资本主义将走向终结？
每当时机来临，同样的陈词滥调就会卷土重来。对科隆的马克斯•普朗克社会研究所(Max Planck Institute)名誉主任、有影响力的德国社会学家沃尔夫冈•施特雷克(Wolfgang Streeck)而言，这个陈词滥调就是“资本主义的终结”。包括卡尔•马克思(Karl Marx)在内，有无数知识分子预言过资本主义会很快(或者至少将最终不可避免地)终结。资本主义却一直存活下来。然而，施特雷克认为，这一次，情况是不同的。资本主义“将在可预见的未来处于一种混沌不明的状态，或是已死，或是即将死于自身的过度发展、但因为没人有能力将其腐朽的身躯挪开而仍明显活着”。
How Will Capitalism End?, a collection of somewhat overlapping essays, envisages a “society devoid of reasonably coherent and minimally stable institutions capable of normalising the lives of members and protecting them from accidents and monstrosities of all sorts”. This will offer “rich opportunities to oligarchs and warlords, while imposing uncertainty and insecurity on all others, in some ways like the long interregnum that began in the fifth century CE and is now called the Dark Age”.
《资本主义将如何终结》(How Will Capitalism End?)是一部由多篇有些相互重复的论文集结而成的著作。本书预见了一个“这样的社会，这个社会缺乏一套较为协调并具备最低限度稳定性的机构，来维持社会成员生活的正常化并保护他们免受各类意外事件和可怕之物的伤害”。这样的社会将给“寡头和军阀提供丰富的机会，同时让其他所有人陷入不确定和不安全的状态，从某种程度上，这个社会就像是始于公元5世纪、现在被称为‘黑暗时代’(Dark Age)的那段漫长的过渡期”。
Streeck is a mixture of the analyst, the moralist and the prophet. As an analyst, he challenges the stability of democratic capitalism. As a moralist, he dislikes a society founded on greed. As a prophet, he declares that the wages of this sin are death.
施特雷克集分析者、道德家和预言家于一身。作为分析者，他质疑民主制资本主义的稳定性。作为道德家，他厌恶一个建立在贪婪之上的社会。作为预言家，他宣称这种罪恶的报应就是死亡。
Streeck does not believe in the inevitable arrival of a socialist paradise. On the contrary, his is a dystopian vision in which capitalism perishes not with a bang, but a whimper. Since, he argues, capitalism can no longer turn private vice into public benefit, its “existence as a self-reproducing, sustainable, predictable and legitimate social order” has ended. Capitalism has become “more capitalist than is good for it”.
施特雷克并不相信社会主义天堂必将到来。相反，他设想的资本主义的灭亡将是反乌托邦式的——不是伴随着一声巨响，而是伴随着一声呜咽。他主张，因为资本主义无法再将私人恶行转化为公共利益，其“作为一种自我繁殖、可持续、可预测以及合法的社会秩序的存在”就终结了。资本主义已经“变得太资本主义，到了对其自身有害的地步。”
The postwar marriage between universal-suffrage democracy and capitalism is ending in divorce, argues Streeck. The path leading to this has gone via successive stages: the global inflation of the 1970s; the explosion of public debt of the 1980s; the rising private debt of the 1990s and early 2000s; and the subsequent financial crises whose legacy includes ultra-low interest rates, quantitative easing, huge jumps in public indebtedness and disappointing growth. Accompanying capitalism on this path to ruin came “an evolving fiscal crisis of the democratic-capitalist state”. The earlier “tax state” became the “debt state” and now the “consolidation state” (or “austerity state”) dedicated to cutting deficits by slashing spending.
施特雷克认为，战后普选民主和资本主义的联姻正走向破裂。通向这个结局的道路经历了几个连续的阶段：上世纪70年代的全球通胀;上世纪80年代的公共债务爆炸式增长;上世纪90年代和2000年代初的私人债务上升;之后的金融危机(其后果包括超低利率、量化宽松、公共负债大幅攀升以及令人失望的经济增长)。在这条通往毁灭的道路上，伴随资本主义的是“民主制-资本主义国家不断演变的财政危机”。早期的“税收国家”变成了“债务国家”，现在则变成致力于通过降低开支来削减赤字的“整固国家”(也就是“紧缩国家”)。
Three underlying trends have contributed: declining economic growth, growing inequality and soaring indebtedness. These, he argues, are mutually reinforcing: low growth engenders distributional struggles, the solution too often being excessive borrowing. His views on the absurdity of quantitative easing as a palliative mirror those of the Austrian economists he despises. This is not the only case in which Streeck echoes rightwing views: his discussion of increasing female participation in the labour market, for example, finds much to regret and nothing to celebrate in this trend.
