Benjamin Selwyn — Piketty, Marx and the roots of inequality

From this perspective Piketty’s thesis is the icing on Marx’s cake, as he explains what happens after capital and labour have been remunerated. For Marx, the balance of class power is the key to understanding distributive outcomes between capitalist and working classes. A more equal society requires a stronger working class.

Piketty’s solution to the problem of rising global inequality is a global wealth tax, imposed by states upon the capitalist class. While it is fundamentally different to Marx’s emphasis on class struggle from below, it can be interpreted in different ways: as an attempt to generate a more equal capitalism, without interfering with its exploitative dynamic. Or potentially as a mobilising step by working class organisations to begin encroaching upon capital’s exploitative powers. Either way it provides much-needed food for thought across the left of centre political spectrum.

Le Monde diplomatique
Piketty, Marx and the roots of inequality
Benjamin Selwyn | Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex
(h/t Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism)

Economic policy is about distribution of the surplus. Left to itself in a laissez-faire system, capital is able to expropriate any share it can sustain without provoking a reaction intense enough  to precipitate change.

There is a huge financial and economic incentive to do just that because the purpose of capitalism is capital formation and unlimited growth measured in GDP per capita regardless of distribution. This is a reason that economists in service of capital are so loathe to consider distributional effects in their models.