The recent decades’ ruling class looting of the economy has culminated in a celebrity branding political campaign of 2016. The text of this inequality is its emphasis on the pathological contradictions of a Stalinist cult of personality and is represented in the current strategy of tension (“smash the state by making me the embodiment of state power”)

The Artist of the Deal is not a meritocrat but is a brand-commodity in the cult(ural) of personality

Philosophers Artists have interpreted the world, the point however is to change it.

Even if we ascribed some artisanal role to Trump in spite of his attempts to mimic landed gentry, would he be any more or less duplicitous than any other totalitarian since he does represent the rule of deficit capital. He reminds us that Medieval “apprenticeship” in the rise of mercantile hierarchy still is all about who owns the terms of production, regardless of modality and that it still is constrained by race, class, and gender.

...capitalism had succeeded in shaping humanity to its profit, and that every kind of "revolution" was thus impossible; that the working class was nothing more than an aspect of capital, unable to supersede its situation; that any future revolutionary movement would basically consist of a struggle between humanity and capital itself, rather than between classes; and that capital has become totalitarian in structure, leaving nowhere and no-one outside its domesticating influence.

Jacques Camatte

It is hopeless for working people as long as those in power still make the rules and erode human rights protections. There is some hope in the long-term battle against inequality as long as we have breath, because there are still things that make sense even as they appear contradictory. The recent acquittal of domestic terrorists in Oregon places the protests in North Dakota more about the historical problems of land hegemony rooted in earlier centuries.

 

 

BUT THE BUNDY FAMILY'S MOSTLY WHITE, ANTI-GOVERNMENT MOVEMENT HAS HAD AN UNINTENDED EFFECT: IT HAS REFOCUSED ATTENTION ON THE ANCESTRAL RIGHTS NATIVE AMERICANS HOLD TO LANDS ACROSS THE WESTERN HALF OF THE UNITED STATES.

When the occupiers took over the refuge last January, the Burns Paiute people watched in dismay. Ancient artifacts stored there were handled and moved. At one point the militants bulldozed through sacred burial grounds while trying to build a road.

Long before it became a refuge in 1908, the Malheur was the traditional winter gathering area for Kennedy's people. That was also long before they were moved to a 10-acre reservation near a landfill outside the small town of Burns.

Tribes in Nevada are now pushing for permanent protection of lands they consider sacred around militia leader Cliven Bundy's ranch, the man who inspired the Oregon occupation and father of Ammon and Ryan.

 

A coalition of tribes in Utah is pushing for a national monument on cultural lands there. And the most high-profile show of tribal unity since the Oregon occupation has been the protests over the Dakota Access Pipeline led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

So even as the US election gets more contentious even as the outcome seems obvious, yet complicated because there will without a Democratic Congress, years more stupidity of wasteful, useless investigations of wrongdoing by wrongdoers. There will be unintended consequences which have already been put into place, even as reactionaries keep trying to roll them back. Trump’s candidacy devolves to the problems of land and capital as well as a pastiche of patriarchy.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZqNuCwK4RY]

 

 

The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.’

 

Inequality and inherited wealth: Krugman: ‘A rising share of capital, in turn, directly increases inequality, because ownership of capital is always much more unequally distributed than labor income. But the effects don’t stop there, because when the rate of return on capital greatly exceeds the rate of economic growth, “the past tends to devour the future”: society inexorably tends toward dominance by inherited wealth.’ (Paul Krugman on Piketty) oxfamblogs.org/…

It does seem however Freudian, to want aristocratic rule, yet the Hamiltonian vision is one seen as hip-hop musicals, which even in the selling tickets is fraught with corporatism.

A recent piece by science writer Matthew Hutson, “Social Darwinism Isn’t Dead,” alerted me to the research of University of Illinois prof Michael Kraus, director of the Champaign Social Interaction Lab, who’s been studying class and psychology since he was a PhD student at Berkeley.

 

One of Kraus’s recent findings is that subjects of a higher class rank are more likely to have “essentialist” views about a person’s identity and status: “the kind of person someone is can be largely attributed to their genetic inheritance.” Or even more bluntly: “we have better genes.” The resulting class structure is something that arises out of inherent traits, from the individual out. Lower-class individuals, however, are more likely to believe that class is imposed on them, from society inwards.

“Constructed beliefs mean that society, the government, powerful people, they ascribe class,” Kraus says. “The system lays down the class structure that is forced upon me as an individual. Essentialist beliefs say that your genes force your class on you.”

It’s a comforting thought—that your elevated class rank is the result of your inherent qualities as an individual, and that society is structured to rightly privilege those qualities. It’s comforting not just because it’s nice to be recognized for what you perceive as your best qualities, but also because it’s predictive; it suggests future stability and success.

