Tooze on Streeck and Streeck on Tooze on Streeck

[danny la rouge]

On a thread we can no longer access, butchersapron posted a PDF of Tooze's original long read review of How Will Capitalism End.

Here is the review hosted along with an exchange between the two of them:

A General Logic of Crisis

 

[articul8]

Adam Tooze’s outpouring is material for a future anatomy of the class rhetoric of faux cosmopolitanism as it flourishes among a soul-searching urban-academic middle class in the post-Brexit moment

 

[brogdale]

Like Streeck; want more?

Fill yer boots.

Trump and the Trumpists – Wolfgang Streeck – Inference

 

[butchersapron]

Tooze (and others) on Varoufakis (and Streeck i suppose as we're concerned with Keynsianism and illusions). Well worth reading the whole collection.

Europe's Political Economy: Reading Reviews of Varoufakis's Adults in the Room

The camp to which my own effort in the New York Review of Books belongs, takes Varoufakis seriously as a witness both to the potential and limits of a certain kind of left-Keynesian politics. These readings have in common not only that they are sympathetic to the frustration that Varoufakis experienced at the hands of the Eurogroup and the “financial institutions”, but that they identify a basic blind spot in his approach, or in his account of his approach to Eurozone reform. It is a blind spot characteristic of Keynesian thinking about policy. In the terms of Geoff Mann and his brilliant diagnosis of Keynesian politics, Varoufakis regards the Eurozone as resulting from an intellectual and political “muddle” (“muddle” is Keynes’s preferred description). Policies were pursued that made no sense in their own terms as a result of short-sighted maneuvering by politicians and bureaucrats. This allows Varoufakis to position himself as the good doctor who by means of his insights will open a way out of the impasse from which all sides will ultimately benefit.

 

[gawkrodger]

Read the NY Review of books review on the train earlier today. Well worth a read

 

[butchersapron]

There's actually a great piece in the new Capital and Class about how the remain and reform approach played out in Greece - it's not properly online at the CSE site yet but i'll upload it when it is. Though i suspect the odd use of renationalisation rather than a less loaded or more apt term is going to send some shrieking.

(It's also part of the Streeck-Tooze debate that was mentioned here. It's actually what that was about really, the prior Habermas-Streeck debate, and i'll upload their two contributions as well)

This is the gist:

The Habermas-Streeck debate revisited: Syriza and the illusions of the left-Europeanism:


The crucial question of the Habermas-Streeck debate on the crisis in Europe was, ‘Should the political forces resisting the de-democratization of capitalism strive for renewal of the European Union through its deeper integration, as per Habremas, or for peaceful dissolution of the European Union and a retreat to a national state, as per Streeck?’ In this article, the arguments of each author are examined against the background of the left-wing Syriza party’s challenge to European austerity in Greece. Three conclusions are drawn. First, Syriza’s nationally charged populism in opposition coincided with Streeck’s considerations. Second, Syriza’s governmental strategy reflected Habermas’s views. Third, Syriza’s sudden rise to power and its subsequent failure to reverse the austerity both substantiate Streeck’s thesis that at the present juncture renationalization of economic policy represents a condition of the possibility for egalitarian politics in Europe.

________
(I posted the above on another thread a few weeks back but it seems more fitting here and with the below addition:

The Capital and Class bit has not yet been published on-line, but a new contestant has entered the field. Perry Anderson in the latest NLR has a merciless extremely agressive 50 page attempted demolition of Tooze, obviously triggered by all of the above - and, as is Anderson's wont, he has decided to take down every single thing Tooze has ever written in English, his 'staggered trilogy'. He gets to the EU etc over the last 15 or so pages and is very very strong on this, and very insulting to Tooze. Tooze has promised to reply ("To be made the object of “one of those” articles by Perry Anderson is a disorientating experience.") and the NLR will publish it at the start of next year.

 

[redsquirrel]

Oh Ta for the heads up butchers. Try to get around to reading that over the next couple of days.

 

[brogdale]

Oh Ta for the heads up butchers. Try to get around to reading that over the next couple of days.

Likewise

 

[Smokeandsteam]

Nice one butchersapron

 

[butchersapron]

Aside from the EU/crash stuff, Tooze already largely dealt with Anderson's points about WW1 in his chapter of the 2015 Historical Materialism book (vol 89 in the series) Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics - chapter 3 Capitalist Peace or Capitalist War? The July Crisis Revisited, which is a very good critique of the concept of a liberal theory of peace arguing it actually hides a liberal concept of war - Anderson tries to pin the former position on Tooze. For Anderson, who prides himself on having ready everything every written in any one of about ten languages, this seems to be quite the sloppy error. It did seem a lot of the refs for the historical section of the piece were rather old.

 

[redsquirrel]

A copy of the Capital and Class article that butchers mentioned above - The Habermas-Streeck debate revisited: Syriza and the illusions of the left-Europeanism - can be found below if anyone wants it.

The crucial question of the Habermas-Streeck debate on the crisis in Europe was, ‘Should the political forces resisting the de-democratization of capitalism strive for renewal of the European Union through its deeper integration, as per Habremas, or for peaceful dissolution of the European Union and a retreat to a national state, as per Streeck?’ In this article, the arguments of each author are examined against the background of the left-wing Syriza party’s challenge to European austerity in Greece. Three conclusions are drawn. First, Syriza’s nationally charged populism in opposition coincided with Streeck’s considerations. Second, Syriza’s governmental strategy reflected Habermas’s views. Third, Syriza’s sudden rise to power and its subsequent failure to reverse the austerity both substantiate Streeck’s thesis that at the present juncture renationalization of economic policy represents a condition of the possibility for egalitarian politics in Europe.

