10

TOWARD A DEMOCRATIC, ECOLOGICAL, AND MULTICULTURAL SOCIALISM

The battle for equality will continue in the twenty-first century, basing itself chiefly on the memory of past struggles. If a historical movement toward more social, economic, and political equality has been possible over the last two centuries, that is above all thanks to a series of revolts, revolutions, and political movements of great scope. The same will be true in the future. In this last chapter, I would like to discuss certain factors that may help drive change in the course of the coming decades, beginning with the environmental catastrophes that are on our horizon and the competition between statist, ideological powers on the global scale. Specifically, I am interested in the challenges posed by the rise of “Chinese socialism,” a statist, authoritarian model that is opposed on every point to the democratic, decentralized socialism defended in this book, and that, in my opinion, is far less emancipatory. However, the Western powers would be wise to take it seriously. If they persist in defending an obsolete, hypercapitalist model, it is not at all certain they will succeed. The true alternative is democratic socialism, participatory and federalist, ecological and multicultural. It is the logical end of a long-term movement toward equality that has been underway since the end of the eighteenth century. To ensure that everyone can contribute to it in a decentralized way, we must develop new forms of sovereignism with a universalist vocation.

Climate Change and the Battle between Ideologies

All the transformations discussed in this book, whether the development of the welfare state, progressive taxation, participatory socialism, electoral and educational equality, or the exit from neocolonialism, will occur only if they are accompanied by strong mobilizations and power relationships. There is nothing surprising about that: in the past, it has always been struggles and collective movements that have made it possible to replace the old structures with new institutions. Nothing prevents us from imagining peaceful developments, supported by new social and political movements that have succeeded in mobilizing a large majority of voters and rising to power on the basis of platforms proposing ambitious transformations. Nevertheless, past experience suggests that large-scale historical change often involves moments of crisis, tensions, and confrontations. Environmental catastrophes are, of course, among the factors that may help accelerate the pace of change. In theory, we could hope that the mere prospect of these catastrophes, whose future occurrence scientific research has increasingly confirmed, might suffice to provoke adequate mobilization. Unfortunately, it is possible that only tangible, concrete damage greater than that we have already seen will manage to break down conservative attitudes and radically challenge the current economic system.

At this stage, no one can predict the source from which these concrete manifestations will arise. We know that in the course of the twenty-first century the planet is probably heading for a temperature increase of at least three degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial levels, and that only actions much more vigorous than those envisaged up to now might make it possible to avoid such a prospect. With temperatures three degrees higher on the planetary scale, the only certainty is that no model is able to predict the whole set of chain reactions that might result, the speed with which coastal cities will be engulfed, or the desertification of entire countries. In view of the other damage that is already occurring, it is also possible that the first signals of impending cataclysm might come from other sources, such as the accelerated collapse of biodiversity, the acidification of the oceans, or loss of soil fertility.1 In the darkest scenario, the signals will come too late to avoid conflicts between nations over resources, and it will take decades to realize possible, as yet hypothetical reconstructions.2 We can also hope that the next waves of important signals, such as outbreaks of fires and natural calamities, will suffice to trigger a healthy public awareness of climate change and legitimize a profound transformation of the economic system, including new forms of intervention by public authorities, as did the crisis of the 1930s. As soon as enough people have seen the dramatic consequences of the processes occurring in their everyday life, attitudes toward free trade, for example, may change radically. We can also foresee hostile reactions toward countries and social groups whose ways of life have contributed most to the disaster, starting with the richest classes in the United States, but also in Europe and the rest of the world.3