But it’s not as simple as education or income. The most powerful predictor of essentialist beliefs is subjective class rank, where one perceives one’s self on a social ladder. And it’s malleable, changing with social context. 

 

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It’s not Trump’s supposed personality disorder that matters. It’s his privilege: http://slate.me/2frXUZO 

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Social context is the key element, and class, race, and gender remain the pivot for all conflict with institutional forces on the battleground of capital.

Wealth distribution and high-tier wage distribution in the United States can be attributed, essentially, to discrimination. This misleading valuation of worker productivity and the resulting wealth inequality create a pressing need for political action. Whether that means raising the minimum wage, correcting gender imbalances in wages and fields of employment, investing in education, or directly redistributing wealth, there is a clear need for policy to step in where the market has failed.

How Gender Changes Piketty’s ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century By Kathleen Geier, Kate Bahn, Joelle Gamble, Zillah Eisenstein and Heather Boushey The Nation 6 August 2014

Thus far, discourse about this watershed book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, has been overwhelmingly male-dominated (the only feminist critique that I am aware of, before this round table, has been Zillah Eisenstein’s). Though Capital has many virtues, attention to gender, alas, is not one of them. Like most mainstream economists, Piketty does not deploy gender as a category of analysis, nor does he engage with the work of feminist economists. Nevertheless, he offers insights about the nature of economic inequality that feminists can build on to advance both gender and economic justice.

 Piketty suggests that to curb economic inequality, we need to reduce the rate of return on capital. He argues that the best way to do so would be via a tax on global capital, an idea that he admits is “utopian.”

The other major remedy he advocates is a steeply progressive income tax. He doesn’t explicitly analyze other anti-inequality policies, but he suggests that they would not be nearly nearly as effective. Why not? This brings us to a fascinating question, which he doesn’t fully answer: What causes the rate of return on capital to be so high in the first place?

AS ECONOMIST SURESH NAIDU HAS NOTED, THERE ARE, BROADLY SPEAKING, TWO POSSIBLE ANSWERS TO THIS QUESTION.

The neoclassical interpretation would be that the rate of return is mechanistically determined by the market: by the forces of supply and demand. If this is the case, then tax policy is the only effective remedy. According to Piketty, the elasticity of substitution between labor and capital is high; this theory, if true, implies that labor market reforms would have little impact on inequality. The enactment of a policy such as a high minimum wage would merely give the capitalist an incentive to replace workers with technology in order to maintain high profits.

But elsewhere, Piketty argues that the return on capital “is always in part a social and political construct” that “depends on national rules and institutions.” As he notes, in Germany, where worker representatives sit on corporate boards, the market value of firms’ capital is lower than in other advanced economies. If capital is indeed primarily a social and political construct, then consequently a much broader array of anti-inequality policies would be effective. On the whole, Piketty’s institutionalist analysis is more persuasive than the neoclassicist version, because it is a better fit for his evidence. He shows, for example, that war and progressive taxes weren’t the only factors that caused economic inequality to decline after World War I; political transformations such as the rise of labor unions also played a major role.

An institutionalist perspective suggests that one promising approach to fighting economic inequality would be labor policies targeted at women. A large body of research (including this study) shows that increasing female employment and earnings would reduce household income inequality. This suggests that anti-inequality advocates should champion policies that improve women’s labor force participation, such as paid family leave and other flexible work arrangements...

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an exciting and groundbreaking book that forces us to look at economic inequality in a new way. Unfortunately, it is seriously flawed by Piketty’s policy imagination, which is confined by the neoclassical straightjacket.

Moving beyond the neoclassical framework suggests a richer array of anti-inequality policy alternatives, of which the feminist response I’ve described is just one subset. Opening up Capital to heterodox analyses such as those provided by feminist and institutional economics allows us to imagine a pro-equality political program that is a better match for the book’s bold vision…

 

Consider the main takeaway of Piketty’s work: capitalism will not solve wealth inequality on its own. His now-famous equation r > g asserts that during times of slow economic growth, the rate of the return on capital (r) will exceed the rate of economic growth (g). This process leads to a booming wealth stock that will be increasingly concentrated in the hands of capital owners.

 I want new kinds of Marxists who are also anti-racist feminists. Marx de-normalized, denaturalized and historicized class, but did not do so for gender, sex or race. We need to do this: de-naturalize and historically contextualize gender and race and sex intertwined with capital. This contextualization expands and enlarges the meanings of labor and capital beyond production. It begins a historical materialism of racialized capitalist patriarchy so that an inclusive critique of excessive inequality can be crafted.

Piketty says “capital is not an immutable concept,” that it reflects prevailing social relations. This is why patriarchy and racism are key to this understanding. The inequality is particularly excessive according to color and sex. Great wealth alongside grinding poverty colludes with a horrific misogyny that defines girls as part of the trafficking of sexual labor and their bodies.

www.thenation.com/...

