Members of Class Unity discuss the crises of capitalism, the political economy of war, and the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza with Professor Wolfgang Streeck.

Wolfgang Streeck is Director Emeritus at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies. In addition to being director of that institute before his retirement, he was Professor of Sociology at the University of Cologne, and before that Professor of Sociology and Industrial Relations at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is one of the world’s leading thinkers on the political economy of modern capitalism. His many books include “How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System” (2016), “Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism” (2017), and “Taking Back Control? States and State Systems after Globalism” (2024).

As a basis for this conversation we read 

Streeck – A Dual Crisis I: Capitalism (chapter 5 of of “Taking Back Control”)

Streeck – Notes on the Political Economy of War

Streeck – Engels’s Second Theory – Technology, Warfare, and the Growth of the State