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
