Interview appeared at Near Futures Online, Issue No. 1, March 2016
Interview
Can there be peace in Europe?
Interview for Liberal Culture, January 12, 2016. Polish version here.
Has Chancellor Merkel made a mistake when she opened the door for migrants without first consulting it with other European countries? Can this decision cost her the role of the European leader?
Like all other European leaders Merkel thinks first and foremost about her own domestic politics. Most of the migrants that had become stuck in the central station of Budapest wanted to go to Germany. The German public had been outraged about the French and the British leaving thousands of migrants stranded in Calais, at the entrance of the Channel tunnel. After Merkel had invited the Budapest migrants to Germany, perhaps also to clear the way for a coalition with the Greens in two years, it turned out there were millions more that wanted to come. At this point the German government began to look for a “European solution”. No European government consults with other European governments when it sees its own vital political interests at stake. Weiterlesen
Politics in the interregnum
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
Conversation on States and Markets (with Marion Fourcade)
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. (…)
The euro, a political error
Interview for L’Espresso, July 7, 2015. English translation published on Verso Books Blog.
„Barely disguised oligarchies“
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
„Alles kommt einmal zum Ende“
Gespräch mit Mathias Greffrath im Deutschlandfunk, 12. April 2015
Wolfgang Streeck, Sie sind emeritierter Direktor am Max-Planck-Institut für Gesellschaftsforschung in Köln. Vor zwei Jahren haben Sie ein Buch geschrieben, „Gekaufte Zeit: Die vertagte Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus“. Und vor einem Jahr erschien ein Aufsatz mit dem Titel „Wie wird der Kapitalismus enden?“ Nicht, ob er enden wird, ist da die Frage, sondern wie er enden wird. Das ist ja eigentlich eine starke Aussage. Sie sind Soziologe. Was unterscheidet eigentlich den Blick eines Soziologen auf die Krise und auf den Kapitalismus vom Blick eines Ökonomen?
Also zunächst mal würde ich sagen: Was der Soziologe kann und der Ökonom können sollte, ist, seine Beobachtung in einen historischen Kontext zu setzen. Das anscheinend Sensationelle des Gedankens über das Ende des Kapitalismus ist ja eigentlich nur, dass man sich klar macht, dass diese Gesellschaftsformation irgendwann Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts in Europa und Amerika angefangen hat, und alles, was geschichtlich anfängt, steht in dem Verdacht, dass es irgendwann auch mal zum Ende kommt. Und ich denke, dass auch die Ökonomen eigentlich – und die klassische Ökonomie hat das ja gewusst. Die klassische Ökonomie hat ja immer auch über den Übergang zu einer neuen Gesellschaftsformation in einer dynamischen, modernen Gesellschaft spekuliert, das beginnt mit Ricardo, Marx, Sombart, was weiß ich alles. Und insofern ist das gar nicht dramatisch. Dass man heute Gründe hat, darüber verschärft nachzudenken, darüber werden wir uns ja noch unterhalten. (…)
Afraid of the Capitalist Victory
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
„Das kann nicht gutgehen mit dem Kapitalismus“
Wirtschaftswoche Online, 8. Januar 2015
Herr Streeck, Sie kündigen das nahende Ende des Kapitalismus an. Wie kann ein Gesellschaftssystem enden, das den meisten Menschen auf der Welt alternativlos scheint und das kaum jemand abschaffen will?
Zunächst habe ich einfach darauf aufmerksam gemacht, dass auch der Kapitalismus ein historisches Phänomen ist. Als Gesellschaftsordnung ist er nicht älter als rund zwei Jahrhunderte. Was einen Anfang hat, hat auch ein Ende. Allerdings müssen wir uns frei machen von dem Fortschrittsglauben, der noch aus dem 19. Jahrhundert stammt. Dieser besagt, dass eine Gesellschaft nur enden kann, wenn sie von einer besseren abgelöst wird. Ich glaube, dass es gute Gründe dafür gibt, anzunehmen, dass der Kapitalismus nicht durch eine Revolution abgeschafft oder überwunden wird, sondern von selbst verendet. Es gibt viele Symptome des Niedergangs, aber am wichtigsten sind drei langfristige Trends in den hochentwickelten, kapitalistischen Ländern. Weiterlesen
Capitalism, neo-liberalism and democracy: Wolfgang Streeck interviewed by Ben Jackson
Interview in Renewal 22 (3/4), Fall 2014
In your new book Buying Time (Streeck, 2014) you take as a starting point the theories of authors such as Jürgen Habermas, Claus Offe and James O’Connor from the 1970s. Such authors wrote about an emergent crisis of legitimacy for capitalism, but their arguments were undermined by the apparent popular capitalist revival of the 1980s and 1990s. Why do you think it is worth returning to these authors and how do you want to adapt their ideas to analyse the present conjuncture?
Failed theories can be instructive, provided they are well-structured and conceptually transparent. From the crisis theories of the 1970s we can learn that it is a mistake to under-estimate the agency of capital while over-estimating popular demands under capitalism for substantive legitimacy. With hindsight we can see that the capitalist economy, rather than having been transformed into a technocratic wealth-producing machine as the Frankfurt School had come to believe, had remained a site of class struggle from above, with highly class-conscious and profit-conscious capitalists. And we can also see that the new consumerism that began in the 1970s went a very long way, and still does, to procure, if not legitimacy, then at least compliance with the laws of capital accumulation. Neither the re-awakening of capitalists as a class nor the rise of consumerism was on the radar screen of ‘Critical Theory’. Weiterlesen
Wolfgang Streeck 