This is an excellent review, from The Nation magazine, of Thomas Piketty's 1,110 page book, Capital and Ideology. My criticisms of the book review are two-fold:
1. The author, Cole Strangler, shows a clear, and, frankly, ignorant, anti-Marxist intellectual bias. Strangler asserts Marx and Marxist intellectuals had no conception how ruling classes' ideologies play a role in suppressing far-reaching reformist thoughts, let alone revolutionary action. In fact, Marx wrote a work called The German Ideology, and explained how ruling class ideas are used in modern societies to maintain and enforce capitalist political and economic power. Worse, Strangler appears oblivious to Antonio Gramsci, the leading early 20th Century Italian Marxist, who wrote about how capitalists use coercion, force, and ideology to maintain and enhance power.
2. Strangler never mentions the way in which corporate dominated media play a major enforcement role in maintaining and enhancing corporate capitalists' power, despite his recognizing Piketty's point that ideology is central to how corporate crony capitalists maintain power (I am using crony capitalist here to ensure libertarians can be part of the critique).
These critiques are substantive, but relatively inconsequential compared to the information Strangler provided in his otherwise able review. The review makes clear Piketty's points, which are: (1) the redistributive policies of the early to mid 20th Century republics were largely successful in ameliorating terrible economic inequality, and did wonders in creating a healthy working class, but (2) global markets undermined the ability to implement further redistributive policies, and, worse, capitalists were able to convince a sizable voting majority of voters to accept more and more pro-capitalist and anti-redistributive policies; and (3) The educated classes (what Barbara Ehreneich calls the professional-managerial class), became the focus of Europe's Labour and Left parties, and, in the US, the Democratic Party, which fractured worker solidarity that had given rise to the more effective Labour parties, and US Democratic Party, in the early to mid 20th Century. Of course, outside of this analysis is the racism factor, though it is part of #2 and #3, and helps explain how a sizable part of the white working class went to right wing xenophobic and racist appeals from the Republicans and Conservative Parties across the North Atlantic and into Europe.
Strangler's review in The Nation is must reading in helping us understand what Piketty is trying to set forth, though less for what a more radical vision may begin to look like. Reading the excellent book review also helps us be more understood when we note how our society's mental health problems arise, in part, from the stresses of economic and political inequality. The beauty and really irony in reading Strangler's book review is readers may now better understand Frederic Lordon's outstanding substantive critique of Piketty's work, which critique, unfortunately, Strangler caricatures to begin his detailed review. It is on par with Strangler's anti-Marxist intellectual bent, again, unfortunately.
One day, we will return Marx to the pantheon of economic and political philosophers--not because Marx is a god or is right about everything. What I simply mean is returning Marx to the pantheon allows us to understand the development of Western political and economic philosophy, as Marx helps explain Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and understand their limitations. Reading Marx directly, and without Cold War propagandistic blinders, may help readers better understand those who came after, and who were critical of, Marx, including non-Marxists such as John Dewey, John Milton Keynes, Buckminster Fuller, Bertrand Russell, and Joseph Schumpeter, among others, and those who embraced or built upon Marx's thoughts and arguments, such as Gramsci, Paul Sweezy, Harry Braverman, Michael Harrington, and David Harvey.
