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 →

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 →