On December 14, Die Zeit published an interview with the 72-year-old political scientist Elmar Altvater. Here are edited excerpts:
Altvater: Capitalism, as we know it, is approaching its end. The system rests on the exploitation of fossil fuels, and the supply is waning. Also, the environment is being destroyed to such an extent that the system cannot continue in its present form. This creates crises which are far more threatening than the current financial crisis.
Question: You don’t think the financial crisis is serious?
Altvater: Of course I do. Huge sums of money are being lost. But they can be restored. The destruction of nature cannot be reversed.
Question: Then what are we to do?
Altvater: We will have to rely on regulation by the state, approved by free, democratic consent. Those who complain that this requires far too much interference from the state should be reminded that in matters of traffic control we all tolerate an infinity of prohibitions. Nobody gets very excited about that.
Question: How do you explain that there is so little questioning of the system?
Altvater: In some ways, there is. We have the Occupy Movement which protests around the globe against the power of the banks. And in Spain we have the Indignados who are demonstrating about unemployment. But as soon as there is an election they vote for the Conservatives – an obvious paradox. It can only be explained by the thought that in times of crisis people are afraid of experiments. Conservatives promise stability.
Question: Have we lost the capacity to imagine another system?
Altvater: Not really. Nothing has been more criticized than Margaret Thatcher’s statement that there simply are no alternatives. Capitalism has become a habit. We can get used to other habits.
Question: Such as?
Altvater: In Bolivia and Ecuador, the principle of buen vivir has been anchored in the constitution. This is a model very different from the market economy. Everywhere in the world cooperatives have sprung up, in the field of energy and real estate, and many others. There are people who believe a centralized economic system can be devised by powerful computers. I think that is nonsense. In some form, markets will undoubtedly survive. But we have to get rid of the idea that the system we have is unchangeable.
Question: Do you have more hope than you used to have?
Altvater: When I was young I was full of hope. With growing age I have become more analytical. But I do have hope. Never before has change been as necessary as it is today and never have the chances of success been greater.
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
Would it not be more appropiate to describe him as a centrist than as a leftist? In any event, I would not agree that a seventy-year old political scientist is an “elderly” political scientist.
I think the professor is right in one sense that there is an alternative to capitalism, by which I take him to mean a market economy. Either consumers, by their purchasing and abstention from purchasing, determine which businesses are successful and which are not; or a government’s unique plan prevails in deciding how resources are used in the production of goods and services.
From what I read, my sense is that the professor would like to have some blend of those two systems, a mix between a market economy and a command economy. I do not see how that is possible since their principles for the production of goods and services are in such fundamental conflict; they really are incompatible with one another.
Furthermore, because government intervention into a market economy leads to worse conditions — even from the standpoint of the advocate of the government action — than what the intervention was meant to resolve, ironically bringing about even more calls for government action usually, the mixed economy like the professor essentially endorsed is not a stable economic system.
So as far as I can tell, the only two options are the market or the state. Does that sound about right?
We have had a mixed state/market economy for 100 years. The state intervenes to prevent child labour, insist on safe working conditions (more or less successfully), encourage investments in favoured activities by tax credits and accelerated depreciation allowances (hello big oil and many mines), building roads and bridges and other physical infrastructure (history of 19th C Canada and US: railroads – political decision which cities got rail service and which – now long gone or at least much diminished – did not); education programs (apprenticeships for what trades? etc) etc etc. The question is the mix, and to a question of degree not kind the direction.
Every time we have a few years of prosperity, people (business people, some politicians, many follow-the-herd journalists) say that ‘we’ have now figured out the right balance of political direction and market energy, so we won’t have any more recessions/failures. Then the economy tanks, and it turns out the theories weren’t quite right, or the foolproof balance ran into more imaginative fools than had been anticipated.
It is not clear from the passage that Eric gives us just what the learned professor would like to do to change the balance – and he may be right, too. Clearly we haven’t arrived at perfection quite yet…
My point would be that those policies were enacted to correct previous government policies (such as expropriating the commons in England or giving huge railroad land grants in the United States, restricting the rights of workers, or enacting regulatory barriers to entry) that made child labor and earning income by wage labor more prevalent than it otherwise would have been (by choking off alternative avenues for a family to earn an income).
But all those corrective steps are pretty measly in comparison to the ways in which government’s prop up big business and criminalize non-established entrepreneurship. I am also cautious to recognize that many so-called corrective measures, like prohibitions on child labor, benefit more privileged workers at the expense of locking people in poverty (by depriving them of income and reducing the supply of labor to make the products they buy more expensive).
I hope it is not presumptuous of me to assume that Profssor Altvater would, if he read your reply, say that he did not think it was as much an either/or propostion as you think and that, in any case, at this point the important thing was to be open to the idea of changing habits.
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
Thomas Paine.
I hope we have enough time.