Jahr: 2015

Politics in the interregnum

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Appeared in ROAR Magazine, December 23, 2015

Professor Streeck, to begin with, could you briefly explain why you believe that capitalism and democracy are in conflict with one another? Is this tension an inherent one, or do you consider it to be a more recent phenomenon?

Democracy: one person, one vote; capitalism: one dollar, one vote. The order of equality vs. the order of egoism (John Dunn). Capitalists as a permanent minority in a majoritarian democratic polity — and democracy ending “at the factory gates”. Social justice vs. the justice of markets. It’s an old story with unending permutations, discussed again and again since the nineteenth century, by legions of scholars and political leaders. Weiterlesen →

The social condition of critical social science

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Presented at the conference „Humanities and the Social Sciences in the Twenty-first Century“ organized by the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), June 15-16, 2015

The presentation will attempt to define critical social science and explore its relationship to practical politics and collective action. It will then examine the different roles contemporary society offers to critical social scientists, after the demise of the figure of “organic intellectual”. It will focus on the situation of a critical social science cut off from political power and influence and under pressure from neoliberal “reforms” of academic scholarship and teaching. It also considers the need for critical social science to assert itself in a pluralist public governed by market laws against the white noise produced by omnipresent mass media, both conventional and new.

Links:
Video (presentation starts around minute 12)
Conference Program [PDF]

Wachsende Wirtschaft, schrumpfende Familien?

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Beitrag der Projektgruppe „Soziale Bedingungen und Folgen flexibler Arbeitsmärkte“ zum Institutstag des Max-Planck-Institutes für Gesellschaftsforschung, 5.-6. November 2015

Einleitung (Wolfgang Streeck)
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Unsicherheiten und ihre Folgen für das Geburtenverhalten (Annina T. Hering)

Viele Kinder, keine Arbeit: Mütter an der Armutsgrenze (Sara Weckemann)

Aufzeichnung der Vorträge:

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Conversation on States and Markets (with Marion Fourcade)

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ASA Economic Sociology Section Newsletter, Fall 2015, pp. 10-16

A perennial question in economic sociology is the relationship between the state and economy, which most economic sociologists conceptualize as co-constitutive. How would you characterize your own take on the relationship between the state and economy, and states and markets? What are some unexplored questions or problems we should be discussing/studying? Where should future research turn?

Wolfgang Streeck: I prefer to speak of either “the state and the market” or “the state and capitalism”. “The market” is shorthand for a mode of governance (free contracts at prices set by supply and demand) while “capitalism” refers to a particular power structure in society (private ownership of the means of production, private accumulation of capital). ”The state and the market” refers to the multifaceted relationship between two modes of allocation (distribution), whereas “the state and capitalism” refers to the equally multifaceted relationship between two different kinds of power (political and economic), or between citizenship and property rights, etc. (…)

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Multimorbidität

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Besprechung von: Tomáš Sedláček / Oliver Tanzer: Lilith und die Dämonen des Kapitals – Die Ökonomie auf Freuds Couch. Hanser Verlag, München 2015.

Süddeutsche Zeitung, 13. Oktober 2015, S. 23

Manchmal kann einem sogar der Kapitalismus leidtun. Andererseits braucht, wer solche Feinde hat, nun wirklich keine Freunde. Tomáš Sedláček ist spezialisiert auf die Verfertigung von Abhandlungen über das Abgründige im kapitalistischen Wirtschaftsleben, in denen er seine Leser unter anderem mit einem end- und bodenlosen klassisch-literarischen Zitatenschatz traktiert. Zugleich ist er (nebenher?) „Chief Macroeconomic Strategist“ einer tschechischen Bank und war nach eigenem Bekunden „Wirtschaftsberater“ von Präsidenten und Ministern in der Tschechischen Republik nach der Wende zum – Kapitalismus! Ein Mensch in seinem Widerspruch? (Weiterlesen auf süddeutsche.de)

Warum der Euro Europa spaltet statt es zu einigen

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Leviathan, Jg. 43 (2015), Heft 3, 365-386 (Online-Zugriff hier)

Basierend auf einem Vortrag in der Reihe „Distinguished Lectures in the Social Sciences“  am Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin, 21. April 2015

Zu den besonders ausführlich behandelten Themen im zweiten Kapitel von Max Webers monumentalem Werk Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, überschrieben “Soziologische Grundkategorien des Wirtschaftens“ (1956 [1920]), gehört das Geld. Für den Soziologen Weber wird Geld zu Geld kraft einer „Verbandsordnung“ (ibid., 54), auch „Geldordnung“ (ibid., 125) oder „Geldverfassung“ (ibid., 145), die unter modernen Bedingungen, so Weber im Anschluss an Knapps Staatliche Theorie des Geldes (1905), nur eine von einem Staat monopolisierte sein könne (ibid., 125). Geld ist eine in einem Herrschaftsverband – ein weiterer zentraler Weberscher Begriff – ein- und durchgesetzte politisch-ökonomische Institution, die wie alle Institutionen bestimmte Interessen privilegiert und andere benachteiligt. Dies macht es zum Gegenstand gesellschaftlichen „Kampfes“ bzw., als wirtschaftliche Institution, zu einer Ressource in dem, was Weber als „Marktkampf“ bezeichnet. (…)

Vortrag und Diskussion als Video hier.

English version

New Left Review, Vol. 95, September-October 2015, pp. 5-26 (access here)

Version française

Contretemps, N° 31, Novembre 2016 (Lire la suite)

Monetary Disunion: The Domestic Politics of Euroland

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With Lea Elsässer, Journal of European Public Policy, 2015

Abstract: Regional disparities within the European Union have always been perceived as an impediment to monetary integration. Discussions on a joint currency were linked to compensatory payments in the form of regional policy. Structural assistance increased sharply at the end of the 1980s. Later, however, it had to be shared with the new member states in the East. Moreover, the low-interest credit that Southern European Monetary Union members enjoyed as a result of interest rate convergence is no longer available. We predict that considerable amounts of financial aid will have to be provided in the future by rich to poor member countries, if only to prevent a further increase in economic disparities. We also expect ongoing distributional conflict between payer and recipient countries far beyond current rescue packages. We illustrate the dimension of the conflict by comparing income gaps and relative population size between the centre and periphery in Europe and in two nation-states with high regional disparities, Germany and Italy.

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(Previously published as Discussion Paper 14/17, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, October 2014 Download [PDF])

Brutish, nasty – and not even short: the ominous future of the eurozone

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Appeared in The Guardian, August 17, 2015

Now the dust has temporarily settled over the ruins of Greece’s economy, it is worth asking if there wasn’t a brief moment when the actors had found a way to cut the eurozone crisis’s Gordian knot. At some point in July German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, appeared to have realised that his dream of a “core Europe” with a Franco-German avant-garde would vanish into thin air if Greece was allowed to remain in the economic and monetary union. Rewriting the rules of the union to accommodate the Greeks, Schäuble realised, would pull the euro southwards, and France, Italy and Spain with it – forever breaking up the European core. (Continue)