Wolfgang Streeck on consumption, depoliticisation and neoliberal capitalism

Abstract

Tucked into Wolfgang Streeck’s influential crisis theory of contemporary capitalism are various attempts at causally linking processes of neoliberalisation to generalised depoliticisation, while depoliticisation is in its turn attributed to the emergence of a diffuse ‘consumerist’ ethos in the 1970s. Streeck argues that rising consumerism led to a generalised demotic embrace of marketised forms of need satisfaction and in so doing evacuated the political will to resist neoliberal reforms. If, however, we take neoliberalisation to entail both the depoliticisation of the demos and the marketisation of the polity, then Streeck’s attempt to connect these processes to consumption is weakened by significant historical oversights on both ends. Streeck’s attribution of depoliticisation to a new consumerist ethos is beset by a reductive economism. At the same time, Streeck overlooks just how pivotal legitimatory ideals of consumer-side social order developed by specific networked elites have been for the marketisation of the polity.