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# Capitalism-and-Its-Critics-A-History-From-the

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★ ★ ★

As these debates about globalization and inequality were raging, Piketty largely kept a low profile. In June 2015, he had lunch with a journalist from the Financial Times at a deli not far from his office at the Paris School of Economics. A year had passed since his appearance at London’s Peacock Theater. “I have had phases of promotion and conferences, which I enjoy very much, but I need to get back to normal life,” he told the journalist.66 Like it or not, though, Piketty had turned into a public intellectual in the grand French tradition. At the start of 2015, the Socialist government of François Hollande awarded him the Légion d’honneur: previous recipients included the existentialist philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, as well as the film actor Brigitte Bardot. Piketty refused to accept the prestigious prize, telling a reporter: “I don’t think it’s up to a government to say who is honorable. They would do better to focus on reviving growth in France and Europe.”67

Piketty’s decision to turn down the Légion d’honneur reflected his disillusionment with Hollande, whose government was following centrist policies and presiding over slow growth and high unemployment. In the 2017 Socialist presidential primary, Piketty supported Benoît Hamon, a former minister of education who campaigned on an ambitious program that included the introduction of a universal basic income, a shorter workweek, and big investments in green energy. The economist Julia Cagé, Piketty’s wife, became Hamon’s chief economic adviser, and Piketty himself wrote articles in Le Monde defending his proposals. At the end of January 2017, Hamon secured the Socialist Party nomination, defeating Manuel Valls, the former prime minister. But in the general election, which took place on April 23, he received just 6.4 percent of the vote, less than a third of the share garnered by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the candidate of the far left.68

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Piketty wasn’t responsible for this crushing defeat, of course. It reflected a broader crisis of western Europe’s center-left parties, which extended to Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom. When these parties did achieve power, as the French Socialists did in 2012, they felt obliged to follow fiscally “responsible” policies, which, as Piketty intimated, checked economic growth and prevented them from expanding programs designed to raise living standards. Inside the eurozone, the adoption of fiscal austerity policies had been enshrined in the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which was a triumph of neoliberal economics. A quarter of a century later, the policy straitjacket was still in place. Meanwhile, globalization and automation continued to diminish the ranks of the industrial working class, which had been the traditional base of the center left.

Further heightening the difficulties facing the center-left, many working-class and lower-middle-class voters were shifting to the right, supporting anti-immigrant rabble-rousers like Le Pen and Trump, who stoked the same nativist and pro-authoritarian sentiments that Stuart Hall had remarked on in early Thatcherite Britain. In theory, these voters were the ones who would have benefited most from the redistributive tax-andspending policies proposed by Hamon and Jeremy Corbyn, the leftist leader of Britain’s Labour Party, who appointed Piketty to an advisory panel. Yet, these voters were increasingly supporting right-wing parties whose economic populism was strictly for show. Younger and more educated voters were trending left, but many of them were attracted to antiestablishment parties, like Podemos in Spain and the Five Star Movement in Italy. The crisis of “labourism,” which Hall had identified three decades earlier, appeared to be turning into an existential one—and one that certainly wasn’t resolved by the resounding victory of the British Labour Party in the July 2024 general election, or the last-ditch victory days later of a broad-left coalition in the second round of French parliamentary elections.

Piketty, for his part, had become convinced that the economic splintering that was driving political polarization couldn’t be reduced entirely to mechanistic economic trends of the sort encaspulated in the “laws” that he’d explored in Capital in the Twenty-First Century. In fact, he had come to believe that the persistence of chronic inequality in a democratic society could ultimately be explained only in the realm of ideas.

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“Every human society must justify its inequalities,” he wrote in the opening passage of Capital and Ideology, a follow-up book that came out in 2019. “Unless reasons for them are found, the whole political and social edifice stands in danger of collapse.”69 The new book was even more massive than its predecessor, and it traced the history of dogmas that had been used to justify unequal outcomes. In premodern societies, Piketty argued, the notion of society as an organic whole served as the rationalization for rigid caste systems. Following the British, French, and American revolutions, “ownership societies” arose, in which the “sacralization” of private property served as the basis of inequality.70 In the twentieth century, more egalitarian and less market-friendly ideas gained ground, including those associated with social democracy and communism, only for them to be subjected to a successful counterattack, which ushered in an age of “hypercapitalism” and rising inequality. “Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological,” Piketty wrote. “This is no doubt the most surprising conclusion to emerge from the historical approach I take in this book.”71

