Review of 'How Will Capitalism End?'

‘How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System’ by Wolfgang Streeck

(Verso, 2016) – book reviewed by Andrew Wallace,

Capitalism and Entropy

This is an intriguingly titled volume of essays, only the first of which is however devoted to the subject of the book’s title, namely a discussion concerning various scenarios in which we might contemplate the mortality of an ‘improbable social formation, full of conflicts and contradictions,...  unstable and influx and highly conditional on historically contingent and precarious supportive and well as constraining events and institutions’.

Streek takes his cue from what he considers a seminal text co-authored 3 years earlier by 5 distinctive thinkers.  Streek’s titular essay then is very much a dialogue and assimilation of this work:-

Does Capitalism Have a Future? (2013) – Wallerstein, Collins, Mann, Derluguian, Calhoun.

The crisis scenarios under discussion are a distillation of Marxist, Keynesian and heterodox economists who remain critical of the key axioms of the so called free market, especially in the wake of the Great Recession (2008). The old spectres of market disequilibrium by overproduction or underconsumption are of course very much in contention, as is Marxist crises of profitability and the problems of modernity by obsolesce and the finite limits of land and labour. Weber and Schumpeter also introduced wider socio-economic themes inherent with bureaucratic sclerosis.

Streek suggests that various crisis scenarios from these 5 writers could be ‘aggregated into a diagnosis of multi-morbidity in which different disorders coexist and, more often than not, reinforce each other.’

No revolutionary alternative is required

A nice little irony at the centre of Streek’s thinking unfolds here. With capitalism in its contemporaneous super-turbo charged  'neoliberal' platform, having so successfully vanquished all would be alternatives (which have typically rescued the system in revitalised form at various critical points in our past history) via its bleak credo of there is no alternative ‘capital realism’ – easier to imagine the end of the world than capitalism, now at the zenith of its apparent impenetrable hegemony, because it has exhausted the possibilities of renewal from reformist quarters, it now be forced kicking and screaming into a prolonged period of entropy.

We are hearing from many thinkers how automation, information technology and electronicisation will have profound implications for the middle classes in much the same way in which mechanisation did for the manual working class.  With alarming implications for unemployment and ongoing secular stagnation or dramatic declines, this will add to the ongoing crisis of underconsumption and demand gap.

Streek has a nice line in irony as he notes our divided identities, located within our consumerist lifestyles, as voracious consumers of cheap clothes and electronic gadgets and household goods, we also put direct pressure on ourselves as producers, ‘accelerating the move of production abroad and thereby undermining (our) own wages, working conditions and employment.’

Neoliberalism has overextended itself, having cannibalised a lot of the soft underbelly, social capital and infrastructure vital to maintaining confidence and stability in the normative capitalist context.

Useful contribution to our Post-Liberal era

The other essays in the book discuss the nature in the shift of post war Keynesian democracy to the post democratic ordoliberalism of thinkers like Hayek, given the move to depoliticisation in many domestic spheres and of course international governance from the EU.

This is an interesting short volume of essays although some of the later offerings may come across as a little dry and technical.  Streek is certainly making a very interesting contribution to ongoing discussions concerning the distinct post-liberal phase we seem to be entering with the marked rise of anti-globalisation sentiments.  And whilst the political atrophy of the left continues, it is important to note that wider structural shifts in the nature of capitalism may mean that other practicalities apart from mere politics may force the hand of history.

Thatcher, Society & the Market

WHAT THATCHER SAID ABOUT SOCIETY:

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, talking to Women's Own magazine, October 31 1987:

'I think we've been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that if they have a problem, it's the government's job to cope with it. "I have a problem, I'll get a grant." "I'm homeless, the government must house me." They're casting their problem on society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first. It's our duty to look after ourselves and then, also to look after our neighbour. People have got the entitlements too much in mind, without the obligations. There's no such thing as entitlement, unless someone has first met an obligation.'

ON Monday's PM program on Radio Four, Baroness Gillian Shephard, in a confrontation with the former Labour MP, Clare Short, denied that Margaret Thatcher had ever said, 'There is no such thing as society!'. The next day on the same program the full quote in which she said it twice was read out: she said 'There is no such thing as society... there are individuals and families!' Essentially, she was claiming 'society' is an 'abstract' concept, and therefore individuals and their families must take responsibility for their own destinies and plight and not blame things that happen onto 'society'.

Significantly in another interview Thatcher challenges the interviewer who uses the term 'the market theory'. She said that 'the market is not a theory' but a reality, and that historically there has always been 'a market'. So there we have it, for her society is an 'abstraction' and the market is 'real'.

The 19th Century French sociologist Emile Durkheim considered society to be somehow more than the sum of its constituent parts: that is more than a random collection of individuals and their families. His view, and that of other social thinkers such as Marx, Weber, Talcott Parsons, Harold Garfinkel, up until the present, is to consider that society is not abstract but acts upon individuals and influences their destinies: in Durkheim's case he even tries to show that such apparently individual acts as suicide are socially construed. This belief in the importance of the social construct is apparent even in the works of novelists such as Dickens and Balzac. Margaret Thatcher, on the other hand, wants to argue that it is 'the market' not 'society', that is the main motor driving the human race even if the destiny is a sociological abyss.

Left wing writers like the play-write Bertold Brecht admitted that capitalism and the market were economically dynamic and creative, but often socially destructive in a devastating way. Yesterday, in the International Herald Tribune, AC Grayling wrote:
'The curious feature of Thatcher's legacy is that although she struck an axe-blow deep into the heart of Britain, it is society, not the political sphere, that remains deeply divided by a widening gap between rich and poor.'

Mr. Grayling adds:
'the country's politics have almost ceased to be ideological, as ... (a)ll the main British political parties now strive for the center ground, and the differences between them are about managerial style, not questions of principle.'

AC Grayling sums-up the legacy of Thatcherism thus:
'She began the deregulation of banking that led ultimately to Britain's contribution to the global financial crisis of 2008. She reversed the trend of greater social integration and diminishing of the wealth gap that characterized Britain in the three decades after 1945. Post-war convergences in class and wealth disappeared and former divisions resurfaced as consumerism and social incivility followed quickly on her brusque reorganization of British society.'

And now, we are left with the debris of Thatcherism: the secular all embracing religion of consumerism, welfare dependency, Mick Philpotts, and a sharp division between owner-occupiers and those young people who fail to get on the housing ladder. The market cannot be ignored but all societies find it necessary to place some form of moral side-constraints on economic exchange in the market place, either through village customs; traditional practices; an appeal to some form of religious authority; or laws and statutory regulations.