Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism

Language: English

Pages: 240

ISBN: 1781685487

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The financial and economic crisis that began in 2008 still has the world on tenterhooks. The gravity of the situation is matched by a general paucity of understanding about what is happening and how it started. 

In this book, based on his 2012 Adorno Lectures given in Frankfurt, Wolfgang Streeck places the crisis in the context of the long neoliberal transformation of postwar capitalism that began in the 1970s. He analyses the subsequent tensions and conflicts involving states, governments, voters and capitalist interests, as expressed in inflation, public debt, and rising private indebtedness. Streeck traces the transformation of the tax state into a debt state, and from there into the consolidation state of today. At the centre of the analysis is the changing relationship between capitalism and democracy, in Europe and elsewhere, and the advancing immunization of the former against the latter.

Jürgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere (Modern European Thinkers)

The Politics of Voter Suppression: Defending and Expanding Americans' Right to Vote (A Century Foundation Book)

In Praise of Reason: Why Rationality Matters for Democracy

Marx and other Four-Letter Words

Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (American Empire Project)

Jürgen Habermas: Democracy and the Public Sphere (Modern European Thinkers)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Than among economists. Amitai Etzioni’s The Active Society (1968) – probably the most ambitious attempt to define the conditions under which modern democratic societies would freely choose their path of development and put their choice into practice – may serve as one of many possible examples: it mentions the economy only once in its 666 pages, and then only to state that ‘Western nations’ could have ‘confidence in their capacity to control societal processes with the wide use of Keynesian and.

Diversity of Democracy: Corporatism, Social Order and Political Conflict, London: Edward Elgar, 2006, pp. 3–45). 60 On the following, see W. Streeck, ‘A Crisis of Democratic Capitalism’, New Left Review, vol. 71, 2011, pp. 1–25. 61 In the 1970s there was agreement that inflation mainly harms the owners of monetary assets, whereas it improves the distributional position of the working class – at least so long as investment is not impaired. But in reality the latter happens at the latest when the.

Interplay between tax and spending cuts shows that the balancing of budgets in the consolidation state is not pursued for its own sake but, as part of a programme of privatization and liberalization, is intended to bring about a general rollback of the state and its intervention in the market. Under the auspices of austerity, budget surpluses give occasion ‘to give people back what belongs to them’ (George W. Bush). In this way, consolidation becomes self-sustaining – especially as citizens who.

Suicide bombing.52 By making a Greek exit from the euro seem a real possibility, the country’s turn to the left raised the price that the West Europeans were prepared to pay to keep it in the monetary union. Yet whether anything will grow as a result of the spending programme agreed on 28 June 2012 is more than doubtful. In fact the promised new growth policy looks as unrealistic as the one that preceded it, and the question of why it should be any more successful has never been discussed. EU.

Debt-financing passim passim, 2.3, 3.1n43, 3.2, 3.3. See also public debt: refinancing ‘debt state’, itr.1, 2.1 passim, 3.1, 3.2 Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Graeber) deficits. See budget deficits deflation, 1.1, 1.2 Delors, Jacques, 3.1, 3.2n78 democracy passim passim, 2.2, 2.3, 3.1, 4.1, 4.2; failure of passim; Hayek views, 3.2, 3.3n19; in intrastate federation/EU passim passim, 3.6, 3.7, 3.8 passim, 4.3, 4.4; state sovereignty relationship; workplace, 1.2. See also social democracy The.

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