what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Monday, January 7, 2019

How will it all end?

I have long had this naïve belief that the next non-fiction book I select will clear the fog of confusion which seems to hover in my mind. I know I’m going to be disappointed but, somehow, the hope still lingers. And so the books continue to pile up on my shelves….
Wolfgang Streeck is a modest 70 year-old German sociologist currently taking the world by storm. I had bought and thoroughly enjoyed his Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (2014) and am now reading his How will Capitalism End?. (2016). He puts the rest of us to shame by being able to draft his material in English…(all but two chapters of the present book).
His quiet,unassuming manner belies his history as a Social Democrat party activist and one of the founders of (although latterly critic of) the Varieties of Capitalism school. His global profile came only in the past decade - since his book Re-forming Capitalism – institutional change in the German political economy (2009) was published by Oxford University Press and New Left Review published in 2011 what was to be the first of a series of articles from him - The Crises of Democratic Capitalism (2011).

The bottom Line
Basically he is an example of a disillusioned social democrat – who used to believe that it was possible to reform capitalism but has, at some point in the past decade, been forced to recognize that this is no longer possible…This paper is probably the easiest introduction to his arguments - complete with some good graphs - and this is an excellent summary of a discussion he took part in on the question of the future of capitalism
The introduction to his latest book is particularly enticing – first interrogating the five authors of Does Capitalism have a future? before suggesting that the totality of our responses to the global challenges we face can be summarized as one or other variant of “Coping, hoping, doping and shopping
The "endgame" he suggests will be drawn-out, disjointed and uncomfortable - although he doesn't really spend all that much space on the issue......and the book is remarkably light on the question of AI and robotisation which has been exercising a lot of people.– let alone on the environment which rates only a couple of references in the index..... 

His book does encourage me to go back to this issue of the shape of the future which beckons – it was March 2018 when I last posted on it - uploading the (short) version of Dispatches to the Next Generation. This is the only introduction I know of to the literature which has been trying to make sense of the world we live in

A Streeck Resource
The Rise of the European Consolidation State (2015) https://www.mpifg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp15-1.pdf
politics of public debt 2013 https://www.mpifg.de/pu/mpifg_dp/dp13-7.pdf

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