Wolfgang Streeck: “Sahra Wagenknecht is the only one asking the right questions — and offering the right answers”

Wolfgang Streeck is a German sociologist and political economist, emeritus director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. Streeck’s work focuses on the tensions between capitalism and democracy, particularly how economic systems impact social and political structures. His notable books include Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, where he explores the long-term consequences of neoliberal policies. Streeck is widely recognised for his contributions to discussions on the future of capitalism in advanced economies.

Zeit: What are you thinking about right now, Mr. Streeck?

Wolfgang Streeck: Someone like me, who has worked on political economy for decades, can’t help but notice today that our perspective on societies has long been limited because we have often overlooked the fact that we are dealing with national societies. The history of democratic capitalism, for example, can only be understood if we examine the connections between individual national societies and global society.

Zeit: You are considered a key intellectual influence on Sahra Wagenknecht’s politics. Are you pleased with the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance (BSW)’s success in Saxony and Thuringia?

Streeck: Oh God, I rarely feel pleased, but I view it with great sympathy. The crisis of the German political system is undeniable, and it’s not just a German phenomenon but can be observed in all Western capitalist societies: the collapse of the centre, the decline of social democracy, and the emergence of new parties that represent interests and values that previously had no place in the established party spectrum. This is usually described as a process of decay, at least from the perspective of the old parties, which might see it that way. But you could also describe it as a process of democratic renewal, if you understand democracy as an institution that gives space to the diverse experiences of citizens, allowing them to articulate and bring these experiences into politics. Many of these new parties are indeed very unsympathetic — Trump, for example, and similar ones in Holland, Italy, France. But if you understand democracy as the opportunity to vote out failed political elites, then you can still concede: yes, democracy exists for this kind of articulation of the will of the voters.

Zeit: But these right-wing populist parties pursue anti-democratic goals.

Streeck: Yes, if you define democracy as being nice to each other, maintaining a Habermasian discourse culture, or upholding certain values that others do not, then by that definition, these new parties are certainly not democrats. But one issue that has been under-discussed in the commentary on the elections is the fact that voter turnout in these two federal states increased by about ten percentage points. That’s sensational, as voter turnout had been steadily declining. The fact that people are now taking these elections seriously again is something I, as a supporter of democracy, don’t view as a bad thing. And specifically, Wagenknecht’s party has mobilised voters who were previously non-voters. What has also become clear is that all these centrist mobilisation efforts — these demonstrations of sensible people, the majority of whom took to the streets in the hundreds of thousands — had no visible impact on the AfD’s results. This shows an interesting resistance in parts of the population to what I would call centrist indoctrination. Indoctrination that tries to cover up the manifest problems of centrist politics by creating a front: “Us, the democrats, against authoritarianism!”. Meanwhile, the self-proclaimed democratic forces are responsible for the decay of infrastructure, the misery of the education system, the schools, the lack of daycare centers, the railways, the crumbling physical and institutional infrastructure from the 1960s and 1970s; and then add immigration policy to that. The centre stands in the face of these problems and marvels at how nothing can be done about them. And then this inability to act is declared as a complex response to complex problems, in contrast to the supposedly simplistic answers given by the so-called populists.

Zeit: Are you personally involved with the BSW?

Streeck: I am a sympathiser, but I am also 78 years old and can no longer attend party meetings, as I become too impatient. I am not an active member. But I see that much of what I have written in recent years is being received within the party’s environment, and I think that’s good. We need a place of political responsibility again, and that place can only be the democratic nation-state. Moreover, in Germany, the crucial questions that must be asked can currently only come from the margins; they cannot come from the CDU, SPD, or Lindner. But a politician like Wagenknecht, who distinguishes herself from others by writing her own texts, might be able to do that.

Zeit: You just listed many political problems and then added the issue of immigration. But isn’t that clearly the main issue, even more so since the attack in Solingen?

Streeck: The problem is not just that people don’t want to be stabbed at festivals. Societies define themselves through prior understandings and agreements that they also expect newcomers to adopt. And here, European societies no longer have any idea how to deal with large-scale immigration. How do you integrate people, how do you prevent ghettos from forming? We are not “Habermasian humans”; we don’t socialise on the flimsy basis of a common constitution, but there are customs and traditions, so to speak, whose visible appearance promotes trust. Also, the alienation effect that arises under immigration conditions needs to be politically manageable; you have to come up with something for that. You can’t just respond by admonishing people not to be racists. You have to ensure that the vast majority of immigrants in this country manage to enter the centre of society. Because those who don’t accumulate politically unproductive and dangerous resentments that are directed against this society.

Zeit: You and Wagenknecht continue to see yourselves as critics of capitalism. Isn’t it strange then to resort to such culturalist categories at all? There are economic reasons that lead to the losers that a competitive society necessarily produces eking out an existence in some parts of the city. This has nothing to do with cultural differences.

