Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Fallacy of Marx-lite

Piketty's book, "Capital in the 21st Century" sits atop the best seller lists of Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and the New York Times (to name a few), something rather unheard of for a 700-plus page economic treatise. The choice of title needless to say harkens back to the earlier Capital by Karl Marx and certainly outsold the original's first edition.

Richard Eskow, fellow at the Campaign for America's Future, the high sales and unprecedented public attention drawn by the book say something remarkable about both its content and the current state of economic and political affairs in the U.S. Eskow writes:
“People are yearning for an explanation of the dire economic straits in which they find themselves...As Piketty himself points out, the Occupy Wall Street movement showed that even seemingly abstruse mathematical concepts like “the top centile” can galvanize large numbers of people when they are translated into simpler language like ‘the 1 percent.’ ”
One of the key services of the book is a statement of solutions, which for Piketty's includes a global tax on extreme wealth as a way to correct what is an inherent flaw of capitalism itself:

Karl Marx the economist is being regularly resurrected these days in the media. His analyses is now heralded as being accurate in the inequality ‘distribution problem’ of the haves and the haves-not. The professors and the journalists who have praised the insight of Marx call for a new “New Deal” with a whole raft of policy proposals and recommendations.

 Rob Urie, political economist and author of Zen Economics, raises an interesting observation.

“The question for Marx-lite economists and political commentators is why Marx himself saw the need for revolutionary change to address the social emergencies that capitalism produces if making policy recommendations would have sufficed?...

...unexplained in Marx-lite economics is how Marx’s identification of the internal contradictions of capitalism could be converted into policies that ‘improve’ capitalism?...

...Again, the current dissociation of Marx-lite from Marx the revolutionary begs the question of why Marx was revolutionary if policy prescriptions would accomplish his ‘goals.’ ...”

It is extremely doubtful, nay, inconceivable, that Marx would accept Piketty's remedy as a cure for capitalism's failings.

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