Wolfgang Streeck snippets

A couple of excerpts from How Will Capitalism End that resonates with me. The first has obvious application to Brexit (though this was written before it) though it also describes how I feel sometimes looking at ESG land.

[T]he arenas of distributional conflict have become ever more remote from popular politics. The national labour markets of the 1970s, with the manifold opportunities they offered for corporatist political mobilisation and inter-class coalitions, or the politics of public spending in the 1980s, were not necessarily beyond the grasp or strategic reach of the 'man in the street'. Since then, the battlefields on which the contradictions of democratic capitalism are fought out have become ever more complex, making it exceedingly difficult for anyone outside the political and financial elites to recognize the underlying interests and identify their own. While this may generate apathy at mass level, and thereby make life easier for the elites, there is no relying on it, in a world in which blind compliance with financial investors is propounded as the only rational and responsible behaviour. To those who refuse to be talked out of other social rationalities and responsibilities, such a world may appear simply absurd - at which point the only rational and responsible conduct would be to throw as many wrenches as possible into the works of haute finance.

The second is timely given a recent outbreak of bullshit about "non-ideological" and "evidenced-based policy.

Standard economic theory treats social structure and distribution of interests and power vested in it as exogenous, holding them constant and thereby making them both invisible and, for the purposes of economic 'science', naturally given. The only politics such a theory can envisage involves opportunistic or, at best, incompetent attempts to bend economic laws. Good economic policy is non-political by definition. The problem is that this view is not shared by the many for whom politics is a much-needed recourse against markets, whose unfettered operation interferes with what they happen to feel is right. Unless they are somehow persuaded to adopt neoclassical economics as a self-evident model of what social life is and should be, their political demands as democratically expressed will differ from the prescriptions of standard economic theory. The implication is that while an economy, if sufficiently conceptually disembedded, may be modelled as tending towards equilibrium, a political economy may not, unless it is devoid of democracy and run by a Platonic dictatorship of economist-kings. Capitalist politics... has done its best to lead us out of the desert of corrupt democratic opportunism into the promised land self-regulating markets. Up to now, however, democratic resistance continues, and with it the dislocations in our market economies to which it continuously gives rise.