Our culture systemically devalues things that have no price, such as caring for others and political participation. (Photo: Michael Aston / Flickr; Edited: JR / TO)
Do we all bear some responsibility for the dominance of capitalism over democracy due to our unrestrained consumerism? The galloping consumption of progressives and conservatives alike extends to cars, bottled water, iPhones, large flat-screen televisions, fashion and more. Wolfgang Streeck explored this and other issues in the following interview with Truthout.
Mark Karlin: You cite the end of WWII as the time that capitalism and democracy became intractably enmeshed. How did it come to be that Western democracies came to assert that freedom could not exist without capitalism?
Wolfgang Streeck: The way I would put it is that they became temporarily reconciled through Keynes’ discovery that economic growth can be stimulated by redistribution from the wealthy to the poor. But “intractably enmeshed” they were precisely not, as we have seen in recent decades when they were extricated from one another in the course of the neoliberal revolution. The pattern that emerged was what I call Hayekian statism: a strong state preventing democratic-egalitarian interference with markets, to allow the market to do its work — redistribute according to market rules, i.e., from the bottom to the top.
The belief that freedom cannot exist without capitalism goes back to the 18th century when the rising bourgeoisie fought against feudalism, abolishing among other things, the guilds that organized economic activities as a quasi-feudal privilege. Fighting…