Thomas Piketty’s global renown shouldn’t stop us from asking some hard political questions — or rather questions about his intellectual and political deception. The media have been almost unanimous about his Capital in the Twenty-First Century (1), proof in itself of the book’s total innocuousness. The world would have to have changed a great deal for Libération, Le Monde, the New York Times, the Washington Post and many more to be so enthusiastic about anything actually controversial. Some English-language media, helped by less than progressive reservations, have managed to keep their heads: the Financial Times took Piketty to task on an obscure statistical point; Bloomberg ran a front cover last May in the style of a teen magazine, showing Piketty as a heartthrob surrounded with stars.

One thing is for sure: only favourably disposed media could hail Piketty as a “21st-century Marx” simply because he calls his book Capital. He admits he has “never managed really” to read Das Kapital (2) or any other works of Marx, does not set out any theory of capitalism, and makes no attempt to challenge its basis (3).

We should not ignore the book’s merits. Every commentator must be impressed by the scale and quality of Piketty’s statistical work. But its principal virtue lies in the fact that it is a book. Most economists, driven by the need to publish, have unlearned the skill of writing books. Instead, they produce technical papers (not longer than the 15 pages allowed by academic journals) so standardised that they lose all meaning. Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the thousand-page culmination of 15 years of dedicated toil. The usefulness of social sciences is never so clear as when they contribute to the political debate with solidly established facts.

But all the methodological rigour in the world will not make up for the most basic deception, so obvious that it has passed unnoticed: the title. Piketty tells us he is going to discuss capital. He is aware that a well-known author has written a book about it before him. He seems to think “I can get away with this”. Unfortunately, it does matter: it’s fine to call a new book Critique of Pure Reason provided you are not writing about, say, herbal medicine.

Just what is capital? Piketty, not having really read Das Kapital, is only able to give a very superficial definition: the wealth of the wealthy. To Marx, capital was something else entirely, a mode of production, a complex social relationship which, crucially, adds employment relationships to the monetary relationships of simple market economies. These are based on private ownership of the means of production and on the legal myth of the “free worker”, who is deprived of any means of making a living independently and therefore forced to hire himself out to survive, and to submit to domination by an employer.

Ultra-long-term view that isn’t

That is what capital is, not just the Fortune 500. In the narrow sense of wealth, capital affects ordinary people through the obscene spectacle of wealth inequality. But as a mode of production and a social relationship, it affects them far more through the slavery it creates — an eight-hour working day takes up half their waking day. Redundant workers probably suffer less from seeing the rich parade their wealth than from the way their lives have been wrecked by the iron law of financial valuation. The same goes for those in work, who suffer under the tyrannical demands of productivity and profitability, constant threats of mass layoffs, delocalisation, restructuring — the energy-sapping precariousness and brutal nature of employment. None of this is even mentioned in the book.

The form and intensity of this slavery are determined by the historical circumstances under which capitalism is manifested — for in practice, there are many different kinds of capitalism. And it is the inseparably linked, changing economic and political factors that continually steer capitalism in new directions. But Piketty is quite unable to see things in a light that would show up the specifically political factors in the history of capitalism.

The first problem is his insistence on taking an ultra-long-term view — which is welcome, given how little most economists know about history, but creates its own problems. To do this over decades can be highly relevant and informative; to do it ultra-long-term, over millennia, means constructing meaningless statistical models and creating huge anachronisms. Piketty presents a graph of “after-tax rate of return vs growth rate at the world level from antiquity to 2100”, as if the concepts of GDP, capital and return on capital after tax had any relevance in antiquity, or even in the 18th century. Applying such concepts as if they were universal is a typical economist’s solecism. Piketty is unable to see that they are ad hoc (and recent) inventions. Ironically, it is when he turns historian, and suddenly switches to the ultra-long-term view, that he most clearly demonstrates his ignorance of the historical realities.

There is also a clear risk of depoliticisation, in that events taking place over decades become minor fluctuations when seen from the perspective of millennia. The decade is the pertinent timeframe for political action, the timeframe within which nations judge their living standards and assess the scope for doing something about them.

Readers may object that Piketty deals mainly with the 20th century. He does, but he applies to it the same universal “laws” that he believes he can apply to capitalism through the ages. To believe that it is possible to define the course of capitalism according to invariant, transhistorical laws, modulated only by fluctuations whose principles are never clearly explained, is the most distinctive feature of economists’ thinking. They see themselves as physicians to society, and often succumb to the temptation of formulating scientific “laws”, like the law of gravity. Piketty is not as naïve as that. But the fact that he too is tempted shows how prevalent “economist-think” has become, affecting even those who (belatedly) advocate a break with economism.

‘Fundamental laws of capitalism’

There are no transhistorical laws applicable to capitalism, and Piketty’s own fundamental laws of capitalism are nothing more than accounting equations. What does exist is the historical course of capitalism, as determined by institutional configurations, their succession controlled mainly by political processes; each of them brings particular forms of the servitude that capital — not wealth — imposes on labour.

