Thomas Piketty's 2020 book Capital & Ideology is a highly celebrated tome that uses economics and sociology to examine the intrinsic illegitimacy of income inequality and provides proposals for correcting its inherent flaws.
The folks at Abrams ComicArts have a new graphic novel adaptation, Thomas Piketty's Capital & Ideology. Clocking in at a "mere" 176 pages, the graphic novel version simplifies and clarifies the text with charts and graphs, as one might expect from a visual narrative.
But that's not the only thoughtful liberty that author Claire Alet and illustrator Benjamin Adam took with their adaptation. Instead of being a lengthy economic diatribe, Alet and Adam decided to focus their version of Capital & Ideology on a personal human narrative. In this adaptation, the "story," as it were, centers on the lineage of a single family who has benefitted from intergenerational wealth (and all the cruelties that helped them to achieve that privilege). As the book blurb explains:
Jules, the main character, is born at the end of the 19th century. He is a person of private means, a privileged figure representative of a profoundly unequal society obsessed with property. He, his family circle, and his descendants will experience the evolution of wealth and society. Eight generations of his family serve as a connecting thread running through the book, all the way up to Léa, a young woman today, who discovers the family secret at the root of their inheritance.
It's a clever device that helps to drive the point home. People typically connect better with personal, individual stories, and Alet and Adam smartly use that to their advantage here. We see how Jules's comfort and condition change at the first introduction of federal income taxes, and we see how he and his friends use their power and privilege to fight back against those changes. We see, too, how his children, grandchildren, and so on continue to benefit from that inherited wealth—we see where they develop education and empathy and also where those things fall short. They return to the desperate self-preservation of the wealthy.
As a reader, this resonates. You understand why it might be difficult for people to keep losing things and giving up things they're used to—and you also get frustrated when those things when you know that a society could achieve all of the things that people (including the wealthy) want if one rich bastard would just part with one of his seven French chateaus. But of course, that person thinks they're entitled to that chateaux, even though, as we all know—and as the book deftly illustrates—it was only earned through immoral and illegitimate means.
Alet and Adam use Jules' lineage to draw a clear line connecting things like the Haitian Revolution and the end of slavery in America directly to the 2008 financial crash, the surging fascism of the last decade, and even the upset in the global supply chain during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's one thing to say that the myth of meritocracy enables powerful institutions to manufacture consent and promote an environment of neoliberal self-censor by only hiring from within the ranks of those elites who have achieved the pre-defined hallmarks of meritocracy as defined by the ruling class that established them; it's another thing to see how a sixth-generation descendent of a slave trader engages in professional networking at an Ivy League school in order to land a lauded political internship where they will be passively discouraged from rocking the boat too much.
One way this depiction resonated with me was in the way that it illustrated changes in voting habits. It's no surprise that Jules's descendants are all conservative / right-wing voters during the rise of the labor movement in the early 20th century. Nor is it particularly novel when the children of those aristocrats go on to higher education and move left as they better understand the things their parents were complicit in. But Alet and Adam do an excellent job of showing what happens after that—how the left-leaning beneficiaries of intergenerational wealth fail to enact any meaningful change for the actual working class. And how that, in turn, pushes working-class voters back towards the right, in an effort to distance themselves from the aristocracy.
In a few short panels, Alet and Adam made me understand this phenomenon in a way that I never did after dozens of desperate conversations with my dad's upper-middle-class golf buddies who rail about "elites" while cheering for a famously racist slumlord.
That's another curious strength of this book: it's a scathing takedown of neoliberalism that's not necessarily a Marxist screed. Piketty (in Alet and Adam's telling) fully supports markets and capitalism as an idea—he just believes they need to be better regulated to maximize freedom for everyone. Indeed, Capital & Ideology helps to illustrate how the (wrongful) association between "deregulation" and "freedom" came to be in the first place. As Piketty shows, the best way to actually make America (and elsewhere) "great again"—which is to say, to return to that post-WW2 era of prosperity when everyone was thriving—is to regulate markets and tax the hell out of the rich. But like in a capitalist way.
Which is all to say that I can't wait to buy this book for my dad.
Thomas Piketty's Capital & Ideology: A Graphic Novel Adaptation by Claire Alet and Benjamin Adam is out September 10, 2024 from Abrams ComicArts.
Previously:
• Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century
• Thomas Piketty explains how Elizabeth Warren's wealth tax is American as apple pie
• Piketty's methods: parsing wealth inequality data and its critique
• Piketty and 100 researchers: inequality is getting worse, and will continue to worsen
• Thomas Piketty's new book uses data to trace how inequality changes ideology
• Piketty, Capital, and the World Wars: does government policy make a difference in wealth concentration?
