This Maverick Thinker Is the Karl Marx of Our Time.
'Who could have seen Donald Trump’s resounding victory coming? Ask the question of an American intellectual these days and you may meet with embittered silence. Ask a European intellectual and you will likely hear the name of Wolfgang Streeck, a German sociologist and theorist of capitalism.
In recent decades, Mr. Streeck has described the complaints of populist movements with unequaled power. That is because he has a convincing theory of what has gone wrong in the complex gearworks of American-driven globalization, and he has been able to lay it out with clarity. Mr. Streeck may be best known for his essays in New Left Review, including a dazzling series on the cascade of financial crises that followed the crash of 2008. He resembles Karl Marx in his conviction that capitalism has certain internal contradictions that make it unsustainable — the more so in its present “neoliberal” form. His latest book, “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems After Globalism,” published this month, asks whether the global economy as it is now set up is compatible with democracy. He has his doubts.
Understand Mr. Streeck and you will understand a lot about the left-wing movements that share his worldview — Syriza in Greece, Podemos in Spain and the new Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance in in Germany. But you will also understand Viktor Orban, Brexit and Mr. Trump.
Mr. Streeck (whose name rhymes with “cake”) argues that today’s contradictions of capitalism have been building for half a century. Between the end of World War II and the 1970s, he reminds us, working classes in Western countries won robust incomes and extensive protections. Profit margins suffered, of course, but that was in the nature of what Mr. Streeck calls the “postwar settlement.” What economies lost in dynamism, they gained in social stability.
But starting in the 1970s, things began to change. Sometime after the Arab oil embargo of 1973, investors got nervous. The economy began to stall. This placed politicians in a bind. Workers had the votes to demand more services. But that required making demands on business, and business was having none of it. States finessed the matter by permitting the money supply to expand. For a brief while, this maneuver allowed them to offer more to workers without demanding more of bosses. Essentially, governments had begun borrowing from the next generation.
That was the Rubicon, Mr. Streeck believes: “the first time after the postwar growth period that states took to introducing not-yet-existing future resources into the conflict between labor and capital.” They never broke the habit.
Very quickly their policies sparked inflation.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/28/opinion/wolfgang-streeck-populism.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
(BTW, the archive.org article was still paywalled. Here's a different archive link:https://archive.is/ta7qf)
I don't know who the "guest opinion" writer Christopher Caldwell is, but he views Streeck's theories solidly through the far right lens. He slipped in a number of digs about "wokeism," the Covid autocracy of shutting things down, and the TSF prosecution legal theory "so novel that not one American in a thousand could explain what he had been convicted of." And most egregiously, he didn't cite a single source for all this analysis of Streeck's theories. He can FUCK ALL THE WAY OFF. I'll just have to read Streeck for myself.
EDIT: What I mean by "horseshit" is the writer's overview of Streeck's theories. This is how the RW "media" get into your mind.
