conclusion piketty

Conclusion I have attempted in this book to propose an economic, social, intellectual and political history of unequal regimes, that is to say, a history of systems of justification and structuring of social inequality, since ancient trifunctional societies and slavers to postcolonial and modern hypercapitalist societies. It goes without saying that such a project will always be in progress: no book can ever exhaust such a vast subject. By definition, all the conclusions obtained are fragile and provisional. They are based on imperfect research that is intended to be expanded and expanded in the future. Above all, I hope that this book has enabled the reader to clarify his ideas and his own ideology of social equality and inequality, and will help to stimulate further reflection on these issues. History as a struggle of ideologies and as a quest for justice "The history of any society to this day has only been the story of the class struggle," wrote Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx in 1848 in the Manifesto of the Communist Party. The statement remains relevant, but I am tempted at the end of this inquiry to rephrase it as follows: the history of any society up to the present day has been nothing but the history of the struggle of ideologies and of the quest for justice. In other words, ideas and ideologies count in history. The social position, important as it may be, is not enough to forge a theory of the just society, a theory of property, a theory of the frontier, a theory of taxation, education, wages, the democracy. Without precise answers to these complex questions, without a clear strategy of political experimentation and social learning, struggles have no clear political outlet. This can sometimes lead after the seizure of power to politico-ideological constructions even more oppressive than those that were meant to overthrow. The history of the twentieth century and the communist disaster today requires a careful study of unequal regimes and their justifications, and especially the institutional arrangements and modes of socio-economic organization really allowing human and social emancipation. The history of inequality can not be reduced to an eternal confrontation between the oppressors of the people and the proud defenders of the latter. It rests on both sides on sophisticated intellectual and institutional constructs, which are certainly not always free from hypocrisy and the will of perpetuation on the part of the dominant groups, but which nevertheless deserve to be examined closely. Unlike the class struggle, the struggle of ideologies is based on the sharing of knowledge and experience, respect for the other, deliberation and democracy. Nobody will ever hold the absolute truth about fair property, just border, just democracy, tax or right education. The history of human societies can be seen as that of the quest for justice. Only the careful confrontation of historical and personal experiences and the most extensive deliberation can allow progress to be made in this direction. However, the struggle of ideologies and the quest for justice are also based on the expression of clearly defined positions and assumed antagonisms. Based on the experiences analyzed in this book, I am convinced that it is possible to overcome capitalism and private property and to build a just society based on participatory socialism and social-federalism. This includes establishing a system of social and temporary ownership, based on the one hand on the cap and the sharing of voting rights and power with employees in companies, and on the other hand on a tax strongly progressive on property, a universal capital endowment and the permanent circulation of goods. It also involves a progressive income tax system and collective regulation of carbon emissions to finance social insurance and basic income, the ecological transition and the establishment of a true equal right to education. Lastly, it involves the development of a new form of organization of globalization, with co-development treaties placing at their heart quantified objectives of social, fiscal and climate justice, and making themcontinued trade and financial flows. This redefinition of the legal framework requires the withdrawal of a number of existing treaties, in particular the free movement of capital agreements put in place since 1980-1990, which prevent the achievement of these objectives, and their replacement by new rules based on financial transparency, tax cooperation and transnational democracy. Some of the conclusions obtained may seem radical. In fact, they are in the tradition of a movement towards democratic socialism that has been under way since the end of the 19th century through profound changes in the legal, social and fiscal system. The sharp reduction in inequality observed in the middle of the twentieth century was made possible by the construction of a social state based on relative educational equality and a number of radical innovations, such as Germanic and Nordic co-management or fiscal progressivity. Anglo-Saxon. The conservative revolution of the 1980s and the fall of communism interrupted this movement and helped to bring the world into the 1980s and 1990s into a new phase of indefinite faith in the self-regulation of markets and quasi-sacralization of property. . The inability of the social democratic coalition to go beyond the framework of the nation-state and to renew its program, in a context marked by the internationalization of trade and educational tertiarisation, also