[For years, Thomas Piketty has articulated a cogent critique of
21st-century capitalism. He now appears to be moving beyond just
critique to call for a 21st-century socialism.]
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COMRADE THOMAS PIKETTY, WELCOME TO THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT  
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Eric Blanc
June 2, 2022
Jacobin
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_ For years, Thomas Piketty has articulated a cogent critique of
21st-century capitalism. He now appears to be moving beyond just
critique to call for a 21st-century socialism. _

While Thomas Piketty shied away from advocating socialism at the time
of the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he’s now
come to embrace the term., Central European University / Flickr

 

Review of _Time for Socialism: Dispatches From a World on Fire,
2016–2021 _by Thomas Piketty (Yale University Press, 2021)

It’s a sign of the times that one of the world’s most prominent
intellectuals has just published a book of essays titled _Time for
Socialism. _As Thomas Piketty explains in the volume’s long
introduction, “If someone had told me in 1990 that I would publish a
collection of articles in 2020 entitled _Vivement le socialisme!_ in
French, I would have thought it was a bad joke.”

Yet for Piketty, like countless others across the world, the past
three decades of what he calls “hypercapitalism” pushed him to
question accepted truths about the prevailing economic system. And
while the author still shied away from advocating socialism at the
time of the publication of _Capital in the Twenty-First Century_, his
2013 best-selling magnum opus on inequality, he’s now come to
embrace the term — arguing that despite the baggage of its
connotations of Stalinism, “It remains the most appropriate term to
describe the idea of an alternative economic system to capitalism.”

There’s more to this than terminology. As Piketty explains, his
embrace of socialism reflects his newfound conviction that “one
cannot just be ‘against’ capitalism or neoliberalism: one must
also and above all be ‘for’ something else, which requires
precisely designating the ideal economic system that one wishes to set
up.” Faced with rampant inequality and looming climate catastrophe,
anger with capitalism is already widespread. What’s now needed above
all, in his view, is a compelling and “clearly explained
alternative.”

A New Socialism

Piketty summarizes his case for “a new form of socialism” as one
that is “participative and decentralized, federal and democratic,
ecological, multiracial, and feminist.” The vision he puts forward
is decidedly in the democratic socialist tradition, which seeks to
deepen and expand the representative institutions and political
freedoms codified in today’s capitalist democracies. Far from
projecting an insurrectionary uprising, Piketty argues that “it is
quite possible to move gradually toward participatory socialism by
changing the legal, fiscal, and social system.”

In his view, this transition has already begun: “If we take a
long-term perspective, then the long march toward equality and
participatory socialism is already well under way.” Though progress
stalled out in the neoliberal era, he notes that the big story in
capitalist countries since the nineteenth century is the “sharp
reduction” in inequalities and the dramatic growth of the welfare
state.

In Western Europe — the geographic focus of his book — total
public expenditure in the early twentieth century was only 10 percent
of the national income. But it has now reached 40-50 percent,
overwhelmingly dedicated to funding services such as education, health
care, and pensions. According to Piketty, this progress was the result
of popular pressure as codified in governmental policy — it was
neither a ruling-class maneuver to forestall radical change, nor was
it an inevitable by-product of capitalist development left to its own
devices.

Though he argues that the further expansion of public services —
including, crucially, measures to make higher education accessible to
all is — is essential for moving toward socialism, Piketty’s
vision is not reducible to rebuilding robust welfare states. For true
equality, we need to rethink the “whole range of relationships of
power and domination.” At the core of his conception of the
transition to socialism is radical redistribution of wealth combined
with an extension of employee influence within private firms.

One of the more innovative proposals in _Time for Socialism _is to
dramatically scale up progressive taxation to provide a “minimum
inheritance for all” of roughly $180,000 for everybody when they
turn twenty-five years old. Through this policy, Piketty envisions
building a society in which “everyone would own a few hundred
thousand euros, where a few people would perhaps own a few million,
but where the higher holdings . . . would only be temporary and would
quickly be brought down by the tax system to more rational and
socially more useful levels.”

Providing a generous financial cushion to all would, among its many
benefits, free workers from being compelled by material necessity to
accept bad working conditions, low pay, and workplace despotism. A
sweeping top-to-bottom redistribution of wealth, in short, would
“help to redefine the whole set of relations of power and social
domination.”

To deepen this power shift, Piketty also proposes that all countries
adopt workers’ comanagement, in which elected employee
representatives constitute half of the boards of directors in all
large enterprises. This proposal, he notes, has already been
implemented in countries such as Sweden and Germany, resulting in “a
considerable transformation of the classic shareholder logic.”

