Time For Socialism: Dispatches from a world on Fire, 2016-2021, by Thomas Piketty

Author: Thomas Piketty. Review by Reg Naulty.

This book is a call for more socialism. It also presents a case for the redesign of the European Union. Thomas Piketty envisages a large-scale re-distribution of income, using progressive taxation on super-rich corporations and individuals, whose wealth has increased by an astonishing amount since the low tax regimes inaugurated by Reagan and Thatcher.

Piketty argues that, since Brexit and the election of anti-European governments in Italy and Hungary, the need for redesigning the EU has become imperative. He provides a ‘Manifesto for the Democratization of Europe’ as a guide, published in 2018. He envisages a budget for democratisation, which would be debated and voted by a European Assembly. The budget would be financed by four major taxes: on the profits of major firms; the top incomes (over €200,000 a year); the highest wealth owners (over €1 million a year); and a carbon emissions tax.

The Assembly would be composed of elected parliamentarians from all twenty-seven countries, the size of the representation being proportional to the size of the sending populations. It is unclear whether this would replace the current European Parliament. Assembly decisions would be determined by a majority vote.

A strengthened EU would be an advantage to the rest of the world. The United States as ‘defender of the free world’ seems to be faltering. But Piketty is aware of how difficult it will be to achieve a new Europe. The current governments of Germany and France are Euro-conservatives, he writes, but the case for redesigning is very strong. In all referendums of the last twenty-five years, the working classes have systematically expressed their disagreement with the Europe presented to them, whereas the richest and most privileged have supported it. This sense of abandonment by the working class has fuelled the rise of populism.

With respect to the US, Piketty remarks on the skill of the Republicans in using nationalist rhetoric, in cultivating a degree of anti-intellectualism, and, above all, in exacerbating ethnic, cultural and religious divisions. Piketty emphasises that it makes no sense to make tax gifts to groups who are old and wealthy, as conservative governments have done. The need to reintroduce progressive taxation is one of his great themes.

The book contains illuminating, if brief, analyses of Indian and Brazilian politics. The latter in particular should have been a matter of international concern, since as late as 1988 it used illiteracy as a method of denying millions of people the vote, while using only weak measures to boost literacy. There are interesting comments about China, where between 1995 and 2015 the share of private wealth held by the richest ten per cent rose by over twenty-five per cent. China, he writes, risks developing a form of pluto-communism with a stronger concentration of private property than capitalist countries.

The book sheds valuable light on our world.

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