Yet another tantalizing critique of Piketty's book

The English-language mondediplo.com site of Le Monde Diplomatique has Why Piketty isn't Marx. Well, of course I clicked and was rewarded with these gems of economics, scholarship, and criticism:
1.
We should not ignore the book’s merits. Every commentator must be impressed by the scale and quality of Piketty’s statistical work. But its principal virtue lies in the fact that it is a book. Most economists, driven by the need to publish, have unlearned the skill of writing books. Instead, they produce technical papers (not longer than the 15 pages allowed by academic journals) so standardised that they lose all meaning. Capital in the Twenty-First Century is the thousand-page culmination of 15 years of dedicated toil. The usefulness of social sciences is never so clear as when they contribute to the political debate with solidly established facts.
But all the methodological rigour in the world will not make up for the most basic deception, so obvious that it has passed unnoticed: the title. Piketty tells us he is going to discuss capital. He is aware that a well-known author has written a book about it before him. He seems to think “I can get away with this”. Unfortunately, it does matter: it’s fine to call a new book Critique of Pure Reason provided you are not writing about, say, herbal medicine.
Just what is capital? Piketty, not having really read Das Kapital, is only able to give a very superficial definition: the wealth of the wealthy. To Marx, capital was something else entirely, a mode of production, a complex social relationship which, crucially, adds employment relationships to the monetary relationships of simple market economies. These are based on private ownership of the means of production and on the legal myth of the “free worker”, who is deprived of any means of making a living independently and therefore forced to hire himself out to survive, and to submit to domination by an employer.
... That is what capital is, not just the Fortune 500. In the narrow sense of wealth, capital affects ordinary people through the obscene spectacle of wealth inequality. But as a mode of production and a social relationship, it affects them far more through the slavery it creates — an eight-hour working day takes up half their waking day. Redundant workers probably suffer less from seeing the rich parade their wealth than from the way their lives have been wrecked by the iron law of financial valuation. The same goes for those in work, who suffer under the tyrannical demands of productivity and profitability, constant threats of mass layoffs, delocalisation, restructuring — the energy-sapping precariousness and brutal nature of employment. None of this is even mentioned in the book.
The form and intensity of this slavery are determined by the historical circumstances under which capitalism is manifested — for in practice, there are many different kinds of capitalism. And it is the inseparably linked, changing economic and political factors that continually steer capitalism in new directions. But Piketty is quite unable to see things in a light that would show up the specifically political factors in the history of capitalism.

2. 
Piketty may repeat over his thousand pages that inequality increases when r(rate of return on capital) is greater than g (growth rate), but he has explained nothing because he doesn’t describe the factors that determine rates of return and growth in each era. These depend on the organisation of structures in the particular era, the result of political struggles — of class struggles.
3.
He is ill-equipped to tell the story.  Nothing in his career has prepared him for it: he cannot go overnight from a social-democratic, organic economist to being the Marx of the 21st century.
[La République des Idées, RI, for instance,]... has consistently taken great care never to raise any indecorous issues... talked about inequality for many years, weeping over the sufferings of the workers, but has blamed rapid technological innovation and lack of training, and praised the virtues of academic research. What about free trade and the devastation it brings? Or the tyranny of shareholder value? Or the EU, now in the final stages of neoliberalism? Not a word. RI thinks all these are our destiny. It has a strategy of evasion — and sleight of hand. Those who claim to be serious and are keen to maintain their influence and their reputation in the media never mention such things.
...
 Finance has been globalised and nobody had taken any notice, but it is now clear that everything is not rosy. The economist Daniel Cohen, like Piketty, after decades of silence on this, has suddenly realised that the design of the EU’s monetary union was “faulty from the start”... Their belated rectifications will have very little effect. Long-term intellectual and political habits are hard to overcome. Capital is riddled with them; Piketty skips over the political and social history that
...
The logical consequence of the strategy of evasion is that taxation becomes the only remaining tool available. Giving up on trying to change structures means taking palliative measures. Taxation has never been anything more than a social-democratic palliative — if we can’t tackle the causes, let’s at least try to alleviate the effects. Piketty, torn between the immediate problem and his desire not to disrupt anything fundamental, would like taxation to have greater virtues than it does, even the ability to regulate international finance. It’s hard to see what kind of tax could substitute for the necessary major assault on the structures of liberalised finance. What tax could replace bank separation, closure of some markets, a ban on securitisation?

4.
Piketty provides a scientific consecration, not only of the public perception that monetary inequality exists, but also of the theme around which the discussion of capitalism will revolve — around which it already revolves: even The Economist has had years of articles on monetary inequality, which will be the weakest link in the diagnosis, the point where the most inoffensive critiques converge. Monetary inequality has a great virtue: it makes it possible to avoid talking about the other inequalities created by capitalism, which are not accidental, but fundamental and constituent — the political inequalities in the true sense of hierarchical subservience in employment; that in business, some give orders and others must follow them. No tax, not even a global tax, will ever be able to address this.
To ask questions about this inequality, which is ultimately about the way lucrative property (capital), controls our lives, and of the pressure to be employed, is to ask the key question that the real Marx asks about capital. Or anyway the key question about capitalism’s current configuration, which a global financial tax (that will never happen) could do nothing about. Only a resumption of the struggle for popular sovereignty, by a single nation, or several nations together, according to political circumstances, would be able to do anything — by changing, through the transformation of structures, the balance of power that allows capital to hold society to ransom.
Piketty’s critique of wealth inequality touches on none of this. 
Isn't it funny how I've studied all these essays with pleasure and I still haven't read the book in question (Capital in the Twenty-First Century) yet.  I have, I should mention, studied Marx's Capital (usually known as Das Kapital) at least once.  I do not endorse every idea that I re-publish here, but I do endorse rigorous debate and critique.  To what extent does economics/business not know what the hell it's doing?  Do we even care?  (The usual answer is of course not.)  I think it is interesting too that this money blog (UpNaira / Money Talk) is becoming in some ways an anti-money blog, have you noticed?  

