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Piketty regards the dominant economic system completely positively. All of his criticisms of conditions and their development are not intended as a principled objection to the capitalist mode of production and distribution. The ideal condition he strives for is a prosperous capitalism characterized by economic growth. Critique of growth as such is foreign to Piketty. And he only criticizes inequality to the extent that it could damage growth and the legitimacy of capitalism. In this sense, he is both progressive and conservative: he wants to change something in order to maintain social relations as they are. He wants to protect capitalism from the poor – not the other way around. That’s not anything that one has to ‘uncover’, but rather it is his openly formulated ‘programme’: ‘I admire capitalism; I admire private property, and I admire the market economy. Of course I recognize that economic growth occurs principally in capitalism. Of course I cling to private property, because it is the foundation of our freedom. There was never as much capital as today. I was 18 years old, when the Berlin Wall fell. I belong to a generation that never had sympathy for Communism.’
[...] On the one hand, inequality appears to be only explainable in terms of different levels of labour performance and therefore only legitimate in terms of labour performance; on the other hand, reality shows that this is not the case. That is the background as to why Piketty moves in circles. He thus ends up arguing that inequality is growing because inequality exists. He argues in a circular fashion, without explaining how ‘original’ inequality came into the world at all, and which socially specific inequality characterizes capitalism: the separation of direct producers from the objective possibilities of production. Piketty thus has noticeably little to say about the manner in which inequality arises and persists in capitalism. That has consequences.
Concerning risk: it is true that whoever lends money takes the risk that he or she might not see that money ever again. And the greater this risk is, the greater the interest demanded will tend to be. That does not mean, however, that interest is the ‘just wage’ for risk. In fact, the reverse is the case: capitalists want to increase their money, make a return on it. That is their goal. To do that, however, they have to take a risk. Their profit is not compensation for a risk. On the contrary: the risk is the condition for the profit. The profit motive comes first. A car company also does not want to produce and distribute cars, thus taking on a risk and receiving profits as ‘compensation’ for the risk. The risk is, by the way, not something natural, but rather socially conditioned: in capitalism, an investment is risky because all competitors want to make profits and struggle with each other for market share, but not all are able to succeed. To state things more generally: in a society in which production is not regulated in a cooperative and political manner, but rather commodities are produced for an anonymous market, it is only revealed in retrospect whether the investment was worth it, whether the product produced is actually sold. The entrepreneurial risk thus arises not solely through the profit orientation, but already due to production for an anonymous market.
[...] The wage does not pay for labour, but rather for the disposal of labour-power for a specific period of time. During working time, the enterprise applies labour in order to make a profit – that is to say, to extract output from the workers that has a monetary value greater than that which they receive as a wage. That is possible because only the disposal over the ability to perform labour (labour-power) is paid, and the workers do not receive a wage corresponding to the value product produced by their labour. That is how it is possible in the first place that the success of the business can be measured in terms of profits – in terms of that which the workers precisely do not receive: surplus-labour. The struggle for shares of social income occurs permanently, its foundation is a negative dependence: capital and labour need each other, but at the same time stand in opposition to each other.
this is preceded by a pretty savagely presented quote from Piketty about Marx's Capital being too complicated
There is never a ‘meritocracy’ – a ‘just’ correspondence between performance and income – in capitalism. However, the idea of a just income is useful: it justifies conditions in which a discussion about just wages occurs, but not one about the relations of disposition and power that actually underlie and regulate income. This legitimizing function is what Piketty has in mind when he warns against growing inequality. What does he see as the central problem of growing inequality and the concentration of wealth? The fact that wealth is increasingly distributed through inheritances and not through performance. With that – and only with that – inequality becomes injustice and thus a problem for Piketty, since inheritance is a way of transmitting wealth that is not mediated by the market, which he regards as scandalous. His demand is that only the market should decide the distribution of income. The market is for him the central entity of justice: market results are fair results.
this. is. so. good.
The performance ideology that Piketty promotes moves – particularly in Germany – within a dangerous context. Performance ideology goes hand in hand with a chauvinism of affluence, which is expressed in Europe through racism and a hatred for supposedly ‘unproductive’ people, for example ‘lazy Greeks’.
