Cynics might be tempted to put Thomas Piketty’s
celebrated tome Capital – ‘Capitalism
doesn’t work’, on the shelf next to Obesity
– ‘Over-eating makes you fat’.
It’s important to remember that accepting what is
obvious isn’t necessarily easy. In particular, those with vested interests
often need their blind incredulity smashed by a sledgehammer. For some it’s not
enough to look around them at levels of personal and public debt, rising
inequality, youth unemployment, social unrest, depression, addiction, friends
applying for their own jobs repeatedly, zero hours contracts, reduced wages,
creeping corruption, the rise of food banks, the increased numbers in work
claiming benefits, ‘resource’ wars, starvation in a world of plenty, a rise in self-destruct
illnesses and so on and so on – to conclude that Capitalism aint
working.
C’est évidemment vrai.
Some people – politicians (?) – and maybe anyone
else who has been living in a glass bubble for the last thirty years – may require
700 pages of facts and graphs, examples and statistics from a huge brain like French
economist and big thinker - Thomas
Piketty.
Some folk need it written in blood – or French!
But some of us don’t.
You may recall that large swathes of the general
public instinctively knew that invading Iraq was a shit idea. Others needed to
wait for the body count and global terror inflation and the books that are
coming out now from ex-serving soldiers to tell them in writing that it was a
bloody, very bloody stupid idea.
So Piketty’s book is, by all accounts, being
celebrated as both genius and earth shattering in the international corridors
of power. If it takes a book for some rather than a little peer out of the
window – I’m all for it – as long as the penny (or the dollar) finally drops –
good.
Many ordinary men and women worked out that we are
decimating the planet, long before the recent UN report (see blog77.) Others
will only believe it when Birmingham is a bleached beach resort and cockroaches
are running Wall Street - oh sorry – they already are – but you know what I
mean.
So well done Mr Piketty. However, if I make it all
the way through your book rather than just reading the copious articles and
snippets and quotes and summaries, I’m still pretty sure I will still end up
filing it next to those other ground-breaking, eye-opening volumes,
Fags
– ‘Smoking Causes Cancer’
&
Planet
– ‘The Earth is Round’
This week’s recommended blog from the archive is;
Blog 18. Elitism for All