Capital and Ideology

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The Brahmin Left – Educational Elitism

Thomas Picketty’s latest book, Capital and Ideology, provides a stimulating analysis of contemporary political issues. These are always grounded in detailed historical research which explore how social, economic and political drivers of the past have shaped the nature of current political practices with a strong emphasis on the role of ideas.

One interesting issue he addresses is that of the Labour Party’s evolution in the post war period. It provides a challenging perspective on the collapse of the red wall and the alienation of working class voters over recent years. The issue of immigration and the lack of an effective narrative to address many traditional labour voters concerns is often cited as one of the causes of this loss of support.

The distance between the party and its voters seemed apparent in the unguarded comments of Gordon Brown, recorded during the 2010 election campaign, about a labour supporter, Gillian Duffy, who he called a bigot after she had questioned him on immigration and “people on benefits”. To dismiss the lady as bigoted was seen by many as illustrative of the views of an out of touch metropolitan elite who no longer had any real understanding of the problems faced by the people they were supposed to represent.

Clearly there are a number of historical forces at work in this apparent divorce of Labour’s political elite from its base. Picketty would be the first to accept and indeed insist on this. However, he points to a specific driver which he feels has played a major part in the evolution of this divide. Education and a concomitant commitment to a meritocratic view of equality.

Picketty sees the structure of political debate and division evolving over the post war period and resolves this evolution into two broad eras. Firstly, the period from 1950 to 1980 which he characterises as “classist”. In other words a battle between advantaged, right,  and less advantaged, left,  social classes. The heyday of the bipolar party system with Labour the party of the workers, and Conservative the party of the owners. The left / right model which this represented has, over the years become less relevant but continues to shape many debates in ways which are counterproductive in Picketty’s view. 

From 1990 to 2020 he perceives the terms of political debate having moved to one which is more about competing elites. These elites coalesce into two broad groupings around the traditional parties. One, Labour, supported by the more highly educated, the other, Conservative supported by the wealthiest and most highly paid.

Picketty’s analysis of the structure of political affiliations in the UK is situated in a much broader consideration of social democratic politics across West and Eastern Europe, the USA and some non-western countries including India in the post war period. He never lacks ambition.

He looks specifically at the level of education of voters for parties of the left and parties of the right using a variety of survey sources. His findings across the piece for left of centre social democratic parties are similar to those for the Labour Party in the UK. Broadly he claims that in the classist period, from 1950 to 1980, the vote for left wing parties was significantly lower amongst the 10% of the population with the highest levels of education than amongst the 90% of the population with the lowest levels of education. The size of the gap between these two diminished over the two decades from 1950 such that in the 1990’s and 2000’s the vote for Labour amongst the 10% of the population with the highest levels of education increased and became significantly higher than those voting for the party from the 90% of the population less well educated.

In parallel with this a meritocratic theory of inequality was adopted. Equality of opportunity was seen as the key which critically meant developing better access to education for the working class. The 1960’s saw the expansion of the Universities following the Robbins Report and the expansion of Polytechnics promoted by Anthony Crossland. Essentially, the aim was to level up the playing field of education to allow working class students to have better and more equitable access.

Through the late 1960’s and 70’s this obviously benefited a significant number of Labour supporters who went on to become senior members of the Labour Party with a very positive view of the beneficial effects of education. Consistent with this was a positive view about their own meritocratic progress. This, according the Picketty, has meant over the years Social Democratic Parties including Labour have “come to be seen as increasingly favourable to the winners in the educational contest while they have lost the support they used to enjoy among less well-educated groups in the post war period.”(712)

The problem with a view that focuses on formal access to education as the key driver of equality fails to take account of the many, less obvious, barriers that exist for individuals from low income families. Picketty feels that the loud support for a meritocratic starting point ignores the facts on outcomes at the end of the race. 

Picketty refers to what he sees as an “astonishingly prescient” work by the sociologist Micheal Young, The Rise of Meritocracy”. This was a dystopian novel in which British society is increasingly stratified on the basis of cognitive capacity which is closely related to social origins. In the novel the Tory Party become the party of the highly educated and dominate the “technicians” in a world where science has decreed that only one third of the population is employable. Picketty sees elements of the novel coming to pass but it is the Labour Party which has become the representative of the educational meritocracy, or in Picketty’s short hand the Brahmin left.

There is much in Picketty’s analysis that can be challenged but his limpid exposition is exemplary and provides a clear target for those who wish to challenge him. His analysis of the mistakes and failures of social democratic politics is much more wide ranging and I will come back to it in the future. His thesis about the Brahmin left as part of it is worthy of consideration and should at the very least provoke wider debate which is sorely needed, as what is not in doubt is the alienation of many traditional Labour voters.

