Unjust Returns

James and Leo were 'round this afternoon, and as usual, a lively debate was had for a while, sparked by the presence on the dining table, aka my winter "office", of my recently-acquired copy of Thomas Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" of 2014, which I mentioned in a recent post. James had just watched a documentary based on that book and Piketty's later works, such as 2019's "Capital & Ideology", on Amazon Prime the other night, which I intend to watch soonish. BTW, the irony of watching documentaries about the evils of rentier global capitalism on Prime is not lost on me, so don't bother calling me out on that one.

The central plank of Piketty's thinking is that were are being dragged back into the horrors of eighteenth and nineteenth century economics, where the gentry had, by dint of birth, enormous wealth in the form of land; and latterly, the captains of industry, usually emerging from the 'lower orders', by dint of talent, luck and happenstance, had similar, through capital and the exploitation of labour; both taking all the cream, with the rest of the population falling into line in a pecking order of servitude to them all at their behest; as if it were the natural order of things. That this is a stupidly simple overview of a complex period of history, I know: but you know what I mean. I happen to think that Piketty's right, though.

The rise of the billionaire class as it's currently framed, is testimony to the fact that all you need in this world, apparently, is bottomless pockets of moolah to wield all power and influence over 99.999% of the world's population. It's the economics of privilege and entitlement, backed up by a business ideology dreamt up by non-businesspeople in the halls of academe such as Harvard and Oxford. We are now in a period where 'ownership' is now the dominant economic asset, rather than the normal cycle of production and consumption: most of the stuff we consume is manufactured on the other side of the planet, anyway - that's the other side to this story - with none but corporate drones over here, feeding the bank accounts of the rentiers who own the transaction process itself. Do nothing of substance, earn shitloads of cash.

That brief period, post-second-world-war, when there existed a state of common humanity: of opportunity - in the real sense of the word - and of a common bond based on the social contract, has tragically been characterised as some kind of sad, failed, Socialist utopia. It wasn't. I was there. And what we have now is the logical culmination of decades of laissez faire, hands-off, right wing government - the New Labour years sadly have to be included in this - nuzzled up to the wealthy in much the same manner as two hundred years ago.

The difference now is that then, they hadn't quite fucked up the economy to the degree that this current bunch of no-marks have subsequently managed, and the cumulative effects of their [in]actions on the climate were only to be felt many years into the future, ie now. However, the seeds of complete climate and subsequent economic collapse have been sown by those that we have most recently elected to entrust with our lives and our planet. We are in part culpable for the situation in which we find ourselves. We definitely need those pitchforks and a healthy wake-up call, folks: it's going to be a shit-show if we don't start running things a lot better than we do at the moment...