Alla Borse du travail in Francia, il 31 gennaio 2020 l’economista Frédéric Lordon ha discusso con Thomas Piketty del suo penultimo libro, Capitale e Ideologia (La Nave di Teseo, 2020). L’articolo proposto qui su Verso ha tradotto in inglese il discorso di apertura di Lordon, che critica in modo sistematico l’approccio di Piketty, a partire dalle definizioni.

So let’s proceed in that order, starting with ‘capital’. What is surprising is that you still don’t have the concept of this. You stick with ‘ownership’, but ownership is not capital… ownership, by itself, is not capitalist. Midas was not a capitalist; Louis XIV was not a capitalist — and they were hardly poor! When you consider the successive historical instantiations of ‘ownership’ you let yourself be trapped in a false nominal continuity that condemns you to a defective ‘definition’ of capitalism.

Here is the definition you give: capitalism is ‘the extension of ownership into the age of large-scale industry and international finance’. By failing to make clear what this ‘extension’ consists of, your definition becomes a circular one.

Il suo discorso si articola poi sul legame fra capitale e finanza, e affronta anche alcune delle soluzioni proposte da Piketty nel libro.

All the less so when one of your proposals is to expand employee ownership. But employee share ownership is the holy grail of the stock exchange. It’s not for nothing that since the end of the nineties all leading companies have launched employee share ownership plans – it certainly doesn’t bother them too much, and it’s even in their own interest. In reality, employee share ownership is a huge scam… for employees.

First because it exposes them to a risk of non-diversification of their portfolio; their savings are entirely invested in the company’s shares… Then because it’s an ideological operation characteristic of neo-liberalism, which constantly tries to conceal the figure of the worker as producer and replace this with the figures of consumer and shareholder, looking at situations exclusively from their point of view. And finally, because employee share ownership is a machine for breaking the political unity of wage-earners.

Al termine del suo intervento però Lordon elenca tre punti che lo hanno colpito positivamente del libro:

First, obviously, the scope of your statistical work is ever more impressive. The historical frescoes are assuming gigantic proportions. You’ve got us used to this, but each time we admire it more and more.

Second, there is the timeliness of your intervention in the economic situation. For a researcher like you, coming from where you come from, to start talking about things like this – even if it’s only to talk! – is very welcome. You have built up a considerable symbolic capital, and you spend it, you commit it – unlike those little hoarders who can never get enough of it, and continue to behave well in order to get the next medal, the next prize, and so on. You ‘open the box’.

Last but not least: you have moved a long way over the years, but you don’t hide anything about this. Reflexivity is the least shared thing in the academic world, where agents try most of the time to negotiate their about-turns on the sly, hoping that they won’t show

Qui un riassunto del dibattito su Twitter tradotto in inglese. Il dibattito completo in francese è disponibile su Youtube.