The Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism: Oliver Nachtwey in Conversation

Join German sociologist Oliver Nachtwey and Ajay Singh Chaudhary for a conversation on how neoliberalism is causing a social crisis in Germany and the rest of Europe.

Upward social mobility represented a core promise of life under the “old” West German welfare state, in which millions of skilled workers upgraded their Volkswagens to Audis, bought their first homes, and sent their children to university. Not so in today’s Federal Republic, where the gears of the so-called “elevator society” have long since ground to a halt. In the absence of the social mobility of yesterday, widespread social exhaustion and anxiety have emerged across mainstream society. This discussion will investigate the crisis of contemporary capitalism in postwar Europe, the reasons for the political and social rupture in German society and the rise of right-wing populism throughout and beyond Europe.

Oliver Nachtwey is Associate Professor of Social Structure Analysis at the University of Basel, and a fellow at the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. His research interests include labor and industrial sociology, political sociology, the comparative study of capitalism, and social movements. He is the author of Germany’s Hidden Crisis: Social Decline in the Heart of Europe.

Ajay Singh Chaudhary is the executive director of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research and a core faculty member specializing in social and political theory. He has written for the The Guardian, Los Angeles Review of Books, Quartz, Social Text, Dialectical Anthropology, The Jewish Daily Forward,Filmmaker Magazine, and 3quarksdaily, among others.

Co-sponsored by Verso Books, Goethe-Institut and Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.

This event is part of Wunderbar Together: The Year of German-American Friendship 2018/19, an initiative of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and the Goethe-Institut, with the support of the Federation of German Industries (BDI).

From the Goethe-Institut New York