Book review: Zwischen Globalismus und Demokratie. Politische Ökonomie im ausgehenden Neoliberalismus

In a number of recent contributions Wolfgang Streeck has provided some of the most penetrating analyses of contemporary capitalism. Particularly noticeable has been his distinction (2013) between Staatsvolk (the people constituting the democratically entitled citizenry of a nation) and Marktvolk (the global holders of finance capital, whose power is exercised over governments through means that bypass and over-run national democracy). In this new work he goes beyond these earlier analyses to provide an account of what he sees as the mutual incompatibility of democracy and a globalized economy. In doing so he reintroduces and updates the contributions to understanding capitalism of those two giants of mid-20th century analysis, John Maynard Keynes and Karl Polanyi. There is also considerable use of data and various research findings, but also of such surprising authors as Edward Gibbon. A core argument of the book is that globalization has shifted power away from the nation state, which has been the primary level at which democracy has flourished, passing it to networks of global corporations. Whereas many of the advocates of globalization depict it as replacing hierarchical state action by free markets in which consumers are dominant, Streeck points out that the architecture of the new global governance is itself highly vertical. Power is drawn out of the various levels of democratic action and lodged in a few international banks and other giant firms. The doctrine of shareholder value maximization has displaced any other responsibilities (to workers, customers, the environment) that firms possessed when they could be regulated at national levels. By erecting global supply chains, corporations have been able to source parts of their products from wherever labor is cheapest and possesses fewest rights, where environmental and other protective regulation is very weak, where taxation is lowest. As a result, much global trading that looks as though it operates through markets really takes place within the structures of individual giant firms, enabling them for example, to use book-keeping techniques to allocate their costs to wherever they choose, irrespective of what is really happening. One might add, though Streeck himself does not make this point, that the accountancy and audit process of contemporary capitalism are as fictive as the “posttruth” of much current political and governmental discourse. The global economy is not really a market economy, but one dominated by giant corporations—and, one might add, their political allies. 1127246 JCS0010.1177/1468795X221127246Journal of Classical SociologyBook Review book-review2022