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Wolfgang Streeck

How Will Capitalism End?: Essays on a Failing System Hardcover – Illustrated, November 29, 2016

by Wolfgang Streeck (Author)

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The provocative political thinker asks if it will be with a bang or a whimper

After years of ill health, capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth has given way to stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the money economy has all but evaporated.

In How Will Capitalism End?, the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that the world is about to change. The marriage between democracy and capitalism, ill-suited partners brought together in the shadow of World War Two, is coming to an end. The regulatory institutions that once restrained the financial sector’s excesses have collapsed and, after the final victory of capitalism at the end of the Cold War, there is no political agency capable of rolling back the liberalization of the markets.

Ours has become a world defined by declining growth, oligarchic rule, a shrinking public sphere, institutional corruption and international anarchy, and no cure to these ills is at hand.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“This collection will be at the centre of social research for years to come.”
—Times Higher Education (“Books of the Year 2016”)

“As the economic gloom deepens to the pitch black night of geopolitical crisis, in the economics departments of the world there can still be heard the confident chuckle: ‘but capitalism always survives.’ How Will Capitalism End? is an extended riff on the possibility of the mainstream economists being wrong. Streeck synthesises the various strands of left crisis theory into a convincing proposal.”
—Guardian (“Best Books of 2016”)

“Democratic capitalism is in bad shape. The crisis of 2007–09 and subsequent election of Donald Trump demonstrate that. In this book, German sociologist Streeck argues that capitalism is doomed, as many have before. But he does not believe it will be replaced by something better. Instead a new Dark Ages lies ahead.”
—Financial Times (“Best Books of 2016”)

“Streeck’s title question—though never answered—opens a window onto the conflict between capitalism and democracy in the neoliberal era. That such a conflict exists is no surprise in Brazil, and still hidden to many in the United States, but a rude and inescapable shock to those who grew up with the comfortable illusions and utopian hopes of post-war Europe.”
—James Galbraith, author of The End of Normal

“Neoliberalism continues to delimit political choice across the globe yet it is clear that the doctrine is in severe crisis. In Wolfgang Streeck’s powerful new book How Will Capitalism End? Streeck demonstrates that the maladies afflicting the world—from secular stagnation to rising violent instability—herald not just the decline of neoliberalism, but what may prove to be the terminal phase of global capitalism.”
—Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism

“The most interesting person around today on the subject of the relationship between democracy and capitalism.”
—Christopher Bickerton, University of Cambridge

“At the heart our era’s deepening crisis there lies a touching faith that capitalism, free markets and democracy go hand in hand. Wolfgang Streeck’s new book deconstructs this myth, exposing the deeply illiberal, irrational, anti-humanist tendencies of contemporary capitalism.”
—Yanis Varoufakis, author of And the Weak Suffer What They Must?

“An important and stimulating book. It is especially interesting in the light of fashionable preoccupations with secular stagnation, the march of robots and the lamentable performance of most leading economies since the onset of the financial crisis.”
—William Keegan, author of Mr Osborne’s Economic Experiment

“The most interesting person on the most urgent subject of our times.”
—Aditya Chakrabortty, Guardian

“Streeck writes devastatingly and cogently … How Will Capitalism End? provides not so much a … forecast as a warning.”
—Martin Wolf, Financial Times

“Offers a powerful prognosis that predicts that the system will suffer a lingering death rather than go out with a bang … there are so many startling formulations of great analytic power in this book that it merits wide circulation in these troubled times.”
—Morning Star

“Streeck has become one of Europe’s most sophisticated and pessimistic left-wing Euroskeptics …[his] criticism of the eurozone is powerful.”
—Jamie Martin, Bookforum

“Not one to embrace the ‘voluntaristic illusions’ of ‘we the people,’ Streeck sees such fantasies as part of a deeper structural crisis … Neoliberalism, in fragmenting workers and consumers into desperately precarious personal brands, has made mass organization effectively impossible, while traditional political channels have been systematically choked off. Capitalism, therefore, won’t be overthrown. It will kill itself through its own power to overcome the restraints that bind it.”
—Greg Afinogenov, n+1

About the Author

Wolfgang Streeck is the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Social Research in Cologne and Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics and a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences as well as the Academia Europaea. His previous books include Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism.