Recall that the global North, despite a limited population (about 15 percent of world population for the United States, Canada, Europe, Russia, and Japan), has produced nearly 80 percent of the carbon emissions that have accumulated since the beginning of the Industrial Age. This is explained by the fact that in Western countries, the annual emissions per inhabitant reached extremely high levels between 1950 and 2000: between twenty-five and thirty tons per person in the United States, and around fifteen tons in Europe. These levels have now begun to decline: in the early 2020s they neared twenty tons in the United States and ten tons in Europe. China’s carbon emissions were below five tons until 2000, yet it emitted between five and ten tons per person between 2000 and 2020. Considering the trajectory we have seen up to now, China should succeed in reaching a Western standard of living without ever passing through a stage of carbon emissions levels as high as those in the West.4 This is certainly to be explained in part by increased awareness of global warming and by the new technologies available. However, we have to qualify the idea that a green Enlightenment will be likely to save the planet. In reality, people have suspected for a long time—indeed, almost since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution—that this accelerated burning of fossil fuels might have harmful effects. If reactions have been slow and remain so limited even today, that is also and especially because the socioeconomic interests at stake are considerable, between countries as well as within them.5 For the countries most affected (in particular in the global South), the attenuation of the effects of a warming climate and financing for measures to adapt to it will require a transformation of the distribution of wealth and the economic system as a whole, and this in turn will involve the development of new political and social coalitions on a global scale. The idea that there might be only winners is a dangerous and anesthetizing illusion that must be abandoned immediately.

Chinese Socialism: The Weak Points of a Perfect Digital Dictatorship

Beyond the environmental issue, rivalries between statist, ideological powers constitute one of the main factors that might accelerate political change. Among the most crucial questions is the future of the Chinese regime, its strengths and its weaknesses. Barring an unexpected collapse, over the coming decades the People’s Republic of China is likely to become the greatest economic power on the planet, even if no one can predict how soon and for how long.6 If we compare the economic structures in force in China and in the West, the most striking difference is without any doubt the property system, and in particular the importance of private property. The share of public capital (all levels of governments and collectivities taken together) was about 70 percent in China in 1978, at the time when reforms were begun. It declined sharply during the years 1980–1990 and until the middle of the 2000s, and has been stable at around 30 percent of the national capital since then (see Figure 39).

It is striking to note that the privatization of property in China ended around 2005–2006: the balance between public and private property has hardly budged since that time. Given the very strong growth of the Chinese economy, capital obviously continues to accumulate in all its forms: new plots of land are being developed, factories and skyscrapers are being constructed, all at breakneck speed. Putting it simply, we can say that the capital being developed under public control is progressing at about the same rate as that in private hands. In this sense, China seems to be stabilizing around a structure of property that could be described as a mixed economy: the country is no longer truly communist, but it is not completely capitalist, either, since public property represents a little more than 30 percent of the total: less than half, of course, but nonetheless a very substantial share. The fact that the Chinese state owns almost a third of everything that can be owned in the country affords it considerable opportunities for intervening in decisions as to where investments are to be made and where jobs are to be created, and for pursuing policies of regional development.

FIGURE 39. The Declining Share of Public Property, 1978–2020

The share of public property (public assets net of debt including all public collectivities, businesses, buildings, land, and financial holdings and assets) in total property (total public and private) was about 70 percent in China in 1978, and it has stabilized at around 30 percent since the middle of the 2000s. It was 15–30 percent in capitalist countries at the end of the 1970s; it was almost nil or negative in 2020. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/equality

Moreover, it will be noted that this average share of about 30 percent of public capital conceals very important differences, depending on the categories of the assets involved. On the one hand, residential real estate has been almost entirely privatized. In the early 2020s, the state and companies held less than 5 percent of the residential housing stock, which became the private investment par excellence for Chinese households that had the means, and this helped make real estate prices skyrocket, especially since opportunities for financial savings are limited and the public retirement system is underfunded. Conversely, the government currently holds around 55–60 percent of companies’ total capital (including all enterprises, listed and unlisted, all sizes and all sectors taken together). This share has remained virtually unchanged since 2005–2006 and testifies to the state’s maintenance of strict control over the productive system, and even an accentuation of control over the largest enterprises. We also see a significant decline of the share of business capital held by foreign investors, which is compensated by a rise of the share held by Chinese households (see Figure 40).

