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| Wolfgang Streeck, an economic sociologist |
I am posting this article from a year ago because I regard Streeck as among the leading discerning thinkers regarding capitalism, and his forte is in reference to the advanced capitalist countries--essentially the US-led Empire (not only the US). I feel that we activists can, and must, learn a lot from him if we are to be successful in creating a bottom-up democratic world order while avoiding the doomsday scenarios awaiting us under the capitalist world order. On the other hand, the reader must take the date of this writing into account (about one year ago) because Streeck did not foresee Trump's yielding to powerful pressures (Russiagate) from the neoliberal Deep State (financial and industrial elites) that govern behind the facade of the official US government. Trump respects power as a highly important means to leverage wealth which to him as a businessman is the highest virtue.)
This is rather sophisticated writing for those of you who have not had the opportunity for advanced education. Here is a sample of his writing so that you can decide if you want to read the whole article:
As a process of institutional and political regression the neoliberal revolution inaugurated a new age of post-factual politics. [5] This had become necessary because neoliberal globalization was far from actually delivering the prosperity for all that it had promised. [6] The inflation of the 1970s and the unemployment that accompanied its harsh elimination were followed by a rise in government debt in the 1980s and the restoration of public finances by ‘reforms’ of the welfare state in the 1990s. These in turn were followed, as compensation, by opening up generous opportunities for private households to access credit and get indebted. Simultaneously, growth rates declined, although or because inequality and aggregate debt kept increasing. Instead of trickle-down there was the most vulgar sort of trickle-up: growing income inequality between individuals, families, regions..... The promised service economy and knowledge-based society turned out to be smaller than the industrial society that was fast disappearing; hence a constant expansion of the numbers of people who were no longer needed. This surplus population of a revived capitalism on the move looked helplessly and uncomprehendingly at the transformation of the tax state into a debt state...as a result of which they found themselves worse and worse off. [7] [My link to a new (to me), very useful concept. See illustrations of this in Eva Bartlett's article in the adjacent post.]