有三种潜在趋势促成了这种情况：经济增长走下坡路、不平等的加剧和债务的激增。施特雷克认为，这三种趋势相互强化：低增长引起了分配方面的困难，解决方法往往是过度借贷。他认为量化宽松作为一种权宜之计是荒谬的，他的这一观点与他所藐视的奥地利经济学家一致。这不是施特雷克唯一与右翼观点一致的地方：比如，他对提高女性劳动参与率的讨论得出的结论是，这种女性劳动参与率提高的趋势带来很多坏处，没有丝毫好处。
In one of his few telling phrases, he describes the response of ordinary people to pressures on them as “coping, hoping, doping and shopping”. But, above all, Streeck stresses the dire consequences of an out-of-control financial system, a predatory tax-evading and tax-avoiding plutocracy, the transfer of substantial parts of the public realm into private hands and resulting corruption of political and economic domains.
施特雷克为数不多的精辟表述之一，是把普通人对压力的反应描述为“应付、期盼、嗑药和购物”。但最重要的是，施特雷克强调失控的金融体系、充斥着逃税避税的掠夺性的富豪统治、将大部分公共领域转入私人之手以及因此导致的政经领域的腐败，带来极为严重的后果。
Streeck also writes devastatingly and cogently on the euro as an assault on democratic politics. “Germany”, he argues, “on account of its regained economic power after 2008 and as the main beneficiary of the EMU [economic and monetary union] due to its export strength . . . de facto governs the EMU as a German economic empire.”
施特雷克也对欧元进行了强有力又令人信服的论述，他认为欧元是对民主政治的一次冲击。“德国，”他表示，“由于其在2008年以后恢复了经济实力，以及该国因为出口强劲是欧洲货币联盟(EMU)的主要受益者……在事实上统治着欧洲货币联盟，使其成为了一个德国经济帝国。”
The eurozone, notes Streeck, seeks to bring together countries with irreconcilably different economic cultures. A democratically legitimate resolution of the resulting tensions is impossible. The euro will either fail or survive as an undemocratic structure subservient to the whims of the financial markets and managed by a technocratic central bank and a hegemonic Germany.
施特雷克指出，欧元区寻求将多个经济文化存在差异的国家团结在一起，而这些差异是不可调和的。要通过民主上具备合法性的方式消除由此产生的紧张局面是不可能的。欧元将要么灭亡，要么以一种不民主的结构存续下去，屈从于变化多端的金融市场，由技术官僚掌控的央行和占据霸主地位的德国来管理。
Streeck’s views on the folly of the euro are convincing, but the forecast that today’s Europe will end up in something like the Dark Ages seems ludicrous. Contemporary Europeans enjoy standards of living, life expectancies, personal freedoms and levels of security that people of the Dark Ages or indeed of the Roman empire could not even imagine.
施特雷克关于欧元这种机制很愚蠢的观点令人信服，但预测今天的欧洲将落入类似黑暗时代的境地似乎就有点荒谬了。当代欧洲人所享受的生活水准、预期寿命、个人自由和安全水平，都是黑暗时代乃至罗马帝国的人根本无法想象的。
Moreover, pace Streeck, today’s world does not consist only of failures. He notes, correctly, that the emergence of the globalised market economy has reduced the effectiveness of the mid-20th-century compromise between democracy and national capitalism. But his enthusiasm for deglobalising capitalism misses altogether the immense opportunities increased trade and foreign direct investment have brought, notably to China and India.
此外，恕我直言，今天的世界并非只有失败。施特雷克指出全球化市场经济削弱了20世纪中期民主制与国家资本主义所达成的妥协的有效性，这一点是正确的。但他对于去全球化资本主义的热情完全忽视了贸易和外商直接投资(FDI)的增加所带来的巨大机会，尤其是对中国和印度而言。
In addition, while the trends and stresses in the functioning of the contemporary market economy and its relationship with democratic politics are part of the story, they are not the whole of it. Streeck is right that no stable equilibrium exists in any society. Both the economy and the polity must adapt and change.