FIGURE 40. Ownership of Chinese Firms, 1978–2020

In 2020, the Chinese state (at all levels of government) held about 55 percent of the total capital of Chinese firms (listed and unlisted companies, all sizes and sectors), as compared with 33 percent for Chinese households and 12 percent for foreign investors. The latter’s share has diminished since 2006 and that of Chinese households has risen, whereas the share held by the Chinese state has stabilized at around 55 percent. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/equality

In addition to this mixed-economy structure and the state’s strong control over enterprises, the other major characteristic of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” as the Beijing regime likes to style itself, is obviously the dominant role played by the Chinese Communist Party. In 2020, the CCP had more than 90 million members, or about 10 percent of the country’s adult population. In the opinion of the regime, whose official positions are expressed daily in the Global Times, Chinese-style democracy is superior to the Western-style electoral supermarket because it entrusts the country’s destinies to a motivated and determined avant-garde, both selected and representative of the society, and ultimately more profoundly involved in serving the common interest than is the average Western voter, who is fickle and subject to influence.7 In practice, however, the regime increasingly resembles a perfect digital dictatorship—so perfect that no one wants to be like it. The model of deliberation within the Party is all the less convincing insofar as it leaves no trace of anything outside it, whereas conversely, everyone can see with increasing clarity the establishment of a generalized surveillance of the population on social networks, the repression of dissidents and minorities, the brutality of the electoral process in Hong Kong, and the threats made against the electoral system in Taiwan. The ability of such a regime to seduce public opinion in other countries (and not only their leaders) seems limited. We must add the sharp rise in inequalities, along with the extreme opacity that characterizes the distribution of wealth and the feeling of social injustice that flows from it, a feeling that cannot be appeased forever by dismissing a few people or putting them in prison.8 The anticipated demographic decline and accelerated aging of the population are also going to constitute major challenges for the regime, and in the course of the second half of the twenty-first century they may lead to the replacement of China by India as the world’s primary economic power.9

Despite these weaknesses, Chinese socialism nonetheless has many advantages. If the Western powers persist in an outdated hypercapitalist ideology, it is not at all certain that they will succeed in limiting the growing influence of the Chinese regime. In the economic and financial domain, the Chinese state has considerable assets that far outweigh its debts, and this gives it the means to pursue ambitious policies, both domestically and internationally, particularly concerning investments in infrastructure and in the transition to new forms of energy. In contrast, it is striking to note to what point the main Western states all find themselves, in the early 2020s, in a position in which the share of public property is almost nil or even negative (see Figure 39). Having failed to balance their public accounts (which would have required them to raise tax rates for the wealthiest taxpayers), these countries have accumulated public debts, while at the same time selling off an increasing share of their public assets, so that the former have ended up slightly exceeding the latter. Let us be perfectly clear: the rich countries are rich, in the sense that private wealth has never been so great; it is only their governments that are poor. If they continue down that path, they may find themselves with increasingly negative assets, which would lead to a situation in which the holders of debt securities would possess not only the equivalent of all the public assets (buildings, schools, hospitals, infrastructures, etc.), but also a special drawing right on part of the taxes of future taxpayers.10 And yet it would be completely possible to reduce this public debt rapidly, as these same countries did after World War II—for example, by taxing the largest private fortunes and thus giving the government some room to maneuver.11 That involves becoming aware of the multiplicity of possible choices and the political and social mobilizations in support of them, an awareness that may, unfortunately, require a few more crises, given the ambient conservatism.