 

[butchersapron]

Good work redders.

 

[Arbeter Fraynd]

The Streeck-Tooze debate seems to me to work on such defeatist, pessimistic grounds that it's pretty depressing reading. Retreat into nation-state politics vs pretend you can reform neo-liberal institutions - surely any decent class based politics pretty clearly shows the weakness of both camps?

Streeck is great on showing how inherently neo-liberal the EU is, and I guess the lack of people making that argument led to him getting a lot of attention, but his vision of what we should do about it is terrible

 

[brogdale]

The Streeck-Tooze debate seems to me to work on such defeatist, pessimistic grounds that it's pretty depressing reading. Retreat into nation-state politics vs pretend you can reform neo-liberal institutions - surely any decent class based politics pretty clearly shows the weakness of both camps?

Streeck is great on showing how inherently neo-liberal the EU is, and I guess the lack of people making that argument led to him getting a lot of attention, but his vision of what we should do about it is terrible

Most critiques of Streeck focus on his lack of 'vision', rather than its value.
Having heard him speak a couple of times, he seems to quite up-front about the limitations of his analysis; more from the tradition of positive economic analysis than normative. Aside from concluding that the only realistic alternative to the avowedly neoliberal supra-state lies, for the time being, in the national context, Streeck attempts to offer little vision really.

 

[brogdale]

From danny la rouge 's post (above) in Streeck's own words:

My concern is not with ‘an assertion of the primacy of the nation’, but with how our historically inherited nation-states can be bound into a European fabric where they can live in peace with each other and with themselves – the latter meaning, to me at least, shielding themselves from powerful pressures, internal as well as external, for a neoliberal restructuring of their economies and societies.

Doesn't sound 'terrible' to me.

 

[Arbeter Fraynd]

accepting the nation state as an answer is quite a big 'aside from', and the consequences illustrated in Streeck's involvement in Aufstehen

 

[brogdale]

accepting the nation state as an answer is quite a big 'aside from', and the consequences illustrated in Streeck's involvement in Aufstehen

The alternative being the neoliberal supra-state, specifically designed to insulate capital from democracy?

 

[Arbeter Fraynd]

The alternative being the neoliberal supra-state, specifically designed to insulate capital from democracy?

No, of course not. I literally said in the post that you're disagreeing with that my problem with the debate was accepting that either/or, it's not likely I'd have changed my mind in the last 45 minutes

 

[brogdale]

No, of course not. I literally said in the post that you're disagreeing with that my problem with the debate was accepting that either/or, it's not likely I'd have changed my mind in the last 45 minutes

Fair point.
But the really existing superstructural context in which class-based politics is effected is an either/or, whether we may wish otherwise or not.
Streeck is more optimistic about challenging neoliberal forces without the presence of the supra-state designed to defend their interests.

 

[yield]

Shockwave
LRB 16 April 2020
Adam Tooze on the pandemic’s consequences for the world economy

Worth a read.

 

[redsquirrel]

Shockwave
LRB 16 April 2020
Adam Tooze on the pandemic’s consequences for the world economy

Worth a read.

Not bad, bit too focussed on economics rather than politics. And too much on Trump as opposed to the political situation in the US. Still as you say worth reading. Cheers.

(It would be interesting to compare the above to what Streeck's positions)

 

[redsquirrel]

Finally got around to actually reading the Capital and Class article. Really good stuff.

Have to ask is there anyone on U75 (besides one loon) that thinks Habermas is not some sloppy idealised social democrat?

To begin with, an implicit yet fundamental supposition behind Syriza’s strategy was the Habermasian illusion regarding European politics resting on a reasoned and unco- erced deliberation among equal interlocutors (Douzinas 2016; Kouvelakis 2016: 54). As confirmed by Yanis Varoufakis (2017) and Euclid Tsaklotos (2016), who were Syriza’s successive finance ministers in charge of the negotiations with the Greek creditors, Tsipras and his team thought that, because they had reason on their side, every well- meaning European sitting across the table would start to see the solution for the crisis in their way as the debt talks progress. What they completely disregarded are the relations of power – the actually existing politics in the actually existing EU, which includes the neoliberal establishment spearheaded by the German export lobby, who come with both their opposing interests and concomitant reasons, and the means to enforce them. This leads me to the second important point.

for Streeck (2015c), who understands the ‘natural laws of economy’ as ‘projec- tions of social-power relations’ (p. 10), and not like Habermas, as neutral rules of the capitalist machine for producing wealth, the EU’s technocracy is not the void in European politics – it is the European politics of class power masquerading as a disin- terested expertise in finding rule-based solutions for the economic problems that are too complicated for the ordinary people.

 

[yield]

Whose century? by Adam Tooze
LRB. Vol. 42 No. 15 · 30 July 2020

What Eric Hobsbawm called the ‘short 20th century’ is supposed to have ended in 1989 with the United States winning the Cold War. Yet today America faces a powerful and assertive China, a one-party state with an official ideology it calls 21st-century Marxism, which is busy building a powerful military on the back of an economy set to become the world’s biggest in the foreseeable future. This development has shaken the assumptions that have underpinned economic and national security decision-making in Washington for the last thirty years.

Overview of the China/USA relationship. No surprises for the regulars.