No End in Sight: On Thomas Pikkety's "Capital and Ideology"
Thomas Pikkety | Capital and Ideology | Belknap | 2020 | 1104 Pages
As the Coronavirus pandemic spread throughout the world, and a flurry of lockdowns and border closures were announced, the now-familiar calls of “we are all in this together” rang out from the top echelons of society. Politicians, bureaucrats, and celebrities drew on the language of communalism to emphasize that everyone would be affected equally by the coming crisis, and that, only by drawing on the egalitarianism gifted to us by our common humanity would we have any chance of beating the virus.
Of course, it did not take long for this imagined scenario of egalitarianism to be unveiled as the lie that it was. As the waves of severe acute respiratory syndrome swept the world – those who had told us to “imagine” the new possibilities that were heralded by the arrival of the pestilence simply closed their doors to the microbial danger that existed beyond the boundary of their abodes. The rich and powerful now turned once again to that cohort of migrant, working class, and the desperately underemployed – those who could not afford to isolate – to keep the world forges burning.
Even as lockdowns spread across the world, an army of delivery drivers on mopeds and bicycles took to the roads, risking life and limb, making certain that goods were delivered to those ordered to stay home; grocery store clerks and factory workers continued to churn out their labor. From pariah to essential services those bodies who existed on the periphery of our political imaginations were now front and center of an economic recovery.
At the same time as health workers struggled with Coronavirus’s insatiable hunger to spread, and delivery workers struggled with our insatiable hunger for goods, mining and tech billionaires saw their profits increase by a collective total of $1.9 trillion. As Governments all around the world procrastinated on and then introduced measly forms of welfare stopgap measures that would slow the dive into poverty that would inevitably be experienced by millions of people, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, increased his net worth by 65% - all the while his essential workers in his delivery depots and factories fought for toilet breaks and standard safety measures. The great leveling had become the great suffocation. Working- and middle-class individuals, in all countries, struggled for breath – figurately and literally. The virus may not discriminate. But its impacts do.
In June 2020, the World Economic Forum (WEF) – that great bastion of austerity economics met digitally in the sleepy town of Davos. Their task was to discuss “the great reset”. The pandemic, they postured, presented an opportunity to reset and reshape the grand economic orders of old and turn them towards more sustainable, socially conscious activities. All this was couched as a reframing of capitalism. As Klaus Schwab, founder and executive chairman of WEF would write: “Corporations don’t have to stop pursuing profits for their shareholders. They only need to shift to a longer-term perspective on their organization and its mission, looking beyond the next quarter or fiscal year to the next decade and next-generation…”. Nowhere is such a mission in full force then the recent decision of the US not to waive vaccine patents. – while the world is heading to a vaccination glut, the promise of vaccination equity is silently quashed by the refusal of the US to waive vaccine patents. The narrow commercial interests of Big Pharma win out – benefiting from public financing – against the call for a more equitable distribution. Much like Nero and his fiddle, Schwab held deeply to the belief that capitalism could develop the opportunities for a better, more egalitarian social movement, even as the edifice crumbles around them.
Almost serendipitously, as the virus was rearing its pestilent head, the French economist Thomas Piketty released Capital and Ideology, a follow-up to his bestseller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In the latter book, which would propel Piketty to the status of academic Rockstar, he argued that when the rate of return on capital investment exceeded the rate of economic growth wealth becomes more concentrated and inevitably leads to an increase in overall inequality. By monopolizing capital investment, the rich become richer – and the plebeians who can only rely on income from labor practices stagnate. Piketty points famously to the decline in global inequality that occurred between World War 1 and War World Two – a period which saw extremely high taxation and individual capital investment all but destroyed – as evidence against the lingering economic myth that lower taxes and concentrating wealth brings about higher growth both globally and for individuals. In short, and as a counterpoint to Schwab’s “great reset”, Piketty claims that when the capitalists dictate economic readjustment inequality is unavoidable.
