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"...defies left and right orthodoxy by arguing that worsening inequality is an inevitable outcome of free market capitalism." What "left orthodoxy" is he referring to..? Standard NYT journalistic boilerplate, please disregard. Piketty is correct to characterize the "six decades" - and I'd add, particularly the "postwar" - as an "exceptional" episode in the history of capitalism. That's something that people are only just now beginning to awaken to. In its essence it was the result of advances in the class struggle on the part of the working class, particularly in the train of the series of socialist and anti-colonial revolutions after 1917. Rather, contrary to what this article appears to have Piketty say, the two world wars and the (unmentioned in the article) intervening fascism acted *against* that positive trend, but did not overcome it. Fascism failed. Instead it was primarily an "inside job", featuring the commercial and financial capitalist invasion of the process of the reproduction of labor power itself, promoting the successive degradation of labor power backed by judicious applications of state power from the "outside". This process may be reaching its limits presently. The response of left-Keynesian Dean Baker is in turns amusing and prescient: "..he believes that Piketty "is far too pessimistic." Baker contends that there are a host of far less ambitious actions that might help to ameliorate inequality: ""Is it really implausible that we would ever see any sort of tax on finance in the U.S., either the financial transactions tax that I would favor or the financial activities tax advocated by the I.M.F.?"" We still wait, Dean...perhaps that's the answer? Baker also noted that "much of our capital is tied up in intellectual property" and that reform of patent laws could serve both to limit the value of drug and other patents and simultaneously lower consumer costs. Not only intellectual property, but also landed property, telecommunications property, and other forms of private property in the use values of nature - as we saw in the mortgage credit induced 2008 crash. This particular question is closely bound up with Piketty's six decades. These span the transition from the old European form of rentiership featuring a consolidated "traditional aristocratic" but thoroughly bourgeois landlord gentry - generally aping the English original - dominant in the State apparatus, in the colonial possessions and therefore over emerging industrial and new forms of commercial (railroads, etc.) capital. The significant *exception* to the old "regime of accumulation" was the United States, precisely as this country emerged as a distinct social formation initially in direct contradictory connection to the "English regime", specifically in the failure to consolidate a landed bourgeois "aristocracy" as a privileged caste of the class. Instead the U.S. regime of accumulation generally - but not always in a crisis-free way - featured the subordination of both landed property and banking capital to a continental commercial capital. Piketty's "six decades" involved the transition from the European to the American regime. This is not to be seen in some pre-ordained teleology. We are now in the era of the terminal crisis of the American regime as big U.S. capital abandons and "guts" the old traditional continental basis of U.S. capitalist accumulation as incompatible with imperialism. -Matt ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
