The New Certainties

Strange how we can at one and the same time deplore the “bubbles” in which people operate and yet, unthinkingly, demonstrate groupthink in our own behaviour. George Parker used the opportunity of a George Orwell award to draw attention to the new mood of “certainty” and tribalism which has been evident in the world these past few years 

When we open a book or click on an article, the first thing we want to know is which group the writer belongs to. The group might be a political faction, an ethnicity or a sexuality, a literary clique. The answer makes reading a lot simpler. It tells us what to expect from the writer’s work, and even what to think of it. Groups save us a lot of trouble by doing our thinking for us.

Politicians and activists are representatives. Writers are individuals whose job is to find language that can cross the unfathomable gap separating us from one another. They don’t write as anyone beyond themselves. But today, writers have every incentive to do their work as easily identifiable, fully paid-up members of a community. Belonging is numerically codified by social media, with its likes, retweets, friends, and followers. Writers learn to avoid expressing thoughts or associating with undesirables that might be controversial with the group and hurt their numbers 

For Parker, it was the massacre of Charlie Hebdo journalists in 2015 which started the process – when 200 US writers objected to the award that year of PEN America’s first Freedom of Expression Courage Award to Charlie Hebdo, the satirical French weekly.

 

Thereafter, it became an award for American political activism. PEN was honoring heroes on its side—public figures whom the majority of American writers wholeheartedly support. The award became less about freedom than about belonging. As Charlie Hebdo showed, free speech, which is the foundation of every writer’s work, can be tough going.

 

The fear is more subtle and, in a way, more crippling. It’s the fear of moral judgment, public shaming, social ridicule, and ostracism. It’s the fear of landing on the wrong side of whatever group matters to you. An orthodoxy enforced by social pressure can be more powerful than official ideology, because popular outrage has more weight than the party line.

Last year I taught a journalism course at Yale. My students were talented and hardworking, but I kept running into a problem: They always wanted to write from a position of moral certainty. This was where they felt strongest and safest. I assigned them to read writers who demonstrated the power of inner conflict and moral weakness—Baldwin, Orwell, Naipaul, Didion. I told my students that good writing never comes from the display of virtue. But I could see that they were sceptical, as if I were encouraging them deliberately to botch a job interview. They were attracted to subjects about which they’d already made up their minds.

 

Certainty has a flattening effect. It washes out the details of human experience so that they lose their variety and vitality. Certainty removes the strength of doubt, the struggle to reconcile incompatible ideals, the drama of working out an idea without knowing where it will lead, the pain of changing your mind. Good writing doesn’t deny or flee these things—it explores them down to their depths, confident that the most beautiful and important truths are found where the glare of certainty can’t reach.

Of course, in Russia these past few days, that certainty has now been enshrined in a brutal new law, passed unanimously in the Russian parliament 

which bans news organisations from reporting anything except state approved press releases (it is now illegal for any broadcaster to call events in Ukraine, for example, “a war”). The new legislation, which has also caused the BBC and most other news organisations to suspend its reporting in Russia, will see journalists and media owners who contravene it jailed for up to 15 years. BBC director general Tim Davie said the law “appears to criminalise the process of independent journalism”

But, even in the West, people are, increasingly, expected to toe the “official line” in comments as analysed in this article by Michael Brenner, Emeritus Professor at Pittsburgh and John Hopkins’ Universities. And it takes a courageous writer these days to write a balanced piece about the war in Ukraine such as Wolfgang Streeck’s recent piece 

Both Russia and the United States have long been facing the creeping decay of both their national social order and international position, apparently making them feel that they must halt it now or else it will continue forever. In the Russian case, what one sees is a regime both statist and oligarchic, confronting growing unrest among its citizens, rich in oil and corruption, unable to improve the lives of its ordinary people while its oligarchs are getting immeasurably rich, a regime increasingly turning towards the use of a heavy dictatorial hand against any organized protests. To sit more comfortably than one can on bayonets requires stability derived from economic prosperity and social progress, in turn dependent on global demand for the oil and gas Russia has to sell. For this, however, it needs access to financial markets and advanced technology, which the US had for some time begun to deny.