contributed to the collapse of the left system. -right which had allowed the compression of the gaps in the post-war period. But faced with the challenges posed by the historical rise of inequalities, the rejection of globalization and the development of new forms of identity withdrawal, the awareness of the limits of deregulated global capitalism has accelerated since the 2008 financial crisis. to create a new business model that is both fairer and more sustainable has resumed. The elements gathered here under the label of participatory socialism and social-federalism largely only take up visible developments in different parts of the world and put these developments in a wider historical perspective. The history of the unequal regimes studied in this book shows, however, to what extent such politico-ideological transformations can not be considered in a deterministic way. Multiple trajectories are always possible, depending on the relationship of forces involving both short-term and eventual logic, and longer-term intellectual evolutions, which often appear as repertoires of ideas in which moments of crisis can go draw. The risk of a new wave of exacerbated competition and fiscal-social dumping is unfortunately very real, with the key to a possible nationalist and identity-based stiffening, which is also visible both in Europe and the United States and India, Brazil or China. Limits of the desoccidentalisation of the gaze I have tried in this book to shift the focus on the history of unequal regimes. The case of India has been particularly instructive. In addition to the Indian Union's example of democratic federalism operating in a very large human community, the Indian case shows how it is possible to use the tools of the rule of law to try to come out of a very heavy unequal inheritance, linked to the meeting between an old caste society and its stiffening by the British colonial power. The institutional tools developed for this purpose have notably taken the form of quotas and "reservations" for places in the university, in public employment and in elective positions for people from disadvantaged and historically discriminated social classes. They were not enough to solve all the problems, far from it. But such experiences are rich in lessons for the rest of the planet, and especially for Western electoral democracies, which will also face immense educational inequalities (long eluded) and are just beginning their learning of the world. multi-confessionalism (which India has known for ten centuries). More generally, I have tried to show how essential it is to understand the world today to return to the long history of inegalitarian regimes, and in particular how the European proprietary and colonial powers have affected the development of societies. trifunctional extraeuropean. Apart from the fact that the traces of this history are still very much present in the structure of contemporary inequalities, the study of old inegalitarian ideologies and their sophistication also makes it possible to distance oneself from the ideologies of the present, which are not always wiser than those who preceded them, and who will also eventually be replaced. In spite of all my efforts to decenter the look, I mean nevertheless how much this book remains unbalanced: a little less probably than my previous book, but much too much anyway. The French Revolution is constantly coming back and the experience of Europe and the United States is constantly solicited, unrelated to their demographic weight. Jack Goody, in his book on the "theft of history," has aptly denounced the often irrepressible temptation, sometimes even written by well-meaning social scientists, to write history from a point of view Western-centered, by lending to the Euramerican world scientific inventions that are not his own, when he is not credited with the invention of courtly love or the taste for freedom, filial tenderness or the nuclear family, of humanism or democracy 1. I have tried in this book to escape this bias, but I am not sure of having succeeded. For one simple reason: my eyes are deeply influenced by my cultural roots, the limitations of knowledge and above all by the extreme weakness of my language skills. This book is that of someone who only reads French and English correctly, and who knows only a limited set of primary sources. This survey is brewing wide, perhaps too much, and I apologize to specialists in different fields for the approximations and shortcuts they will find. I hope it will be quickly completed and surpassed by multiple works renewing our understanding of particular unequal regimes, especially in the many geographical and cultural areas poorly covered in this book. No doubt my gaze is also determined by my personal trajectory, even more than I imagine. I could mention the diversity of social backgrounds and political persuasions to which my family background has exposed me. I also saw my two grandmothers suffering from the patriarchal model that was imposed on their generation. One was unhappy with her bourgeois life and disappeared prematurely in Paris in 1987. The other was a farm worker at age 13, during the Second World War, and died in 2018, in Indre-et-Garonne. -Loire. I heard one of my great-grandmothers, born in 1897 and missing in 2001, tell me her memories of before 1914, when France was preparing her revenge against Germany. Born in 1971, I became an adult thanks to the freedom my parents gave me, and then listening on the radio to the collapse of Communist dictatorships when I was