THE PLEONECTIC RIFT

Dick Pountain /The Political Quarterly/ 11 Nov 2024 04:41

The Greatest Of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought From Plato To Marx by David Lay Williams: Princeton University Press; Sept 2024; pp424; £30.00

Pleonexia is a Greek word that means insatiable greed, avarice, covetousness, a desire to have more without limit. Think of it as an opposite to anorexia: eating nothing versus eating everything. David Lay Williams' book is about economic inequality as perceived and condemned by seven great thinkers from Plato to Marx, all of whom were familiar with the word, and employed it in their condemnations. In fact “Pleonexia, the Greatest of All Plagues” would have been another excellent title for this book (though he and PUP wisely chose a less arcane one). The book is specifically about economic, as opposed to other forms of inequality:

“...unless otherwise expressly stated, when speaking of “economic inequality,” I mean what economists sometimes call “wealth inequality,” as opposed to “income inequality.” Although income and wealth are often strongly correlated, sometimes they are not.”

So it's not another account of the politics and sociology of inequality but rather an exploration in moral philosophy, spanning 2300 years of history, of the attitudes of Plato (a classical republican; Jesus Christ (founder of Christianity); Thomas Hobbes (monarchist); Jean-Jacques Rousseau (early modern republican); Adam Smith (classical liberal); John Stuart Mill (utilitarian); and Karl Marx (communist) not all of whom are radical egalitarians. Indeed Plato, Jesus, Hobbes and Smith are more often invoked by conservatives, but Williams convincingly demonstrates that despite their differences on other social and economic matters, they all understood that vast wealth gaps corrode the fabric of society, degrade politics and loosen family ties. Inequality lies at the root of the collapse of most empires and civilisations. 

Williams avoids presenting detailed economic statistics for the era of each thinker, instead referring to such work by other experts like Thomas Piketty, Walter Scheidel and Charles Lindblom. Similarly he doesn’t devote much space to detailed analysis of the mechanism by which inequality erodes the social fabric, leaving that too to sociologists like Wilkinson and Pickett or Mike Savage (his bibliography runs to 24 pages). What he embarks on instead is to demonstrate that all his chosen thinkers believed that economic inequality is wrong, and to show that reasons for this judgement evolved over time, from Plato’s sickness of the soul (pleonexia) to Karl Marx’s capitalist who “ruthlessly forces the human race to produce for production’s sake”. 

His purpose directly concerns contemporary politics as he seeks to unmask various ways in which current commentators of both Left and Right are misinterpreting these thinkers to ignore or to justify the rapidly increasing inequality which so obviously lead to Donald Trump’s devastating election victory in November 2024. The billionaire moguls of Silicon Valley who 20 years ago appeared mostly sympathetic to the Democrats have pivoted to Trump. Elon Musk pranced on platforms with him, Jeff Bezos forbade his Washington Post editors to endorse a candidate (ie. Harris), while Mark Zuckerberg announced that he’d made a “20-year mistake” and “political miscalculation”. The stock price rally following Trump’s victory increased their collective fortunes by $64 billion overnight.

Right-wing free-market followers of Hayek and Friedman claim that economic egalitarianism is an invention of twentieth-century liberals, and that the Western canon from Plato to Smith uniformly supports inequality, so inequality’s critics are merely expressing resentment and envy of the wealthy. But Williams contends that many Left opponents of inequality fail to produce convincing arguments for why it’s wrong, leaving them exposed to such an envy slur. Some other Left-wing critics regard poverty to be the moral problem and concentrated wealth and inequality to be morally less relevant: “fight poverty, not inequality.” Steven Pinker for example makes the 'sufficientarian' argument that feeding, housing and clothing the poor outweighs concerns over excessive wealth.

Williams devotes a separate chapter to each of his thinkers. Today we see Plato as an  elitist, given that his ideal republic was to be ruled only by philosophers and maintained by slaves, but Williams argues that one must looks past this (slavery was ubiquitous in that epoch) to his major political works ‘Republic’ and ‘Laws’, which show a concern for economic equality for free citizens. He claimed these citizens needed to possess four primary virtues – wisdom, moderation, justice, and courage – and that greed, inequality and oligarchy corroded all three, leading to social disharmony and civil war. This wasn’t simply a theoretical conclusion: fifth-century Athens experienced two oligarchic coups against democracy, followed by periods of reform under Solon and Lycurgus, and Plato learned from this history that extreme wealth, poverty, and inequality don’t simply collapse political regimes but distort individual souls through insatiable greed or pleonexia, which was therefore “the greatest of all plagues” (Laws, 744d).

In one of the smaller colonies of the Roman Empire an egalitarian tendency already existed among Hebrew-speaking tribes, whose prophets had written for centuries against the evils of excessive wealth and usury. In the 7th century BC Palestine had a fertile agriculture that enabled landlords to accumulate wealth, and the prophet Amos decries the way they exploited peasant farmers by loaning them money and appropriating their lands when they failed to repay. The religious authorities tried to defuse this class antagonism using the Mosaic Law, which prescribed that every seventh year be a ‘‘sabbath year’ during which slaves were freed, debts cancelled and land left fallow for the poor to forage. Every seventh sabbatical year was a ‘jubilee’ which restored all land to its original owners. Needless to say such radically distributive policies were enforced less and less as religious leaders became wealthy themselves, and by the time Jesus of Nazareth was born in Galilee province he founded a new Christian religion by expelling the moneylenders from the Temple.      

Thomas Hobbes is now remembered for ‘Leviathan’, in which he strongly advocates concentration of all power in a monarch, in reaction to the chaos unleashed by the English Civil War. His economic ideas are therefore also assumed to favour the emerging merchant capitalism, but Williams points out that in his other great work ‘Behemoth’ Hobbes relates that growing concentration of wealth among the merchant class made them ‘insolent and presumptuous of impunity’ eventually rising to threaten the sovereign authority, and precipitating violent civil war. Hobbes was keenly aware that as feudal patronage slowly gave way to open markets, inflation seriously eroded livelihoods as ex-peasants became wage labourers.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau inaugurated the modern attitude to inequaliy, calling it by name in ‘Discourse on the Origin of Inequality’ and questioning the legitimacy of rulers who abuse their authority to protect the wealthy from the poor. He held that legitimate authority only exists by common consent and by pursuing the common good, and that in economically unequal societies “the apparent power is in the hands of the magistrate and the real power is in those of the rich” – the ideas that provided the intellectual impetus for the French Revolution. 

Adam Smith remains the doyen of free-market enthusiasts everywhere, but Williams  convincingly demonstrates that even he was grievously concerned over the detrimental effect of economic inequality on social cohesion, as for example in ‘The Wealth Of Nations’ where he remarked “Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many”. The result, as Eric Hobsbawm once observed, was that industrial relations in the first half of the eighteenth century could be described as “collective bargaining by riot.” John Kay, inventor of the flying shuttle used in the weaving machines that displaced countless workers, was forced to flee Britain after his home was destroyed by an angry mob in 1753. 

