Is There A Gradual Path to Socialism?
While Thomas Piketty shied away from advocating socialism at the time of the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, he’s now come to embrace the term. (Central European University / Flickr)
A review of Thomas Piketty's new book
by Eric Blanc
Review of Time for Socialism: Dispatches From a World on Fire, 2016–2021 by Thomas Piketty (Yale University Press, 2021)
It’s a sign of the times that one of the world’s most prominent intellectuals has just published a book of essays titled Time for Socialism. As Thomas Piketty explains in the volume’s long introduction, “If someone had told me in 1990 that I would publish a collection of articles in 2020 entitled Vivement le socialisme! in French, I would have thought it was a bad joke.”
Yet for Piketty, like countless others across the world, the past three decades of what he calls “hypercapitalism” pushed him to question accepted truths about the prevailing economic system. And while the author still shied away from advocating socialism at the time of the publication of Capital in the Twenty-First Century, his 2013 best-selling magnum opus on inequality, he’s now come to embrace the term — arguing that despite the baggage of its connotations of Stalinism, “It remains the most appropriate term to describe the idea of an alternative economic system to capitalism.”
There’s more to this than terminology. As Piketty explains, his embrace of socialism reflects his newfound conviction that “one cannot just be ‘against’ capitalism or neoliberalism: one must also and above all be ‘for’ something else, which requires precisely designating the ideal economic system that one wishes to set up.” Faced with rampant inequality and looming climate catastrophe, anger with capitalism is already widespread. What’s now needed above all, in his view, is a compelling and “clearly explained alternative.”
A New Socialism
Piketty summarizes his case for “a new form of socialism” as one that is “participative and decentralized, federal and democratic, ecological, multiracial, and feminist.” The vision he puts forward is decidedly in the democratic socialist tradition, which seeks to deepen and expand the representative institutions and political freedoms codified in today’s capitalist democracies. Far from projecting an insurrectionary uprising, Piketty argues that “it is quite possible to move gradually toward participatory socialism by changing the legal, fiscal, and social system.”
In his view, this transition has already begun: “If we take a long-term perspective, then the long march toward equality and participatory socialism is already well under way.” Though progress stalled out in the neoliberal era, he notes that the big story in capitalist countries since the nineteenth century is the “sharp reduction” in inequalities and the dramatic growth of the welfare state.
In Western Europe — the geographic focus of his book — total public expenditure in the early twentieth century was only 10 percent of the national income. But it has now reached 40-50 percent, overwhelmingly dedicated to funding services such as education, health care, and pensions. According to Piketty, this progress was the result of popular pressure as codified in governmental policy — it was neither a ruling-class maneuver to forestall radical change, nor was it an inevitable by-product of capitalist development left to its own devices.
Though he argues that the further expansion of public services — including, crucially, measures to make higher education accessible to all is — is essential for moving toward socialism, Piketty’s vision is not reducible to rebuilding robust welfare states. For true equality, we need to rethink the “whole range of relationships of power and domination.” At the core of his conception of the transition to socialism is radical redistribution of wealth combined with an extension of employee influence within private firms.
One of the more innovative proposals in Time for Socialism is to dramatically scale up progressive taxation to provide a “minimum inheritance for all” of roughly $180,000 for everybody when they turn twenty-five years old. Through this policy, Piketty envisions building a society in which “everyone would own a few hundred thousand euros, where a few people would perhaps own a few million, but where the higher holdings . . . would only be temporary and would quickly be brought down by the tax system to more rational and socially more useful levels.”
Providing a generous financial cushion to all would, among its many benefits, free workers from being compelled by material necessity to accept bad working conditions, low pay, and workplace despotism. A sweeping top-to-bottom redistribution of wealth, in short, would “help to redefine the whole set of relations of power and social domination.”
To deepen this power shift, Piketty also proposes that all countries adopt workers’ comanagement, in which elected employee representatives constitute half of the boards of directors in all large enterprises. This proposal, he notes, has already been implemented in countries such as Sweden and Germany, resulting in “a considerable transformation of the classic shareholder logic.”
He nevertheless cautions against idealizing this comanagement system as it has been implemented in the past, arguing that more ambitious versions of it are possible. Piketty concludes his case by stressing his proposals’ provisional nature: the specific policies he puts forward “aim to open the debate, never to close it” because “the participatory socialism I’m calling for will not come from the top.”
A Welcome Shift
The fact that a thinker with Piketty’s intellectual influence has embraced socialism is significant in itself, paving the way for greater numbers of people to begin envisioning a world beyond capitalism. But what should we make of his vision of socialist transformation?