He nevertheless cautions against idealizing this comanagement system
as it has been implemented in the past, arguing that more ambitious
versions of it are possible. Piketty concludes his case by stressing
his proposals’ provisional nature: the specific policies he puts
forward “aim to open the debate, never to close it” because “the
participatory socialism I’m calling for will not come from the
top.”

A Welcome Shift

The fact that a thinker with Piketty’s intellectual influence has
embraced socialism is significant in itself, paving the way for
greater numbers of people to begin envisioning a world beyond
capitalism. But what should we make of his vision of socialist
transformation?

Talk of a relatively gradual and already underway shift toward
socialism will no doubt raise eyebrows among radicals trained to
expect that a break with capitalism will necessarily require some form
of revolutionary rupture
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the state and economy. Yet this gradualist vision should not be
dismissed out of hand.

The truth is that we have no way yet to precisely predict the form
that a transition to socialism
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take in an advanced capitalist democracy
[[link removed]]. Piketty’s
insistence that the radical reforms he envisions will be won through
struggle against (rather than accommodation to) corporate power is
likely sufficient as a strategic horizon for the foreseeable future.
Though a more rapid and less peaceful revolutionary break may
eventually be put on the agenda in the face of minoritarian employer
reaction, there’s no need nor any political benefit to project
immediate revolution as the _only_ possible path forward.

Some radicals may similarly frown upon Piketty’s insistence that the
transition to socialism is already underway, as seen in the growth of
the welfare state and related declines in economic inequality. Yet
here too the author is onto something: the reforms won by socialists,
organized labor, and social movements over the past
century _have _made significant incursions into market relations.

Despite neoliberalism’s ravages, the welfare state has not been
dismantled even in places like the United States and the UK —
current and future struggles for decommodification are thus being
waged on a significantly higher social baseline than they were in,
say, the 1930s. As such, the most pertinent criticism of social
democrats — one shared by Piketty — is not that they were
gradualists, but rather that they eventually proved incapable of
being _effective _gradualists. Instead of continuing to shift power
and control toward working people, social democratic parties largely
abandoned this project in the face of economic crisis, globalization,
and employer resistance from the 1980s onward.

Nor does it make sense to criticize Piketty for omitting calls for the
nationalization of the economy’s commanding heights. There’s a
strong argument to be made that markets for private goods are fully
compatible with (and arguably necessary for) a thriving socialist
society — provided that the state radically undermines capitalist
power and wealth, that firm-based economic democracy is expanded, and
that robust welfare policies provide everybody with the essential
services they need to survive. That said, Piketty’s case would have
been strengthened had he engaged more with proposals for a complete
democratization of firms, as famously envisioned by Sweden’s
“Meidner plan
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No Path Forward Without Labor

Amore significant limitation is that Piketty says little in the book
about the importance of rebuilding the power of organized labor
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This question gets passing mentions in his admonitions to “rethink
institutions and policies including public services, and in
particular, education, labor law, and organizations and the tax
system” and to “stop denigrating the role of trade unions, the
minimum wage, and salary scales.” Yet the author’s relative
inattention to organized labor today is somewhat surprising given his
commendable focus on the urgency of bringing back working-class
politics and his consistent acknowledgement of the historical
importance of trade unions in reducing inequality.

Perhaps Piketty, with his expertise in leveraging data to identify
historical trends and policy solutions, felt that it was best to leave
it to others to flesh out the strategic lines of march necessary to
win his proposed vision. But without a revitalized labor movement to
change the balance of class power, the author’s most ambitious
policy solutions are unlikely to pass — and some of his other
proposals might not have their intended consequences.

Employee comanagement, for example, generally can serve as a tool for
increasing workers’ influence when paired with robust trade unions.
But in the absence of the relatively favorable relationship of forces
created by strong working-class organization and the credible threat
of disruptive workplace action, comanagement plans risk becoming
toothless at best and mechanisms of employer control at worst, pushing
workers to rubber stamp bosses’ prerogatives.

None of this detracts from the overall importance of _Time for
Socialism _— or the cogency of its vision. Piketty’s effort to
sketch out an alternative to capitalism should be the cause for
reflection by progressives still skeptical of “the S word.” And
his work should be taken no less seriously by radicals, whose
political effectiveness in capitalist democracies has all too often
been undercut by a doctrinal attachment to formulas articulated for
other eras and political contexts. To win a better world, the
compellingly open-minded spirit of _Time for Socialism_ may
ultimately prove to be of even greater utility than its specific
policy proposals.

Adapted from _New Labor Forum_ [[link removed]].

_ERIC BLANC is the author of Red State Revolt: The Teachers’ Strike
Wave and Working-Class Politics._

_The new issue of JACOBIN will be out on Tuesday. Subscribe today
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yearlong print and digital subscription._

* Thomas Piketty
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* socialism
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* capitalism
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* Inequality
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* Climate Change
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