Wolfgang Streeck

The article is a rebuttal of Albrecht von Lucke’s recent critique of left-wing populism. Engaging with left-wing critiques of the strategic notion of populism, it argues that Germany and the Eurozone have entered into a populist moment. Engaging with justified left-wing criticisms of populism as a political strategy and drawing on the historic experience with the real-existing European Union during the „battle of Greece,“ it makes the case for an enlightened, European populism from the left as a means to overcoming the dual political and strategic impasses of both the European left-wing technocracy  purported by Lucke and others as well as the fallback to the nation-state as a means of defending the welfare state articulated by Wolfgang Streeck and other remaining social democrats.

The paper "Capital, housing and inequality in 21st century" raises critical questions for housing researchers by introducing debates from economics into the field of housing studies. The authors conclude “it is time to debate housing capital in the century ahead” and stress “there is an urgent need for a renewed political economy of housing policies”. We agree that housing studies would not only benefit from a re-engagement with political economy, but also that “a wider understanding of housing systems is required to make sense of how global capitalism has developed since the 1980s.” However, whereas Duncan Maclennan and Julie Miao quickly reduce housing researchers to housing economists and political economy to political-economy-within-economics, we would like to acknowledge the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of both housing studies and political economy. To us, the focus of Maclennan and Miao—debating the mechanics of Piketty and its relevance to housing economics—is too narrow. We argue that one should take Piketty’s Capital to the next level and present the broader range of issues and conceptual debates that need to be included in an examination of housing, capital and inequality in the 21st century. In particular, we feel that the rich tradition in geography, urban studies and political economy to study the effects of overaccumulation on real estate and the built environment needs to be included in a political economy of housing. 

If we want to contemplate about the long-term outlook of capital and housing, we need to think about the dialectics of the toxic nature of housing centred financialization. The urbanization of capital (à la Lefebvre and Harvey), or the metamorphosis of capital (à la Piketty), is simply not a stable set of social relations. While Piketty’s arithmetic underlying growing inequality may be a correct assessment of actually existing trends, the long-term durability of real estate as store-of-value is not as straightforward as suggested. Housing studies should not be reduced to housing economics, and political economy should not be reduced to a political economy approach within economics in which politics plays the second fiddle to so-called economic laws. We need to understand the role of real estate in the political economy as real world phenomenon rather than as the outcome of a universalistic deduction that exists separate from time and space. Housing as carrier of practices of capital accumulation is variegated in space, across national manifestations of capitalism and is shaped by historical trajectories, culture and institutions. The rise of housing as carrier of wealth needs to be understood as part of larger political economic developments, in which the twin phenomena of neoliberalization and financialization are key to understand the shifting power relation, the ‘regulated deregulation’ (Aalbers 2016b) of both housing and mortgage markets, and the return of the rentier class. Although ‘real world economic’ aspects of housing are introduced at the end of Maclennan and Miao’s paper, we believe they need to be at the core of how we perceive the future of capitalism and inequality. Housing is central to the variegated political economy of contemporary societies and therefore key to understanding actually existing capitalism and inequality.

Das Buch „Gekaufte Zeit“ von Wolfgang Streeck erschien bereits 2013 zum ersten Mal. Es basiert auf Streecks Adorno-Vorlesung aus dem Jahr 2012, die mit Adorno aber wenig zu tun hat (vgl. Streeck 2015: 49). Er analysiert in diesem Werk die gegenwärtige – nach wie vor hochaktuelle – Finanz- und Fiskalkrise in Bezug auf deren ökonomische, politische und soziale Hintergründe und Konsequenzen. Das Buch fand Beachtung in einem Ausmaß, welches auch den Autor überraschte, dessen publizistische Reichweite – wie er selbst schreibt – bislang überwiegend an spezialisierte Fachzeitschriften gebunden war. Besonders die Debatte zwischen Streeck und Habermas wurde viel beachtet. Nun erschien das Buch in erweiterter Auflage Ende 2015 wieder, mit einem Vorwort das auf die Rezeptionsgeschichte Bezug nimmt sowie erweitert um den Aufsatz zur Geldordnung der Europäischen Währungsunion mit dem Titel „Warum der Euro Europa spaltet, statt es zu einigen“. Das Buch ist damit allemal auch 2016 wieder einen Blick wert.