In Capital and Ideology, Piketty has largely replaced quantitative models with qualitative analysis. Piketty utilizes historical, political, and philosophical analysis to provide a sweeping and detailed account of the ideological context behind how what he calls “inequality regimes” sustain themselves. While the method has changed, Piketty’s central argument remains largely the same – though he has added some extra bits. The central theme of Piketty’s challenge to modern economics continues to be threaded throughout the new book. What differs between Capital in the Twenty-First Century and Capital and Ideology is how Piketty approaches the critical nature of the debate around inequality. The major criticisms of Piketty’s first book were that it was euro-centric (only detailing the rise in inequality in the US and Europe over the last 150 years), and that it paid little attention to why inequality matters, and that his idea of Capital largely rested on definitions of ownership which had more in common with everyday business transactions, than the deep theoretical lines found in Marx, Smith, and others. In this follow-up, Piketty sets to stifle such concerns. Firstly, Piketty places greater emphasis on the development of “inequality regimes” through Colonialism and Slavery in Asia (China, Japan, and India in particular) and African countries. There is some discussion of how Europe and the US benefited from these colonial and slave regimes. Piketty should be credited with the ways he deftly examines the developmental impacts on African societies because of the European slave market. However critical points could still be raised at the overall lack of critical treatment of slavery in terms of how European countries benefited from its spoils while stagnating development on the African continent. Secondly, in replying to critics of the first book that claimed that Piketty’s economic focus underplayed the philosophical justifications of inequality, Piketty’s whole mantle in this book is to focus on how inequality is justified within certain economic epochs, all the while focusing on the role that Capital has played in determining inequality in society. Rather than showing how modern economic theory has problematized our approach to inequality – Piketty looks instead to why and how justifications of inequality continue to be legitimized in society. The opening lines of Capital and Ideology introduce us to the specific object of his critique:
Every human society must justify its inequalities: unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse. Every epoch therefore develops a range of contradictory discourses and ideologies for the purpose of legitimizing the inequality that already exists or that people believe should exist.
There is a continuing argument within philosophical, political, and economic circles that certain inequalities are justified insofar as they produce stabilizing effects for the rest of society. While Piketty questions some aspects of this mentality, he does, in the end, fall back on an old Rawlsian line that social and economic inequalities are to be to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged members of society, though he does also caution his reads about accepting abstract and general principles of social justice “instead of the way in which those principles are embodied in specific societies and concrete policies and institutions”. The pragmatism of this approach seems to off-set the focus on ideology that the title announces. This becomes more peculiar when Piketty presents a definition of ideology which appears more idealistic than pragmatic.
Piketty’s discussion of ideology takes place in just a few pages within the introduction. He presents his view of ideology as a “positive” and “constructive” account against those pejorative accounts which claim ideology as irrational and conspiratorial. Contra these post-ideological discourses – which can often be found in political rather than academic discourses -Piketty proposes a normative understanding. Ideology is a “set of a priori plausible ideas and discourses describing how society ought to be structured”. Social, political, and economic dimensions all contribute to the structure of an ideology. On this definition, ideology becomes a set of discursive arrangements that propose answers to a specific number of structural questions. For Piketty, the “realm of ideas” which he identifies as the political and ideological sphere of society is autonomous to the set of productive forces and economic structures defined by each inequality regime. Piketty is keen to point out that a range of possible ideological states exists mutually within any one inequality regime. Piketty’s general approach to ideology is best described as bland. He does not offer much in the way of new content – but instead relies on old ideas about what ideology is and how ideology manifests itself. While he pays homage to the idea that singular ideological justifications can be dominant during a particular era, he never really gives a detailed understanding of why particular ideologies become and continue to be dominant.
