“Capital and Ideology” (2020) is the long-awaited sequel to French economist Thomas Piketty’s 2013 opus, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”. Whereas the first volume was a fairly dry text, heavily informed by Piketty’s lifetime of data collection and research on the true extent and causes of economic inequality, this second volume aspires to something more like history, sociology or even political philosophy. Piketty is a polymath and, for better and worse, he has opinions on everything and wants to share them with you. Nevertheless, this is another 1,000+ page tome, so to save y’all the trouble of reading it I’ve attempted to distill the key lessons of each part of the book into this five-part reading guide, which I’ll be posting weekly over the course of March 2021. Today’s blog will provide a general review and introduction to Piketty’s core arguments.
When I began this project, I wanted to take the time and give “Capital and Ideology” proper consideration. Piketty is a serious contributor to economic policy debates, with robust data backing him up and a strong, central message. He was an invaluable influence on my thinking when I was writing my first book, “Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder”, and the role of ideology in social order is a foundational leftist question. I regret to report, however, that “Capital and Ideology” does not reach the same heights as its predecessor. A much shorter book [300 pages] making the same arguments would not have gone unnoticed in the broader left-utopian publishing sphere - there’s genuine insights in the text that are worth engaging with. But as an editor myself, let me just say this book is many hundreds of pages too long - there are very many lengthy digressions and repetitive historical examples that add little of value. It’s too long for a polemic and too disorganised to treat as a a serious work of scholarship.
Theodicy and the construction of inequality regimes
I’ve noted before on this blog that liberalism has a theodicy problem: if all men [sic] are created equal, then why is inequality everywhere? Piketty’s book, if it had to be summed up as addressing one central problem, generalises this observation to construct a theory of inequality regimes. Here, ‘regime’ is being used in the same sense as in my second book, a social order that proscribes a specified set of benefits to a specified set of beneficiaries. Inequality is everywhere, Piketty begins, so “every human society must justify its inequalities". Inequality regimes are ideologies that legitimise the inequality that exists in the material world, and upon the basis of which people develop rules, norms and institutions that make sense of their social order.
“[Every] inequality regime is associated with a corresponding theory of justice. Inequalities need to be justified; they must rest on a plausible, coherent vision of an ideal political and social organisation. Every society therefore needs to answer a series of conceptual and practical questions about the boundaries of the community [the political regime], the organisation of property relations [the property regime], access to education [the education regime] and the apportionment of taxes [the fiscal regime].“
Note that the ‘truth-value’ or hegemonic nature of any given inequality regime is irrelevant; every justification of inequality “contains its share of truth and exaggeration, boldness and cowardice, idealism and self-interest”. What matters is whether a regime successfully legitimises and stabilises a particular social order - at least for a little while. Piketty is not explicit in doing so, but his approach to ideology fits [as mine does] within the broader field of Cultural Evolutionary Studies. For Piketty, ideologies are in constant dialogue with the need to solve social problems, and evolve and change overtime in haphazard and uncontrolled ways until they are replaced by something more fit. Piketty’s historical method is admirably historically contingent - ideologies are experiments enacted by stressed politicians and bureaucrats in times of crisis who often have little sense of the social changes they’re making.
“Each nation’s political and ideological trajectory can be seen as a vast process of collective learning and historical experimentation. Conflict is inherent in this process because different social and political groups have not only different interests and aspirations but also different memories. Hence they interpret past events differently and draw different implications regarding the future.”
Nevertheless, the book would have benefitted from a more serious engagement with evolutionary sociological literature. This is something of a theme in Piketty’s work - he’s more likely to invent his own term or concept than engage in debates with existing academic disciplines.
What kind of leftist is Piketty anyway?
For Piketty, inequality is neither economic nor technological - it is political and ideological, the result of conscious and unconscious social choices which are enacted by people and could have been enacted differently. The inequalities that exist today (which, Piketty’s data constantly reminds us, is worse today that at any time since the Gilded Age) and the institutions that maintain it are not the only ones possible - change is permanent and inevitable, and we do not live in the best of all possible worlds. It bears mentioning here that both orthodox Marxists [e.g. Gramsci] and leftists working in the broader Marxian tradition [e.g. Habermas etc.] have already problematised the classical deterministic understanding of the relationship between economic base and ideological superstructure. Dialectical materialism, correctly understood, is a philosophical practice that emphasises social change as a process, a dynamic, and a movement.
