We need to sort of sit down and write what some alternative possibilities look like
and how they look. And I then look around and say, 'Well, who is doing that and are
there examples of this going on right now?' And to his credit, I want to say that Thomas Piketty is
one of the examples that I want to look at. In his last book which is about the question of equality,
his last book is a very good example of at least beginning to think about
the nature of the problems which we face. But before getting into Piketty,
I want to make some comment about where he lies in the general spectrum of economic thinking,
and if I had to put him in a type cast, I'd say Piketty is writing in the tradition
of what I call Ricardian socialism. Now, Ricardian socialism has an interesting history,
and it came out of the fact that the classical political economists,
with Ricardo in the forefront of course, the classical political economists worked with
the labor theory of value. They took the view that value was established by labor and was associated
with labor. And their whole economic thinking was guided by embrace of the labor theory of value,
but there was a moral issue that came with the labor theory of value which the Ricardian
socialists were very much concerned with, and it was this. If labor is the source of all value,
how come labor receives so very little of it and the capitalists seem to get it all?
This was a burdensome moral question, and it was a moral question that was actually provoked by
embrace of the labor theory of value. If you say value is labor
and labor input and you don't give the laborers anything, then there's something clearly wrong.
And so a whole school of Ricardian socialists grew up, and this whole school was about
trying to rectify that wrong: how to rectify it and at the same time keep the economy running.
And they started to come up with some very interesting ideas which basically
were about a redistributive socialism. That is, what they saw was production
was generating what was needed. That production was organized in a certain way, and they started
to say 'Well, we can't do too much about production but once the commodity is produced,
we can do something about its distribution and therefore we have to redistribute the value which
is produced so that some of it, more and more of it, goes somehow to labor and to those who produce
the value. And this culminated in John Stuart Mills text on socialism which came out about
mid-century which is a wholesale embrace of this. So, this Ricardian school of socialists was really
trying to say 'All right, capital is organizing production. We're not going to mess with that
but we can change the way in which the product is distributed and it's through distributive
measures,' which is of course largely the philosophy of social democratic parties,
that what we try to do is to redistribute the wealth in certain ways towards
the needy populations and to those who are of course doing the work. So, Piketty is very much
in that line of Ricardian socialists but that therefore involves some pretty macro thinking,
and that macro thinking is something which is worthy of consideration. Having said that,
I must immediately suggest of course that Marx was fiercely critical of the Ricardian socialist,
and he was fiercely critical because in his view the problem lay not in distribution but
in production: who had the power to organize production and who had the power to change
the economy in foundational ways. And Marx was kind of saying John Stuart Mill
thinks that socialism is about simply redistribution
when actually he says that we cannot interfere with the act of production and production is
a fact of nature. In fact, this is what Mill says. He says production is a fact of nature
and then we can't change nature, but we can change the distribution. So that was his
philosophical standpoint, and Marx hates that and says 'No, I don't want anything to do with that.'