The Chinese regime has other strong points. When climatic catastrophes occur, it will have no difficulty blaming the West. More generally, China does not hesitate to remind us that it industrialized without resorting to slavery and colonialism, of which it was itself a victim. This allows China to rack up points against what is perceived by the world as the eternal arrogance of Western countries, which are always quick to lecture the whole Earth concerning justice and democracy, but prove incapable of dealing with the inequalities and discrimination that undermine them, even though they manage to come to terms with all the potentates and oligarchs from whom they benefit. On these subjects, the right response to China’s statist, authoritarian socialism would be to promote a form of democratic, participatory socialism that is ecological and postcolonial, one which finally pays attention to the global South and to all the West’s inequalities and hypocrisies. Such an evolution would also make it possible to respond to the fact that neoliberalism is running out of steam, a decline that was accelerated by the financial crisis of 2008 and by the pandemic of 2020, and which can be explained more generally by the failure of Reaganism’s promises to spur growth through deregulation, to the point that the middle and lower classes, who had been promised the moon, have begun to have serious doubts about globalization.12 At first, we can certainly fear that neoliberalism might be replaced by various forms of the neonationalism incarnated by Trumpism, Brexit, and the rise of Turkish, Brazilian, and Indian nationalism, which are different political movements but all blame foreigners and diverse internal minorities for national misfortunes.13 The failure of Trumpism nonetheless shows the limits of this political trend, which may lead to a headlong rush toward exacerbated identitarian conflicts and a new wave of fiscal-social dumping that favors the richest and the most polluting.14 All this is hardly likely to resolve the challenges of the moment and seems everywhere to be likely to reinforce Chinese statist and authoritarian socialism, which also feeds on nationalism, but is based on a public authority that can give it the means to realize its ambitions, at least for a time.

From the War between Capitalisms to the Battle between Socialisms

For these different reasons, it is very possible that future ideological confrontations will be more similar to battles between forms of socialism than to the war between forms of capitalism that people often talk about. More generally, we must insist above all on the very great diversity of economic models observed around the world and throughout history, including systems that claim to adhere to capitalism or to socialism.

In this book, I have defended the possibility of a democratic and federal socialism, decentralized and participatory, ecological and multicultural, based on the extension of the welfare state and progressive taxation, power-sharing in business enterprises, postcolonial reparations, the battle against discrimination, educational equality, the carbon card, the gradual decommodification of the economy, guaranteed employment and an inheritance for all, the drastic reduction of monetary inequalities, and finally, an electoral and media system that cannot be controlled by money. These are only a few of the options: above all, I have sought to show the diversity of possible systems, and the way in which mobilizations around alternative systems have made a powerful contribution to shaping historical trajectories in the past. The debates on alternative systems and the multiple forms of socialism, which had died out for a time in the 1990s following the collapse of Soviet communism, have been revived since the crisis of 2008, and as the inegalitarian and climatic dead ends of the current system were gradually recognized. These debates and these struggles are not about to stop.

I would also like to repeat that democratic socialism, though it may seem very distant from the present world, is in reality embedded in a stream of considerable transformations achieved in the past, sometimes within a few decades. Except for a few formal similarities, the social, legal, fiscal, educational, electoral, and international institutions characterizing the authoritarian and colonial capitalism of 1910 and the mixed social-democratic economy of 1980 have little in common. If the democratic, participatory socialism described here were to be realized between now and 2050, it would be in direct continuity with this movement, and would probably not be any more different from the second model than the latter is from the first one. This reflection on economic systems is also indispensable for nourishing the dialogue between models. If Western countries, or some of them, were to abandon their habitual capitalist and nationalist postures and adopt a discourse founded on democratic socialism and an exit from neocolonialism, with major steps toward fiscal justice and sharing the tax receipts of the multinationals and billionaires all over the world, that would make it possible not only to regain credibility with regard to the global South, but also to drive Chinese authoritarian socialism into a corner in matters of transparency and democracy. On central questions such as ecology, patriarchy, and xenophobia, the truth is that at this point none of the present regimes has any particularly convincing lesson to teach others. Only a dialogue between systems and a healthy emulation might allow us to hope for some progress.

Will Money Creation Save Us?