Nevertheless, Piketty himself is often contemptuous when writing about mainstream socialism, and treats Marxism as synonymous with narrow economism - in which the structure of society is purely materalistic, deterministic and decidedly Newtonian in outlook and character. This may be something of straw man, but Piketty himself sometimes hints that he’s veering in precisely the opposite direction. The ideological sphere is “truly autonomous”, we are told and “given an economy and a set of productive forces at a certain stage of development, a range of possible ideological, political and inequality regimes always exist". The truth lies somewhere between these two strawmen - some ideological variation is always possible, but which variations are stable is a question that only a dialectical or evolutionary sociology can tell us. Piketty is too sensible to outright endorse pure idealism, and the vast bulk of the text is finely graduated story of the historical contingencies and accidents that led to the emergence of each inequality regime in each particular time and place. But a strain of idealism underpins both his analysis and the kinds of solutions he thinks should be pursued, as if solving the greatest social, economic and political questions of our age were just a matter of finding the right policy mix.
Despite the sheer radicalism of Piketty’s policy proposals, the book itself embodies an almost instinctual dismissal of revolutionary change. Piketty, a tenured economic professor at one of France’s most prestigious institutions of learning, disdains the so-called populist left, most varieties of localism and mass movements in general. As a confirmed liberal of the self-described Rawlsian variety, his eyes are fixed firmly on the multinational and institutional - good policy is an end result of good institutional design. No one should have any doubts about Piketty’s genuine commitment to popular democracy or to a radical redistribution of wealth but like most utopians he’s unwilling or unable to outright acknowledge that the true barrier to the kind of reform he wants isn’t bad ideas or bad values but the entrenched social power of institutions with vastly more social and political influence than any reformer.
So what *does* Piketty want to do about all this inequality?
Like any good utopian book, “Capital and Ideology” is replete with ideas and schemes to remedy the injustices and inequalities it identifies. Piketty describes his outlook as ‘participatory socialism’ and he’s more or less explicit that this is little more than re-branding of the currently de rigueur current of democratic socialism. In this sense, in policy terms it’s not too different from the sorts of proposals you’d hear from Paul Mason, Rutger Bremen, Stephanie Kelton, or even myself - though I will give Piketty credit for dreaming big. The core element of Piketty’s programme are social and temporary ownership of the means of production, an universal capital endowment [universal basic inheritance], strongly progressive taxes on property, inheritance and income, educational justice and more participatory democracy.
I’ll say a few things about these specific programs in a moment, but the details aren’t really that important. None have any chance of being implemented, nor does Piketty offer even the hints of a work program that would bring them closer to fruition. Like a disaster capitalist, Piketty is putting his plans on a shelf in the hope that they’ll be be dusted off by harried bureaucrats the next time a crisis rolls around. But from the perspective of the middle stages of the worst economic crises in a century caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s clear that no one with real power is reading “Capital and Ideology” in search of a way out.
Co-determination in workplace management - a corporate structure whereby workers in a firm have a permanent right to representation on management boards - is of course an idea that is long overdue. It’s proved highly successful in those countries that have adopted it, and democracy at work has been a core demand of socialists for a hundred years. Piketty also remains a strong advocate of a hefty wealth tax, on all forms of capital (not just real property), that would return 1 per cent or more of capital wealth to society each year and act as a strong incentive against hoarding. His central concept, ‘temporary ownership’, aims to emphasise that ownership is not seen as exclusive and legitimate right of any one individual, but rather as a stewardship of a society’s surplus value on behalf of future generations. In fact, Piketty’s full-throated embrace of heavily progressive taxes on almost all forms of wealth and income is fucking admirable in this day and age. One of the core things a wealth tax would fund would be a universal capital endowment [a sort of universal basic inheritance] for all citizens, a sort of permanent land reform or rolling libertarian ‘year zero’. Although as Piketty points out later on educational justice means that most states could also spend about the same order of magnitude educating a child from birth through to tertiary degree, so the question of how best to allocate that inheritance, I think, remains an open one.
So, what’s next?
There are good ideas in “Capital and Ideology” - the concept of inequality regimes, the ‘Brahmin Left’, ‘propertarianism’, trifunctional societies etc. - that will be picked up and discussed for years to come, but you shouldn’t have to slog through 1040 pages just to get to the good stuff. So I’ve done that for you! Future parts of this reading guide will be published weekly, every Monday. Links to each part are provided below for future reference:
Part 2: The French Revolution and Propertarian Liberalism [published 8 March]
Part 3: Liberal Imperialism and the Globalisation of Inequality [published 15 March]
Part 4: The Great Transformation, or How to Destroy Capital in Three Easy Steps [published 22 March]
Part 5: The Brahmin Left and the Nazbol Vortex [published 29 March]