Does anybody on the left care about political economy anymore? Two things I’ve been reading lately put the question in my mind. For one, I started Richard Beck’s great book Homeland: The War on Terror in American Life; as a consequence of Beck’s argument about the political-economic basis of the GWOT, I then started Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, a second- or third-hand copy of which has been languishing in the corner of a cobwebbed bookshelf in my office for some months now. Beck’s thesis is that stagnating global economic growth since the 1970s poses a lot of economic and political problems (to put it mildly), and that the GWOT was one way – though certainly not the only possible way – for the USA, as the global hegemon and steward of the international economy, to manage those problems. Piketty’s book focuses on the form and dynamics of capital in this same context of stagnating global economic growth. His general argument is that there are tendencies internal to capitalism that narrow inequality, like diffusion of skills and knowledge (forces of “convergence”) and tendencies that exacerbate it (forces of “divergence”). The most important force of divergence for Piketty is the “capital/income ratio,” the amount of privately held capital as a percentage of national income.* Crudely, when the rate of return exceeds the rate of growth, this balloons the capital/income ratio, which drives inequality. I juxtapose these two here just to emphasize the political economic mode of reasoning – there are deep structures and logic to capitalism, as a dynamic and complex global system, and these shape but do not fully determine the landscape of political realities and possibilities at any given time at all levels – international, national, and sub-national.
Beck’s argument was so forceful because, being a Literate Leftist myself and consequently sequestered in the dumbest possible corners of the discourse, I have gotten so used to people talking about economic growth like it’s merely ideology. All you have to do, to be a serious leftist, is skim some of the rhetorical scum from the stock pot and run with it – to talk about growth as if it’s only considered the criterion of economics and economic performance because it serves the big bad capitalists’ interests and flatters the ideological priors to do so; to dismiss growth as one more ideological bogeyman used to instill the false consciousness that we must live in a capitalist economic system. There’s one major problem with this, though, which is that we actually do live in a capitalist economic system. Whether we should or not, and whether we like it or not, we are living in and dealing with capitalism, and growth is important to capitalism. (It’s right there, in fractal form, in the valorization imperative, M must become M’.) There is a hugely important material basis to what growth is, and its determining relationship to the dynamics of capital and labor, of who gets what and how much, to the texture of what everyday life will be like for the people on earth, to the conflicts that this generates, and to the geopolitics that arise to manage all of it. Growth is a deep determinant, and its tendencies derive from the deep internal structure and workings of capitalism as a world economic system.
But we don’t talk about any of this! Much less try to think concretely about what any of it might mean for the only question of any use and interest to a working class or leftist politics, which is: what does power look like, and how do we get some of it? This was visible during the recent lead-up to the passage of the OBBBA, the “opposition” to which was a lot of posting, a lot of Refusing and Challenging Logics, a lot of Visioning Alternative Futures, a lot of discourse, and very little by way of mass politics. Most of the people I know are leftists, and I can count on two fingers the people that are doing anything on the level of mass politics around health and health care. Piketty is right that something like a global progressive tax on capital, which would work to flatten out the corrosive inequality that is everywhere growing, is very unlikely to happen given the scale of international coordination it would require alone (not to mention the scale of unified opposition it would face). That is not a defeatist statement, it is valuable information informed by an intuition for the structure and dynamics of capitalism. Given that such a global action is vanishingly unlikely, what are prospects for national-level policies to redistribute some of the resources that are currently locked up in private capital? Or, even more ambitious but still within the realm of possibility, what are the prospects for national-level politics that will create more favorable conditions for a slate of policies and approaches to dealing with the capital/income ratio, or overhauling the health care system such that wealth redistributed into it is spent on actually caring for people?
There are a variety of tactical approaches to take here. All I am suggesting is that we might think about it, and when I say think, I mean really think. I am deeply fucking burned out on any kind of political work or organizing, which I know is supposed to be no excuse in today’s leftist culture, but it’s the reality. I’ve also been reflecting, via the unintended consequences of my Covid “work,” on the high costs of misreading or misunderstanding the power coordinates of the moment. As Colin pointed out recently, talking about the opportunist lackeys staffing the health agencies (Jay Bhattacharya, Vinay Prasad, Marty Makary) – these people started out fringe, and gained their notoriety and national profile as posters, which is to say, in pitched and combative argument online with people like me and Colin, who were in general pretty misguided in thinking we could defeat by out-arguing. How much we realize we’re participating in creating the spectacle that drives the outrage cycle that the right (not the left, not so far, anyway) is able to alchemize into real political power – how much we realize what we’re doing probably varies from person to person, and from situation to situation, and of course hindsight is perfect, but I’m tired of it. To say the least.
I’m sure someone will object that Piketty is not a Marxist. Who gives a fuck? Neither was Marx! Piketty’s book is an attempt to analyze the system of global capitalism as it actually exists. The sad sack American left has completely given up whatever small amount of effort it ever expended on political economy, except as a signifier that we are serious people – serious people describe the discourse analysis they’re doing as “political economy.” Piketty’s method is different than Marx’s, and his political goals less radical and explicit – where Marx’s approach was dialectical, Piketty’s is more standard historical social scientific research of the kind we’d recognize from anywhere. But Piketty’s work, in at least making an attempt to chart the deep structure of the evolution of capitalism since Marx, unwittingly delivers a critical message of dialectical reasoning, though: things are the way they are because they got that way (care of Levins and Lewontin). How did things get this way?
The policy clientelism endemic to the Democratic party that Phil documented infects the left, too. All I can say is that political education is a critical part of any leftist program, not an afterthought, or an exercise in intellectual branding, or an adjunct to the Real Work of knocking doors with no concrete goal or whatever – first, what are we fighting for, and then, how do we work within this landscape as it exists to get enough power to implement it?
* All these things, capital, income, national income, capital/income ratio, have technical definitions which are given in Piketty’s book. Here I am presenting just the barest overview.
P.S. — I apologize if the background of the emails I’ve been sending has been black. I discovered a bit of rogue CSS code embedded in my settings that made it so, and I have deleted it, even though I have no idea how it got there! Sorry for the inconvenience!