Exploitation, capitalist crisis, and democratic planning : problems of Piketty’s socialism

Thomas Piketty is the most politically and economically important participant in the ongoing debate about the deleterious effects of income and wealth inequality. The article analyses his arguments carefully because they give Marxists an opportunity to intervene in a mainstream political-economic debate in which they are generally not taken seriously. As impressive as Piketty’s argument is, and as willing as he is to embrace a socialist solution to capitalist crisis, a non-dogmatic Marxist examination of his texts reveals that his argument does not grasp at the most systematic level the connections between the driving forces of the capitalist economy and the undemocratic implications of widening inequality. This article will argue that although his critique acknowledges the structural inequality of power between workers and capitalists upon which capitalist society depends, his argument points towards an organic link between the exploitation of labour, the falling rate of profit, capitalist crisis, the shift of investment from the productive economy to the financial sector, and growing inequality that he does not explicitly formulate.