It certainly surprised some readers of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, who had been led to believe that the economic formula r > g was the “fundamental force for divergence.” Now the famous formula had “all but disappeared,” the writer Idrees Kahloon commented in The New Yorker.72 Piketty appeared to have adopted Keynes’s dictum that “the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”73 At first glance, his stated interest in the construction of “dominant narratives” that underpinned “the existing inequality regime”74 also seemed to have echoes of Gramsci. But while the Italian Marxist had worked within a framework of class rule, he regarded intellectuals as the “deputies” of the dominant “historical bloc.”75 Piketty explicitly disavowed this approach, writing, “I insist that the realm of ideas, the political-ideological sphere, is truly autonomous.”76

Piketty’s intellectual evolution made for some interesting reviews, but in practical terms he ended up in the same place he had been in Capital in the Twenty-First Century: arguing for radical policies to reverse rising inequality. “The inequalities and institutions that exist today are not the only ones possible, whatever the conservatives may say,” he wrote.77 Incorporating his previous call for a global wealth tax, he laid out a reform agenda that included three key elements: power sharing within large firms, with workers’ representatives getting half the voting rights on corporate boards; punitive tax rates on very high incomes and large fortunes to “make ownership of capital temporary”;78 and the introduction of a “universal capital endowment” along with a universal basic income. Taken together, Piketty wrote, these reforms would create the foundations for “a participatory socialism for the twenty-first century” that would “transcend today’s capitalist system.”79

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If fully enacted, Piketty’s policy agenda would surely have transcended the plutocracy. Keynes had raised the possibility of low interest rates euthanizing the rentier. Piketty was now proposing expropriation through the tax system. Under his proposals, governments would introduce a “triptych” of progressive taxes on income, property, and inheritances, with marginal rates as high as 90 percent on the largest fortunes and incomes. Based on simple arithmetic, it seemed likely that Piketty’s levies would hit the likes of Elon Musk, Bernard Arnault, and Jeff Bezos with tax bills of tens of billions of dollars. Piketty compared their putative impact to the breaking up of great landed estates in France during the French Revolution and, later, in Ireland, Spain, and Mexico. Once his ultraprogressive tax system was in place, he said, there would be sufficient revenues to fund all existing government programs, a new universal basic income, and a new universal capital endowment, which would provide every citizen with a lump sum payment of about 120,000 euros at the age of twenty-five, which would “open up new possibilities such as purchasing a house or starting a business.”80 The ultimate policy goal, Piketty said, was a “just society that allows all of its members access to the widest possible range of fundamental goods,” with the latter term defined to include a proper education, decent healthcare, the right to vote, and the ability to participate as fully as possible in social and civic life.81

When Capital and Ideology was published, Trump was in the White House, Emmanuel Macron was in the Élysée Palace, and Angela Merkel was in the German Chancellery. Not surprisingly, some reviewers dismissed Piketty’s tax and spending proposals as pie in the sky. In an immediate sense, this criticism was justified, but Piketty was drawing on the large canvas of history rather than setting out a program to win the next election. “The balance of power at any moment,” he wrote in his conclusion, “depends on the interaction of the short-term logic of events with long-term intellectual evolutions from which come a wide range of ideas that can be drawn on in moments of crisis.”82 During the 2020 Democratic primary, the Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders both proposed new wealth taxes. Two of Piketty’s research associates, Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, helped to design Warren’s version, which would have imposed an annual tax of 2 percent on fortunes worth between \$50 million and \$1 billion, and 3 percent on fortunes above \$1 billion.

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In the big picture, the “long-term intellectual evolution” that Piketty was trying to bring about was a reformulation of the postwar social bargain to meet the changed circumstances of the twenty-first century. In September 2023, he gave a talk via video to a conference in New York organized by Columbia University’s Center on Capitalism and Society. After reviewing some recent economic history and talking about some of the policies he proposed in Capital and Ideology, he stepped back from the experience of the past few decades and defended the social democratic experiment in managed capitalism that had preceded it. If we take a longer-term perspective, going back to the nineteenth century, the movement to reduce inequality and broaden prosperity had proved very successful, particularly in Europe, he insisted. “But there is still a long way to go,” he added. “Social democracy is not a finished product.”83 Nobody in Piketty’s audience, or outside it, could argue with that conclusion.

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“A confluence that could propel a new paradigm” The End of Capitalism, or the Beginning?