 

Similarly with external security, where the US and NATO have for nearly two decades now penetrated politically and militarily into what Russia, only too familiar with foreign incursions, claims as its cordon sanitaire. Moscow’s attempts to negotiate on this have led to post-Soviet Russia being treated by Washington in the same way as its predecessor, the Soviet Union, with the ultimate aim of regime change. All attempts to end the encroachment have led to nothing; NATO has moved closer and closer, recently stationing intermediate-range missiles in Poland and Romania, while the United States has increasingly treated Ukraine as a territory it owns – viz., Victoria Nuland’s vice-regal proclamations on who should lead the government in Kyiv. 

I should make it clear that Streeck,  although a very highly respected German sociologist and political economist, does not pretend to have any particular expertise in International Relations – although he has ventured in the last few years into the field of analysis of German politics. For really solid analysis on issues of security I’ve found Anatol Lieven very reliable and in mid November last year – in the middle of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan “The Atlantic” published this piece of his reminding us that “Ukraine was the most dangerous place problem in the world” – to which there was then a solution (Minsk II) that, however, the US was resisting

Such inconvenient truths are quickly pounced upon and held up to ridicule by the liberal  mainstream media; this New Republic article has indeed invented a new name -  “westplaining” – for what it calls the 

“unending stream of Western scholars and pundits condescending to explain the situation in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, often in ways that either ignore voices from the region, treating it as an object rather than a subject of history, or claiming to perfectly understand Russian logic and motives. Eastern European online circles have started using a new term to describe this phenomenon of people from the Anglosphere loudly foisting their analytical schema and prescriptions onto the region” 

Wolfgang Streeck is, of course, on the list – but I have to say that his geopolitical analysis gives us the sort of balanced view which any attempt at negotiation will desperately need. With Ukrainians struggling for their lives under murderous aggression, we are understandably focused on the human suffering involved. We are currently in war mode but need to think ahead…. 

After the media debacle of Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, showing strength vis-à-vis Russia seemed a safe way to display American muscle, forcing the Republicans during the run-up to critical midterm elections to unite behind Biden as the leader of a resurrected ‘Free World’. Washington duly turned to megaphone diplomacy and categorically refused any negotiation on NATO expansion. For Putin, having gone as far as he had, the choice was starkly posed between escalation and capitulation. It was at this point that method turned into madness, and the murderous, strategically disastrous Russian land invasion of Ukraine began.

 

For the US, refusing Russian demands for security guarantees was a convenient way to shore up the unconditional allegiance of European countries to NATO, an alliance that had become shaky in recent years. This concerned especially France, whose president had not long ago diagnosed NATO to be as ‘brain-dead’, but also Germany with its new government whose leading party, the SPD, was considered too Russian-friendly. There was also unfinished business regarding a gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Merkel, in tandem with Schröder, had invited Russia to build it, hoping to fill the gap in German energy supply expected to result from the FRG’s Sonderweg running out of coal and nuclear power. The US opposed the project, as did many others in Europe, including the German Greens. Among the reasons were fears that the pipeline would make Western Europe more dependent on Russia, and that it would be impossible for Ukraine and Poland to interrupt Russian gas deliveries should Moscow be found to misbehave.

The confrontation over Ukraine, by restoring European allegiance to American leadership, solved this problem in no time. Following the lead of declassified CIA announcements, Western Europe’s so-called ‘quality press’, not to mention the public-broadcasting systems, presented the rapidly deteriorating situation as a Manichaean struggle between good and evil, the US under Biden versus Russia under Putin. In Merkel’s final weeks, the Biden administration talked the US Senate out of harsh sanctions on Germany and the operators of Nord Stream 2, in return for Germany agreeing to include the pipeline in a possible future package of sanctions. After the Russian recognition of the two break-away East Ukrainian provinces, Berlin formally postponed regulatory certification of the pipeline – which was, however, not enough. With the new German Chancellor standing next to him at a Washington press conference, Biden announced that if necessary, the pipeline would definitely be included in sanctions, Scholz remaining silent. A few days later, Biden endorsed the Senate plan that he had earlier opposed. Then, on 24 February, the Russian invasion propelled Berlin to do on its own what would otherwise have been done by Washington on Germany’s and the West’s behalf: shelve the pipeline once and for all.