Piketty may repeat over his thousand pages that inequality increases when r (rate of return on capital) is greater than g (growth rate), but he has explained nothing because he doesn’t describe the factors that determine rates of return and growth in each era. These depend on the organisation of structures in the particular era, the result of political struggles — of class struggles. In France, there was an impressive institutional conjunction after the second world war, and the balance of power between capital and labour tipped some way in favour of labour, with tight controls on capital, the reduction of the stock exchange to a rump, strict regulation of international competition, economic policies geared towards growth and employment, and repeated currency devaluations, producing 5% growth and forcing capital to behave a little more decently. But this only happened because the Matignon agreements of 1936 had prepared the ground after the liberal elite of the 1920s had been swept away, because employers had been compromised by collaboration with the Nazis, the Communist Party had 25% of the vote in the post-war years, and capitalists were nervous about the Soviet Union.

Though Piketty repeatedly mentions “institutions” and “politics”, he is blind to institutional and political history. He talks about the effects of war, and more remotely of decolonisation. These external shocks are almost impossible to quantify, but their role is to destroy capital (wealth) and turn the clock back. He fails to mention general strikes, social struggles, the power struggle between capital and labour, and their institutional consequences. Capitalism according to Piketty has no history — only an unvarying age-old law, occasionally disturbed by accidental events, but always returning to its implacable long-term trend, which leaves no room for conflict between social groups, the real force behind institutional change.

Yet it is the outcome of such conflicts that determines the course of capitalism. Just as it took one direction after the second world war, it took another at the end of the 1970s. Piketty says nothing of the ideological and political reconquest by the rich who, having been less rich for a time, wanted to be richer again. The rollback agenda of US conservatives in the 1970s explicitly expressed the intention of reversing social advances. These advances are always institutional conquests.

The key question is who controls institutions and structures, who has the power to create them, or reshape them to their own ends. Such political questions never surface; the book never mentions any real conflict. There is no analysis of financial deregulation in the 1980s, which made businesses more subject than ever to shareholder control. There is no account of the key role of the socialist governments of the time, the management revolution or the elimination of political and economic differences between leftwing and rightwing elites. There is no account of the unchecked neoliberal drift of the EU from 1984 towards “free and undistorted competition” — the mechanism par excellence for the destruction of advanced social models. There is no account of the treacherous treaties that have removed all room for manoeuvre in national economic policy. Unless these things happened by chance, they must be human work. Capital, as a social group, has now won back everything it conceded after the second world war. But it is still pressing its advantage — with unprecedented support in France from the Socialist Party, which seems to have decided to hand it everything on a platter.

Evasion and sleight of hand

Piketty remains in a fog of macroeconomic abstractions, repeating that r > g, and cannot claim to have shed light on anything, still less to have made the “theoretical breakthrough” some journalists claim for him. He is ill equipped to tell this story. Nothing in his career has prepared him for it: he cannot go overnight from a social-democratic, organic economist to being the Marx of the 21st century. He is a historian of the sociopolitical school of Pierre Rosanvallon; he was an adviser to the Socialist Ségolène Royal during her 2007 presidential election campaign; the media call him one of the “substitute intellectuals”. In the late 1990s, tousled casual was no longer fashionable, people wanted seriousness: figures, a scientific approach and no ideology, except for Rosanvallon-style globalisation-is-doing-OK-though-it-could-do-better equivocation, suggesting we should not rebel over a few imperfections (“that’s what we have experts for”). La République des Idées (RI), a thinktank and publisher of “correct” ideas led by Rosanvallon, with a mission to nurture France’s Socialist Party intellectually, has consistently taken great care never to raise any indecorous issues. RI has talked about inequality for many years, weeping over the sufferings of the workers, but has blamed rapid technological innovation and lack of training, and praised the virtues of academic research. What about free trade and the devastation it brings? Or the tyranny of shareholder value? Or the EU, now in the final stages of neoliberalism? Not a word (4). RI thinks all these are our destiny. It has a strategy of evasion — and sleight of hand. Those who claim to be serious and are keen to maintain their influence and their reputation in the media never mention such things.

The financial crisis of 2007-8 and the European crisis of 2010 brought a violent resurgence of what had been suppressed. (This will have to be discussed. But it is difficult to discuss such issues from scratch — when one does not know how to respond properly, not knowing about whole areas and without the words to describe what can be seen.) Finance has been globalised and nobody had taken any notice, but it is now clear that everything is not rosy. The economist Daniel Cohen, like Piketty, after decades of silence on this, has suddenly realised that the design of the EU’s monetary union was “faulty from the start” (5). These experts must be running on diesel: they clearly need time to warm up. Their belated rectifications will have very little effect. Long-term intellectual and political habits are hard to overcome. Capital is riddled with them; Piketty skips over the political and social history that led to Fordism, then to neoliberalism.