The idea of a performance-linked income also has a flipside: if the market is recognized as an entity for evaluating performance, then economic failure can consistently be explained by a lack of potential and willingness to perform. Greece is in crisis? Then the Greeks surely have not worked hard enough. Somebody is unemployed? Then he or she obviously did not make enough of an effort. Somebody earns very little? Then he or she is not worth more. Somebody earns a lot of money? Then he or she is an excellent character who possesses saleable ‘skills’: the ability to perform, assertiveness, the capacity for teamwork, in short: the ability to succeed. Every result of the market can thus be explained by quasi-natural, personal qualities of individuals, and is therefore justified. Success and failure thus become a question of character.
With that, every critique of the economic system is rendered toothless. Those who succeed can be proud of themselves and look down upon those who fail. Those who fail can admire the winners of the competition and be ashamed – which is to say, turn the critique towards themselves.
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[...] She had said that he wanted to study computers, and that she was trying to help him. I still remember her voice, as it tried to erase San Giovanni, the salami, the odor of the factory, her situation, by citing with false expertise abbreviations like: Cybernetics Center of the State University of Milan, Soviet Center for the Application of Computer Science to the Social Sciences. She wanted to make me believe that a center of that type would soon be established even in Naples. I had thought: in Milan maybe, certainly in the Soviet Union, but here no, here it is the folly of your uncontrollable mind, into which you are dragging even poor, devoted Enzo. Leave, instead. Get away for good, far from the life we’ve lived since birth. Settle in well-organized lands where everything really is possible. I had fled, in fact. Only to discover, in the decades to come, that I had been wrong, that it was a chain with larger and larger links: the neighborhood was connected to the city, the city to Italy, Italy to Europe, Europe to the whole planet. And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.
[...] Franco, Pietro, all the best students, and of course the renowned teachers at the Normale expressed themselves in a complex manner: they wrote with deliberate artifice, they had an ability to classify, a logical lucidity, that Professor Galiani didn’t possess. But I had trained myself to be like them. And often I succeeded: it seemed to me that I had mastered words to the point of sweeping away forever the contradictions of being in the world, the surge of emotions, and breathless speech. In short, I now knew a method of speaking and writing that—by means of a refined vocabulary, stately and thoughtful pacing, a determined arrangement of arguments, and a formal orderliness that wasn’t supposed to fail—sought to annihilate the interlocutor to the point where he lost the will to object. But that evening things didn’t go as they should have. First, Adele and her friends, whom I imagined as very sophisticated readers, and then the man with the thick eyeglasses intimidated me. I had become again the eager little girl from the poor neighborhood of Naples, the daughter of the porter with the dialect cadence of the South, amazed at having ended up in that place, playing the part of the cultured young writer. So I had lost confidence and expressed myself in an unconvincing, disjointed manner. Not to mention Nino. His appearance had taken away any self-control, and the very quality of his speech on my behalf had confirmed to me that I had abruptly lost my abilities. We came from backgrounds that were not very different, we had both worked hard to acquire that language. And yet not only had he used it naturally, turning it easily against the speaker, but, at times, when it seemed to him necessary, he had even dared to insert disorder into that polished Italian with a bold nonchalance that rapidly managed to make the professorial tones of the other man sound out of date and perhaps a little ridiculous. As a result, when I saw that the man wished to speak again, I thought: he’s really angry, and if he said bad things about my book before, now he’ll say something even worse to humiliate Nino, who defended it.
He made a grimace of displeasure and said: “Lina is brave, even too brave. But she doesn’t know how to submit to reality, she’s incapable of accepting others and herself. Loving her was a difficult experience.”
[...] I’m so limited, I can only concentrate on one thing at a time, excluding everything else. But now I’ll change. Right after this boring dinner I’ll drag Nino with me, I’ll make him walk all night, I’ll ask him what books I should read, what films I should see, what music I should listen to. And I’ll take him by the arm, I’ll say: I’m cold. Confused intentions, incomplete proposals. I hid from myself the anxiety I felt, I said to myself only: It might be the only chance we have, tomorrow I’m leaving, I won’t see him again.