Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021
I’ve been interested in Thomas Piketty since seeing the book of an avowed French Socialist turn up on the desk of people who were very much not, from around 2013.
However I’d never actually read any of him.
This is a collection of essays that doesn’t quite add up to a compelling whole in my view. Acknowledged at the start, it’s made up of essays and articles, often published for papers like Le Monde.
Some speak to the emerging issues of Brexit, Covid and feel from a point in time. Others speak to longer trends like the evolution of Europe, Quantitative easing. A final block reflect on the meaning of Inequality, The Left and internationalism, and feel evergreen.
The essays sometimes repeat, and don’t always flow well. But taken as “dispatches” they make more sense.
For me, the striking bit is hearing a representative clearly articulate a position almost totally absent in mainstream UK discourse. The great Brexit debates have left a strong faction of new and old Europhiles, but few I think would hope the EU may act as a general solvent for nationalism. Lots of EU debate centres around a question of what to expose and what to retain.
Yet for a socialist like Piketty, I think the question is more “how do you avoid the perils of nationalism”, and “how do you address inequality with a universalist mindset, not a particularist one”.
I don’t imagine these claims would find immediately fertile ground in the UK, a nationalist sentiment is well and long cultivated.
But these essays do suggest to me a paucity within the Overton Window, an absence of voices that, when read, don’t seem so much “radical” as “excluded”.
Before "Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021" I read: An Artist of the Floating World
After "Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire, 2016–2021" I read: Against Money