此外，虽然当代市场经济的运行中的趋势和压力，以及当代市场经济与民主政治的关系是事情的一部分，但却不是事情的全部。施特雷克有一点说的很对，那就是任何社会都不存在稳定的均衡。无论是经济还是政治都必须适应和改变。
Yet the relationship between democracy and capitalism is not, as Streeck seems to believe, unnatural. On the contrary, both systems derive from a belief in the role of people as active citizens and economic agents. In the former role, they make decisions together; in the latter, they make decisions for themselves. The boundaries and modes of operation of both systems are open to constant renegotiation. But both are essential.
然而，民主和资本主义之间的关系并不像施特雷克似乎认为的那样不自然。相反，这两种体系都源于一种将人视为活跃的公民和经济主体的信念。在前一种角色中，人们共同做决策;在后一种角色中，他们为自己做决策。这两种体系的边界和运行模式都能够接受不断的修订。但两者都必不可少。
Moreover, democracy cannot function without a market economy. The alternative — a thoroughly politicised economy — cannot function properly: just look at today’s Venezuela. The market protects democracy from becoming overstretched, while democracy provides a legitimate framework for the market. Just as the market economy is the least bad way to generate prosperity, so is democracy the least bad way to manage social conflicts.
此外，没有市场经济，民主制度就无法正常运行。而另一个选择，即彻底政治化的经济体制，无法正常运转：看看今天的委内瑞拉就明白了。市场能防止民主变得不堪重负，而民主则为市场提供了一个合法的框架。正如市场经济是创造繁荣的糟糕程度最轻的方式，民主也是管理社会冲突的糟糕程度最轻的方式。
Furthermore, in today’s world, it is not capitalism that is in imminent danger, but rather democracy. A predatory form of post-democratic capitalism, not the end of capitalism, is the threat. Correspondingly, authoritarianism seems a far greater peril than the anarchy of a dark age.
此外，在当今世界，面临紧迫危机的并非资本主义，而是民主。人们面临的威胁不是资本主义的终结，而是掠夺式的后民主制下的资本主义。相应地，威权主义似乎也比黑暗时代的混乱状态危险得多。
The challenges we confront in bringing finance under control, rebalancing corporate governance, remedying inequality, sustaining demand and, above all, managing the tensions between the democratic nation state and the global market economy are genuine. The answers should include a modicum of deglobalisation, notably of finance, and greater co-operation among democratic governments, notably on taxation and the provision of global public goods. Will this be difficult? Yes. Will the answers work forever? No.
在一些事情上，我们的确面临挑战：让财政状况重新变得可控、重新平衡公司治理、纠正不平等、支撑需求，以及最重要的，管理民主的民族国家与全球市场经济之间的紧张关系。解决方案应该包括以下两点：略微去全球化，尤其是在金融方面;加强民主政府之间的合作，尤其是在税收、全球公共品的提供方面。这会很难么?是的。这些方案会永远有效吗?不会。
Is the task possible? Absolutely, yes. Streeck condemns this “technocratic-voluntaristic doability worldview” as hopelessly naive. Such defeatism before supposedly unmanageable social forces is characteristic of a certain sort of intellectual. But the “doability worldview” saved civilisation in the middle of the 20th century. It can (and must) do so again, even if its old institutional bases, particularly trade unions and political parties, have weakened.
这个任务可能完成吗?绝对可能。施特雷克谴责这种“技术官僚-意志论式的‘能做到’的世界观”简直天真到无可救药。在看似无法管理的社会力量面前缴械投降是一类知识分子的特征。但正是这种“‘能做到’的世界观”在20世纪中期拯救了文明。这种世界观能够(而且必须)再次做到这一点，即使其过去的机构基础，尤其是工会和政党的力量都弱化了。
How Will Capitalism End? provides not so much a convincing forecast as a warning. Its analysis is exaggerated and simplistic. Streeck correctly identifies some disturbing trends. Nevertheless, the history of the 20th century shows we do not have to be victims of forces beyond our control. We can choose the worse, or the better. We should choose the better.
与其说《资本主义将如何终结》做了一个令人信服的预言，不如说它发出了一个警告。该书的分析有所夸大，并且过于简单化。施特雷克指出了一些令人不安的趋势，这是正确的。然而20世纪的历史表明，在不受我们控制的力量面前，我们并非注定成为受害者。我们可以选择更坏的处境，也可以选择更好的处境。我们应该选择后者。
How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System, by Wolfgang Streeck, Verso RRP£16.99/$26.95, 272 pages
《资本主义将如何终结?有关一个失败体系的论文集》(How Will Capitalism End? Essays on a Failing System)，沃尔夫冈•施特雷克著，Verso出版社，建议零售价16.99英镑/26.95美元，272页