Williams thereafter arrives at the more familiar and (perhaps) less contested path to modern opposition to inequality via the utilitarian liberalism of John Stuart Mill and the outright communism of Karl Marx. Each of the seven chapters ends with a conclusion summarising that thinker’s suggested measures to combat economic inequality, ranging from alms-giving, to Lycurgus’ abolition of gold and silver currency, from debt sabbaths to highly progressive wealth taxes and restrictions on inheritance, to educational reform or socialist revolution.

Stopping with Marx feels like quitting just as it gets interesting as Williams is well aware, but he ruefully admits that to proceed into the 20th century with its two world wars, revolutions, organised labour and welfare states, would require a whole extra book. That’s certainly true for the logical next steps would have to tackle communism versus social democracy, the reformist ideas of Maynard Keynes and Galbraith, the historic dip in inequality that Thomas Piketty documented in ’Capital In The Twenty First Century’, and the fossil-fuelled climate crisis precipitated by rising Western affluence. At that point Williams would have left moral philosophy for active political economy. 

Social democracy has become the first effective system for controlling inequality through regulation and progressive taxation, but has brought unforeseen consequences: the downward spread of prosperity induces pleonexia among the electorate (though we now call it ‘consumerism’) accompanied by an aversion to paying taxes. This, and a failure to create transnational regulatory bodies opens a loophole through which reaction and pleonectic 

oligarchy have reversed the flow, a story still being written to which Trump’s second term might prove the finale. Williams’ choice of end-point was perhaps wise, and the work he has produced is a valuable tool for progressives to continue the argument, if it does indeed continue.   

Dick Pountain, London

TAMPERING WITH REALITY

Dick Pountain /The Political Quarterly/ 15 Mar 2024 03:34

The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence by Matteo Pasquinelli; Verso 2023; pp264; £16.99

It feels as though a storm is gathering around Artificial Intelligence (AI), since just about everyone believes that it’s set to change our world but in what direction is a matter of great controversy: will it be a mob of peasants storming Frankenstein’s castle with pitchforks and burning brands, or eager prospectors with mules, spades and pans scurrying to make their fortune in the California hills. 

Matteo Pasquinelli, an Associate Professor in Philosophy of Science in Venice, has written an excellent social history of AI in which he treats these technologies as the most recent stage in the historical process of the Division of Labour: “In the industrial age, the supervision of the division of labour used to be the task of the factory’s master” and AI is just another, more powerful technology for measuring, organising, spying-on and controlling workplace and workers, the latest phase in the exploitation of Labour by Capital. Pasquinelli is no techno-utopian.

Pasquinelli’s book covers an ambitious span of historical time, which he found necessary to identify the origins of what he calls ‘algorithmic thinking’ ie. the creation of rules for solving problems via a sequence of discrete steps. His introductory chapter, ‘The Material Tools Of Algorithmic Thinking’, locates the earliest recorded examples of such thinking in the Vedic mythology of India around 800 BCE. Those rituals involved building ‘Fire Altars’ whose design was prescribed by stepwise methods intended to reassemble the fragmented body of the god Prajapati (but they also served to teach a system of geometry useful in building). From that beginning a path winds through the Babylonian creation of counting, and hence accounting, on clay tablets, through the Greek geometers, the Arabic algebraicists and finally to the Europe of Pascal, Leibniz, Newton and Descartes.    

Pasquinelli’s book is organised into four sections, the second of which, ‘The Industrial Age’, contains four chapters beginning with one devoted to Charles Babbage, to whom he attributes the mechanisation of mental labour. In 1822 during the UK’s industrial revolution Babbage designed his Difference Engine, a machine to automate numeric calculation. It would employ then state-of-the-art technologies like metal cogs and steam power to generate tables of logarithms – needed by astronomers and the military – more quickly and cheaply than hand calculation. Babbage only ever produced a single prototype but his efforts in effect inaugurated modern computer science, as well as influencing Karl Marx toward a labour theory of the machine. Babbage saw that all machines imitate and replace some previous division of labour, and that a calculating machine in particular automates the derivation of labour costs. In three following chapters Pasquinelli traces the effect of Babbage’s Principle in Marx’s idea of the ‘general intellect’ and a labour theory of knowledge, at a depth which may prove a slog for all but professional scholars of Marxism. 

A third section, ‘The Information Age’, arrives at what we’d now recognise as Artificial Intelligence where Pasquinelli excels in his choice of crucial technological pivot-points and personalities, as well as in explaining the complex ideas involved. He zips through Alan Turing, the invention of the digital electronic computer during WWII, the rise of cybernetics and interest in ‘self-organising’ systems after the war, and the work of John von Neumann and Donald Hebb aimed at emulating the human nervous system via electronics. An early practical goal was pattern recognition, needed both for reading text and for industrial control, and its pursuit created a split between those who sought to use symbolic mathematics and those who pursued solutions by statistical induction from large amounts of sample data. 

The most intriguing chapter is ‘Hayek and the Epistemology of Connectionism’ which reveals that Friedrich Hayek, co-founder of neoliberal economics, put forward a theory of human cognition which depicted our nervous system as an ‘instrument of classification’ in accordance with the ideas of Hebb’s new ‘connectionist’ school of AI. This is seldom remembered because Hayek didn’t wish for it to be implemented in hardware, believing that it already existed in the operation of markets, as aggregators of knowledge about prices. Here Pasquinelli touches upon the late-1940s debate about ‘socialist calculation’, initiated by Ludwig von Mises who argued that economic planning would prove impossible under a socialist bureaucracy due to lack of commodity prices as units of account. He was opposed by the Marxist economist Oskar Lange who later in the 1960s proposed the use of increasingly powerful computers in socialist planning. 

Pasquinelli follows the split between the ‘symbolic’ and ‘connectionist’ AI schools into a final chapter on Frank Rosenblatt’s 1957 construction of his Perceptron, the first proper artificial neural network of a kind that points toward today’s ‘deep learning’ machines. Using a camera with a 20x20 pixel grid, the Perceptron could recognise simple patterns like alphabetic characters, and the thrust of Pasquinelli’s  argument is completed by its arrival as the route to today’s functioning AI becomes visible: emulated human neurons connected into ever-wider and deeper networks and trained on huge amounts of real world data. That route spanned another 50-year ‘AI winter’ of tepid results, hampered by lack of computer processing power and training data – AI research only started sprinting again in the late 1990s with the advent of LSI (Large Scale Integration) silicon microprocessors and the Internet. 

Google LLC was founded in 1998 and quickly monopolised internet search and advertising, in the process amassing huge quantities of users’ data for free which it deployed in AI research to automate natural language translation. Pasquinelli has of necessity to skim lightly (but accurately) over this period as it would require a whole second volume to describe in detail the way these developments lead to ‘deep learning’ algorithms, pre-trained generative transformers (GPTs) and a sudden blossoming of AI power after 2020 which surprised even its own inventors, and to some extent still does. 

