Jacobin online, February 25, 2016

Interview with Jonah Birch and George Souvlis

You’ve argued in recent years that the trajectory of “democratic capitalism” in Europe has increasingly been in the direction of a social and economic model that prioritizes the imperatives of the market and of business profitability over the requirements of democratic equality and social solidarity. Can you talk a little about how that process has unfolded, and how the eurozone crisis that broke out after 2008 fits into this picture?

Democracy under capitalism is democracy to the extent that it corrects the outcomes of markets in an egalitarian direction. Economic liberalization disconnects democracy from the economy — makes it run dry, as it were. The result is what is called post-democracy: democratic politics as a mass spectacle, as part of the entertainment industry. One way democracy is decoupled from the economy is by a transfer of economic policy out of the hands of national parliaments and governments to “independent” institutions such as central banks, summit meetings like the European Council, and international organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The euro, as instituted by the Maastricht Treaty, has in this way de-democratized (although by no means depoliticized) monetary and economic policy-making in its member states. Substantively, it has imposed a hard-currency policy on the whole of Euroland, one under which some countries, like Germany, can prosper while many others cannot. Weiterlesen →

Interview appeared at Near Futures Online, Issue No. 1, March 2016

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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 →

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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Appeared, in Italian, in L’Eco di Bergamo, May 15, 2015

How do you interpret the current economic-financial crisis in part of the western world?

It is a return to the normal condition of capitalism: instability, uncertainty, unpredictability, a permanent conflict between social justice and the justice of the market. The return began in the 1970s with the breakdown of the postwar order. The three decades after the war were an exceptional period. Since then, a crisis sequence has begun brought inflation, public debt, private debt, secular stagnation and anarchic money production. The financial crisis of 2008 was the high point up now. More such high points are coming. Weiterlesen →

Klassekampen, Oslo, January 15, 2015 (in Norwegian)

As I understand it one of the main arguments in your book, „Gekaufte Zeit“, is that we now experience a rise of a new form of capitalism in the western world. A form of capitalism which evades democratic procedures. What is the main problem with western democracies? And is it possible to restore the balance between democracy and capitalism?

The so-called postwar settlement in Western capitalist democracies involved a state capable of correcting the distributional outcomes of markets. In exchange for its reinstatement after the disasters of the first half of the century, capitalism had to produce public benefits such as full employment, a growing welfare state, social security, steadily rising incomes, and a gradual reduction of inequality. For several decades now, Western capitalist economies have no longer been able to deliver on these promises. Growth is declining, inequality increasing, public and private debt is rising, so are economic risks, and crises are becoming more severe and disruptive. The new doctrine of economic policy is higher rewards for the winners and greater punishments for the losers – redistribution from bottom to top – rather than growth by stabilizing and expanding aggregate demand through steady increases in mass incomes: from Keynesianism to neoliberalism. For this purpose economic decision-making has to be taken away from democratically elected parliaments and accountable governments, to be relocated in international organizations and institutions as well as in “independent” central banks. As I said, these are trends that have been going on for decades. I cannot see how they could easily be reversed in the near future. Weiterlesen →