English

„Nuit debout peut être porteur d’une transformation sociale de grande ampleur“

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Le Monde, 3 mai 2016. English translation published on Verso Books Blog.

Par Collectif: Tariq Ali, écrivain ; Ludivine Bantigny, historienne; Patrick Chamoiseau, écrivain ; François Cusset, écrivain et historien ; Christine Delphy, sociologue ; Cédric Durand, économiste ; Elsa Dorlin, philosophe ; Annie Ernaux, écrivain ; Eric Fassin, sociologue ; Bernard Friot, sociologue ; David Graeber, anthropologue ; Nacira Guénif, anthropologue ; Razmig Keucheyan, sociologue ; Stathis Kouvelakis, philosophe ; Frédéric Lordon, philosophe ; Gérard Mordillat, écrivain ; Toni Negri, philosophe ; Leo Panitch, sociologue ; Paul B. Preciado, philosophe ; Wolfgang Streeck, sociologue ; Enzo Traverso, historien.

Les crises ouvrent le champ des possibles, et celle qui a commencé en 2007 avec l’effondrement du marché des subprimes ne déroge pas à la règle. Les forces politiques qui soutenaient l’ancien monde sont en voie de décomposition, à commencer par la social-démocratie, qui a franchi depuis 2012 une étape supplémentaire dans son long processus d’accommodement avec l’ordre existant. En face d’elles, le Front national détourne à son profit une partie de la colère sociale en jouant d’une posture prétendument antisystème, alors même qu’il n’en remet rien en cause, et surtout pas la loi du marché. (…)

Scenario for a Wonderful Tomorrow

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Review of Martin Sandbu, Europe’s Orphan: The Future of the Euro and the Politics of Debt, Princeton University Press: Princeton, 2015

Appeared in London Review of Books, Vol. 38, No. 7, March 2016, pp. 7-10

Europe is falling apart, destroyed by its most devoted fans, the Germans. In the summer of 2015, having humiliated the Greeks by forcing another reform diktat down their throats, Angela Merkel started a new game, aimed at diverting attention from the economic and political disaster monetary union had become. Abrupt changes of policy are nothing new to Merkel, who is best described as a postmodern politician with a premodern, Machiavellian contempt for both causes and people. Having made her party adopt a radically neoliberal, deregulationist anti-labour platform in 2003, she barely escaped defeat two years later at the hands of Gerhard Schroeder. When she became chancellor, she used her office and the Grand Coalition with the post-Schroeder Social Democratic Party (SPD) to purge her own party of neoliberalism and neoliberals, and social-democratise it beyond recognition. In 2011, after the nuclear accident at Fukushima, which received extensive media coverage in Germany, it took Merkel, then known as the Atomkanzlerin, no more than a few days to order the immediate closure of eight nuclear power plants and to initiate legislation to end all nuclear power generation by 2022 at the latest. This was only a few months after she had, with much political arm-twisting, got the Bundestag to repeal the nuclear phase-out passed by the Red-Green coalition in 2001, and to extend the operating licences of German nuclear plants by an average of ten years. (…) Continue

Social Democracy’s Last Rounds

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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 →

Can there be peace in Europe?

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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

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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]

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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