Complex inequalities in the age of financialisation: Piketty, Marx, and class-biased power resources (original) (raw)

Financialisation is widely acknowledged as a stressor of income equality as severe as those once considered staples of the political economy literature-globalisation, welfare retrenchment, and skill-biased technological employment. Research since the financial crisis has more pointedly fleshed out the institutional and regulatory characteristics of financialisation, allowing more specific causal channels linking the rise of finance to greater disparities in wealth and income to be established. Coupled with fears of continued stagnation across advanced capitalist democracies, Piketty's prognosis concerning the future distribution of income appears warranted. Accordingly, where slack national growth rates fall below those returns offered by rentier income streams; inequality, he claims, should rise as a consequence. Whilst Piketty rightly links the rising ratio of capital-labour income to loosed bargaining constraints on top earners (through falling top marginal tax rates since the 1970s), there is little sense of how wider institutional contexts may have played into this, nor how the institutional structure of capitalism has assumed various forms throughout time – financialisation merely the most recent. The temptation is thus to view the rise of the 'super rich' as a consequence of misguided fiscal policy, without interpreting this phenomenon as part of a wider package of neoliberal reforms aimed both at the labour movement, and the welfare state.