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References:
- Quotes 1-4 above taken from "Why Piketty isn't Marx", written by Frédéric Lordon in Le Monde Diplo May 12th 2015 (link)
The introduction/summary: Thomas Piketty’s thousand-page economics bestseller reduces capital to mere wealth — leaving out its political impact on social and economic relationships throughout history.

- Workers, a painting, by Olumide Oresegun

- Flower seller, and other paintings of labour(ers), by Diego Rivera

- What does Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the book, look like? 

Tunnelling through on the back of the creative economy

Creative production is happening in Nigeria.  It is not highly organized and it is not well funded, both of which constraints are practically positive drivers of raw creativity.  But this movement is capturing the hearts of the youth who would otherwise be unemployed and frustrated.   I am proud of what I'm calling La Renaissance, you have to say that with a French accent folks :) 

Here's a thought: if we can do the arts so well, we can do science and invention and thought and all that too.  Think about it: Information is almost free, access to markets is practically equal worldwide, while on the other hand, the high levels of capital and investment and organization available in today's hubs (like top 100 universities or Silicon Valley companies) are NOT a requirement for thinking.

You can do mathematics without a fabulous supportive structure.  Grigori Perelman did.  Sure, no one will understand what you're doing with yourself or how you're ever going to make enough money to make a complex crowd-pleasing life.
I never said it was for everybody.
You can study online and work remotely on high-tech projects.  
At any rate, you can do literature without a fabulous structure - and there is some precedent for that.  If there is so much angst, then it means there is so much to write about, doesn't it?  

In fashion design, Nigeria rocks.   In pop music, I think nobody is producing better.  Not Korea, not America...  

We have a nominally large film industry but maybe not the message/mission and not the revenue to make it world-class. 

But...
We haven't scratched the surface in product design.  Environmental design.  Beautification and street art.  Performance art.  Architecture - and I don't mean just throwing cement and marble at the problem.  History.  Storytelling.  Cuisine.

We still have half the population stuck in the market and kitchen doing the same repetitive tasks half the day.  Why?

We are stuck in traffic when we should be working or playing, making or praying.  Why?

We don't make a lot of the products we claim to like - not cell phones, not luxury homes, not cars, not our expensive fake hair. 

We haven't cut out the hours and dollars spent on generators and fueling in this town.  At least for a start get an inverter?  Change the laws so that investment can proceed?  We are not inventing low-power devices.  We don't even really care to make things really, we think it is for the lowly among us.  We actually look down on our geniuses until they have the shiny car to show for it.  Wow. 

 We think Islam and Christianity are so different.  We don't know the North, if we live in the South of the country.  We don't know the Mainland, if we live on the Island in Lagos.  We still don't have a Metro public transportation link or a city plaza.  We don't want to be seen on public transportation. 

We give all our money to the politicians of the current day then throw them out and give all our (potential capital) to the next batch.  We have a Freedom of Information law but few who know how to use it.  We claim it's the president and cronies oppressing the people, but what I see choking us is self-repression, the need to please, class-mania, local-thinking, slavery of the mind.  I got my own issues too, it's not just you :) 

We want to care for our own children but screw over the next person's children?  We teach our children to not waste time dreaming, "success" is more important.  We still wear winter clothes as uniforms to work, lawyers still wear blonde wigs, and philosophy still starts with Aristotle.  We haven't created material based on our heritage.  We study entrepreneurship in a classroom, by cramming facts for a test.  We have schools that are only exciting to a few students while others dream everyday of escaping.  We have schools that can not afford to employ the best, since the best can get higher salaries and more social status elsewhere.  We have schools that make people want to go abroad.

We've got our fingers permanently stuck in pointing at God or the president who is to blame and who should fix this or fix that. We're so stuck on survival, and after survival is guaranteed we move on to excessive consumption because in our minds we're just poor.  While we're running this rat race, we don't care to leave an astounding legacy, we'll settle for a plate of rice thank you very much.  Uncle Barack once termed this a poverty of ambition. 

We have starved our minds for so long, that we actually fear the public servants of today's democracy as much as we feared the gun-toting generals of the eighties and nineties, and oops, even before that.  We don't say thank you when a governor does the right thing - we expect "him" to thank himself by helping himself to public funds.  We don't vote women into office, we say men should "rule" and women should assist.  I'm tired of female deputy governors, assistant council presidents, what's so wrong with women being authority figures?    We don't say thank you when a citizen does the right thing, we don't have time for that, but we have time for the one who can dash us money.  We have no time to contemplate the stars or to smell the flowers. 

But we have pop music.   By God, we do.  And maybe that can lead us into the future, at least by telling us our dreams.
Maybe Baby, it is just a thought:  

PLAY