In his concluding chapter ‘The Automation of General Intelligence’ Pasquinelli confronts the politics of AI directly: its monopolistic ownership, and also its extractive nature which ‘scrapes’ (ie. steals) a whole corpus of human culture from the internet for training data, without payment, along with racial and other biases that creep in as a result. His own position appears broadly aligned with the Italian ‘operaismo’ movement of the Hardt and Negri strain and he never deviates from a hostile view of AI as the ultimate tool of control and surveillance over labour: “The first step of technopolitics is not technological but political. It is about emancipating and decolonising, when not abolishing as a whole, the organisation of labour and social relations on which complex technical systems, industrial robots, and social algorithms are based”.

My own inclination is more ‘culturalist’ than Pasquellini’s, forcing me to wonder whether the positive powers of AI couldn’t be tamed and harnessed to help implement schemes of participatory socialism of the sort imagined by Eduard Bernstein, Thomas Piketty and many others. Then I reflect further on the threat that deepfaked images pose to truth, privacy, democracy and even to personal identity, and wonder whether perhaps pitchforks and burning brands might not be such a bad thing after all…

 

PEACEFUL CIVIL WAR?

Dick Pountain /Political Quarterly/ 03 May 2023 09:42

BOOK REVIEW: The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism, by Martin Wolf; Allen Lane Feb 2023, pp474, £30

“Democracy is peaceful civil war. The divisions that emerge in democratic politics may, in the wrong circumstances and with the wrong people, become sources of insurrection, civil war, or creeping authoritarianism in the name of the people.” 

So says Martin Wolf, the Financial Times’ chief economic commentator for almost thirty years and now perhaps the most respected and influential financial journalist in the world. He’s an enthusiastic supporter of both capitalism and democracy and an opponent of state socialism. Surely therefore it must be rather easy to predict the opinions he will offer about the current state of the world in his substantial study ‘The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism’? Actually not. He’s not really a member of that pack of Cold-War-Liberal economists who surround the thrones of Western capitals, egging on governments to more extreme forms of neoliberal austerity. This rapidly fading clique all subscribe to the moral axiom of postwar US political and economic supremacism, namely that democracy and capitalism are inseparably joined together as ‘liberal democracy’, a system of governance so virtuous that it’s worth fighting wars to spread it around the world. 

By contrast Wolf believes that the connection between democracy and capitalism is neither moral, nor inevitable, nor unbreakable, but is rather contingent, fragile and historically determined by specific circumstances that may never arise again, and that this connection is now under the most serious threat since the 1930s. He believes a separation between democracy and capitalism must only lead to one of two kinds of catastrophe: weakening democracy leads to authoritarian plutocratic rule while weakening capitalism leads to economic stagnation and loss of innovation. The emergency measures he proposes to counter the current threat – which he’s not certain will succeed – look remarkably like those that would be proposed by a Keynesian Centre Left (if we had one).

Wolf first became a free-market enthusiast upon reading Hayek while working at the World Bank in the 1970s, but after joining the FT in the ‘80s he became ever more disillusioned with excessive veneration of the private sector, so that when the world financial crisis of 2007-8 erupted he was a strong advocate of governmental fiscal and monetary interventions and a leading light in the so-called ‘Keynesian resurgence’. Since then he’s been a vocal supporter of public goods as the guarantors of security and stability, a position that he defends and explains in some detail in this book.

His book is organised into three sections the first of which, ‘On Capitalism And Democracy’ gallops briskly through a history of human civilisations, industrial revolutions and the rise of markets. He offers a plausible account of the way commercial markets ultimately required democratic rights, even though the process of winning them was slow and stepwise through intense political struggle against vested aristocratic interests. And such rights didn’t automatically bring with them economic equity: that requires an ongoing struggle by organised labour for a welfare state and collective bargaining. Wolf walks away from his earlier infatuation with free markets thus: “Universal suffrage democracy leads to a big government by the standards of the nineteenth century. Such governments are consistent with the survival of competitive capitalism. The libertarian version of capitalism is, however, incompatible with universal suffrage democracy. People who want the former must openly admit their opposition to the latter.” Wolf sees such a drive toward plutocratic absolutism among Trump’s US Republican adherents.   

The second part, ‘What Went Wrong’, analyses the trends and events that have lead to erosion of support for political parties of both Left and Right, the rise of populist charlatans like Trump, Johnson and Bolsonaro, and the shift of capitalism away from productive investment towards the various forms of rent seeking: “The economy of the mid-twentieth century in the high-income countries, with its armies of unionized, reasonably secure, relatively well paid, and overwhelmingly male industrial workers, was the product of a particular stage of economic development, buttressed by the postwar commitment to full employment. This social and cultural pattern has vanished, together with its economic base.” He supports this conclusion with copious statistics and graphs, quoting sympathetically from progressive critics like Adam Tooze, Guy Standish and Thomas Piketty. 

Part three is weakest of the sections, in which Wolf proposes policy changes he hopes might counteract public disillusion with politics and corporations and make regulation more effective. These include accelerating the transition to renewable energy; properly financing the NHS, care and pension systems; curbing the political influence of corporate money and attacking corporate tax evasion. Some currently fashionable nostrums he rejects, like a Universal Basic Income which is “too ill-targeted to be a good use of the additional tax money that would have to be raised to pay for it”. His hope is that a package of major reforms might still improve economic security enough to restore faith in democratic politics and reduce the attraction of populist demagogues.  

It feels odd to have to defend democracy in 2023, but remember that the Leninist/Trotsyist view of ‘bourgeois democracy’ as a sham erected to conceal capitalist exploitation which must be demolished to build socialism, still has adherents in parts of the Left – the violence, corruption and incompetence of many actually-existing 20th century socialist and communist regimes, and the cascade of  ‘colour revolutions’ that ended most such regimes suggest that representative democracy does command widespread popular consent. Even so it’s reasonable to ask whether forms of ‘democratic socialism’ – as proposed for example by the Labour Party under Corbyn and McDonnell, Bernie Sanders in the USA, or the more far-reaching proposals of Thomas Piketty for ‘participatory democratic socialism’ – could eliminate the threat to democracy posed by an increasingly plutocratic, rent-seeking neoliberal global capitalism. 

Wolf’s reforms would leave capitalist property more regulated but under the same ownership and management, whereas more radical schemes demand a degree of property and control be transferred to the workforce through works councils, share ownerships and Piketty’s ambition to redistribute income, wealth and capital across successive generations. Wolf openly doubts whether the political will and electoral support can be mustered to achieve even his rather mild reforms, and far steeper obstacles face such radical schemes, but even if none of these horses is going to run, it  helps a bit for a voice as authoritative as his to confirm that the grandstand is on fire…

To me Wolf’s ‘democratic capitalism’ looks very like the social democracy that prevailed in much of the West during the post WWII boom: a mixed economy with some publicly-owned utilities operating alongside private firms, and unions representing the interests of the employed. Not a victory but rather an armistice in the class war, whereby workers agree not to expropriate capitalists in return for a fair share of the wealth they create. Almost all political economists nowadays scorn the idea of return to social democracy as impossible, proffering various reasons, sometimes dubious and contradictory. These remind me of a wry and subversive Italian proverb Al contadino no far sapere quant'è buono il cacio con le pere (Don’t let the peasants know how good pears are with cheese!)