On September 19, 2023, António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, addressed the seventy-eighth General Assembly in apocalyptic terms. “Our world is becoming unhinged,” he declared. “Geopolitical tensions are rising. Global challenges are mounting. And we seem incapable of coming together to respond.” Guterres, a former prime minister of Portugal, mentioned the war in Ukraine and military coups in the Sahel, but the core challenges he highlighted were more systemic: inequality, rising debt levels, authoritarianism, a “dysfunctional, outdated, and unjust” financial architecture, and “the most immediate threat to our future: our overheating planet.” If the world didn’t tackle these issues quickly, Guterres warned, it faced the prospect of “a Great Fracture in economic systems and financial systems and trade relations.”1

The secretary-general wasn’t the only one issuing dire warnings. Earlier in the year, a report from the World Economic Forum (WEF), which hosts an annual conference of political and business bigwigs in Davos, Switzerland, said, “We have seen a return of ‘older’ risks—inflation, costof-living crises, trade wars, capital outflows from emerging markets, widespread social unrest, geopolitical confrontation and the spectre of nuclear warfare—which few of this generation’s business leaders and public policy-makers have experienced.” And these risks were being “amplified by comparatively new developments … including accelerating climate change, unsustainable levels of debt, a new era of low growth, [and] low global investment and de-globalization.”2 In a survey of its network of “thought leaders” in business, government, academia, and civil society, the WEF listed five statements about the coming decade and asked the respondents to pick the one that most closely resembled their views. The most commonly selected statement was “consistently volatile across economies and industries with multiple shocks accentuating divergent trajectories.”3

28

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Declarations that global capitalism was in crisis were nothing new, of course: ever since the ringing declarations of The Communist Manifesto, critics had been predicting the demise of the system. In the 1940s, even two of capitalism’s biggest champions—Schumpeter and Hayek—argued that it was doomed. (To them, the fatal threats were bureaucracy and socialism.) But had global capitalism ever faced so many serious challenges simultaneously? Writing in the Financial Times in October 2022, Adam Tooze, an economic historian at Columbia University, described the current conjuncture as a “polycrisis,” noting: “In the polycrisis the shocks are disparate, but they interact so that the whole is even more overwhelming than the sum of the parts.”4 In a demonstration of just how fraught and contested the times were, some leftist commentators even criticized the term polycrisis, claiming that it obfuscated the fact that there was only one underlying crisis: capitalism itself. “Pandemics, climate breakdown, wars and global deflationary pressures are not mere externalities of the capitalist system but intrinsic to its operations—long predicted by a diverse group of thinkers,” Farwa Sial, a research fellow at the University of Manchester, wrote on the Developing Economics blog.5

Throughout the history of capitalism, critics had argued that it was amoral, inequitable, and destructive, but rarely had the criticisms come together in such dramatic fashion. “The climate emergency, rising inequality, and pandemic diffusion have raised the question: for what purpose is capitalism fit?” the economists Wendy Carlin and Samuel Bowles, two cofounders of the CORE Econ project, which provides openaccess teaching materials for economics students, wrote in a 2021 article about constructing a new political economy paradigm.6 A 2023 opinion poll by the Harris Poll and Forbes found that “almost half of Americans, regardless of generation and race, say that capitalism is headed on the wrong path.”7

In short, global capitalism was facing a crisis of legitimacy of a sort it hadn’t experienced since the 1930s—one that extended to the right as well as to the left. During the Biden administration, two new conservative research institutes in Washington, DC, put out stinging critiques of globalization and market fundamentalism. “What has happened to capitalism in America?” one of the reports, from American Compass, began. “Businesses still pursue profit, yes, but not in ways that advance the public interest  … Globalization crushed domestic industry and employment, leaving collapsed communities in its wake. Financialization shifted the economy’s center of gravity from Main Street to Wall Street, fueling an explosion in corporate profits alongside stagnating wages and declining investment.”8 The other report, from the Edmund Burke Foundation’s National Conservatism project, commented that “transnational corporations showing little loyalty to any nation damage public life by censoring political speech, flooding the country with dangerous and addictive substances and pornography, and promoting obsessive, destructive personal habits.”9

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In some ways, these criticisms echoed what leftists had been saying for generations. In others, they evoked the writings of the nineteenth-century arch-conservative Thomas Carlyle. Certain free market conservatives had constructed a moral defense of capitalism by adopting the sociologist Max Weber’s argument that it was based on the Protestant values of hard work, thrift, sobriety, and self-reliance. The emergence of a new plutocracy, whose conspicuous consumption evoked the Gilded Age “captains of industry” that Veblen wrote about, made a mockery of this claim. In 2023 Amazon’s Jeff Bezos took possession of a custom-built 417-foot-long superyacht that came with a helipad-equipped support vessel and was rumored to cost \$500 million.10 Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg was building a fourteen-hundred-acre compound in Hawaii that reportedly included a blast-proof underground bunker.11 “Nobody believes any more in a moral revival of capitalism,” the sociologist Wolfgang Streeck, the longtime director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne, wrote. “The Weberian attempt to prevent it from being confounded with greed has finally failed, as it has more than ever become synonymous with corruption.” Streeck made this comment in 2014. The subsequent decade only confirmed his point.12