Product details

Publisher : Verso; Illustrated edition (November 29, 2016)
Language : English
Hardcover : 272 pages
ISBN-10 : 178478401X
ISBN-13 : 978-1784784010
Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
Dimensions : 6.37 x 0.99 x 9.45 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #702,989 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #571 in Free Enterprise & Capitalism
- #1,247 in Theory of Economics
- #1,263 in International Economics (Books)

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J. Mann

Essential education re: the world we now live in

Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2016

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[Edit 2/10/2017] Most of my review (following this edit) stands, but I would add that while the end of capitalism is inevitable the form it will take - and how society will be organized afterwards - is uncertain. Thus the title. Dense, fascinating book, due to be read often by me.] This is a collection of essays, which together deliver a very valuable assessment of capitalism's role in our society. It is not a book for wimps; I intend to read it again, after reading several authors referenced in footnotes (e.g. Adam Smith, John Maynard Keynes, Karl Polanyi, Robert Reich, Joseph Stiglitz, Thomas Picketty). Streeck's theme is that capitalism, which harnesses the energy of selfishness to drive innovation and production, is in conflict with social democratic government which is concerned with welfare of the society as a whole and for its citizens. In the passage of time various external and internal forces have given shape to this conflict and required (and continue to require) an ever-evolving project to manage it. He is viewing this whole big picture as a sociologist - indeed, two of the essays are titled "How to Study Contemporary Capitalism?" and "The Public Mission of Sociology". Prior to reading Streeck I had read 'Dark Money' describing the ferocious assault on democracy by the very personification of selfishness, Charles Koch; Streeck's book provides context for understanding our current crisis.

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Important Insights

Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2016

Wolfgang Streeck is a German economic sociologist, and Emeritus Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. Streeck contends that today's capitalism is plagued by five ultimately potentially fatal problems: declining growth, oligarch, short-changing the public sphere, corruption and international anarchy - for which no political arm/process exists to confront them. A central problem of capitalism is that insecure workers (kept that way to make them obedient workers) must also be confident consumers.

Per Streeck, the 2008 'Great Recession' was the latest in a long sequence of political and economic disorders that began with the end of postwar prosperity in the mid-1970s. Successive crises have proven ever more severe. Global inflation in the 1970s was followed by rising public debt in the 1980s, and fiscal consolidation in the 1990s accompanied by a steep increase in private-sector indebtedness.

Streeck also identifies three long-term trends in first industrialized, now increasingly deindustrialized capitalist countries. The first is a steady decline in the rate of economic growth, the second is an equally persistent rise in overall (governments, private citizens, financial and non-financial firms) indebtedness in those same states, and the third is ascending income and wealth inequality.

Streeck fears these three trends may be mutually reinforcing. Inequality impedes improvements in productivity and weakens demand, low growth reinforces inequality by intensifying distributional conflict as concessions to the poor become more costly, and rising debt compounds inequality caused by stagnant wages and reductions in public services. Despite innumerable demands and blueprints for 'reform' to prevent recurrence, little has changed. Governments (especially in the U.S.) have firmly remained in the grip of the money-making industries - while they in turn continue to be showered with cheap cash created by central banks. Yet, unprecedented liquidity has failed to jumpstart the economy, and inequality marches upwards - what little growth there is appropriated by the top 1%.

Several attempts were made in 2013 to reign in monetary expansion, both in Japan and the U.S., but when stock prices plunged, 'tapering' (as it was caused) was postponed. Central bank balance sheets were then at about 3X pre-crisis levels, and rising. Continued low interest rates etc. made it easy for the private sector to postpone deleveraging, easy for the government to finance deficits, and easy to delay needed reforms.

Capitalism and democracy has long been considered adversaries, until the postwar seemed to have reconciled the two. Owners of capital had feared democratic majorities abolishing private property, while workers and their groups expected capitalists to finance a return to authoritarian rule in defense of their privileges. These fears were alleviated for awhile. Today, doubts about the compatibility of capitalism with democracy have returned. Among the ordinary people, there is now a pervasive sense that politics can no longer make a difference - perceptions of deadlock, incompetence and corruption among what seems to be an increasingly self-contained and self-serving political class, manifested by declining electoral turnout.