 

Western European governments dutifully suppressed all remaining memories of the deeply rooted recklessness of American foreign policy, induced by the sheer size of the United States and its location on a continental-sized island where nobody can get to them, regardless of the mess they make when their military adventures go wrong – and, astonishingly, gave the United States, a far-away non-European declining empire with different interests and a host of problems of its own, full power of attorney in dealing with Russia over nothing less than the future of the European state system.

What about the EU? In short, as Western Europe is returned to ‘the West’, the EU is reduced to a geo-economic utility for NATO, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help ‘the West’ encircle Russia on its Western flank.  

Further Important Reads

https://oxfamapps.org/fp2p/what-to-read-on-ukraine/ - a fascinating commentary and selection

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/03/vladimir-putin-ukraine-war-chechnya - an interesting analysis of Putin whose biography by Masha Gessen reports his being kicked out of the Pioneers for being an uncontrollable lout. Plus ca change

https://ourfiniteworld.com/2022/03/02/russias-attack-on-ukraine-represents-a-demand-for-a-new-world-order/ Some people consider that Putin invaded Ukraine because he fears democracy – this energy blog offers another explanation – relating to energy supplies from which at the moment Russia is making almost 1 billion dollars a day.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/04/what-would-ukraine-russia-peace-deal-look-like - a very recent article from Anatol Lieven (see body of post)

Ukraine and Russia – from civilised divorce to uncivil war Paul d’Anieri (2019) - apparently a very balanced analysis

https://samf.su reading listbstack.com/p/space-and-time?s=r - military analyst Lawrence Freedman’s latest assessment

https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/domino-effect?pc=1426 

follow the money my favourite (Canadian) blogger gives his take – the discussion thread is worth following

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/podcasts/the-prospect-podcast-219-peter-ricketts-how-to-stop-putin - Peter Ricketts was a UK Ambassador to NATO and he's interviewed here by Alan Rusbridger

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

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2014/09/some-notes-on-crisis.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2015/03/how-governments-have-bought-and-used-up.html

https://nomadron.blogspot.com/2016/11/now-with-bang-but-whimper.html

https://wolfgangstreeck.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/streeck-summer-2018.pdf

https://wolfgangstreeck.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/streeck2017_whose-side-are-we-on.pdf

http://kingsreview.co.uk/articles/farewell-neoliberalism-interview-wolfgang-streeck/

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

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/will-capitalism-end-or-can-it-be-reformed/

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

http://www.mpifg.de/people/ws/downloads/Streeck_Small-State%20Nostalgia.pdf

https://thecurrentmoment.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/interview-with-wolfgang-streeck/

Democratic capitalism and its contradictions; (2011)

The Crises of democratic Capitalism (NLR) 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9oYebm07Wa0

https://soundcloud.com/user-726964754/wolfgang-streeck-the-future-of-capitalism

re-forming capitalism - http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~phall/EJS%202009.pdf
https://www.planksip.org/how-will-capitalism-end-by-wolfgang-streeck/

Not with a bang ....but a whimper......

Last year I drew attention to the fact that, despite their prolific output, economists seemed to have some difficulty in making sense of more global trends – 

It’s significant that the best expositions of the global economic crisis and its causes rarely come from economists……..somehow the framework within which the modern economist operates precludes him/her from even the vaguest of glimmerings of understanding of the complexity of socio-economic events. Their tools are no better than adequate for short-term work…..

For real insights into the puzzles of the modern world, think rather David Harvey (a geographer) and his A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005); John Lanchester and James Meek (novellists and writers); Susan Strange, Susan George or Colin Crouch (political science); or Wolfgang Streeck – a Koeln Professor of Sociology. All have extensive and eclectic reading; a focus on the long-term; and the ability to provoke and write clearly. 

"Eclectic" is the key word; few economists are trained these days in political economy - which roots the study of economics in the wider context of history and political analysis...... 

Wolfgang Streeck is Director of the Max Planck Institute and an unlikely scourge of capitalism – but his texts are becoming ever more apocalyptic. He has just published another - How will Capitalism End? - a summary of whose basic thesis can be found in this 2014 New Left Review article

The NLR is the favoured outlet for Streeck’s long, clear and incisive articles eg one in 2011 on “The Crisis of Democratic Socialism”  which led to the short book Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism (2013). 