No matter which economic model we adopt, we must finally insist on the essential role that will be played by the monetary and financial system in the coming decades. The central banks and monetary policy have assumed a decisive importance following the financial crisis of 2008 and the pandemic crisis of 2020–2021. Specifically, the balance sheet of the world’s main banks, that is, the whole of the loans they have granted and the securities they hold, has regained in a little more than ten years a level seen during the historic postwar peak (see Figure 41). In theory, nothing forbids us to go further.15 Today, no currency is defined in relationship to gold or to a material referent: currency is above all an electronic sign on computers, which the central banks can create without limits. There are even plans to set up central bank digital currencies in the near future. Individuals would have digital accounts at their country’s central bank, which would permit banks to directly credit individuals’ accounts, rather than routing through private banks and enterprises, as is now usually the case.16

FIGURE 41. The Size of Central Banks’ Balance Sheets, 1900–2020

The total assets held by the European Central Bank (ECB) rose from 11 percent of eurozone GDP on the last day of 2004 to 61 percent on the last day of 2020. The curve for 1900–1998 indicates the average of the balance sheets for the German and French central banks (with peaks of 39 percent in 1918 and 62 percent in 1944). The total assets of the Federal Reserve (created in 1913) rose from 6 percent of US GDP at the end of 2007 to 36 percent at the end of 2020.

Note: The average for rich countries includes Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Holland, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Sources and series: piketty.pse.ens.fr/equality

The spectacular increase in monetary creation since 2008 illustrates once again to what point economic institutions are not unchanging. They are constantly redefined according to crises and power relationships, within unstable and precarious compromises. This new ease in increasing the money supply has nonetheless led to a confusion that it is important to clarify here. In short, money is an indispensable tool of economic, social, and climate policy, on the condition, however, that it is not made sacred and is put back in its place in a coherent institutional framework based especially on the welfare state, progressive taxation, parliamentary deliberation, and democratic supervision.

Let us recall first of all that the only true limit to monetary policy is inflation. So long as there is no substantial increase in consumer prices, there is no solid reason not to increase the money supply if it enables us to finance useful policies such as the struggle for full employment, a guaranteed job, the thermal insulation of buildings, or public investments in health care, education, and renewable energy. Inversely, if inflation flares up in the long term, then that means that the limits of monetary creation have been reached and that it is time to rely on other tools to mobilize resources (beginning with taxes).17 We must also emphasize the fact that in the event of a rapid collapse of the economy connected with a financial crisis, a pandemic, or a natural or climate catastrophe, the central banks are the only public institutions capable of reacting fast enough to avoid a spate of bankruptcies or an explosion of poverty. Fortunately, this role as lender of last resort, which had been rejected in the name of financial orthodoxy during the crisis of 1929 and led the world to the edge of the abyss, is now the object of a positive consensus, which shows that we can learn from history. The problem is that the monetary policies put in place in 2008 and 2020 continue to be inserted into a relatively conservative schema. In conclusion, the monetary weapon has been used frequently to save banks and bankers, but there is much more hesitation when it is a question of saving the planet, reducing inequalities, or relieving the public authority of the considerable debts accumulated as a result of crises and diverse bailouts and plans to jump-start the private sector.

Regarding public debts, the balance in force in the early 2020s is relatively precarious. The central banks have bought back an ever-larger share of state loans, at an interest rate that is almost zero. If the rates start to climb again, or rather when they begin to climb again, the interest burden will be unbearable for citizen taxpayers, and it will be necessary to implement other solutions, like the exceptional levies on private wealth that were applied after World War II. Moreover, current monetary policy poses other problems. For small savers, zero or negative interest rates are not necessarily good news. On the other hand, for those who have the means to borrow at low interest rates and to find good investments, it is possible to obtain excellent yields. In all, monetary creation and the purchase of financial securities have helped boost prices on the stock and real estate markets, and to further enrich the rich. We must add that zero interest rates constitute in large measure a new privilege for rich countries. Investors everywhere are prepared to be content with a small reward for investing their capital in safe currencies and in the debt securities of the principal Western countries (if they are not partly forced to do so by the new banking regulations), but inversely they demand high interest rates when it is a question of lending to southern countries. Rather than marveling at this miracle of zero interest rates, the rich countries would be wise to take a look into international financial cooperation, which might allow all countries to finance themselves at low rates in a time of crisis.