DEATH AND/OR TAXES

Dick Pountain /The Political Quarterly/ 22 Jul 2022 11:12

The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, by Gal Beckerman; Bantam Press Feb 2022, pp352, £9.34

A Brief History Of Equality, by Thomas Piketty; Belknap Press April 2022, pp272, £16.9


When I first sat down to write this review the runners and riders had just been announced for the race within the UK Conservative Party to find a replacement for disgraced PM Boris Johnson. Out of 11 starters, 10 immediately declared their intention to reduce taxes and shrink the size of the British state, despite advice from the whole economic profession that doing so would worsen inflation and inequality. After a week the process spat out two final contenders: foreign secretary Liz Truss and the recently-ex chancellor, Rishi Sunak (whose resignation undid Johnson). Sunak had orchestrated three years of pragmatic, Keynesian emergency measures to save the British economy from Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns – measures that included cash loans to firms and a furlough scheme to help them avoid laying off employees. This needed massive government borrowing and contributed to inflation approaching 9% and a ‘cost-of-living crisis’ that the popular financial journalist Martin Lewis has warned will lead to rioting in the streets. Liz Truss berated Sunak for not promising immediate tax cuts, and since these are the catnip the Tory flock demands to vote for a winner, he had to promise some too, albeit slightly later. As we all now know, Truss won.

This depressing tax-cutting obsession among the contenders is merely the latest manifestation of the fact that neoliberalism retains a solid hold, indeed a Gramscian hegemony, over politics in most of the world, despite the massive shocks of the 2008 financial crash and a Covid pandemic that might have been expected to improve the fortunes of the Left, or at least generate some doubt about the wisdom of allowing markets to rule everything. The two books reviewed here address two different aspects of this toxic political/economic landscape.

Gal Beckerman, senior books editor at The Atlantic magazine and formerly of the New York Times, wrote The Quiet Before about the factors that have sometimes brought people out to riot in the streets throughout modern history, and about why they almost always fail in their objectives. Thomas Piketty’s latest, A Brief History Of Equality, is the work I was hoping for when I reviewed his previous book, Time For Socialism, in this journal last year. It contains a concise distillation of the findings of his two great research projects Capital In The 20th Century and Capital And Ideology, applied to political economy rather than statistical economics. It contains little new material, though it does have a penetrating analysis of the nature of Chinese ‘socialism’: its intention rather is to reach readers who would be deterred by his previous huge tomes, and among them, with luck, might be those political activists whose lack of any credible economic program is the implicit subject of Beckerman’s book.

Beckerman’s book recounts, in an engaging narrative style, 10 historic events that occurred between the 17th and 21st centuries, in places from Aix-en-Provence to Minneapolis. Not all are riots or demonstrations though several are, but all of them do involve radical and oppositional ideas, and each illustrates the effect of some recent innovation in the means of communication that made them possible. The first describes how a Provençal scholar called Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc in 1635 organised a group of volunteers from all over Europe, North Africa and even Canada, to jointly observe an eclipse of the sun so that he could measure longitude, and he used letters to communicate his detailed instructions to them all.

The second concerns a three-mile-long, million-signature petition delivered to Parliament by British Chartists in 1839, largely organised through the pages of Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star newspaper. The third (my favourite) describes the attendance of Mina Loy at a Futurist manifestation in Florence in 1913; the fourth recounts the career of Nnamdi Azikiwe (popularly known as ‘Zik’) who rose from editor of The African Morning Post newspaper in The Gold Coast to be the first president of an independent Ghana. Later chapters cover events and media from Roneo-copied fanzines and samizdat novels to emails and WhatsApp videos, US vaccine information during Covid to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville and BLM riots in Minneapolis. Each chapter is written like a short story in readable and gripping prose, so that several are as moving as they are informative.

Particularly so is Chapter 7 on the Arab Spring and occupation of Tahrir Square in Cairo, an early example of mass mobilisation via the internet. The tragic failure of this movement crystallises a thought that permeates most of his later chapters, namely that the people so mobilised and their leaders (when they had any) were woefully lacking in any programme for what success would entail, any coherent plan for changing laws and institutions. This is in stark contrast to those Chartists of Chapter 2 who clearly aimed at gaining the vote and won it after repeated arduous struggles.

Among the user reviews of Thomas Piketty’s new book, A Brief History of Equality on Amazon you’ll find quite a few hostile critics saying it contains nothing new, which isn’t true but in any case misses the point that in it Piketty presents his complex suggestions for achieving participatory socialism in a compact fashion more likely to be widely read – had it been compulsory to read all four volumes of Das Kapital there would have been no Russian Revolution.

Piketty rehearses again the facts, that economic inequality has declined overall since the middle ages, did so fastest between the 20th century’s two world wars, and is now rising again thanks to neoliberal reaction against post-WW2 social-democratic reforms. He explains more accessibly his proposed raft of solutions, which include restoring steeply progressive taxes on income, wealth and carbon emissions; redistribution of wealth and ownership in addition to income through worker share holdings, universal benefits and capital endowments, and time-expiring shareholdings designed to obstruct the emergence of dynastic ownership through inheritance. A Brief History does also contain new matter to deepen his accounts of gender politics, racism and colonialism, which goes so far as to recommend payment of a permanent ‘reparation share’ from the developed North to the South in place of international aid. This expands considerably on his conviction that the worst failure of Western social democracy was its lack of international reach, its lack of weapons for taming global capital like a worldwide financial register to regulate capital flight, tax-havens and outsourcing.

Perhaps the most interesting addition is Chapter 10's section on ‘Chinese Socialism: The Weak Points of a Perfect Digital Dictatorship’, in which Piketty analyses the nature of the Chinese regime – a crucial political question as it concerns Taiwan, support for Putin’s war in Ukraine, trade relations with the USA and much more. As expected he supports his opinion with statistics about ownership patterns:

“Barring an unexpected collapse, over the coming decades the People’s Republic of China is likely to become the greatest economic power on the planet, even if no one can predict how soon and for how long ...[ ]... The share of public capital (all levels of governments and collectivities taken together) was about 70 percent in China in 1978, at the time when reforms were begun. It declined sharply during the years 1980–1990 and until the middle of the 2000s, and has been stable at around 30 percent of the national capital since then ...[ ]... If the Western powers persist in an outdated hypercapitalist ideology, it is not at all certain that they will succeed in limiting the growing influence of the Chinese regime”.

China’s authoritarianism is anathema to his own desired participatory democratic socialism, but it might bestow the ability to enforce counter-measures to the climate crisis that democracy will prevent the West from achieving.

