Capital e ideología

The meritocratic and entrepreneurial discourse is, often, a comfortable way of justifying any level of inequality by the winners of the current economic system, without even having to subject it to scrutiny, as well as stigmatizing the losers for their lack of merit, talent, and diligence. The blaming of the poorest did not exist, or at least not with this magnitude, in the unequal regimes of the past.

—Thomas Piketty

Thanks to the success of Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), Thomas Piketty has been able to access fiscal and historical sources that different governments had previously refused to provide. Based on the study of this unprecedented data, the author proposes an economic, social, intellectual, and political history of inequality, from hierarchical and slave societies to modern postcolonial and hypercapitalist societies, passing through colonialist, communist, and social democratic societies.

An important conclusion emerges from this analysis: inequality is not economic or technological; it is ideological and political. In other words, ideas and ideologies matter in history. For Piketty, the common thread in the history of human societies (which is also the history of the search for justice) is not the class struggle, as Marx and Engels argued, but the struggle of ideologies. Social position is not enough to forge a theory of a just society, of just property, of just taxation, or of democracy. No one will ever have the absolute truth on these matters.

Thomas Piketty is convinced that it is possible to overcome capitalism and build a just society based on participatory socialism and social federalism, and he presents his proposal in this ambitious work.