At the same time, government debt has risen while participation rates have fallen, tax revenues as a percentage of GDP have risen, and top marginal income tax rates have declined. Institutional protection of the market economy from democratic interference has advance greatly - trade unions are on the decline everywhere, economic policy widely turned over to democratically unaccountable central banks - concerned above all with the health of goodwill of financial markets, and in Europe, national economic policies, including wage-setting and budget-making, are increasingly government by super-national agencies like the European Commission and Central Bank, also beyond the reach of popular democracy. (Likewise, TPP.) Elites are also losing faith in democratic government and its ability to reshape societies in line with market imperatives - countries like China are complimented for authoritarian political systems being so much better equipped than majoritarian democracy to deal with the challenges of globalization. Elite pressures for economic neutralization of egalitarian democracy takes the form of continuing relocation of political-economic decision-making to supranational institutions such as the European Central Bank and summits of government leaders.

Both radical critics of capitalism (Marx, Polanyi) and bourgeois theorists such as Weber, Schumpeter, and Keynes have predicted its impending end. For a long time, political protests are likely to remain local, dispersed, uncoordinated.

Global mobility enables employers to replace unwilling local workers with willing immigrant ones.

The conspicuous failure of even negative real interest rates to revive investment coincided with a long-term failure to even negative real interest rates to revive investment coincided with a long-term increase in inequality. They may be one of the causes of the financialization of capitalism that began in the 1980s. This does not preclude high profits in the financial sector, essentially from speculative trading with cheap money supplied by central banks. Money generated to prevent stagnation from turning into deflation causes inflation. The only inflation in sight now is that of asset-price bubbles.

Low growth in the future does not provide additional resources with which to settle distributional conflicts and pacify discontent. Easy money provided by central banks to restore growth adds to inequality - inviting speculative rather than productive investment. Plutonomic capitalists no longer have to worry about national economic growth because their transnational fortunes grow without it - hence the exit of the superrich from Russia and Greece.

Finance is an 'industry' where innovation is hard to distinguish from rule-bending or rule-breaking, where payoffs between firms and regulatory authorities is extreme, where revolving doors between the two offer unending possibilities for corruption, where the largest firms are not just too big to fail but also too big to jail - given their importance for national economic policy and tax revenue. Nobody believes anymore in a moral revival of capitalism.

The dollar's function as international reserve currency is now contested - and it cannot be otherwise, given the rising levels of public and private debt, and several highly destructive financial crises. The U.S. has been either defeated or deadlocked in three major land wars since the 1970s.

The end of capitalism can be imagined as a death from a thousand cuts, all at the same time.

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Athan

Sober and serious, if incomplete

Reviewed in the United States on March 12, 2017

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Comfortably the most provocative thing about this book is its title.

Away from that, this collection of twelve essays on the decline of the market economy is very sober and sedate. It’s certainly no call to arms! Neither its content nor its style relate in any way to the sundry cod-revolutionaries who endorse it on the cover; Streeck, a serious sociologist, is nothing like them!

His answer to the question he asks on the cover of the book can be summarized in a rather apologetic “we don’t know for sure that capitalism will end, we just know it’s in trouble.”

He does not foresee a new world order and he does not propose an alternative system. He merely predicts that the current struggle between what he calls “democracy” and “market forces” will remain unresolved, leading to permanent instability and unpredictability, with all that entails.

The basic assumption in the background of the book, never fully articulated (the best effort to do so is in Chapter 8), is that the capitalism system as we know it (the kind that 1. helps us best to decide where to allocate our marginal resources and the kind where 2. democracy and market forces have worked in relative harmony) is a special type of system that can only thrive if it is hosted and supported by strong institutions, including a government that sets and enforces basic rules and regulations regarding what it is we’re allowed to own, whether we’re allowed to transfer ownership, how much market power businesses are allowed to exercise, what happens if we fail to stick to our side of a bargain etc. etc. This not being a naturally-occurring system, its institutions need continuous support from society, and the support has (perversely) often come via the resolution of internal or even external conflict. Conflict that has certainly been absent since the “end of history” in 1989, for example.