I suggested earlier that these two books between them offer hints as to why the Left is languishing rather than flourishing since the 2008 crisis, which demands some further explanation. Piketty offered these terse explanations in Capital And Ideology, namely that “a dis­illusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement” followed from the collapse of the Soviet Union, and that “the less educationally advantaged classes came to believe that the parties of the Left now favour the newly advantaged educated classes and their children over people of more modest backgrounds”. Both of these observations suggest that Marxist ideas of class and class-struggle no longer retain much political traction among Western working populations, who were relatively happy with the compromises won by social-democracy after WWII and whose anger at having them removed by neoliberalist reaction is easily deflected onto immigrants and college-educated Leftists who tell them off for not struggling hard enough.

The legacy of Marxism to Western leftists, faint as it is, has been mostly a hindrance: a vote-losing moralism and a contempt for social-democracy as a partial solution that falls short of full state socialism. This situation has generated an important debate among contemporary Marxists about the precise nature of late, technological capitalist states and their huge increase in inequality: are capitalists losing faith in investment and innovation altogether and becoming pure rentiers; have they become less reliant upon extracting surplus value through the wage mechanism and now expropriate value directly (for example when Google and Facebook ‘steal’ users’ data for free); is colonialism really over or does it persist in disguised forms?

A few, Piketty included, synthesise these doubts into a more realistic picture which abandons dogmatic adherence to Marx. From its inception during the Renaissance and Industrial Revolution, ‘capitalism’ has never been purely dependent on surplus value extraction but has always plundered too – South American silver and gold, slavery, unpaid housework, cheap eastern labour – and reinvested the proceeds into ‘pure’ European capitalist production. Jason Moore, another unorthodox critic puts it thus: “capitalism thrives when islands of commodity production and exchange can appropriate oceans of potentially Cheap Natures – outside the circuit of capital but essential to its operation.” In A Brief History Piketty moves further in this direction, extending his earliest concerns of property, borders and education into greater emphasis on gender politics, racial and colonial matters, as well as by frankly describing his recommendations as both democratic and participatory socialism.

A largely technophobic Left is prone to exaggerating the malignancy of the giant US tech corporations. Their global communications system of unprecedented power is currently being abused for surveillance, high-speed speculation, tax evasion and the operation of 'gig' companies like Uber and AirBnB to undermine regulation and organised labour. However it could with sufficient political will be made to serve progress, as several of Beckerman’s stories suggest and as Piketty acknowledges in a closing section called ‘Will Money Creation Save Us?’ Experience of the Covid pandemic has shown what can be achieved by printing money, and if that causes inflation then the proper cure is not austerity but more robust collection of corporate taxes: “In theory, nothing forbids us to go further. Today, no currency is defined in relationship to gold or to a material referent: currency is above all an electronic sign on computers, which the central banks can create without limits. There are even plans to set up central bank digital currencies in the near future. Individuals would have digital accounts at their country’s central bank, which would permit banks to directly credit individuals’ accounts, rather than routing through private banks and enterprises…”

What a fine irony if Engels’ ‘withering away of the state’ were to be finally achieved by the banks working together with severely-chastened tech giants like Amazon, Google, Facebook. Piketty concludes that “Economic questions are too important to be left to others. Citizens’ reappropriation of this knowledge is an essential stage in the battle for equality. If this book has given readers new weapons for this battle, my goal will have been fully realized” – to which I would merely add that reading Gal Beckerman's book as well will prepare them better for the travails they face before achieving it.

BEYOND HYPERCAPITAL

Book review: ‘Time For Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016-2021’ by Thomas Piketty. Yale University Press 2021, 346pp

To begin this review it would be hard to improve upon Thomas Piketty’s own opening:

“If someone had told me in 1990 that I would publish a collection of articles in 2020 entitled Vivement le socialisme! in French, I would have thought it was a bad joke. As an 18-year-old, I had just spent the autumn of 1989 listening to the collapse of the communist dictatorships and ‘real socialism’ in Eastern Europe on the radio.”

Piketty became famous for his huge, painstaking volumes of economic and ideological history which explore the trajectory of inequality through the ages in great statistical detail. Though these works do clearly favour decreasing inequality, he made few explicitly polemical political statements in them. The final section of ‘Capital and Ideology’ (reviewed here in vol 91/4) did sketch a package of radical fiscal and institutional reforms that he believed would reduce global inequality, but it appears the sheer rapidity and intensity of the crises in global industrial civilisation has stimulated him into a more public declaration. The confluence of potentially terminal climate change, Covid pandemic, populist retreat into nationalism and war, energy shortage and supply chain collapse leads him to espouse a by-no-means easy or fashionable cause :

“Born in 1971, I belong to a generation that did not have time to be tempted by communism, and which became adult when the absolute failure of sovietism was already obvious. Like many, I was more liberal than socialist in the 1990s, as proud as a peacock of my judicious observations, and suspicious of my elders and all those who were nostalgic. I could not stand those who obstinately refused to see that the market economy and private property were part of the solution. But now, thirty years later, in 2020, hypercapitalism has gone much too far, and I am now convinced that we need to think about a new way of going beyond capitalism, a new form of socialism, participative and decentralized, federal and democratic, ecological, multiracial, and feminist.”

These multiple problems facing the world are overlaid and interwoven in ways that make analysis extremely challenging, only possible by clearly identifying the most significant factors, and there Piketty shares the choice of his countryman Tocqueville who believed that “there is almost no issue of public interest which does not derive from taxes or end up with taxes.”

This puts him at odds with orthodox Marxists who see the possession of capital and exploitation of labour as the primary evils, and insurrectionary expropriation as the cure.
Abandoning his earlier liberalism in favour of ‘participatory socialism’ means that Piketty proposes we struggle not for one class to own the state, but rather to defend sufficient legitimacy in a social-democratic state, against both right-libertarian attempts to demolish it and authoritarian-populist attempts to turn it into instrument of surveillance and coercion, so that it retains the ability to redistribute income, wealth and property through progressive taxation, education, global fiscal transparency and enforcement. Historically-speaking this ambition aligns him more closely with the gradualist socialism of Marx and Engel’s contemporary Eduard Bernstein than with those Leninist and Trotskyist strands that still exert such influence on the contemporary Left, and have so made ‘centrist’ into a dirty word.

Bernstein observed that “democracy is a condition of socialism to a much greater degree than is usually assumed, i.e. it is not only the means but also the substance” while Piketty adds to this that “history shows that inequality is essentially ideological and political, not economic or technological”. Inequality can potentially be eradicated by changing people’s minds, and Piketty has already demonstrated that following five centuries of extraordinary inequality due to ownership by kings and aristocrats (and barely altered by the French Revolution), the 20th century saw it halved by precisely such means. Inequality is currently on the rise again – a counter-reformation wrought by neoliberal corruption of the programmes of ‘centrist’ parties – but it remains low in historical terms.