His latest book, however, explodes any idea of the inevitable arrival of a socialist paradise –On the contrary, his is a dystopian vision in which capitalism perishes not with a bang, but a whimper. Since, he argues, capitalism can no longer turn private vice into public benefit, its “existence as a self-reproducing, sustainable, predictable and legitimate social order” has ended. Capitalism has become “more capitalist than is good for it”. 

The postwar marriage between universal-suffrage democracy and capitalism is ending in divorce, argues Streeck. The path leading to this has gone via successive stages: the global inflation of the 1970s; the explosion of public debt of the 1980s; the rising private debt of the 1990s and early 2000s; and the subsequent financial crises whose legacy includes ultra-low interest rates, quantitative easing, huge jumps in public indebtedness and disappointing growth.

Accompanying capitalism on this path to ruin came “an evolving fiscal crisis of the democratic-capitalist state”. The earlier “tax state” became the “debt state” and now the “consolidation state” (or “austerity state”) dedicated to cutting deficits by slashing spending. Three underlying trends have contributed: declining economic growth, growing inequality and soaring indebtedness. These, he argues, are mutually reinforcing: low growth engenders distributional struggles, the solution too often being excessive borrowing.  

The book finishes by exploring five systemic disorders – “stagnation, oligarchic redistribution, plundering of the public domain, corruption and global anarchy…..” which Streeck talks about here and which are (very briefly) defined in this summary

Curiously, however, the book seems to give little coverage to automation…on which a recent article called Four Futures offers an insightful perspective – reviewed in the Los Angeles Review of Books – a review which also carried a good piece on The Supermanagerial Rich

Other Relevant Reading

http://averypublicsociologist.blogspot.bg/2016/11/the-end-of-capitalism.html

https://www.ft.com/content/7496e08a-9f7a-11e6-891e-abe238dee8e2

Buying Time http://www.panoeconomicus.rs/casopis/2015_1/08%20Book%20Review.pdf

https://regulation.revues.org/11925

David Harvey eg

https://citizenactionmonitor.wordpress.com/2016/06/13/the-end-of-capitalism-part-1/

https://citizenactionmonitor.wordpress.com/2016/06/14/the-end-of-capitalism-part-2/

https://citizenactionmonitor.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/the-end-of-capitalism-part-3/

https://vimeo.com/91747532

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/107091/1/81811505X.pdf

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/09/wolfgang-streeck-the-german-economist-calling-time-on-capitalism

http://salvage.zone/in-print/neoliberalism-as-the-agent-of-capitalist-self-destruction/ (Neil Davidson on Neoliberalism)

student reading list;http://www.brianmilstein.com/pdfs/syllabus-TheorizingCrisis-final.pdf

How governments have bought - and used up - time

It’s significant that the best expositions of the global economic crisis and its causes do not come from economists……..somehow the framework within which the modern economist operates precludes him/her from even the vaguest of glimmerings of understanding of the complexity of socio-economic events. Their tools are no better than adequate for short-term work…..

For real insights into the puzzles of the modern world, think rather David Harvey (a geographer); John Lanchester and James Meek (novellists and writers); Susan Strange and Susan George (political science); or Wolfgang Streeck – a Koeln Professor of Sociology. All have extensive and eclectic reading; a focus on the long-term; and the ability to provoke and write clearly. 

Streeck is also Director there of the Max Planck Institute and an unlikely scourge of capitalism – but his texts are becoming ever more apocalyptic. 

For my money, his analysis offers much more than everyone's current favourite Thomas Pikety - whose 700 page magnum opus I suspect few have actually read.

The New Left Review is the favoured outlet for Streeck’s long, clear and incisive articles eg one in 2011 on “The Crisis of Democratic Socialism” and then one last summer on “How Will Capitalism End?” introducing an English audience to the arguments of the short book Buying Time – the delayed crisis of democratic capitalism which had appeared in Germany in 2013. European Tribune offered the following useful summary -

Capitalism and democracy were a powerful couple during the "trente glorieuses" post-WWII years. Expectations of economic growth, full employment and increasing prosperity became so entrenched that the fundamental antagonisms between the two were overlooked, or even deemed to have been definitively relegated to the dustbin of history. This, indeed, was the dominant view of the Frankfurt School during Streeck's formative years.

