Should-Read: Adam Tooze: Reviewing ‘How Will Capitalism End?’ by Wolfgang Streeck

Should-Read: Adam Tooze: Reviewing ‘How Will Capitalism End?’ by Wolfgang Streeck: “Streeck draws urgent practical conclusions… https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n01/adam-tooze/a-general-logic-of-crisis

…‘Bringing capitalism back into the ambit of democratic government, and thereby saving the latter from extinction, means de-globalising capitalism.’ Capitalism must be cut back to the scale of the nation-state, because it is at the level of the nation-state that Europeans have over the last two centuries been able to establish ‘social cohesion and solidarity and governability’. The brutality of the Eurozone’s containment of the Syriza government in Greece seemed to vindicate Streeck’s warnings. His following has soared. In the Anglophone academy his work has been embraced as a refreshing return to the basics of Marxisant crisis theory. In Germany his impact has been more ambiguous. By contrast with the UK, France and the US, where Euroscepticism has always been a strand on the left, in Germany Lexit has not….

Streeck criticises the cosmopolitans for their elective affinity with Davos man, but the worry about deglobalisation is that its primary movers would be even less attractive and might, despite their populist slogans, be just as closely associated with big business. The experience of the 20th century suggests that when trying to channel nationalists’ energies into progressive politics, it is crucial to be clear-headed about one’s objectives. When you say you want to put the nation in charge and to throw off the yoke imposed by the invisible power of the cosmopolitan ‘market people’, who do you expect to rally to your banner? Streeck may protest to sympathetic interviewers that when he advocates immigration restrictions that doesn’t make him a closet AfD supporter or a proto-fascist. But given Streeck’s slide from a conflictual notion of class to the idea of an integrated society and from there to an enthusiastic embrace of the nation, and all this against the backdrop of bona fide nationalist mobilisation, what does he expect?…