Piketty’s data

It's been reported in the past ten days that some experts from the FT or LSE are claiming that Piketty's sources are inaccurate. What a shame that his book has been a best seller yet his conclusions are pathetic reformism. Marx turning in his grave again.

That begs the question. Was it reforms that affected the distribution of wealth, or something else i.e economic conditions?

I think they did the same with the original Capital. Marx use of the parliamentary Blue Books were subject to scrutiny and challenged for accuracy. I thought this was quite an insightful (inciteful) view of the book from an interesting anglehttp://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/02/tinkering-with-capitalism/

Yeah, our issue as Communists is ‘production’, but for most workers the issue is ‘distribution’.The overwhelming majority of workers on this planet are not opposed to ‘capitalism’ (as a system of production and exploitation), but are opposed to the current distribution of wealth.

Again, workers are not against there being ‘income from capital’, but are against the proportion going to the capitalists. And Piketty’s data seems to prove that, by some method, whether by the human agency of reformism or the ‘objective’ movement of ‘economic conditions’, that the proportion being distributed to workers can grow, and the proportion being distributed to capital can fall, without the need for socialism, that is, changing the system of production.

Similarly, most workers have nothing against ‘inequality’; they’re quite happy with the ‘vacuum cleaner’ model of wealth suction, and just want a portion diverted to them. They fear that, without the ‘vacuum cleaner’, they’ll have to go back to ‘brush and shovel’.I don’t think that there is necessarily anything within the ‘vacuum cleaner’ method that will make workers reject its method of operation. In fact, the 20th century proves that they’ll do anything to maintain its working.To me, the ‘questioning’ of the system has to come from outside the working of the system; that is, it’s an issue of ‘human agency’ rather than ‘economic conditions’. Workers must want more than a greater ‘distribution’ for themselves; they must want to question the ‘vacuum cleaner’. If they don’t, all the ‘vacuum cleaning’ in the world won’t make them critical. Whilst the only alternative they can picture is ‘brush and shovel’, then Piketty and the reformists will hold sway.Since I think that the only way forward is for workers who are already Communists to persuade other workers that Communism is possible, and since that is a task of education and propaganda, I think that we are failing to explain our ideas to workers. To me, the history of the socialist movement is the failure to explain to workers in terms that they themselves can understand. I’m still yet to hear a good explanation of Capital, for example, as opposed to simply regurgitating Marx’s mysterious words. Only with understanding can come the confidence to act for oneself. Acting for others (employment within capitalism) will not in itself produce enlightenment about one’s actions. There has to be a ‘critical break’ by each worker, as an individual. We’re not helping to develop this ‘critical break’, which can only come about with thought, and not through day-to-day life, of mere experience of ‘economic conditions’.

This rather fine article is not written by the “ultra keynesian” John Kenneth Galbraith, who died back in 2006.  It is written by his son James K Galbraith. On the evidence of this article, James is far from being the “ultra keynesian” his father was and, if he is a keynesian at all, he can only be called, at best, a highly unorthodox one.In Section 1 of the article, James K Galbraith neatly summarizes the Marxian and the marginalist conceptions of capital, and comes out on the side of Marx.  He soundly criticizes the neoclassical physicalist “production function” and thereby criticizes his father’s master, Keynes himself.James presents the pithiest summary I’ve ever read of the famous, but abstruse, Cambridge capital controversies of the 1960s, in which Samuelson graciously conceded losing the battle, but in which the pyrrhic marxians lost the war (they effectively succeeded in demolishing Marx’s Capital for a whole generation until Andrew Kliman rescued it in the year James K Galbraith’s father died).Importantly for socialists, James K Galbraith’s criticism of physicalism [accounting capital in physical units], as Andrew Kliman proved in Reclaiming Marx’s Capital, lays a devastating blow on neo-Ricardian, or Sraffian, economics as well as on neo-classical, or marginalist, economics.  It is the proof of Marx’s social relations of production conception of value, though James K Galbraith may not see it that way.In any case, this man is no orthodox keynesian, at least as far as his explicit theory goes in this article.Piketty, of course, is totally different.  He is a pure phenomenologist, not in Hegel’s sense, but in the sense of an empirical scientist, not a theoretical one.  He is a modern day Thomas Tooke, whose History of Prices and of the State of the Circulation during the Years 1703–1856  was a mine of empirical data for Marx.Fact, or data, begs explanation; it is not its own ineffable explanation.  Fact, as nothing-generating-something, is what Hegel implies by being–nothing–becoming. The world won’t let us sit on the piketty fence.