Thomas Piketty

In this powerful new work, Thomas Piketty reminds us that rising inequality is not inevitable. Over the centuries, we have been moving toward greater equality. Piketty guides us with elegance and concision through the great movements that have made the modern world and shows how we can learn from them to make equality a lasting reality.

A Brief History of Equality

Bastien Vaucher

The experiment of Soviet communism (1917-1991), a major event that runs through and to a certain extent defines the twentieth century, perfectly illustrates these two pitfalls. On the one hand, it was in fact power relationships and intense social struggles that allowed the Bolshevik revolutionaries to replace the czarist regime with the first "proletarian state" in history, a state that initially achieved considerable advances in education, public health, and industry, while at the same time making a major contribution to the victory over Nazism. Without the pressure of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement, it is not at all certain that the Western property-owning classes would have accepted Social Security and progressive income taxes, decolonization and civil rights. On the other hand, the sanctification of power relationships and the Bolsheviks’ certainty that they knew the ultimate truth concerning equitable institutions led to the totalitarian disaster we witnessed.

It is only after having established their supremacy over certain products that the countries that have become dominant begin to lapse into the free-trade discourse, which in practice often ends up making other, less advanced countries permanently dependent on them.

In the United States, Roosevelt had to threaten to "pack” the Supreme Court in 1937 so that it would lift the veto by which it was blocking his social legislation in the name of free enterprise, even though he had just been reelected with 61 percent of the vote. It is probable that episodes of the same kind will occur in the future in times of crisis—times that it is impossible to foresee. Here, too, this observation must be used not as an excuse for trampling on all legal rules, but on the contrary, to propose new rules that are more profoundly egalitarian and democratic than the preceding ones, without losing sight of the fact that the law must be a tool for emancipation and not for the preservation of positions of power.

If there is a domain where censitary voting continues to reign, it is certainly that of economic power. In joint-stock companies, the stock- bolders legally have all the power, with voting rights proportional to the number of stocks they hold. It might be said that this is the definition of capitalism, but in fact it is a specific institutional arrangement that is not particularly natural and has been established only gradually, in the context of specific circumstances and power relationships. Theoretically, other rules are perfectly conceivable. For example, nothing guarantees that stockholders are more competent to manage an enterprise than a company’s employees, or that they are more invested in its success over the long term. Often the opposite is true: an investment fund can put capital into an enterprise and withdraw it again in a short period of time, whereas employees generally invest a major part of their lives, their energy, and their skills. In many respects, employees constitute the company’s first long term investors. If we look at the big picture, we can only be surprised by this persistence of plutocracy in economic matters.

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