Piketty is not a naïve centrist and doesn’t imagine that eradication of inequality can be accomplished without extraordinary resistance from the billionaires and corporations who stand to lose, and who have vast financial, ideological and coercive powers at their disposal. He’s not a politician, nor even a political scientist, and hence confines himself to painting a picture of the institutions and tax regimes that would need be put in place to achieve a just, global, participatory socialist economy: the political programmes and organisations required to get there remain beyond his purview (and indeed perhaps beyond anyone’s right now) but a well-thought-out picture of the ultimate goal is a big step toward initiating the necessary debates and struggles.

Most of the content of ‘Time For Socialism’ is a collection of 58 of Piketty’s monthly columns for the French newspaper Le Monde between 2016 and 2021, few longer than four pages. It begins with a strong 26-page introduction which explains his principal ideas about taxation, redistribution and internationalism, followed by 13 columns about coping with globalisation, some of which dispel myths about the relative productivity of various nations, the Chinese phenomenon and Basic Income versus Fair Wages. The next 20 focus on specifically French reforms, with an excoriating denunciation of Macron’s scrapping of their successful Wealth Tax, and a harsh critique of the Parcoursup education reform (which that tax would have better financed). A further 21 concern reform of the EU, with an emphasis on democratising it by greater involvement of national parliaments and the removal of the unanimity rule that stymies most progressive reforms. The final four columns arrive at January 2021 and cover European Left unity, Covid-19 debt, the perilous state of US democracy after the Capitol invasion, and two extraordinary maps of world inequality that reveal its highs and lows everywhere. As you might expect from previous Piketty works, almost every column features a graph, not all of which appeared in the Le Monde originals, some being imported from his research papers. I must warn any graphophobes that many of these contain quite challenging amounts of data.

These essays emphasise the daunting task progressives face in resisting and taming what Piketty describes as ‘hypercapitalism’. The principal weapons deployed by the neoliberal counter-reformation have been fiscal opacity (hiding assets in offshore tax havens), fiscal dumping (encouragement of a ‘race-to-the bottom’ in low taxation that deprives competing nation-states of revenue), outsourcing and social dumping (exporting manufacture to low-pay countries and/or importing low-paid workers to undermine trade unions and pay rates). In ‘Capital and Ideology’ Piketty claimed that the decline of post-WWII social democracies has largely seen caused by the failure of national parties to build sufficiently powerful international links and institutions: in this book he expands that diagnosis to claim that tackling the looming climate crisis and disarming those potent neoliberal weapons will require a unified, internationalist solution – increased tax revenues permit more investment in decarbonisation and job creation. One might describe such efforts as ‘hyperkeynesism’ though I’m not sure he would like that:

“...no valid environmental policy can be carried out if it is not part of a global socialist project based on the reduction of inequalities, the permanent circulation of power and property, and the redefinition of economic indicators.”

In essence this requires the restoration of steeply progressive taxes on the revenues of corporations and the wealth of billionaires, instituting a global register of assets to provide transparency, and a network of treaties imposing global standards of minimum wages and taxes. Piketty is aware that neither world government nor a world tax inspector are either desirable or possible, and that demanding unanimity creates a serious obstacle to major reform (think of the UN veto here). Instead we have to devise structures within which nation states can reform at their own pace while being incentivised to co-operate, a situation he labels ‘social-federalism’ as opposed to the ‘national-liberalism’ exemplified by Brexit:

“The nationalists attack the free circulation of people: social-federalism must deal with the circulation of capital and the fiscal impunity of the wealthiest”

So is this book a good introduction to Piketty’s ideas for readers who lack the time (or courage) to tackle the great tomes? Better for Le Monde readers perhaps, as non-specialist English readers may find the section on French policy obscure, but his introduction and the later essays do constitute a fair summary.

An obvious, easy, and not very useful criticism is that should democracy itself fail, which is less unthinkable than it was a decade ago, then all bets would be off (and discussion of precisely what forms of tyranny might ensue is fodder for internet trolls rather than this esteemed journal). A different point interests me, namely his brave choice of the term ‘socialism’ which he himself clearly feels to be a radical step. France, along with many other countries, already has a Socialist Party whose reputation has suffered badly in recent decades – and it’s quite impossible to imagine any party with ‘socialist’ in its name ever being elected in the USA.

It’s very hard to think of satisfactory alternatives though, and Piketty habitually prefixes the term with ‘participatory’ for the serious reason that his proposals are not fully-formed policies
but meant to spur extensive debate and argument. I’ll therefore leave the last word to him too:

“History will decide whether the word ‘socialism’ is definitively dead and must be replaced. For my part, I think that it can be saved, and even that it remains the most appropriate term to describe the idea of an alternative economic system to capitalism. In any case, one cannot just be ‘against’ capitalism or neoliberalism: one must also and above all be ‘for’ something else, which requires precisely designating the ideal economic system that one wishes to set up, the just society that one has in mind, whatever name one finally decides to give it.”

 

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 31 Oct 2021

 

A NATION DIVIDED

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 8th Apr 2021

Book review: ‘Brexitland: Identity, Diversity and the Reshaping of British Politics’ by Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford, Cambridge University Press 2020, 410pp

Let’s kick off with a thought experiment. Imagine there’s a pandemic of a lethal virus, but for some reason it’s only possible to vaccinate half of the world’s population. The population becomes divided between those still susceptible to infection, who will find they have a harder time finding employment, can’t mix socially with the inoculated and are generally looked-down upon. They become deeply resentful and hostile toward those who have been inoculated.

OK, experiment over. Such a condition actually exists right now, but it’s not caused by the SARS CoV 2 virus – in their book Brexitland Sobolewska and Ford argue that Brexit was the culmination of conflicts that had been building in the UK electorate for decades, rather than their cause:

" ‘Brexitland’ is the name we give to our divided nation, but while Brexit gives a name and a voice to these divides, they are not new. They have their roots in trends which have been running for generations – educational expansion, mass immigration and ethnic change".

So the EU Referendum wasn't a moment of creation but one of awakening, when long-term social and political processes finally became sufficiently obvious to different voting groups for them to separate into distinct and opposed camps called ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’. Sobolewska and Ford are Professors of Political Science at Manchester, where Sobolewska leads an ESRC research project on identity politics in Britain, hence the framework for their analysis of the Brexit result is built around identity and ethnocentricity:

“... ethnocentric worldviews have a powerful impact on politics, and provide a powerful and intuitive theoretical explanation for potent political conflicts which are, at root, about group identities and group boundaries.”

The anthropological concept of ethnocentrism means to judge other peoples’ cultures, practices, behaviors and beliefs by your own standards (regarded as superior) rather than by their own. In politics it encourages solidarity with your own group and hostility toward other groups and so encompasses various attitudes which nowadays tend to be lumped together (rightly or wrongly) as ‘racism’.