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Capital and Ideology

Thomas Picketty has produced another enormous tome. Like Capital in the 21st Century, it is an excellent analysis of the growing problem of inequality and comes at a really interesting time. Whereas his first work looked at the economic drivers of inequality and produced the formula r>g where r stands for the annual rate of return on capital and g stands for the growth rate of the economy. In essence claiming that the wealth of owners of capital’s income will increase at a faster rate than the growth in the overall economy. This facilitates a remorseless concentration of wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people. In essence that book looked at the mechanics of this process. 

Capital and Ideology is a companion volume which essentially looks at how the inequality produced by this mechanism is justified. It does so by setting the process of justification of inequality regimes in there long term historical setting. He explores the transformation from, what he sees as a sort of pre-modern template for all inequality regimes, ternary or trifunctional societies, to the inequality regimes of modern unified states. 

Trifunctional sytems are those which divide society into three variously described social orders. Essentially, a clerical, a noble and a mass grouping. The clerical is the religious and or intellectual order, the noble is essentially the warrior class, and the final group is the third estate, the property-poor remainder of the population. Picketty applies this trifunctional analysis to an enormous canvass. Ranging across a number of European civilisations but also, India, China, Iran and others. He sees this system of distinctions as the oldest and most common type of inequality regime.

His analysis is aimed at showing how the trifunctional historical roots of different societies shape the changed circumstances of inequality and continue to echo in the forms of justification used today. Throughout there is an impressive wealth of historical data and analysis. 

Picketty also looks at how the “age of exploration” and imperial dominance impacted the shape of the global economy, the emergence of the modern centralised state and a new template to support the new inequality regime. A template structured around the deification of property ownership. Under trifunctional regimes there was an overlapping of property rights and regalian powers at the local level. In other words the local baron owned the land, defended it, taxed it, maintained order and dispensed local justice. The emergent modern age was organised around “a strict separation of property rights, ostensibly open to all, and regalian powers, a monopoly of the centralised state.” 

This model persisted through to the beginning of the 20th Century when three challenges arose causing a crisis for the ownership model founded on private property. The three challenges were around, growing inequality within European ownership societies; inequality amongst countries as colonial competition and increasingly powerful independence movements contended; and finally a nationalist and identitarian challenge which reinforced competition amongst European powers with the consequences of economic collapse and two world wars.

All of this led to a different view of property and willingness to redistribute it as an outcome of conscious public policy. A massive reduction in levels of inequality resulted with the advent of social democratic movements across the world, building upon demands from the 19th Century for wider franchise and greater state support for the unemployed and the old. Accelerating the creation of social states with substantial public services and economic and industrial engagement by governments. The New Deal in the US, the National Health service are just two, albeit shining, examples of how the needs of the majority of the population started to be met.

In truth the first two parts of the book are building up to this point and the last three are an analysis of how the period of classist, social democratic politics after the end of World War 2 consciously addressed the issue of inequality and created a trente glorieuses where the living standards of millions in the west were increased beyond any historical precedent. It then analyses the period from 1980 when a new model of Hypercapitalism evolved through the twin processes of globalisation and communications technology innovations, and the new justificatory regime which supported this model. One dressed in notions of equality of opportunity, set in a context where the levels of wealth concentration are returning to levels last seen in the gilded age of the robber barons.

This is a political economy history book but focussed very much on the here and now and critically the ideas and ideologies which have created and sustain the world we live in. By setting these in a historical framework Picketty aims to show how what exists at the moment as the economic reality is contingent and can be contested, but more importantly can be changed. The book does not just analyse the world but aims to change it. Picketty sets out what can be done via progressive taxation of all sources of income and wealth to reduce unsustainable levels of inequality. He addresses the issues of tax avoidance and secrecy regimes; the problem of European unity; the beggar my neighbour race to the bottom of corporate taxation; inequality in educational opportunity and much more. The book does not lack ambition.

By bringing into the public consciousness the experiences of the past, where, for example, property rights were so sacrosanct when slavery was abolished it was the slave owners who were compensated, it provides depth  and shade to many contentious issues of the hear and now.

This book is very much a marathon but one where you are running through the pages of history brought to life in limid prose and substantial detail. Acres of statistical evidence are marshalled and reveal trends in the longue duree which impact now on the issues shaping national and international political debate. They are deftly handled by a writer at the top of his game. Dissecting ideologies and debates of the past and illustrating how they continue to be evoked in political debate. Like a marathon the work is daunting at the start but on completion there is a real sense of elation. I have every confidence there will be those who profoundly disagree with it and I am certain some of the arguments are contestable, however, as a catalyst for change it is unrivalled.

It would be fascinating to hear what Picketty has to say about the political economic implications of Covid-19 as I suspect they may provide a catalyst for much more profound change than anything we have seen to date.

It is said that those who fail to study history are condemned to repeat it. Picketty is doing his best to help us overcome this failure. Help him. 

“Capital and Ideology” Thomas Picketty. Belknap Harvard Press 2020.