How Will Capitalism End

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* Book: How will capitalism end? Essays on a Failing System Hardcover. By Wolfgang Streeck. Verso, 2016

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Description

"In How Will Capitalism End? the acclaimed analyst of contemporary politics and economics Wolfgang Streeck argues that capitalism is now in a critical condition. Growth is giving way to secular stagnation; inequality is leading to instability; and confidence in the capitalist money economy has all but evaporated. Capitalisms shotgun marriage with democracy since 1945 is breaking up as the regulatory institutions restraining its advance have collapsed, and after the final victory of capitalism over its enemies no political agency capable of rebuilding them is in sight. The capitalist system is stricken with at least five worsening disorders for which no cure is at hand: declining growth, oligarchy, starvation of the public sphere, corruption and international anarchy. In this arresting book Wolfgang Streeck asks if we are witnessing a long and painful period of cumulative decay: of intensifying frictions, of fragility and uncertainty, and of a steady succession of normal accidents."


Review

Michael Roberts:

"Wolfgang Streeck is the Emeritus 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 European. Streeck’s views carry some weight, indeed sufficiently to be reviewed by Martin Wolf in the Financial Times.

Streeck’s thesis, as the title implies, is that capitalism is a system that is going to end and its demise is not so far away. He opens by reprising another book that covered the views of five other social scientists, called Does Capitalism Have a Future? That contains contributions by the likes of Immanuel Wallerstein, Randall Collins, Michael Mann, Georg Derluguian and Craig Calhoun. As Streeck says, all these scholars agree that capitalism is heading for an ultimate crisis, although each has different reasons why.

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He thinks that capitalism will die “from a thousand cuts” and will not be saved by Mann and Calhoun’s alternatives. With no proletariat as a force for taking society forward under socialism, capitalism will collapse under “its own contradictions” to be followed, not by socialism, but by “a lasting interregnum”, a “prolonged period of entropy” where ‘collectivism’ does not emerge but instead there is a disparate ‘individualism’.

Streeck’s account of the current state of capitalism follows in the book and provides an excellent narrative, particularly his critique of Keynesian and reformist responses (although chapters are somewhat repetitive). He sees a systemic disorder revealed by first, rising inequality (where the top 400 taxpayers in the US get over 10,000 times more income than the bottom 90% and the top 100 American households have 100 times more wealth!). Then there is the rife corruption by the rich and powerful, as exhibited in the role of the banks. And the growing power of finance capital, a totally unproductive and damaging sector of capitalism.

All this has been described by many, including by me in this blog. But Streeck sees these forces as the ones that will end capitalism, rather than as part of reoccurring crises of slumps in capitalist production. Capitalism is more unfair and corrupt than incapable of meeting people’s needs. But because there is no positive force in society that can replace capital, capitalism “will go to hell but for the foreseeable future will hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself.”

For Streeck, it is a “Marxist prejudice that capitalism as an historical epoch will end only when a new or better society is in sight and a revolutionary subject ready to implement it for the advancement of mankind”. In a way, Streeck predicts a new stage of barbarism after capitalism collapses, similar to what happened to the Roman Empire after its collapse in the 5th century. Then a sophisticated slave-owning economy gave way to tribal states; cities gave way to small villages; landed estates gave way to small groups; technology was left idle and forgotten.

In my view, Marx did and would recognise that barbarism could supersede capitalism. There is no guarantee that capitalism is followed by socialism. He would also argue that without a “revolutionary subject” (i.e. the working class) carrying through political action to end the capitalist mode of production, it can stagger on. Streeck’s is right that capitalism has no long-term future, but is he right that there is nothing to replace it to take human society forward?

Streeck’s view is the cynicism of the academic divorced from the working class and seeped in the experience of the reactionary neo-liberal period (a very short time in human existence and capitalism). In my view, the (Kondratiev and profit) cycles of capitalism will eventually create new forces for change – a new more confident working class as the agent for change. But if not, … then." (https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2016/11/08/will-capitalism-end-or-can-it-be-reformed/)