In the author’s own words, capitalism “was always a fragile and improbable order and for its survival depended on ongoing repair work. Today, too many frailties have become simultaneously acute while too many remedies have been exhausted or destroyed. The end of capitalism can then be imagined as a death from a thousand cuts.” (p. 13) He goes on to state the main theme of his book as follows: “For the decline of capitalism to continue, no revolutionary alternative is required, and certainly no masterplan of a better society displacing capitalism.” (p. 14) Between now and the “end of capitalism” Streeck basically predicts a Dantean purgatory: “A society in interregnum would be a de-institutionalized or under-institutionalized society.” (p.14)

The most dire prediction you will find here is that “the social world of the post-capital interregnum, in the wake of the neoliberal capitalism having cleared away states, governments, borders, trade unions and other moderating forces, can at any time be hit by disaster.” (p. 14)

My favorite essay is not the one that gives the book its title. Comfortably the most lucid piece here is chapter 9, “How to Study Contemporary Capitalism.” It is in this well-considered chapter that the author best summarizes his (perforce, in a collection of essays, oft-repeated) narrative that takes us from the apogee of the system around 1970 to its near-death experience in 2008:

“After the end of post-war growth, governments in the ‘free world’ avoided conflicts with strong trade unions over wage increases and unemployment by allowing for high rates of inflation. Inflation, much like credit, served to pull forward in time as yet non-existing resources, enabling employers and workers to realize in nominal money terms claims whose sum total was in excess of what was in fact available for distribution. While workers believed they were achieving what they perceived to be their moral-economic right to a steadily rising living standard combined with secure employment in their present jobs, employers were able to reap profits in line with expectations of a proper return as established in the decades of post-war reconstruction. As inflation continued, however, it devalued accumulated savings and increasingly distorted price relations. Its conquest in the early 1980s, in the course of the ‘Volcker revolution, did not bring stability, however. Instead, it ushered in a period of rising government debt as electoral politics substituted for collective bargaining as the political-economic mechanism of the time for mobilizing surplus resources to pacify otherwise disruptive distributional conflict. When this, too, became unsustainable in the 1990s, consolidation of public finances could be undertaken only by giving households access to deregulated private credit, allowing them to compensate for stagnant incomes and rising inequality by borrowing on their own account.” (pp. 214 – 215)

The essays in the book take turns in looking at the events of this period through a number of the favorite “lenses” of socialist theory.

Chapter 3, for example, expounds the well-worn theory that for the longest time Soviet communism and American capitalism were busy delivering pretty much identical outcomes to their citizens. It was allegedly only at the point where every Russian household and every American household alike were equipped with (for example) a washing machine that the outcomes bifurcated. Capitalism at that point stopped fulfilling “needs” and moved on to “wants” and became a mechanism to create new consumerist “wants” for its citizens who would not have felt the urge to buy these goods and services if they had not been prodded to do so.

With only 2% of the US workforce working in agriculture today managing to not only feed the entire US population, but also rendering the US the largest food exporter on earth, I think the argument is stale. Pakistan has 70% of its population working in agriculture and my home country of Greece is at the geometric mean of the two at 12% and I’ll tell you people are applying for green cards from both (and both countries, unlike the US, are net importers of food too!) The fact that the US has 98% of its workforce to spare after it’s grown its food does not strike me as a failure. Neither do I think the work they do is inferior in interest to that performed by the guys who work at Monsanto or the sundry mercantile exchanges, to say nothing of the 0.6% of the US population that actually gets dirt under its fingernails. The argument extends even better in my view to manufacturing, Donald Trump’s (and presumably Wolfgang Streeck’s) objections notwithstanding.

Similarly, the book laments the fact that women have been forced to join the workforce (allegedly so the family unit can keep spending –the author refuses to acknowledge that they may get positive utility from working) and even hints that people today are acquiring education as a means to an end (spending) rather than because they want to. All a matter of opinion, of course, but mine differs rather vehemently form Wolfgang Streeck’s. I did a math degree at the age of 31-33 and God knows I had nowhere to go with it. I just loved doing it. I’m 100% sure I was not alone and 99% sure I’ll never use the stuff I learned and have already forgotten. It was consumption, alright, but my brain was doing the consuming and I had a ball.

There is a collection of chapters (four in total) that concern themselves with the situation in Europe. The European bureaucracy, chief among its institutions the ECB, is correctly identified as the ersatz European government and is accused of putting the interests of capital ahead of the interests of the citizens.

The author is exactly correct to say that the European institutions tend to identify more with the lender (typically a northern European bank or pension fund) than with the borrower (typically a Mediterranean government). He is equally correct to identify that democratic process was suspended when the elected governments of both Italy and Greece were supplanted by banking-friendly technocrats.

