Cross front – Wolfgang Streeck: Irr way with symptoms

In the 1990s, the populism researcher Karin Priester examined how new “68ers” became new rights. At that time, those in particular had been succumbed to the philosophical core and found their way through Martin Heidegger to a new right agenda, which continues to date, for example, in the magazine “Tumult”. At the same time, the literary and political scientist Jost Müller found a tendency based on a former 68er that the “cultivated conversation with an intelligent fascist” was wanted out of narcissism and intellectual arrogance. To this day, Müller’s judgment on such wishes applies: “The disaster uses where intellectual narcissism with chattering crisses-cross-chatting, arrogance with ignorance pairs.” The times have changed, the disaster has increased.

In recent years of the multiple crisis, greater diffusion movements within the political landscape have been recorded. It is no longer, as in the 1980s, formerly authenticity enthusiasts, into mythical deprived radical left -wing, the great favor of the self -absorging of the supposedly provocative of shouting. But it is now a milieu that was previously native to the left social democracy. The ghosts differ here on the basic questions about the position on Europe and the nation state, but the lines have already been visible in relation to Corona and Russia.

A cross -border commuter that marks the breaks in this left milieu is the well -known sociologist Wolfgang Streeck. Due to his departure from neoliberal social democracy, he describes himself at the latest in 2012 with his book »bought time. The adjoining crisis of democratic capitalism “a reputation as a critic of capitalism and also publishes lively in left magazines such as the” New Left Review “. Without his reputation, Streeck acts as an organic intellectual of the BSW today, the basis for the conspiracy ideological party as well as in the new right library of Conservatism and gives interviews with neo -fascists such as Benedikt Kaiser in the Neumechen magazine “Die Kehre” or the Blatt “Élénementes” The Nouvelle Droite. But what is the fascination with streeck for leftists and rights and what does that say about the intellectual state of a formerly left milieus?

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Neither right nor left

The meandering between the milieus is characteristic of Wolfgang Streeck’s position. Because it was “indifferent”, as he says in an interview with the fascist magazine “Die Kehre” whether a need to look at the “latest from the new”, “” right “or” left “at home”. Similarly, actors of the new right, such as Constantin of Hoffmeister on the neo -fascist blog »Eurosibiria«, celebrate both the successes of the AfD and the BSW after the state elections in Thuringia and Saxony. For Hoffmeister, this signals the “resuscitation of a strong National Bolshevik current”. Wolfgang Streeck legitimizes such cross-front activities through his texts. In the sense of new conflicts of terms, he produces a new main contradiction that claims the youngest modernity as contrary to a lost state, to which back to the national.

For Streeck and the national social flow of the social left, this transfigured state is the Fordist Welfare state of the 1970s. Here the world was still okay before the increasingly neoliberal globalization used. According to Streeck, this globalization is based on the contradiction between “Marktvolk” (global companies, investors and governments) and “state people”. The changes in the class conditions are considered from the outset by national glasses. Consequently, the workers class for Streeck also appears only as a worker that was previously organized nationally and was suspended on the attacks of global capital and cosmopolitanism. Real transnationalization processes of the workers class themselves are not recognizable in this nationally set analysis framework.

Right -wing cultural fighters like this perspective. Streeck can be considered unpleasant and rebellious if he gives lectures in the new right of milieu, but after all he only tells too popular. During his lecture in 2023 in the library of conservatism, a central think tank of the new right in Germany, it looked like this: Streeck asked with a smile and with a raised index finger a “conservative revolution” and suggested that the welfare state of the 1970s be taken as a conservative role model. And he voted in the left “praise of the nation”, with which Michael Bröning, for example, defended the nation state, which had to be placed against an allegedly anti -national mainstream.

Connection to the right

It is not far from the nation’s praise. In a praise of the BSW 2024 in »Friday«, Streeck, contrary to any empirical reality, brings the right propaganda word of the »unlimited immigration« and, also to the right narrative, refers to the summer of migration in 2015. That there was already a first asylum rights in Germany in autumn 2015, which followed another streeck as well as European tightening of migration, which finally resulted in the common European asylum system. He also ignores the fact that it was actually not a no-border link that delayed this tightening for a long time, but the contradictions between Melonis Italy and Orban’s Hungary.

In the “New Left Review”, Streeck was disappointed with the election result of the BSW and the reasons why so many workers had chosen AfD. He did not consider the workers who are not allowed to choose or have not chosen AfD. The right story of the AfD is reproduced as a social party. Streeck’s presentation of democracy of national sovereignty and homogeneity approaches the former social democratic milieu from the new ideology. Finally, through the dichotomization of nation and globalism, he promises the new right transformation of anti -capitalism into anti -liberalism.

The anti -liberalism is also evident when Streeck devalues ​​the climate crisis from a global problem of survival of mankind to a purely moral question. He mocks the necessary adjustments from cities to changed climatic conditions as a question of “virtuous cities” or climbs as “religion”. Consequently, he has to keep global problems out of the national fantasies and ward off as false moral ideas. The intellectual national lateral thinking, for which he speaks, also approaches the right here. The loud rejection of gender -sensitive language also fits into this picture – “the peculiar spellings and strange glottal valleys,” as Streeck calls it – and the idea that there is more than two genders. Attempts at non-discriminatory everyday practice are then in turn opposed to redistribution policies.

Back to anti -liberalism

However, the social question is currently stepping down behind the peace issue anyway. The attack in Russia on Ukraine is interpreted in the national analysis framework of the geopolitical situation of the 1970s. In a lecture in 2024 at a conference of the conspiracy ideological party, Streeck assumes that the nation state and sovereignty are a “weapon of the weak against the strong” and is therefore “denied or trimmed” by the “Imperium”, the USA. At the same time, he hides Putin and Russia’s imperial wars and thus implicitly refrains from any own interests. The fact that he also demands a “multipolar world order” with a block-free Europe should particularly look forward to the European strategists of the new rights, which hope for similar things. In an article about the Ukraine War-published in a anthology in the conspiracy-savvy Westend-Verlag and published by the first chairman of the right professor network network freedom of science-Streeck then knocks on the cosmopolitism he rejected in the formula “Americism as a universalism” in anti-liberal tradition.

The political border passages, meandering between the left, conspiracy affins and open milieus: all of this ultimately based on Streeck’s confusion of nation with liberation and its transition from anti -capitalism to anti -liberalism. It should be asked socio -psychological whether this nation -state nostalgia does not also result in grief over the loss of one’s own meaning in the science structure. Because it is precisely on those points that current social sciences are rejected or ignored where they still have a social influence: in anti-discrimination work, social advances in equality issues of sexual orientation or non-binarity. Here the supposedly left fighter of the working class becomes a mere cultural fighter. Ironically, Streeck falls back to those regressive natural ideas with which the authoritarian to fascist strand of neoliberalism legitimizes social inequalities.

Streeck thus speaks for a milieu that draws his scientific authority up close to the power and, now, after the loss of this proximity, is in lateral thinking. Every own situity is hidden and you can show yourself as an ignorant towards the needs of the urge -harassed of the capitalist mode of production. Instead of solidarity, a national pseudo -bellion and the political forces of fascism are flirted with a national pseudo -bark.