Earlier this year the French economist Thomas Piketty published the English translation of his book Capital in the 21st Century. For a time this 665 pp. apparently densely-written tome amazingly enough ranked No. 1 at Amazon and as of this writing (Oct. 28, 2014) is still ranked no. 224. I must admit that I have not read the book, but I have read a fine review/critique of it that appears in the November, 2014 issue of Monthly Review (the leading Marxist journal in the United States): "Piketty and the Crisis of Neoclassical Economics," by John Bellamy Foster and Michael D. Yates, pp. 1-24. And thus while I come not to review Prof. Piketty's book, I will review briefly some of what Messrs. Foster and Yates, Editor and Associate Editor respectively, of Monthly Review, have to say about it.
Thomas Piketty imparteix la 25a. edició de la Lliçó d'Economia
(Image by Universitat Pompeu Fabra Barcelona) Details DMCA
Prof. Piketty is a statistics-based economist. For years, he has been working on the gradually widening wealth and income gaps in the capitalist world. Conventional, "neoclassical" capitalist economics tells that that the number one function of the system is to "generate full employment," and that any failures along that line are generally "not its fault" but rather those of "frictions" and "government interference," as capitalist economists and social critics from Ayn Rand on up or down (depending upon your point of view) repeatedly tell us. The role and function of each individual working in the system is totally dependent upon what they "put into it" in terms of education, effort, and so on, not any external factors, such as the relations of production.
Contrariwise, Prof. Piketty, rather, with tons of data at his disposal, tells us that this is not so. That in its current form capitalism is indeed designed to produce income and wealth inequality as its first goal. As Foster and Yates point out, this conclusion of Piketty, who regards himself as a "neoclassical economist" in the capitalist camp, puts to rest (or stronger) the long-term capitalist myths, that the system, especially if the "free market" is allowed to function without "government interference," works to the benefit of everybody.
Further, Foster and Yates make it quite clear that both classical and neoclassical economics (the latter being the dominant one in the capitalist world today) rather than being a set of theories upon which capitalism was built, are indeed a set of constructs designed post-hoc to justify the reality of capitalism that Marx and Engels described in their seminal work over the years of the mid-19th century. One can hardly see the mill-owners in Manchester, England or the metal-works owners in the Wuppertal, Germany sitting down to read "Say's Law" and then deciding, "ah yes, that's how I'm going to run my business, and I'm going to run my workers into the ground because they just haven't put enough into it, and I have."
