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.
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