a student in 1989, followed by the Gulf War in 1991. Si I examine how my vision of history and the economy has evolved since I was 18 years old, I believe that it is above all the historical sources that I discovered and exploited that led me to modify substantially my initial conceptions (who were more liberal and less socialist than they became). In particular, the writing of High Income in France in the twentieth century (2001) made me understand how much the reduction of inequalities had occurred in violence over the last century. The crisis of 2008 also led me to take a closer look at the financial, heritage and international fragilities of global capitalism and the history of capital and its accumulation, which is at the heart of Capital in the 21st century (2013 ). This book is based on new sources from both colonial history and post-election surveys, which led me to develop a political-ideological approach to unequal regimes. But this is undoubtedly a reconstruction too rational, which neglects the hidden effects of my old and recent personal experiences on the production of such reasoning. I have tried in this book to restore to the reader the conscious part of my journey, that is to say the historical sources, the works and readings that led me to the positions I defend, as much as I can judge. The civic and political role of the social sciences Social scientists are very fortunate. They are paid by society to read books, explore new sources, synthesize what is possible to learn from available archives and surveys, and try to give back what they have learned to those who pay them. that is, the rest of society). They sometimes tend to waste a little too much time in disciplinary quarrels and sterile identity assignments. Yet despite this, the social sciences do exist and play an indispensable role in the service of public debate and democratic confrontation. I tried to show in this book that it was possible to mobilize methods and materials from different social sciences to analyze the history of unequal regimes, in its social, economic, political and intellectual dimensions. I am convinced that part of our contemporary democratic turmoil stems from an excessive empowerment of economic knowledge vis-à-vis other social sciences and the civic and political sphere. This empowerment is partly the consequence of the technicality and increasing complexity of the economic sphere. But it also results from a recurrent temptation for professionals of this knowledge, whether they operate at the university or in the commercial world, to arrogate to themselves a monopoly of expertise and a capacity for analysis that they do not have. not. In reality, only the intersection of economic, historical, sociological, cultural and political approaches can make some progress in our understanding of socio-economic phenomena. This is particularly true for the study of inequalities between social classes and their transformations in history, but it seems to me that the lesson is more general. This book has been nourished by the work of many social scientists in all disciplines, without whom this investigation could not have existed. I have also tried to show how the gaze of literature and cinema can bring a complementary perspective indispensable to that of the social sciences. This excessive empowerment of economic knowledge is also the consequence of the fact that historians, sociologists, political scientists and other philosophers have too often left economists to study economic questions. Now political and historical economy, as I have tried to practice it in this inquiry, concerns all the social sciences. All social scientists, it seems to me, must integrate socio-economic developments into their analyzes, collect quantitative and historical data whenever useful, and rely on other types of methods and materials. as soon as it is necessary. The abandonment of quantitative and statistical sources by a large number of social scientists is all the more regrettable since only a critical look at these sources and the conditions of their social, historical and political construction can make it possible to make use of them. reasoned. In fact, this attitude has contributed to the empowerment of economic knowledge as well as to its impoverishment. I hope this book can help to remedy this. Beyond the sphere of researchers, the empowerment of economic knowledge also has deleterious effects on the civic and political sphere, because it feeds fatalism and the feeling of helplessness. In particular, the journalist and the citizen bow too often before the expertise of the economist, however very limited, and refuse to have an opinion on the salary and the profit, the tax and the debt, the trade and the capital. But these are not optional subjects for the exercise of democratic sovereignty. Above all, these questions are complex in a way that does not justify their abandonment to a small caste of experts, on the contrary. Their complexity is such that only wide collective deliberation, based on the reasoning, the pathways and the experiences of all, can allow us to hope for some progress in their resolution. This book has basically one object: to contribute to the citizen reappropriation of economic and historical knowledge. That the reader disagrees with some of my conclusions does not really matter, because it is for me to open the debate, never to decide it. If this book was able to awaken interest in new issues and allow it to appropriate knowledge that it did not hold, then my goal will have been fully achieved.