A good review for activists which will save us from having to go through a slough of 1000 pages of undigested speculation. As far as Marx versus Piketty is concerned Piketty admitted re his first book that he never read Marx! Krugman's review also indicates problems with understanding Marx: “In Marxian dogma, a society’s class structure is determined by underlying, impersonal forces, technology and the modes of production that technology dictates. Piketty, however, sees inequality as a social phenomenon, driven by human institutions.”— Sorry Dr Krugman, but Marx says that class structure is conditioned by human social institutions and is a product of historical development not determined by impersonal forces but by a dialectical interaction between material forces and human responses the most important of which is, with regard to the modes (means) of production the historically constituted social relations of production i.e., class relations involving who owns and controls the means of production. Piketty’s view “Inequality is neither economic nor technological; it is ideological and political.”- is only half right and represents the idealistic non materialistic flaws of bourgeois economics. The truth is Marx’s view that the inequality intrinsic to capitalism is a product of the interaction between economic and technological forces and the ideological and political forces engendered by this interaction.
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