real utopias

Thomas Piketty has written a book called Capital that has caused quite a stir. He advocates progressive taxation and a global wealth tax as the only way to counter the trend towards the creation of a “patrimonial” form of capitalism marked by what he dubs “terrifying” inequalities of wealth and income. He also documents in excruciating and hard to rebut detail how social inequality of both wealth and income has evolved over the last two centuries, with particular emphasis on the role of wealth. He demolishes the widely-held view that free market capitalism spreads the wealth around and that it is the great bulwark for the defense of individual liberties and freedoms. Free-market capitalism, in the absence of any major redistributive interventions on the part of the state, Piketty shows, produces anti-democratic oligarchies. This demonstration has given sustenance to liberal outrage as it drives the Wall Street Journal apoplectic.

David Harvey is the well-known Marxist Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Harvey has a new book out and has also reviewed Thomas Piketty’s (http://davidharvey.org/2014/05/afterthoughts-pikettys-capital/).  Harvey is pretty critical of Piketty’s book.  Harvey recognises that Piketty provides powerful data on the inequality of wealth and income in the major capitalist economies since the capitalism became the dominant mode of production and social relations from about 1750.  “What Piketty does show statistically (and we should be indebted to him and his colleagues for this) is that capital has tended throughout its history to produce ever-greater levels of inequality. This is, for many of us, hardly news. It was, moreover, exactly Marx’s theoretical conclusion in Volume One of his version of Capital.”