Streeck: I disagree with the term “critic of capitalism”. I am a theorist of capitalism. I take the sociological, historical and political science tradition of capitalism critique seriously in the sense that I want to understand what capitalism is all about in its ever-changing form. It’s not just wether certain people lose in a competitive environment, but whether they exist in a life context from which the resources to do something about it arise — or not. Socialisation and, if you want to call it that, exploitation cannot be easily separated. Politics in capitalism is also an attempt to contain its creative destructive power, and one prerequisite for that is solidarity. But if the conditions for solidarity are no longer met, then capitalism cannot be domesticated. And it must be domesticated, or else murder and manslaughter will prevail. Many of the solidarity resources developed after World War II — such as strong trade unions or mass political parties — have been fundamentally weakened during the neoliberal years. The mass political parties are losing members, shrinking to a core of advertising professionals — or heating experts [a reference to Germany’s controversial heating law]. The remaining local solidarity communities must succeed in integrating immigrants and then fighting the battle together. There are always good examples, like IG Metall, which is very strongly influenced by people with a so-called migrant background, even at the federal level today. But all of this has to be learned and built up, and it can’t happen overnight in any quantity.

Zeit: Why do you need the Sahra Wagenknecht Alliance for that? You can find similarly migration-sceptical positions in the CDU.

Streeck: Because the right questions need to be asked and because you have to ensure that no empty answers are given to the questions. What is a parliament for? It’s for having people behind the speaker’s podium who know enough to make life difficult for the government. The AfD is not capable of that; it only caters to resentments. To take another example, besides migration policy: where is a real discussion about our foreign policy taking place? Who asks the right questions besides the BSW? The Chancellor casually mentions in a press conference that from 2026, American nuclear-capable intermediate-range missiles will be stationed in Germany. No debate follows. In fact, this is a unique change in Europe’s security architecture. Do we even want this? The BSW may succeed in raising such questions in parliament so that they can no longer be avoided. The goal is to reclaim the national political arena to address the real issues that the old centre has successively tried to cover up, leave to the market, or shift to Brussels. Maybe it will succeed in restoring a responsive state in a revived democratic public sphere. That’s where it starts; that’s the resource that democracy depends on. The intentional neutralisation of this resource by covering up the real questions with demonstrations of “democrats against authoritarians” deliberately undermines it. The official so-called discourse then becomes: “Wagenknecht is nationalistic!”. Yes, what else, we have nation-states, and that’s ultimately our only potentially effective instrument for formulating and asserting our interests as a society.

Zeit: Liberalism and capitalism are also diligently theorised and criticised by the right. What distinguishes your position from a conservative or reactionary position?

Streeck: My most important teacher was a man named Amitai Etzioni at Columbia University in New York. He was a sociologist’s sociologist. He had an interesting life. He was born in Cologne, grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, studied under Martin Buber, and did his doctorate in Berkeley, California. Etzioni was later considered the inventor of so-called communitarianism. This theory incorporated his life experience across societies and his connection to specific communities. The kibbutz, for example, never left him. His experience was that people cannot live if they cannot integrate into a community and develop a sense of commonalities that distinguish them from other groups. At the same time, however, people are dependent on adapting to a context where everyone is equally human. This is an alternative to the extreme dilution that occurs with Habermasian universalists, where human communities are drawn ever higher until there is actually only one morally legitimate human community: humanity as a whole. Etzioni’s communitarianism understood that such a concept is, if you will, unsociological and therefore bound to fail. Under today’s conditions, the problem does not seem to me to be how to further advance a universalism that really only means depoliticisation and technocracy, but how to get a little further down to the so-called base, where real “diversity” is at home. How can people empower themselves in the concrete communities in which they live?

Zeit: If that is the case, why don’t you support the AfD and Björn Höcke [one of the party’s key leaders]?

Streeck: Oh God. I don’t know a single consistent thought from Höcke and his followers. It’s all just cynical symbolic provocations. But even if he were somehow a conservative, I wouldn’t have anything to do with him. Conservatives on the right believe in a natural hierarchy, a world in which the better ones are there to tell the less good ones what to do. But I am an unconverted egalitarian: all people are of equal value. Furthermore, right-wing conservatives believe that there can be no peace in this world: there are Schmittian existential enemies with whom we can only live if we don’t let them live. The latter has become a central theme of the American neocons and the European NATO conservatives, including our foreign minister.

Zeit: Are you comparing Annalena Baerbock to Höcke?

Streeck: If you say that this war can only end when we hand Putin over to The Hague, then that means final victory: German tanks in Moscow. And I say we should think about that again.

Zeit: You can view this rhetoric critically, but in fact it is a demand in the name of universalistic values ​​— and not in the name of Schmittian enemy thinking. It’s rather the opposite: your particularist, communitarian position actually relies on there being an enemy who is different from oneself.

Streeck: Oh, come on. The fact that there are others in the world is a fact that we have to deal with. You don’t have to love them, but you have to learn to live with them. To go back to Etzioni: the world consists of communities, and the task of politics is to organise them as a community of communities, as well as possible, with luck and skill; by the way, this is written, quite unoriginally, in the Charter of the United Nations. Once again, why it’s impossible for me to align with any right-wing group: more or less, they all adhere to an elitist worldview, where a minority, to which they naturally belong, supposedly has an inherent right to tell the majority what to do. I can’t support that; I am deeply egalitarian. For me, the life experience of every person is equally valuable, which is why in a democracy, everyone, whether they are a Nobel Prize winner or not, has exactly one vote and only one vote, not weighted by high school grades. Anyone who challenges that cannot be my friend. Regarding the BSW: you can categorise political movements on two dimensions, culturally libertarian or conservative, and socio-politically progressive or liberal. This creates four quadrants, and three of them are occupied. The fourth quadrant, culturally conservative and socio-politically progressive, has not been occupied until now. That’s where the BSW could establish itself permanently, and that’s where I also feel comfortable.

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