Generally speaking, the emergence of a new monetary tool recognized as such is a powerful factor for change: it makes it very difficult to explain to the public at large that a return to economic and financial orthodoxy is the only possible option. This tool, however, must be placed under democratic supervision. A consensus is now emerging regarding the central banks’ obligation to make their balance sheets greener, indeed, to lead the movement toward durable and equitable development. This is excellent news in itself, except that this new mission will require vast democratic deliberations, in parliamentary precincts and in public forums, on the basis of detailed assessments, pro and con, that will allow us to judge the effects of the different possible monetary policies on multiple social and environmental indicators. However, the current model of the central banks is absolutely not that one: after being appointed by governments and promptly confirmed by parliaments, their leaders limit themselves to meeting behind closed doors and deciding among themselves the best way to use immense amounts of public resources.18 Among the many highly political decisions that will have to be made, we can also mention the question of whether to postpone the repayment of certain long-term debts.19 You can bet that many battles will have to be fought before the central banks become a genuinely democratic tool in the service of equality.

For a Universalist Sovereignism

It is time to close our inquiry. The march toward equality is a battle whose outcome is uncertain, and not a road laid out in advance. Since the end of the eighteenth century, equality has made its way by overturning the rules established by the regimes in power. The same will be true in the future. It would be an illusion to imagine that decisive transformations could take place if we adopt the unanimity of the countries or the social groups concerned as an untouchable principle. Each political community must be able to set the conditions for the pursuit of trade with the rest of the world, without waiting until it has reached agreement with all its partners. That is always how it has been in history: each government must, if it deems it useful, free itself from its predecessors’ commitments, especially if these commitments put social harmony and the survival of the planet in danger. However, it is essential that this form of sovereignism be defined on the basis of universalist and internationalist objectives, that is, by making explicit the criteria of social, fiscal, and environmental justice that can be applied to all countries in the same way.

It would be absurd to claim that such a path is easy to follow and clearly marked out: nearly everything remains to be invented. In practice, this universalist sovereignism will not always be easy to distinguish from nationalist sovereignism, which is founded on the defense of a particular civilizational identity and interests that are supposed to be homogeneous within it. In order to clearly distinguish the two approaches, we have to adhere to several strict principles. Before committing to unilateral measures, it is critical to propose to other countries a model of cooperative development based on universal values and on objective, verifiable social and environmental indicators that make it possible to publicly state the extent to which different classes of income and wealth contribute to public and climatic burdens. We must also describe precisely the transnational assemblies that would ideally be entrusted with global public goods and common policies of fiscal and environmental justice. If these social-federalist proposals are not immediately adopted, the unilateral approach must still remain incentivizing and reversible.20 Finally, the sovereignist-universalist path loses all credibility if it is not based on a constant search for credible international coalitions capable of accelerating the transition toward socialist, democratic federalism, which should remain the ultimate objective.

This kind of universalist sovereignism will also require active citizens. The social sciences can contribute to this, but it goes without saying that they will not suffice. Only powerful social mobilizations, supported by collective movements and organizations, will allow us to define common objectives and transform power relationships. By what we ask of our friends, our networks, our elected officials, our preferred media, our labor union representatives, and by our own actions and participation in collective deliberation and social movements, each of us can make socioeconomic phenomena more comprehensible and help grasp the changes that are occurring. Economic questions are too important to be left to others. Citizens’ reappropriation of this knowledge is an essential stage in the battle for equality. If this book has given readers new weapons for this battle, my goal will have been fully realized.