The authors categorise the British voting population using a three-fold typology based on degrees of ethnocentrism, which they have measured and distinguished using questionnaires and by analysing voting patterns: ‘Identity conservatives’ favour their own kind and culture, which they fear is being diluted by immigration: historically they have voted for the Conservative Party; ‘Conviction identity liberals’ are cosmopolitan, actively embrace multiculturalism and oppose racism and sexism: historically they have voted Labour, Liberal-Democrat or Green; ‘Necessity identity liberals’ are immigrants or their descendants whose experience of racism in the UK has made them vote Labour alongside conviction liberals, even though their core values are otherwise far less liberal (especially on sexual mores and orientation).

Note the term ‘identity’ which all these three designations share: Brexitland offers a rigorous statistical and demographic analysis of the way in which identity has displaced economic class as the main determinant of political allegiance in the UK, steadily since WWII but speeding up in the 1960s, a phenomenon often popularly referred to as ‘culture war’. One of their more important findings confirms a strong correlation between voting patterns and educational status, since conviction liberals tend to be university graduates while identity conservatives tend to be either old or else ‘white school leavers’ without higher education. This typology is more subtle and more difficult than it first appears because these don’t claim to be total personality types but merely tendencies that may become more or less prominent in different political contexts, and hence are wide open to manipulation by astute demagogues.

Over 11 densely detailed and argued chapters (illustrated by a profusion of graphs) Sobolewska and Ford unpick several transformatory demographic forces that passed through the UK polity since WWII. Immigration came in two waves, a first from the Commonwealth starting from the 1948 British Nationality Act – including the so-called ‘Windrush Generation’ – and a second wave under New Labour from the enlarged EU, which started in 2004. The hostility these two waves generated differed, the first producing Enoch Powell’s ‘rivers of blood’, the National Front and BNP, while the second produced UKIP and the Brexit Referendum.

That difference was in large part due to a second force, the massive expansion of further education since the 1970s under both Conservative and New Labour governments. In 1988 15% of school leavers went to university but by 1994 that had risen to 33% and is rising still. Further demographic forces at work were deindustrialisation, which caused a weakening of the traditional Labour vote, and the rise of regional nationalisms in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland which further drove identity conservatives away from the Labour Party. The complex interaction of all these forces over time, steered this way and that by political agents and agendas, compounded by constituency boundary changes, geography and urbanism, has resulted in the Labour Party ceasing to be largely a party of the industrial working class and becoming instead a party of the university-educated middle and professional classes.

Sobolewska and Ford’s work points in a similar direction to Thomas Piketty’s, which depicts in Capitalism And Ideology a 'Brahmin Left' that has become divorced from its proletarian class origins – and also like Piketty, they see the drift back toward identity politics as a symptom of detachment from politics altogether in many representative democracies. By a particularly tragic irony, an influx of young conviction liberals fostered the illusion that Jeremy Corbyn could turn Labour voters back toward socialism, an error that ultimately facilitated the triumph of a hard Brexit and Johnson’s 80-seat majority.

Sobolewska and Ford studiously maintain their commitment to demography and data throughout Brexitland and avoid any major digressions into psychology, not for want of knowledge because they refer in footnotes to Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt’s work on authoritarianism. However having previously reviewed Haidt’s The Righteous Mind for this journal, I’m tempted to extrapolate a little myself. Recent research reveals that young children who overhear negative comments about some unfamiliar social group may acquire long-lasting bias against that group, while Haidt’s own experiments found that liberal subjects score lower on a ‘fear of contamination’ than conservatives. The extreme vitriol and polarisation which Brexit provoked may stem from deep-seated psychological differences triggering powerful emotions that obstruct rational debate: perhaps it is possible to eliminate such biases by education, but they may equally reassert themselves with advancing age.

Two problems have vexed me for a decade, firstly why have so many of the world’s democratic electorates converged on a condition approaching stalemate with almost exactly half their populations voting for populist parties, and secondly how many Leave voters were surreptitiously voting for a complete halt to immigration (and equally secretly hoping for the removal of most migrants once Brexit is completed)? For obvious reasons Sobolewska and Ford didn’t put such a blunt, even offensive, question in their project.

Sobolewska and Ford do expect that identity politics will permanently transform the UK electorate, but not in any easily predictable direction. Their final section examines three possible futures which they label ‘fragmentation’, ‘restoration’ and ‘replacement’. Fragmentation could happen if

“identity conflicts prove impossible to contain within a two-party system still structured around economic divides, and voters become split between three, four or more substantial parties.”

This would prove chaotic under first-past-the-post and hence revive interest in some form of Proportional Representation. Restoration means a return to the traditional class-based fight between Labour and the Conservatives if

“identity conflicts fall down the agenda, for example, if a sustainable Brexit end state arrives and conflicts over immigration fade with the implementation of a new migration system.”

The third scenario, Replacement, sees one or both the traditional governing parties fail to accommodate identity conflicts and disappear, as its voters shift en masse to parties that better reflect their concerns. This happens rarely but is not unknown, and they invoke the collapse of the British Liberals after WWI or of Canada’s Progressive Conservative Party in 1993.

Brexitland ends on a not quite pessimistic note for Labour supporters, because the proportion of identity conservatives in the electorate ought to decline as older cohorts die off and more youngsters go to university. However that alone won’t overcome the loss of Scottish and Red Wall seats, the party’s confusions over Brexit and immigration, and the low-intensity civil war between Starmer and Corbyn supporters. It will need a combination of determination, deviousness and openness to alliances as skillful as that deployed by the Brexiteers:

“The past decade has belonged to those who activated and mobilised identity conservatives. The next decades may belong to those who learn to do the same with identity liberals.”

IN PURSUIT OF THE JUST ECONOMY

Dick Pountain/ Political Quarterly/ 18 Jul 2020

Book Review: ‘Capital and Ideology’ by Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press Harvard, 2019, pp1091

Thomas Piketty's place as the current scholar of inequality would be hard to dispute. His first huge project, 'Capital In The Twentieth Century' assembled and analysed statistical evidence for economic inequality throughout recorded history, demonstrating that it had remained roughly constant until exponential growth began after the British Industrial Revolution. This growth was interrupted by a pronounced dip between the 20th-century's two World Wars, but has now resumed to a point where 1% of the world population owns 50% of its wealth. 

In this new volume ‘Capital and Ideology’, Piketty applies the same meticulous research methodology to the related question of the different ways that people have justified economic inequality throughout history, and to what was responsible for that dip, which takes him into the realm of political economy. Comparison of his work to Karl Marx's Capital feels inescapable – the significance of his focus on ‘inequality’ versus Marx's focus on ‘exploitation’; the choice of ideology for his second volume, when Marx famously didn't live long enough to fully tackle the subject. However Piketty ends the book with a set of radical and concrete proposals that perhaps demand more attention given the current worldwide crisis. 

