Thomas Piketty, whose new book Capital in the Twenty-First Century is enjoying maximum exposure across the globe at the moment, is being described in much of the mainstream media as a Marxist or an 'anti-capitalist' (the headline below is from the recent Mayday edition of the London Evening Standard). Not only does this description mischaracterize Piketty's arguments, it also traduces Marxism. Piketty expresses no interest in ending the exploitation and alienation of capitalism; he is a liberal concerned with economic inequality who proposes higher rates of taxation for the wealthy - an entirely respectable and mainstream position. He even told a New York Times interviewer that 'private property and market institutions' are necessary for 'economic efficiency and personal freedom' - a conviction he seems to have acquired during a visit to Romania in the immediate post-Soviet era. Given that such facts are easily discoverable and quite widely known, one can only marvel at the journalistic disingenuity on display here.
Turning to the economic arguments of the book itself, Piketty's argument about growing 'income inequality', as Andrew Kliman has pointed out, rests on a number of dubious assumptions (e.g. Piketty excludes the social wage from his definition of working class income). Moreover, Piketty's rebuke of Marxist economic analysis for its supposedly mistaken reliance on the theory of the falling rate of profit ('an historical prediction that has turned out to be quite wrong') seems wrongheaded: Marx only argued for the tendency of the profit rate to fall - and in any case, as Marxist economists such as Michael Roberts have shown, there is indeed evidence of a secular decline in world profit rates since the 1960s.
Piketty articulates a centre-left politics, arguing that inequality is a threat to 'democratic societies' and the 'values of social justice on which they are based'. But there is a question for Piketty here: if 'democratic societies' really are based on 'values of social justice', why do they systematically generate the kind of inequality Piketty documents? I don't mean to suggest here that Piketty's book is worthless; but it is hardly 'anti-capitalist' and Piketty is certainly no Marxist.
Piketty articulates a centre-left politics, arguing that inequality is a threat to 'democratic societies' and the 'values of social justice on which they are based'. But there is a question for Piketty here: if 'democratic societies' really are based on 'values of social justice', why do they systematically generate the kind of inequality Piketty documents? I don't mean to suggest here that Piketty's book is worthless; but it is hardly 'anti-capitalist' and Piketty is certainly no Marxist.
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