He fails, however, to observe that when push came to shove, the ECB used all its authoritarian independence not to enforce rules, but to pander to the sundry borrowers. It did so, moreover, in a manner no sovereign government could ever hope to emulate. For all of Wolfgang Streeck’s protestations, the institutions he decries (perhaps in self-preservation) have printed trillions of EUR, precisely to allow the struggle between “democracy” and “market forces” to remain unresolved. That’s what “kicking the can down the road” has been all about, and it’s the most august of institutions to whom this has been delegated.

The role of the objectionable institutions at the center of Europe has thus been dual:
1. First, a mechanism for sovereign EU governments to avoid political accountability to the individual electorates when passing tough measures, a way indeed to bypass the democratic process.
2. Second, a mechanism for sovereign EU governments to avoid political accountability to the individual electorates when letting off the hook those who cannot pay. Germany would never have bought Italian bonds. Along the same lines, the UK would never have sent money to Ireland, much as that was necessary to end the era of IRA terrorism. All that money has been channeled through the institutions of the EU.

The failures of the ECB have in my view not come from its mandate or from its attitude to state borrowers. The ECB has actually failed in a much more fundamental role, that of keeping its eye on the banking system: it let German and Dutch banks gorge on both US subprime and Mediterranean govvies, while allowing the Spanish and Italian banking system to take full advantage of the “exorbitant privilege” to create EUR.

In what has to be the most unsung string of financial crimes in history, we ended up with Spanish owners for companies as diverse as Hochtief, all of the UK’s civilian airports, the Argentinian phone company etc. etc. all while the Spanish banking system defaulted on hundreds of thousands of depositors whom it duped into buying its subordinate debt. Similarly, Michele Ferrero (purveyor of fine chocolates to the ambassador’s reception) died in Monte Carlo and the Agnellis have moved their partying to New York and their holding company well clear of Italy, all while the Italian banking system is dying under a mountain of loans that will never be repaid and derivatives deals that nobody ever questioned. That’s what Streeck ought to be complaining about in my view. Not about authority that was never really used, other than to help kick the can down the road.

But enough about that. A truly fantastic chapter (chapter 8) follows, which laments the displacement of the discourse that has taken place in our democratic societies:

You cannot but agree with Streeck that, rather than seek to address THE basic issue, which has to be redistribution, the “progressive” side in politics has abdicated its responsibility and prefers to talk about non-issues: “Culture wars, ‘family values,’ lifestyle choices, ‘political correctness,’ the age and sex of politicians, and the way they dress and look and speak deliver an unending supply of opportunities for pseudo-participation in pseudo-debates, never allowing for boredom to arise: whether the foreign minister should or should not have his male companion accompany him to a state visit to the Middle East; if there are enough women cabinet members, and in sufficiently powerful positions; how female ministers attend to their small children, too little or too much; whether the president of the Republic should use a motor cycle when visiting his lover; and how often the minister of economic affairs takes his daughter to Kindergarten in the morning.” (p. 189)

This, of course, mirrors the way the Democratic party in the US has refused since 1976 to engage in anything resembling redistribution, has refused to contain the market power of emerging monopolies from IBM through to Microsoft and onto Google and Uber, has allowed (alone with New Zealand among advanced countries) big pharma to advertise on TV, came down in favor of Angelo Mozilo and “sanctity of contract” rather than the evicted subprime borrower, all while of course espousing Romneycare, pretending to shut down Guantanamo, pretending that sticking “record fines” on people like Steve Cohen is comparable to how we treated Boesky and Milken three decades ago, trying and failing to sign the odd treaty on non-proliferation, paying lip service to global warming, making nice with Fidel Castro and more recently espousing separate toilets for transsexuals and shouting “Putin” whenever it feels it’s been cornered on the issues.

The less-developed theme in the book, still present in quite a few of the essays, is the idea that in the course of the past forty years capitalists have gathered enough power to work around the restrictions imposed by the state, but that this has actually served to threaten capitalism, because it has led to excesses that are provoking an angry reaction to the status quo.

In my view that’s a pity, because if there is a threat to Capitalism that’s precisely from where it comes:

Streeck has the pieces, but he fails to put them together, basically. The American more so than the Western European, is first and foremost a consumer, and he’s been getting killed:

1. The crisis of 2008 has thrown in the microwave oven the hitherto slow process from “perfect competition” to “oligopoly” in so many markets (example: two companies sell baby formula in the US, only one sells chewing gum, your cable TV typically comes from one source and the two biggest mattress companies have merged) that the supply curve on tons of products and services has wildly curved upwards, squeezing output downward and price upward, not only causing the sluggish growth the economy has been experiencing (including to the market for good jobs), but also keeping prices elevated in the face of crappy demand.

