Return of the scourge

Not since Tocqueville or perhaps even Lafayette has a Frenchman so taken America by storm; or at least, in the case of Thomas Piketty, taken American leftists by storm.

The occasion for such enthusiasm is the French socialist’s 700-page tome, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, an unabashed effort to resurrect Karl Marx by arguing that he was correct after all in his critique of capitalism.

Leading pundits of the left like Paul Krugman and Ezra Klein have applauded Piketty’s sequel to Kapital, while a reviewer in Esquire called it the most important book of the century. Sitting at No. 1 on Amazon, Marx II might eventually surpass the sales of Marx I.

The most interesting part of the Piketty phenomenon is thus not so much his book as the leftist response to it, which might tell us more about the intellectual barrenness of the left in the post-Soviet era than about the oligarchic consequences of capital accumulation.

At a minimum, the embrace of Piketty’s door-stopper flows from the lack of any “big books” on the left in recent decades, defined as those that have strongly influenced debate over major issues in public policy. Fifty or so years ago, the left dominated the big-book sphere, with John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, and many others. If one wanted to read what mattered and what intellectuals were jabbering about, you read the left.

That all ended with the rise of the modern conservative movement, culminating in Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, after which the right increasingly dominated intellectual debate and thus the big-book picture, whether the issue was entrepreneurship (George Gilder’s Wealth and Poverty), crime (James Q. Wilson’s Thinking About Crime), social policy (Charles Murray’s Losing Ground), or even world politics (Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations).

Indeed, it is difficult to remember any major work on the left that reverberated much beyond insular academe after the publication of John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice in 1971 (itself sliced and diced thereafter in every way possible from the right by Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State and Utopia).

Piketty changes all that. For the first time in a long time, the left has the book that everyone, right and left, seems to be talking about; that it dovetails with the left’s Occupy Wall Street dogma on inequality as the defining issue of our time makes it even more politically useful.

On a more profound level, though, Piketty has become a sensation because he seeks to restore the credibility of a belief system crucial to the identity of the left and which had fallen on hard times since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The core of the left has always been the Marxian goal of a massive redistribution of wealth by an activist state (a “ dictatorship of the proletariat,” in Marx-speak), producing a classless utopia in which “to each according to need, from each according to ability” prevails.

There can, in the end, be no ideological coherence or pragmatic political project on the left without this vision, because virtually all elements of leftism since publication of The Communist Manifesto have flowed from it. The presumed death of communism thus robbed the left of its primary reason for existence. Efforts to fill the resulting vacuum with other enthusiasms-earth worship/ environmentalism (“global warming”) and identity politics-have been only partly successful. Take out Marx and all you have left of leftism is sequential grievance-mongering.

So Piketty brings Marxism roaring back into the picture by restoring to it some measure of intellectual respectability, especially for those lacking the intellect or moral sense to remember what it once wrought (in conjunction with its sinister modification known as Leninism) in places like Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, and the killing fields of Cambodia. People, especially leftists, can forget a great deal in a quarter-century, especially when they badly wish to.

In the end, however, there might still be some risk in the left’s uninhibited championing of Piketty. The socialist dream in this country has only remained viable when hidden behind labels like “progressivism” and “liberalism.” The American left has strenuously resisted the “socialist” label and dismissed as “red-baiters” anyone who points out the strong similarities between their positions and goals and those of European “social democrats” like Piketty.

Embracing Marx via Piketty might thus beneficially resurrect Marxian socialism, but only at the expense of ripping the mask off post-New Deal American liberalism to reveal what lurks beneath. Indeed, Kyle Smith notes in the New York Post, regarding the Piketty moment, that, “We can only hope Hillary Clinton is dumb enough to agree … that now is finally the moment to call for a hammer and sickle to be added to the Stars and Stripes.”

It might also be difficult, as a practical political matter, to embrace Piketty while also somehow avoiding his radical solutions for the inequality allegedly induced by contemporary capitalism, which include a global 60 percent tax on all incomes above $200,000 and an 80 percent tax on those above $500,000.

Good luck to Democrats when they try to sell that to American voters this fall.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 13 on 05/05/2014

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