{"id":26291,"date":"2025-09-19T07:49:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T02:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=26291"},"modified":"2025-09-20T21:28:56","modified_gmt":"2025-09-20T16:28:56","slug":"sine-qua-non","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/?p=26291","title":{"rendered":"sine qua non<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wolfgang Streeck<\/a>:<\/p>\n

First, an economy<\/em> is capitalist if its stability \u2013 its current reproduction \u2013 depends on the successful open-ended accumulation of privately-owned capital for investment in continued open-ended private capital accumulation. Second, a society<\/em> is capitalist to the extent that its economy is \u2013 predominantly \u2013 capitalist; if it is, its stability as a society depends on the stability of its \u2013 capitalist \u2013 economy. Third, from this it follows that in a capitalist society the well-being of private capital \u2013<\/span> in other words, its continued open-ended accumulation \u2013 is a condition of the well-being of that society, and not vice versa<\/em>. Or, put otherwise, the well-being of a society that has turned its economy over to capitalism is contingent on the well-being<\/span> of its capitalist economy \u2013 on that economy yielding enough profit to make capital owners continue investing in it. Or, moving from a functionalist to a structuralist language, the well-being<\/span> of the capital-owning<\/em> class in a capitalist political economy is a \u2013 necessary but not necessarily sufficient \u2013 condition of the well-being of the capital- operating<\/em>, or working, class, again not vice versa<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9\u00a0\u03a9<\/p>\n

The upshot is that a capitalist economy, indeed political economy, is a battlefield rather than a court of justice or, for that matter, a self-governing<\/span> and self-optimizing<\/span> machine requiring, if at all, occasional expert programming. There is in real life no ideal point dividing between capital and labor the proceeds of a capitalist economy \u2026<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This seems on the one hand such a simple insight, but in the couple days since I read it it’s come up in my mind again and again that throughout my life in the US everyone around me very clearly lives with this assumption backwards. People complain about corporate profits at the expense of social well-being with at least the tone of, and often the literal wording „don’t they understand!“, supposing corporate officers must not realize the damage they do, that somehow people „should“ take precedence over profits. Such na\u00efvet\u00e9 is clearly and consistently deadly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wolfgang Streeck: First, an economy is capitalist if its stability \u2013 its current reproduction \u2013 depends on the successful open-ended accumulation of privately-owned capital for investment in continued open-ended private capital accumulation. Second, a society is capitalist to the extent … Weiterlesen →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mwehle.de\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}