The book's introduction, "Crisis theory : then and now" deals with this historically embarrassing mis-analysis. Jürgen Habermas, in particular, developed the notion of the "legitimation crisis", postulating that people expect governments to intervene successfully in the economy to try and ensure economic prosperity, and that failure would cause the validity of the capitalist system to be questioned, thus undermining its legitimacy.

Streeck presents his book as an attempt to rehabilitate crisis theory, explaining that the postulated legitimation crisis is now upon us... forty years later, having been pushed back by our governments' successive, and moderately successful, attempts at buying time.In fact, the end of the post-war boom indeed led to a legitimation crisis - but it was not the workers/ consumers / electors who revolted. It was capital.

The notion of "Late Capitalism" has been around since the beginning of the 20th Century. But the predicted demise of capitalism is late, and keeps getting later. The error committed by the neo-Marxian Frankfurt thinkers, in Streeck's analysis, was to have considered capital as a resource, more or less biddable and accountable to democracy. Of course, as they should have known, capital is an actor, particularly in class struggle.

Streeck outlines several phases in the attempts by governments to buy time for their socio-economic model subsequent to the boom years : 

Inflation In the 70s, productive investment started to fall short of what was required for full employment. Inflationary monetary policy was the first ploy to buy time, accommodating wage rises in excess of productivity growth. But the replacement of real growth with nominal growth lost its charm with stagflation in the late 70s, which put a squeeze on profits and threatened to lead to a capital strike. 

Public debt The monetarist revolution of Reagan, Thatcher and imitators put capital back in the driver's seat. The recession they provoked, with its mass unemployment, did however require additional revenue to keep the wheels turning, and governments resorted massively to borrowing.

Private debt In the 1990s and 2000s, slashing of public services and reduction of public debt was accompanied by an explosion of private debt. 

Each of these phases is seen by Streeck as a means of conjuring money out of nowhere, in order to enjoy the benefits of growth in excess of growth itself.

The financial crisis of 2008 is seen as the final reckoning, the democracy/capital nexus being confronted with its contradictions.According to Streeck, democracy and capital were forced by circumstances into an arranged marriage after WWII. But each successive crisis entailed the progressive emancipation of capital from democratic constraints. Self-regulated markets were alleged to function efficiently, and government intervention in economic matters was de-legitimised. This ideology is now so dominant that it is hardly even questioned after the massive nationalization of private losses which was imposed on the citizen/taxpayer as the price to prevent economic collapse in the recent crisis.

The expansion of the financial sector, and the ever-increasing mobility of capital, have made the capital markets a harsh and fickle mistress for democracy. In fact, Streeck identifies the fact that governments are now accountable to two distinct constituencies : their citizen electors, or people of the nation (Staatsvolk), and their creditors, or people of the market (Marktvolk). The characteristics of these two constituencies of what he calls the “debt state” can be portrayed thus -

Staatsvolk	Marktvolk
National	international
Citizens	investors
civil rights	claims
Voters	creditors
elections (periodic)	auctions (continuous)
public opinion	interest rates
Loyalty	"confidence"
public services	debt service

Other useful resources on the book are -

https://vimeo.com/113376601

http://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviewofbooks/reviews/2015/1488

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2642

http://www.lse.ac.uk/publicEvents/pdf/2014-MT/20141020-Streeck-PPT.pdf

http://www.renewal.org.uk/articles/interview-capitalism-neo-liberalism-and-democracy

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n16/susan-watkins/vanity-and-venality

http://www.eurotrib.com/story/2014/8/17/152951/315

http://www.resetdoc.org/issue/01/05/2014

http://www.mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de/downloads/14-10-00_Streeck_Renewal.pdf

The crisis in context – democratic capitalism and its contradictions (2011)

The painting is one from the current exhibition in Sofia's National Gallery - on Industrial Landscaoes. It's Lavrenov's marvellous "20 years of socialist construction"!!