Piketty diverges from Marx right from the start, since for him ideology isn’t entirely determined by the mode of production but is conditioned by multiple factors and thus can play out differently at different places and times. In this he is closer to Weber, Veblen, Bourdieu and Boltanski. The gap widens since he treats ‘class’ not as the foundational category it was for Marx but as a secondary effect of factors that include income, wealth and education. He starts the book with a definition of ideology so commonsensical as to be an affront to post-Althusserian, post-modern orthodoxy: 

I use “ideology” in a positive and constructive sense to refer to a set of a priori plausible ideas and discourses describing how society should be struc­tured. An ideology has social, economic, and political dimensions. It is an attempt to respond to a broad set of questions concerning the desirable or ideal organization of society. Given the complexity of the issues, it should be obvious that no ideology can ever command full and total assent: ideological conflict and disagreement are inherent in the very notion of ideology.

For Piketty all ideologies exist to answer two categories of question – about borders (who is us and who is them?) and about property (who’s allowed to own who or what?). The bulk of ‘Capital and Ideology’ consists of detailed examinations of statistics about various ‘inequality regimes’ that have arisen throughout history and across the world – this is not a wholly Eurocentric work even if he does apologise for speaking only French and English. 

Like Marx he periodises history, but not into the same eras. For Piketty premodern societies have a ternary or ‘trifunctional’ structure divided between three classes, the military (warriors, kings, nobles), the clerical (priests, lawyers, scholars), and a ‘third estate’ of merchants, artisans, peasants and workers. The French Revolution marked the first overturning of such an order, to inaugurate the era of ownership or ‘proprietarian’ regimes which separate possession of power from property and create the modern state (though for a long time political rights remain confined to property owners). Proprietarian regimes diminish the influence of the clergy and instead ‘sacralise’ private property itself to render it unquestionable by any political agent. 

The first three parts of the book deal with premodern trifunctional and slave societies, proprietarian and colonial societies, and culminate with the more egalitarian communist and social­-democratic regimes that arose in the 20th century after periodic crises of proprietarian regimes generated resistance from the lower, ‘disadvantaged’ classes. It was these regimes which created that mid-century dip in inequality. In a review of this length I can barely sketch the breadth and complexity of Piketty’s analysis so I’ll cut straight to the chase: he regards communism and social democracy as both having failed, causing a return to extreme inequality in the ‘hypercapitalist’ and ‘postcommunist’ societies we are living through in the 21st century.

For Piketty communism failed because dogmatic application of Marxist theory merely sacralised state property instead of private property: the authoritarianism and economic stagnation this engendered undid those regimes so deeply that post-communist regimes in Russia, China, and Eastern Europe have become staunch supporters of 21st-century neo-liberal ‘hypercapitalism’. It also instilled in the Western democracies a “dis­illusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement”.

He concedes that the social-democratic alternative was the more successful, but began to unravel with the elections of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher (a process completed by the elections of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson). Social­-democratic parties had lost the ability and ambition to redistribute wealth, which allowed the living standards of middle and working classes to stagnate and then erode. Competition between states to lower taxes, encouraged for example by EU membership, compounded this situation. Post-war educational reforms gradually lead to those with higher education voting Left while those without voted Right, an ironic role-reversal that anti-i­mmigrant parties (and factions within older parties) were quick to exploit. Also, while for 50 years the mere existence of a communist counter-model had inhibited capitalist elites and par­ties hostile to redistribution, that inhibition was lifted with the fall of the Soviet Union. But for Piketty the most significant flaw of social-democratic politics lay in confining itself within the nation state, and thus failing to construct the international structures needed to combat capitalist tax evasion and outsourcing. 

For me the crux of his argument, and the most engrossing part of the book, is Part 4 entitled ‘Rethinking The Dimensions Of Political Conflict’. In three chapters on ‘Borders and Property’, ‘Brahmin Left’ and ‘Social Nativism’ Piketty applies his schemas to the current politics of the UK, USA, Europe, India and Brazil. By analysing statistics on voting patterns, wealth and education he demolishes perceptions of the balance of electoral forces on both Left and Right. His thesis will be controversial and likely to evoke furious condemnation from the Left. He contends that the Left-Right cleavage (which he labels as ideologically ‘classist’) is being displaced by a more complex set of contests:

Briefly put, the social hypothesis is this: that the less educationally advantaged classes came to believe that the parties of the left now favor the newly advantaged educated classes and their children over people of more modest backgrounds [...]  the classist left­ right party systems of the postwar era have given way to a system of dual elites consisting of a “Brahmin left” attractive to the highly educated and a “merchant right” attractive to the wealthy and highly paid.

The political struggle is no longer two- but four-sided: inegalitarian internationalists (pro-immigrant, pro-rich); inegalitarian nativists (anti-immigrant, pro­-rich); egalitarian internationalists (pro­-immigrant, pro-poor); and egalitarian nativists (anti-­immigrant, pro­-poor). Older ruling parties, like both Labour and Conservative in the UK and Republican/Democrat in the USA, are often internally split along such lines, and egalitarian nativists may of course merely adopt an egalitarian pose as an electoral tactic – a whole three-page section is devoted to his critique of the term ‘populist’. 

Piketty is certainly a reformist, but not a liberal reformist. In the final chapter 17 of Part 4 he proposes fiscal and legal measures sufficiently radical that if implemented they would, he claims, transcend capitalism: he regards them as a minimum requirement to bring the egalitarian portions of the electorate back together. These measures include a return to steeply progressive taxation, with confiscatory wealth, property, inheritance and carbon taxes. Rather than a universal basic income he demands a universal capital endowment to be paid to everyone on their 25th birthday. Industry is to be co-managed through compulsory representation of workers on all company boards, and fiscal transparency to be imposed through a world-wide financial register. And to top it all off, Piketty recommends constitutional amendments to protect these measures against future diminution. 

He refrains from putting exact figures on tax rates and board numbers on the grounds that these are matters for public, political debate and negotiation, hence his own preferred label of ‘participatory socialism’. Such policies could equally be described as radical, ‘Bernsteinian’ social democracy. Whatever we call them, they’re precisely the concrete political-economic policies so badly needed by, but so conspicuously absent from, recent radical movements like Occupy Wall Street. 

Marx’s ‘Capital’ was the foundational document of 20th-century labour movements and thus changed history, but his insights became ossified into a quasi-religious dogma that still hinders even the democratic Left via an unspoken teleological belief that history leads us inevitably toward success: “would be revolutionaries who argue that nothing can be done until the conditions for revolution are ripe” in Piketty’s words. The 21st-century world he analyses is one already altered by Marx, and his multi-factorial approach can help us understand why the Left/Right demarcation became so confused. 

Capitalists will certainly mobilise colossal resources to oppose these measures, and when I first proposed this review to our esteemed Literary Editor on 19th February 2020 I might well have joined a chorus accusing Piketty of naivety. What neither of us knew was that 9 cases of Covid-19 had been reported in the UK that day. Two weeks later there were 85, a month after that 43,282. That's what 'exponential' looks like, those are the sorts of fact in which Piketty deals. We face economic meltdown of a depth yet to be plumbed, and maybe a moment of historic bifurcation where the only alternatives are something like Piketty’s participatory socialism or descent into a neo-feudal regime with most people jobless and poor, and the insulated, corona-vaccinated 1% as a new ‘nobility’.