Even more spectacular is the ambition expressed in the last part of his book, boldly titled “Regulating Capital in the 21st Century”. The logical consequence of the strategy of evasion is that taxation becomes the only remaining tool available. Giving up on trying to change structures means taking palliative measures. Taxation has never been anything more than a social-democratic palliative — if we can’t tackle the causes, let’s at least try to alleviate the effects. Piketty, torn between the immediate problem and his desire not to disrupt anything fundamental, would like taxation to have greater virtues than it does, even the ability to regulate international finance. It’s hard to see what kind of tax could substitute for the necessary major assault on the structures of liberalised finance. What tax could replace bank separation, closure of some markets, a ban on securitisation? If Piketty saw the problem this way, he would have to approve of the creation of a definancialised enclave with adequate protections — severe restrictions on the freedom of movement of capital. That would be too much for him: he is so anxious to maintain his anti-nationalist credentials that he apologises for using France as an example.

Globalised solutions

In line with its own unvoiced assumptions, orthodoxy requires a solution in the style of Jacques Attali (first president of the European Bank): globalised capitalism has suffered a few mishaps, but we will find globalised solutions. People must be patient. The globalisation of solutions is coming. “Socialist” France is prepared to abolish a tiny EU tax on financial transactions, but a global tax on capital is on the way. Piketty takes a thousand pages to conclude that the choice is between a global tax and isolationism. Those who have read his book in good faith may feel disappointed that they are not yet out of the woods.

They may also have been a little naïve. The media sold Piketty as the new Marx, but did not mention his background. And readers believed the media. It is surprising how many people, including some who should have known better, were taken in. Piketty claims he is “vaccinated for life against the conventional but lazy rhetoric of anti-capitalism.” A clean-shaven Marx, then, not a hair out of place. But he is still willing to wear a false beard. In a US interview with New Republic, he claimed he had no time for Marx (6). Back in France, he said straight out that he was “trying to contribute to the emergence of the communist idea” (7). And everyone believed him. In December 2014 he reaffirmed his belief in “market forces” and rebuked “the new extreme left movements in Europe”, Podemos and Syriza (8). But by January he had become an informal adviser to Podemos’s leader Pablo Iglesias, since he now saw the rise of anti-austerity parties as “good news for Europe” (9). On a French television show in February, he refused to say whether he was a leftwing or a rightwing economist. He may lack intellectual consistency, but you have to admire the opportunism with which he adapts to public opinion in real time, so as to please the widest possible audience.

Piketty provides a scientific consecration, not only of the public perception that monetary inequality exists, but also of the theme around which the discussion of capitalism will revolve — around which it already revolves: even The Economist has had years of articles on monetary inequality, which will be the weakest link in the diagnosis, the point where the most inoffensive critiques converge. Monetary inequality has a great virtue: it makes it possible to avoid talking about the other inequalities created by capitalism, which are not accidental, but fundamental and constituent — the political inequalities in the true sense of hierarchical subservience in employment; that in business, some give orders and others must follow them. No tax, not even a global tax, will ever be able to address this.

To ask questions about this inequality, which is ultimately about the way lucrative property (capital) (10), controls our lives, and of the pressure to be employed, is to ask the key question that the real Marx asks about capital. Or anyway the key question about capitalism’s current configuration, which a global financial tax (that will never happen) could do nothing about. Only a resumption of the struggle for popular sovereignty, by a single nation, or several nations together, according to political circumstances, would be able to do anything — by changing, through the transformation of structures, the balance of power that allows capital to hold society to ransom (11).

Piketty’s critique of wealth inequality touches on none of this. He has the good taste to offer us a pleasant vision of social harmony, with the top 1% or 0.1%, as the villains — as if the remaining 99.9% were united in deservingness by their employment, when they are in fact divided by all the conflicts of their own situations and the neoliberal violence propagated along the chains of command in business. Those divisions are all the greater because of the particular structures of contemporary capitalism, established by the persistent efforts of a class aware of itself and its interests; but this is something those who claim to be serious will not mention, even when they claim they are discussing the theory of capital.

The worst is that Piketty’s book has an explicit “social philosophy”: labour is deserving, but wealth generated through business enterprise is good — unless the rich merely sit on that wealth. The formula “every fortune is partially justified yet potentially excessive” is not scary. The media, controlled by their shareholders, did not misjudge Piketty. In his desire for generalised peace — between capital and labour, the peace of the 99.9%, the peace of “global governance” — Piketty, who mentions “institutions”, “politics” and “conflicts” only as a matter of form, delivers his vision: “The bipolar confrontations of the period 1917-89 are now clearly behind us.” This does not sound like our moment in time, when a historic crisis of capitalism has returned the idea of ending it to the intellectual agenda.