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”
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
summary and interview 2017 - http://nearfuturesonline.org/the-life-and-time-of-the-european-consolidation-state/
Does Capitalism have a future? with Etzioni
interview Jacobin 2016 https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2518-social-democracy-s-last-rounds-wolfgang-streeck-for-jacobin
interview Jacobin 2016 https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/2518-social-democracy-s-last-rounds-wolfgang-streeck-for-jacobin
2016 interview https://journals.openedition.org/regulation/11925
https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/files/45379477/Ronzoni.EJPT.pdf
- the best summary and review
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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