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Quote by Thomas Piketty

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Capital and Ideology

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Thomas Piketty
Thomas Piketty

Thomas Piketty is a renowned French economist born on May 7, 1971. His research focuses on income and wealth inequality, economic growth, and capital accumulation. Piketty is known for his in-depth studies on inequality and his influential book 'Capital in the Twenty-First Century' has had a global impact. more

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“The key theoretical and political question is not, therefore, how class (in the Marxist sense) ‘intersects’ with the various identities where individuals are presumably located, but how to differentiate between the effects of capitalist class power upon large and heterogeneous (in terms of identity) sectors of the working class, and the effects of identity-based interactions and conflicts within those sectors.”

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“...today class has been reduced to another ‘ism’; i.e. to another form oppression which, together with gender and race, integrate a sort of mantra, something that everyone ought to include in theorising and research, though, to my knowledge, theorising about it remains at the level of metaphors (e.g. interweaving, interaction, interconnection, etc.)”

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“One casualty of this "increasingly sophisticated" intersectional model, which focuses primarily on the power of discourses, is the neglect of the most materially relevant variable in many of the problems faced by women (and by many racial and sexual minorities): economic class.”

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“In 1680, four years after the [Bacon] rebellion, Virginia passed the Law for Preventing Negro Insurrections. It restricted the movement of enslaved people outside plantations; anyone found without a pass would be tortured with twenty lashes "well laid on" before being returned. At a time when white servants and African slaves often worked side by side, the hand of the law reached in to divide them. Prison time awaited "English, and other white men and women intermarrying with negros or mulattos." Already any indentured white servant caught running away with an enslaved African person was liable for their entire lost term of service, meaning that the servant risked becoming permanently unfree. The law separated the members of the lowest class by color and lifted one higher than the other. The goal, as it has been ever since, was to offer just enough racial privileges for white workers to identify with their color instead of their class. The Virginia legislature ended the penalties imposed on rebels for the insurrection of 1676, but only the white ones, removing a source of lingering solidarity among them.”

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“These demographics presented real threats to white planters, including a potential cross-racial labor movement. Plantation work was close and intimate, and it fostered a troubling solidarity between the growing Black population and white indentured servants. White planters could not afford for such a dangerous bond to form--which is why in 1705 Virginia's legislature did as much to codify white privilege as it did to establish Black subjugation.”

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“Never was the two cultures stand-off more apparent than here. In Gunn’s poem, a new neighbour (an outsider) wants them evicted because of their detrimental effect on property prices. She might well have been an academic: in more than thirty years in the humanities side of universities, the attitude towards those skills which I encountered was mainly one of ignorant, patronizing condescension. Just occasionally a student from the science side would dismantle a car in a campus car park only to be moved on by the authorities, as were Gunn’s auto freaks. Among the younger academics, disdain for this culture verged on contempt because of its supposedly obsolete ‘masculinist’ values. Those same academics were also the ones quick to brand any intense friendship between the men of this ‘masculinist’ culture as repressed homosexuality. In truth, sometimes it might have been, and yet sometimes it almost certainly wasn’t: some of the most loyal and selfless friendships I’ve ever known were between working-class young men who, insofar as anyone can ever be sure of these things, really were straight.”

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“A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their 'education' is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander. That they will come to the front seems to be taken for granted, always and everywhere. In Lissagaray's History of the Commune there is an interesting passage describing the shootings that took place after the Commune had been suppressed. The authorities were shooting the ringleaders, and as they did not know who the ringleaders were, they were picking them out on the principle that those of better class would be the ringleaders. An officer walked down a line of prisoners, picking out likely-looking types. One man was shot because he was wearing a watch, another because he 'had an intelligent face'.”

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