So, what was the prognosis for capitalism, two and a half centuries after Richard Arkwright opened Cromford Mill? One scenario was that the polycrisis would continue, intensify, and possibly even prove fatal—an outcome that Streeck predicted. Citing the examples of Polanyi, Marx, Keynes, Schumpeter, and others, the German scholar readily acknowledged that many of capitalism’s most illustrious theorists had mistakenly predicted its demise. “I believe that this time is different,” he added.13 The list of systemic ills that Streeck identified was similar to the ones that Guterres and the WEF would produce years later: it included slow growth in output and productivity, “oligarchic redistribution,” rising political extremism, and a lack of effective global leadership. The future, Streeck wrote, would bring a series of cascading crises in which “predictability and governability will decline further (as they have for decades now).” At some point, “the myriad provisional fixes devised for short-term crisis management will collapse under the weight of the daily disasters produced by a social order in profound, anomic disarray.”14

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Streeck didn’t provide a timetable for the coming collapse, which was a shrewd omission on his part. Any prediction of capitalism’s demise needs to take account of its powers of rejuvenation, which Marx himself pointed to, and the ability of governments to manage it through sticky patches. Although Keynesian policies are out of fashion today, they invariably reappear whenever capitalism is under serious threat. In 2020, as many countries shuttered large parts of their economies to control the coronavirus pandemic, global GDP fell by 2.7 percent, according to the IMF. This was first worldwide recession since 2009 and the deepest since World War II. But in 2021, after many Western governments introduced large stimulus packages and scientists discovered vaccines for Covid-19, global GDP rebounded strongly, rising 6.5 percent. In 2022 and 2023, it grew by 3.5 and 3.2 percent, respectively, confirming the recovery from the pandemic.15

For the second time in a decade and a half, governments had stepped in to save global capitalism. The Global Financial Crisis and the pandemic were obviously two very different phenomena, but both of them highlighted the dangers of unleashing the market and relying on the profit motive to allocate resources and capital. In advance of the 2008 blowup, deregulation led to excessive risk-taking by large financial institutions. During the pandemic, the global supply chain froze up, leaving many Western countries short of essential items like respiratory masks, diagnostic testing kits, computer chips, and baby formula. “The industries at the center of the supply chain—from shipping and rail to meat processing—had liberated themselves from rules imposed to limit their dominance,” the journalist Peter S. Goodman wrote in his illuminating 2024 book, How the World Ran Out of Everything. “They had reprised the era of the Robber Barons in achieving monopoly status. This had delivered stupendous profits to shareholders while yielding danger and dysfunction for society at large.”16

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Still, global capitalism did survive the pandemic and it started to adapt to a new reality. The US government offered companies financial incentives to manufacture masks and computer chips on the US mainland. Major US companies, adopting the mantra of “resiliency,” looked to source some of their most vital inputs from closer to home. This was another demonstration of capitalism’s ability to shape-shift in response to new circumstances and policy regimes. From the nineteenth-century ideal of free trade and small government that was pioneered by Britain; to the Keynesian managed capitalism of the postwar era; to the globalized hypercapitalism of the late twentieth century; to the Chinese state capitalism that some observers see as the winning model for the twenty-first century—there have been many varieties of capitalism. In the decade and a half after the Global Financial Crisis, economists and commentators across the ideological spectrum were busy proposing new economic models—or old ones in new guises. The options being touted included a technology-driven revival in productivity and income growth that would give free market capitalism another lease on life; a drastic shift away from materialism and economic growth in the name of sustainability; a retreat into protectionism and economic nationalism; and the creation of a new managed capitalism for a postindustrial age of algorithms and platform monopolies.

★ ★ ★

Hovering over many of these discussions was the emergence of potentially transformative digital technologies, such as self-driving vehicles, drones, 3D printing, robotics, and, most ominously, large language artificial intelligence models. In their 2014 book The Second Machine Age, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, two economists at MIT, wrote: “The key building blocks are already in place for digital technologies to be as important and transformational to society and the economy as the steam engine.”17 Modern economists refer to a technology that impacts the entire economy over extended periods as a “general purpose technology.” (The idea goes back at least as far as Kondratiev, although he rarely gets the credit.) Brynjolfsson and McAfee argued that AI could turn out to be the most powerful general purpose technology of all. In response to the question “Is growth over?” they wrote, “Not a chance. It’s just being held back by our inability to process all the new ideas fast enough.”18

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