before and after the fall of the Wall and picked up quite a bit about Marxism / Historical Materialism. As far as I see, Tooze is miles away from orthodox Marxism.
Tooze knows both Europe and the US well and he has the historical knowledge, so I take his analyses seriously, e.g. (1).
But here I do not see a marxist anti-imperialist either.
On the contrary, he seems to be enthusiastic about the war of the good West, however many human lives it may cost.
(1) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/04/us-len...
Btw, I strongly suspect you still do not understand the difference between historical and political Marxism (nothing to do with "the war of the good West"...just read about historiography) but if you just consider the theme of Wages of Destruction, it should be extremely obvious to you that Tooze is a historical materialist (again though, I would consider whether you know enough about historiography and economics to understand the nuances of these points i.e. if you didn't study economic history to postgrad level, then you likely do not).
You are telling me I am wrong because you lived in Berlin? Only on HN -> Sounds like you're the one showing off buddy.
(I do not claim understanding marxism, it's a vast field und marxists enjoy fighting each other. I actually took a marxism course in university - it mainly convinced me that Marx' economic theory is wrong (labour theory of value) and that this smart guy Sraffa in Cambridge could not fix it (or fixed it to death))