Frédéric Lordon: Why Piketty isn't Marx
One cannot help but feel suspicious when a book titled Capital, claiming to be a ground-breaking work of political economy, receives little but gushing accolades from across the mainstream media. In an article published for Le Monde Diplomatique, Frédéric Lordon lays out why such suspicion might not be ill-founded. For Lordon, Thomas Piketty remains confined within the myopic sphere of accountancy, failing to attend to capitalism as a historical and political phenomenon:
"Capitalism according to Piketty has no history—only an unvarying age-old law, occasionally disturbed by accidental events, but always returning to its implacable long-term trend, which leaves no room for conflict between social groups, the real force behind institutional change."Visit Le Monde Diplomatique to read the article in full. Frédéric Lordon is the author of Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire, and a regular commentator on current events.