PIketty is still worth reading even as the critiques have been measured, since this moves the discourse forward in an institutionalist direction, away from so many different abstractions meant to mystify the relations of labor to capital. So many disputes in the US still echo the inequities of the 19th Century with often 21st Century solutions still mired in violence so many more centuries old.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century Thomas Piketty Translated by Arthur Goldhammer HUP website

What are the grand dynamics that drive the accumulation and distribution of capital? Questions about the long-term evolution of inequality, the concentration of wealth, and the prospects for economic growth lie at the heart of political economy. But satisfactory answers have been hard to find for lack of adequate data and clear guiding theories. In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty analyzes a unique collection of data from twenty countries, ranging as far back as the eighteenth century, to uncover key economic and social patterns. His findings will transform debate and set the agenda for the next generation of thought about wealth and inequality.

Piketty shows that modern economic growth and the diffusion of knowledge have allowed us to avoid inequalities on the apocalyptic scale predicted by Karl Marx. But we have not modified the deep structures of capital and inequality as much as we thought in the optimistic decades following World War II.

The main driver of inequality—the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth—today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values. But economic trends are not acts of God. Political action has curbed dangerous inequalities in the past, Piketty says, and may do so again...

RELATED LINKS

• Watch Thomas Piketty discuss Capital in the Twenty-First Century in an in-depth interview with Charlie Rose, on The Colbert Report, PBS NewsHour, Channel 4 News, MSNBC’s All In with Chris Hayes and Now with Alex Wagner, and Bloomberg TV’s Market Markers, and with The Economist, Foreign Affairs, CNN Money, and HuffPost Live
• Read interviews with Piketty at the New York Times blog Economix, Vox, Salon, The New Republic, and the Irish Times
• View “Piketty’s Inequality Story in Six Charts” at the New Yorker blog Rational Irrationality, “Capital in 3 Minutes” from the BBC’s Newsnight, and, at Business Insider, 23 of Piketty’s charts “that will make you worried about the future”
• Read Bill Gates’s review of Capital in the Twenty-First Century
• At the NYT blog Upshot, read “everything you need to know about Thomas Piketty vs. the Financial Times”
• View footage from Piketty’s conversation with United States Senator Elizabeth Warren
• Watch Piketty’s July 2014 lecture [in English] at AK Wien, Austria
• Watch Bill Moyers discuss the book with Nobel laureate Paul Krugman on Moyers & Company
• Read short guides to the book from Vox, the Harvard Business Review, and Tom the Dancing Bug
• Read profiles of Piketty in the New York Times Business section and Sunday Styles section as well as the Chronicle Review
• Listen to Piketty discuss the book on the BBC World Service’s Business Daily, WNYC’s Leonard Lopate Show, WBUR’s On Point, and KPFA’s Against the Grain
• Read lengthy considerations of the book from Thomas Frank at Salon, Larry Summers at Democracy, and the Guardian
• Read analyses of the frenzy surrounding the book at the New Yorker blog Rational Irrationality, The Nation, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Washington Post
• Read coverage of Piketty’s book tour from the New York Times, New York Magazine, New Yorker, New Republic, Guardian, and Wall Street Journal
• In the New York Times, read about the stir Capital in the Twenty-First Century has caused among leading economists, and, in The Week, why it’s the book that “everyone is talking about”
• Follow along with The Economist’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century book club
• Read Bloomburg BusinessWeek’s take on Piketty’s “immodest proposal” for a global tax on wealth
• Listen to Piketty discuss the financial dynamics at work against social mobility on the BBC World Service’s The Forum
• Read a Fortune post on the “fresh perspective” and “wealth of newly compiled data” with which Capital in the Twenty-First Century helps us to understand the actual workings of capitalism
• At Chicago Magazine, read about Thomas Piketty’s theories of inequality and new work on the cognitive rationalization process that happens among the well-off
• On the eve of the 2014 World Economic Forum meetings in Davos, read in the Wall Street Journal about Piketty’s theories on inequality
• Read an early take on Capital in the Twenty-First Century from The Economist
• At The Week, explore Piketty’s conclusions via the classic Disney film The Aristocats
• In the New York Times, read about Piketty’s finding (with Emmanuel Saez) that the top 10 percent of earners in 2012 took home the highest percentage of total American income ever recorded
• In the Guardian, read Piketty and Saez’s argument for substantially raising top marginal tax rates
• Plot graphs of income inequality over the past century via the World Top Incomes Database, an ongoing endeavor by Piketty, Saez, Facundo Alvaredo, and Tony Atkinson
• Download Piketty’s Technical Appendix for the book, which includes additional figures and tables, as well as Internet links to all the series, excel files, programs, formulas, primary sources and technical studies used as the bedrock of Capital in the Twenty-First Century