2. Just as this phenomenon is starting to consolidate (it had a one-time effect on the speed of growth and had a permanent one-time effect on inequality), another very sinister effect is taking hold: a large number of markets that used to clear at a single price for everybody is with the help of the Internet converting business model to perfect market segmentation. Think of how you don’t dare go back to a website and reprice plane tickets because the engine knows you just asked for that ticket, for example. Market segmentation allows for perfect price differentiation, which converts the whole of the consumer surplus into economic rent for the seller.

The shift of power from the consumer (the customer who used to be “king”) to the producer has not gone un-noticed. The American people did not vote in their first black president, a man promising to deliver “change,” because they were pining for a Harvard-educated member of the establishment who’d go on to sell his White House memoirs for 60 million dollars.

They firmly believed they were voting in a Hugo Chavez. An Andreas Papandreou. Somebody who might cost them, but would cost the emerging plutocracy even more.

The very same public that once simultaneously voted in Clinton, Blair and Schroeder (all of them "third-way" social liberals / nouveaux fiscal conservatives) to protect its newly-acquired middle-class savings from the idle recipients of welfare, the very same public that once hung by Greenspan’s every word, because he was the man to preserve those savings and protect them from the ravages of the market, has discovered that the powers-that-be have taken the mandate it gave to them to such an extreme that now it finds itself unable to hand over to its children the same status it was accorded by its parents.

And that is the biggest threat to capitalism.

The public is mad and second time round it’s taken no chances. The crazier the politician, the more insane he sounds, the likelier to bring down the temple, the better. We’ll deal with the consequences later!

Where does that leave us with Streeck’s opus? Well, it kept me good company, it taught me some stuff and it sure made me think. So I’ll round up its 3.5 stars to four, much as I disagree with most of what the author has to say. Also, it’s fantastic to hear from a socialist who is not shouting from the rooftops.

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Top reviews from other countries

Frits Hoen

Not bad.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 10, 2019

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I don't think capitalism will actually end. I wish it would but it is not going away.

Crawford Kilian

Is the end of capitalism really unimaginable?

Reviewed in Canada on February 5, 2017

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This review first appeared in The Tyee:

Some anonymous wise person once observed that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But Wolfgang Streeck, a 70-year-old German sociologist and director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, thinks capitalism’s end is inevitable and fast approaching. He has no idea what, if anything, will replace it.

This is the premise of his latest book, How Will Capitalism End?, which goes well beyond Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century. Piketty thinks capitalism is getting back into the saddle after being ruined in two world wars.

Streeck thinks capitalism is its own worst enemy and has effectively cut itself off from all hope of rescue by destroying all its potential rescuers.

“The end of capitalism,” he writes in the introduction, “can then be imagined as a death from a thousand cuts... No effective opposition being left, and no practicable successor model waiting in the wings of history, capitalism’s accumulation of defects, alongside its accumulation of capital, may be seen... as an entirely endogenous dynamic of self-destruction.”

According to Streeck, salvation doesn’t lie in going back to Marx, or social democracy, or any other system, because there is no salvation at all. “What comes after capitalism in its final crisis, now under way, is, I suggest, not socialism or some other defined social order, but a lasting interregnum — no new world system equilibrium... but a prolonged period of social entropy or disorder.”

Five developments, three crises
If we need a historical parallel, the interregnum between the fall of Rome and the rise of feudalism might serve. The slave economy of Rome ended in a chaos of warlords, walled towns and fortress-estates, and enclaves ruled by migrant barbarians. That went on for centuries, with warlords calling themselves “Caesar” and pretending the Empire hadn’t fallen.

Streeck sees the interregnum emerging from five developments, each aggravating the others: “stagnation, oligarchic redistribution, the plundering of the public domain, corruption, and global anarchy.”

All these problems and more have grown through “three crises: the global inflation of the 1970s, the explosion of public debt in the 1980s, and rapidly rising private indebtedness in the subsequent decade, resulting in the collapse of financial markets in 2008.”