  1. 1. IPCC, Global Warming of 1.5°C, Special Report, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Geneva, 2018; IPBES, “Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services,” Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Bonn, May 4, 2019; W. Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347, no. 6223 (2015), 1259855; J. Hickel, Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save Society (London: William Heinemann, 2020).

  2. 2. In Rouge impératrice (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 2019), Léonora Miano imagines that in 2124 a powerful African Federation finally achieves unity and, after the climatic and nuclear catastrophes of the twenty-first century, succeeds in transcending the dead ends of Westerners’ commercial globalization and ends up moving beyond its prejudices and resentments to offer a helping hand to European refugees.

  3. 3. See Chapter 1, Figure 3. After such catastrophes, it is possible that people will no longer smile at all at the whims, private jets, or space tourism of billionaires, who are always prompt to support the craziest geo-engineering hypotheses if these will allow them to avoid simple and rebarbative solutions, such as paying taxes and living modestly.

  4. 4. L. Chancel, “Global Carbon Inequality in the Long Run,” March 2021, WID.world. Compare L. Chancel and T. Piketty, “Carbon and Inequality: From Kyoto to Paris,” November 2015, WID.world. The figures given here reflect both direct and indirect emissions (after correction for imports).

  5. 5. C. Bonneuil and J.-B. Fressoz, L’Événement anthropocène. La Terre, l’histoire et nous (Paris: Points, 2016); J.-B. Fressoz and F. Locher, Les Révoltes du ciel. Une histoire du changement climatique (Paris: Seuil, 2020).

  6. 6. Expressed in terms of parity of purchasing power, China’s GDP became greater than that of the United States in 2013. However, in terms of annual national income per adult, China remains at a level only a third of that in the West: about 15,000 euros in China, as contrasted with almost 40,000 euros in Western Europe and 50,000 euros in the United States. At the current rate of convergence (5 percent per year), the gap could be filled between now and 2040–2050. China would then have a population and a GDP half again as large as the cumulative total of that of the United States and Europe.

  7. 7. The editor-in-chief of the Global Times, Hu Xijin, was a young student at the time of the Tiananmen Square incident in 1989, likes to remind people that it was the separatist wars in Yugoslavia that demonstrated for him the pacifying role of the Party and of the deliberations within it, along with the impossibility of leaving to electoral passions the task of making decisions as delicate as those regarding the border system or the property system. See the interview with Hu Xijin, Le Monde, October 15, 2017.

  8. 8. On the evolution of inequalities and Chinese data’s lack of transparency, see T. Piketty, L. Yang, and G. Zucman, “Capital Accumulation, Private Property, and Rising Inequality in China, 1978–2015,” American Economic Review 109, no. 7 (2019): 2469–2496.

  9. 9. India will probably see its population overtake that of China in 2028. If the country manages to surmount its very burdensome legacy of inequality and invests more in education, health care, and infrastructure, while at the same time escaping the identitarian and authoritarian excesses of the Hindu nationalists presently in power—which is far from sure—it has parliamentary, federal, and electoral institutions and a system of a free press that provide it with political foundations more robust than those of China (and far more exportable and attractive for other countries).

  10. 10. For a recent example of this development, which is still ongoing, we can cite the project to privatize the ADP (Paris Airports) group that was adopted in 2019 by the French government. It expects this sale to bring in 8 billion euros—after having deprived itself of 5 billion per year in tax receipts by doing away with the wealth tax and progressive taxation on income from capital. It would have been simpler to transfer the property titles directly to the persons benefiting from tax decreases.

  11. 11. See Chapter 5. The value of the public assets registered in the national accounts generally amounts to between 100 and 150 percent of the national income, so that net public property becomes negative when the debt exceeds this level. It will be noted that the Western countries themselves had mixed economies during the period 1950–1980: public debt had been reduced to a minimum and public assets were large, so that the net public property represented a substantial portion (typically 20–30 percent) of the national capital. I cannot settle here the complex question of the ideal level, which depends in particular on the type of democratic governance developed in the public sector; let us simply say that it seems far better that the net public property’s share in the national capital be positive but less than half, rather than that it be zero or negative.

