Lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science, to inaugurate the English translation of Gekaufte Zeit: Die vertagte Krise des demokratischen Kapitalismus, Suhrkamp, Berlin 2014; London, October 20, 2014
English
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
The Politics of Exit
Review of Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing of Western Democracy, Verso: London and New York, 2013
New Left Review, Vol. 88, July and August 2014, pp. 121-129
Much of what is now mainstream political science tends to be rather boring. Following the lead of American departments and journals, research on issues of real intrinsic interest, such as the changing character of political parties, seems to be stuck in endless attempts to model the choice between office-seeking and policy-seeking, the interaction between ‘vote-maximizing’ parties and ‘utility-maximizing’ voters, the organization of voter preferences or the dynamics of coalition formation — all in timelessly general property spaces, designed to lend themselves to representation by complex sets of formal equations.
There are, however, exceptions. Among the most remarkable of these, until his untimely death in the summer of 2011, was Peter Mair, professor of comparative politics at the European University Institute in Florence. Widely respected, especially on the European side of his profession, Mair preserved a keen understanding of both the history and the purpose of the study of democracy. (…)
How Will Capitalism End?
Published in New Left Review 87, May-June 2014 (Download [PDF]). Deutsch in Blätter für deutsche und internationale Politik, März und April 2015 (Download [PDF]). Französisch in Le Débat, Numéro 189, Mars-Avril 2016 (Zugriff [Paywall]).
Presented at the British Academy, London, January 23, 2014 (further information).
The SPD under Merkel
thecurrentmoment, June 2, 2014
Since the fall of 2013 Germany has been governed by a Grand Coalition, led by the Christian Democrats under Angela Merkel and including as junior partner the Social Democrats under Sigmar Gabriel. Arguably the union of Black and Red was nothing more than the formalization of an informal cohabitation that had followed the end of the first Grand Coalition of the new century in 2009. Now that the opposition in the Bundestag has been reduced to a tiny and politically dispersed minority, it seems not much of an exaggeration to consider the government firmly in the hands of a centrist national unity party into which the two former Volksparteien have peacefully dissolved. Weiterlesen
Book Talk at Columbia University: Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
New York, April 3, 2014. Further Information
Moral Categories in the Financial Crisis
With Marion Fourcade, Philippe Steiner and Cornelia Woll. In: Socio-Economic Review, Vol. 11 (2013), No. 3, 601-627. Also as Discussion Paper 13/1, Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies, June 2013
Abstract: Karl Marx observed long ago that all economic struggles invite moral struggles, or masquerade as such. The reverse may be true as well: deep moral-political conflicts may be waged through the manipulation of economic resources. Using the recent financial and Eurozone crises as empirical backgrounds, the four papers gathered here propose four different perspectives on the play of moral judgments in the economy, and call for broader and more systematic scholarly engagement with this issue. Focusing on executive compensation, bank bailouts, and the sovereign debt crisis, the symposium builds on a roundtable discussion held at the opening of the Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies (MaxPo) in Paris on November 29, 2012.
Contribution to a Symposium in Honor of Claus Offe
Berlin, March 22, 2012. Further Information
Germany: Questions on European Societies in the Crisis
European Societies, Vol. 14 (2012), No. 1, 137-139
Interview with Wolfgang Streeck
thecurrentmoment, January 3, 2012
What are the stories right now that you think people either aren’t paying enough attention to, or about which we have the wrong view?
Generally the historical and political-economic continuities between the global inflation crisis of the 1970s, the widespread public debt crisis of the 1980s, the internationally agreed consolidation and financial deregulation policies of the 1990s, and the worldwide private debt crisis of the 2000s, with its commutation into another public debt crisis. Weiterlesen
Wolfgang Streeck 