It is worth taking a brief detour through the long history of what is perhaps the singularly most important concept in contemporary social sciences. Ernesto Laclau has bought attention to the fact that the problem of ideology is central to Plato’s construction of the polis in The Republic; from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s identification of the social foundations of inequality to de Tracy’s coinage of the term as a “science of ideas” to the various Marxian definitions of ideology as false consciousness, a narrative of subjectification and a tool of social cohesion in a class-divided society. In more modern times, the work of Althusser, Foucault, Badiou, and Ranciere have developed complex, sophisticated accounts of how ideology manifests, and its role in the reproduction of capitalism. What connects the ancient thinkers of ideology (Plato, Rousseau, de Tracy, and Marx) with the contemporary scholars (Althusser, Foucault, Badiou, Zizek and Ranciere) is an insistence on the material dimensions by which ideological justifications for inequality arise. The discursive arrangements of ideological justification have a material existence insofar as such justifications are shaped by the way we insert ourselves into the world. Our being, doing, and saying – the regulation of our place in society – is not only determined by ideas and discourses, but by the very structures of society that have enforced a particular way of thinking about the world. In his largely cognitive account of ideology wherein our ideas and justifications of the social world are largely autonomous to their material dimensions, not once does Piketty reckon with an entire tradition that has attempted to move away from such idealistic accounts. In a sense, Piketty relies on an old liberal axiom that the force of the better argument – those justifications and reasons for a bright new day will win out in the end. However, as countless scholars have shown our performativity in society is not merely about discourse, but is shaped by the environment that we find ourselves in. This might come across as pedantic but invoking one of the most utilized concepts in social science might also require us to look at the evolution of that concept. Indeed, one could claim that Piketty’s analysis of ideology is ideological itself. Not simply as a new discourse that challenges certain justifications of inequality in the hope of finding a remedy for hyper inegalitarian capitalism – but in the sense that the answers that Piketty provides in challenging the currents of capital accumulation acquiesce to the dominant ideology of capitalism, without hesitation.
As mentioned above, Piketty turns to how ideas and justifications of inequality have shaped our understanding of the idea that inequality is natural – and that some people ought to be treated differently for society overall to progress. From these discourses emerge the social, political, and economic norms by which we can make sense of the basic institutional structures of society. Taken together, they provide us with a narrative that justifies each and everyone’s place in our current social organization. The narratives that are told to us about where we belong, and what we deserve need at each stage of our social development to be retold. Piketty’s work is, by in large, a historical analysis of these narratives – from the trifunctional societies, divided between the “complementary” classes of priests, warriors, and commoners, to the colonial and slave societies and finally to the recent hyper-capitalist and post-communist societies. At each stage of the redrawing of society's historical development, Piketty turns to the political and ideological dimensions that sustained inequality through those transformations. Piketty’s work is, by in large, a historical analysis of this development – from the trifunctional societies, divided between the “complementary” classes of priests, warriors, and commoners, to the colonial and slave societies and finally to the recent hyper-capitalist and post-communist societies. At each stage of the redrawing of society's historical development, Piketty turns to the political and ideological dimensions that sustained inequality through those transformations. For instance, in his discussion of how “trifunctional societies” developed into the “ownership societies” of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, he turns to the justifications that historical questions of property rights ought not to be entertained lest contentions arise over the newly formulated ideas of social justice. As he writes: “Absolute respect for property rights acquitted in the past offered a new form of transcendence, which made it possible to avoid widespread chaos and fill the void left by the end of trifunctional ideology. The sacralization of property was in some ways a response to the end of religion as an explicit political ideology”.
From these discourses emerge the social, political, and economic norms by which we can make sense of the basic institutional structures of society. Taken together, they provide us with a narrative that justifies each and everyone’s place in our current social organization. The narratives that are told to us about where we belong, and what we deserve need at each stage of our social development to be retold.