  12. 12. The term “neoliberalism” refers to the new form of economic liberalism in vogue all over the planet since the 1980s, as opposed to the classical economic liberalism that existed in the nineteenth century and until 1914. This idea may be useful, but on the condition that we not lose sight of the fact that this neoliberalism found a place in typical societies in the North characterized by a powerful welfare state without much relation to those before 1914, and in post-independence movement societies marked by neocolonialism in the South, in forms very different from those taken by colonialism before 1960 or before 1914. The term was introduced at a colloquium that met in Paris in 1938 and that brought together a group of liberal intellectuals (including the journalist Walter Lippmann and the economists Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Wilhelm Röpke) to describe the collapse of pre-1914 liberalism and to reflect on future reconstructions. See S. Audier, Le Colloque Lippmann. Aux origines du “néo-libéralisme” (Lormont: Bord de l’eau, 2008); S. Audier, Néo-libéralisme(s). Une archéologie intellectuelle (Paris: Grasset, 2012).

  13. 13. On the structural instability of the tripartition liberalism-nationalism-socialism in the political-ideological sphere, see B. Karsenti and C. Lemieux, Socialisme et sociologie (Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2017). In short, liberalism is based on the market and on the social disembedding of the economy, nationalism replies by reifying the nation and ethno-national solidarities, whereas socialism promotes universalist emancipation through education, knowledge, and power-sharing.

  14. 14. On the way in which Brexit was financed in 2016 by hedge funds and financial lobbies demanding a new wave of deregulation and no longer limiting themselves to the deregulation carried out by the European Union in the 1980s and 1990s, see M. Benquet and H. Bergeron, La Finance autoritaire. Vers la fin du néolibéralisme (Paris: Raisons d’agir, 2021).

  15. 15. Even before the pandemic of 2020, the balance sheets of the central banks of Switzerland and Japan exceeded 100 percent of the GDP. See T. Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 696–705.

  16. 16. In addition to facilitating monetary policy, central bank digital currency could embody a genuinely public banking service, free and accessible to everyone—the exact opposite of the systems of electronic currency dreamed of by private operators (whether they are decentralized and polluting, like Bitcoin, or centralized and inegalitarian, like projects envisioned by Meta [formerly Facebook] and private banks).

  17. 17. The defenders of monetary creation in the service of guaranteed employment and the Green New Deal, like S. Kelton and P. Tcherneva, are very clear on this point. See S. Kelton, The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People’s Economy (New York: PublicAffairs, 2020). Compare L. Randall Wray et al., “Public Service Employment: A Path to Full Employment,” Research Project Report, Levy Economics Institute of Bard College, April 2018.

  18. 18. See E. Monnet, La Banque Providence. Démocratiser les banques centrales et la création monétaire (Paris: Seuil, 2021), which proposes in particular to create a European Credit Council attached to the European Parliament. N. Dufrêne and A. Grandjean, La Monnaie écologique (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2020).

  19. 19. The public debts on the European Central Bank’s balance sheet, for example. might be postponed by forty or fifty years without interest, or depending on the realization of climatic objectives. For public debts, as for the sums that might be credited to the accounts of private individuals, they might also be recorded on the ECB’s balance sheet as a perpetual no-interest debt, which would be tantamount to canceling them. In any case, it would be better to make these decisions when interest rates are zero, because conflicts between countries will break out again if rates rise in a disorganized way.

  20. 20. For example, if a sovereignist-internationalist state imposes sanctions on a country that practices fiscal or climatic dumping, the latter activities must stop as soon as the country in question decides to tax the profits of multinationals or carbon emissions at the desired level. From this point of view, sectorial measures adopted without a universal basis must be forbidden, because they can easily trigger an escalation of sanctions without any constructive and objectifiable outcome.