Anyone of a certain age in B.C. has vivid personal recollections of these crises and the hurt they caused. The strikes and inflation of the 1970s preceded the Socreds’ “restraint” era, and now we mortgage our lives for a foothold in the housing market. Streeck reminds us that it was nothing personal, just business. We weren’t just coping with one damn thing after another; given his perspective, we can see how it all fit together with an awful inevitability.

And it continues to fit together. Temporary foreign workers and other immigrants make unions’ jobs harder. “Recovery” amounts to replacing unemployment with underemployment. Education is an expensive holding tank to keep young people off the labour market. Women are encouraged to work so they can be taxed. But middle-class families need two incomes anyway to maintain their status, so they import underpaid immigrant women as nannies. At some point soon these nannies will be sent back to their home countries when Vancouver’s housing bubble pops. Perhaps the middle-class families will then make their payments by taking in boarders.

Streeck’s essays were written over the past few years, and are sometimes a bit dated. For example, he writes that “American oligarchs, unlike their counterparts in other societies like Ukraine or Russia, are of a ‘non-ruling’ type, since they are content to live alongside a public bureaucracy, a state of law, and an elected government run by professional politicians.” That changed on Nov. 8, when the American oligarchs ousted noncompliant professional politicians and assumed direct power through Donald Trump and his cabinet. (We may yet see an analysis of Trump on Streeck’s blog.)

In one essay, Streeck shows how the economic crisis of the 1970s led to the political crisis of today. Postwar Europe and America rebuilt the world by “Fordism” — mass production of durable goods at an affordable price, with few or no options. But Fordism eventually glutted the market with all-too-durable goods. In the 1960s, I wore the hand-me-down nylon socks my father had bought in the 1940s. In 1972 my wife and I bought a washer and dryer that still run reliably in 2016, without repairs.

That couldn’t last, especially as the baby boom tapered off. Capitalism’s solution was to offer customized, short-lived products that didn’t just meet your needs, but met your wants as well. That meant avocado-coloured refrigerators in the 1970s and granite kitchen countertops today, but nothing that really made life easier. It just let consumers express their changing personal tastes and status.

And it wasn’t just consumer goods — it was information as well. Streeck notes that public broadcasting systems and a few private networks dominated the media for decades. Now we have hundreds of private channels competing for our attention (and our money). Public media like the CBC have tried to compete with private radio and TV, with generally awful results: instead of classical music, CBC Radio 2 gives us Mozart’s greatest hits plus Mozart gossip. Radio 1 promotes the careers of inarticulate hip-hop artists and reports commuter woes caused by housing prices and the lack of decent public transit.

Politics as personal fashion statement
What Streeck calls the “individualization of the individual” has afflicted whole nations, including Canada. We no longer vote for a party because our family always has, or because we support most of its policies. We want avocado-coloured day care programs, and granite-counter “world-class” pipeline safety, and if we don’t get both in one party, we stay home and sulk. In effect, we prefer to be consumers of politics as personal fashion statement rather than actually take part in running the country.

Marx thought communism would see the withering-away of the state. Instead, capitalism has reduced the state until its chief functions are protecting the rich and policing the poor. But in the process, capitalism has killed off its rescuers. Who’s going to save the banks in the next collapse? Who’s going to bail out the masters of the financial universe when artificial intelligence takes their jobs? And who’s going to police the poor when taxpayers can’t pay for the cops and the rich are hiring cops for their own gated communities?

Wolfgang Streeck sees neither a single cause of capitalism’s collapse nor any obvious successor regime. The European Union may break up. Climate change may drown south Florida, including Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. Refugees will keep coming north; they will eventually overwhelm the fences and guards and create new enclaves in Europe and the U.S.A. and Canada. New pandemics will sweep unchallenged around the world.

No coherent political communities will be there to respond to such disasters. Such communities may arise centuries from now, but if Streeck is right, capitalism has ensured that we and our children will never live in them.

21 people found this helpful

Willem van den Toorn

Strong reading. Solid analysis of developments in recent and ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 19, 2018

Verified Purchase

Strong reading. Solid analysis of developments in recent and not so recent past, interesting scenarios. Reading requires some stamina as sentences tend to be long and detailed. The reader is helped by Streeck introducing each chapter with an indication of what is going to talk about. Careful and effective / illustrative quotations and references.

One person found this helpful

Dr. Abdul G. Kassi

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 16, 2018

Verified Purchase

Shows the flows ia system and how it will effect the system of capitalism

Carolann

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 2, 2017

Verified Purchase

Very interesting read