In what is certainly a nod to Marx’s distinction between “modes of production”, despite his earlier assertions to never having read him, Piketty categorizes different historical modes of economic and social discourse as “inequality regimes”: “a set of discourses and institutional arrangements intended to justify and structure the economic, social and political inequalities of a given society”. This concept allows Piketty to move somewhat seamlessly from questions of production and ownership to the discriminatory practices of status, race, and religion found in each epoch. A concern that runs through Piketty’s analysis is how the discourses that one finds in the inequality regimes are all rendered from an idea of the naturalness of inequality. Through his analysis, Piketty attempts to show that the naturalization thesis of inequality, which has gripped several historical epochs, is, in fact, false: “what made economic development and human progress possible was the struggle for equality and education and not the sanctification of property, stability, or inequality”. The naturalization thesis of inequality undergoes changes in the transformation of one epoch into another, to satisfy the political and social structures that define each “inequality regime”. In ternary societies – those defined by a tripartite relation between warrior, priest, and peasant – the naturalization thesis was sustained by a functionalist argument in which each group had its place, and each group's function helped sustain the stability of society. When, in the movement to “ownership” or propertarian societies in the eighteenth century – when the hallowed ideas of humanity and equality became mainstream, the idea of the naturalization of inequality become more fervent. Since anybody, in principle, could hold any position in society, it was only because of natural inequalities that some people succeeded, and others failed to succeed. The move from a functionalist justification of inequality – in which everyone has their part to play – to the justification of inequality through equal access, also provided the ruling classes with the legitimacy to hold on to the property that stemmed from previous regimes. The era following the French revolution, for example, represented one of the most unequal times in Western history – up until the hyper-inegalitarian capitalism of today, largely based on an inability to rethink property rights communally. By focusing on the political and ideological justifications of the reification of inequality, and their continued acceptance of readjustment through various inequality regimes, Piketty explores how an analysis of these inequality regimes can provide us with a multi-disciplinary perspective that grounds a new universalistic egalitarian narrative, and a new ideology of equality.
This points to perhaps a deeper problem in Piketty’s scholarship. One cannot deny the precise and effective use of economic, historical, and social scientific data. Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century identified him as a truly remarkable scholar of these areas – and Capital and Ideology solidify that idea. However, his understanding of philosophical and theoretical frameworks is largely underwhelming. For instance, Piketty aims a once-influential school of Marxism that holds that the material conditions of society – the correspondence between the means and relations of production – are all that matter in an analysis of the justifications of inequality. But such vulgar analysis has long been cast to the periphery, and most theorists recognize the co-determining effects of the material, and for lack of a better word, the ideological. Piketty’s constant claim throughout the book is that religious legal, social, and political ideas have been long part of the story of why inequality and its justifications continue to persist while undergoing adjustments in each “inequality regime”. But once again such ideas are not necessarily new. I do not doubt Piketty’s enthusiasm for participatory socialism, but more reference to key work already being done in this area would have sufficed.
Like his previous work, Piketty is audacious in detailing Capitalism’s continued reliance on inequality to sustain itself. Inequality, in a sense, is the planned obsolescence of Global macro-economic policy. While Apple and Sony build products with artificially limited lifespans so that we must keep going back every year or so to replace it, so does the capitalist class integrate inequality into its system so that they continue to have a laboring class to do their dirty work. In focusing on the ideological justifications that have historically sustained such a system, Piketty gives us a glimpse into the inner-workings of the ruling class's logic. Piketty offers several institutional arrangements for a “participatory socialism”. These are not, he readily admits, perfectly satisfactory and convincing answers, but offer instead a concrete experiment for change that might just spur social and political mobilization out of the hyper inegalitarian narrative we are currently in. However, in the end, Piketty provides no substantial answers as to how to overcome this ideology. The approach to ideology that he takes seems to suggest that we are always in a constant struggle over discursive arrangements – that only the force of the better argument will out in the end. The cognitive approach to ideology that figures in Piketty’s momentous work downplays the real material structures of society that affect our ways of doing, being, and saying. While Piketty once again showcases his immense talent in detailing problems with the current order of things, and one should read the book on this point alone – his solutions are still embedded in a discourse that sees no material end to Capitalism.