Gaining power and using it: the promise and limits of socialism in Mouffe and Piketty

Throughout Western democracies, the left remains in political purgatory and without a road towards political power. We examine Chantal Mouffe’s strategy for achieving a left populism with socialist characteristics, followed by Thomas Piketty’s program for ‘participatory socialism’. We highlight the admirable details they offer about alliance politics and transforming property relations. Nevertheless, we argue for why they cannot realise in practice what they hope to achieve, in part because of their respective convictions about the autonomy of the political. Mouffe’s treatment of economic and political liberalism, and her misreading of class relations and neoliberal oligarchy, leave her politics within a liberal capitalist orbit. Piketty’s work is overly idealist and insufficiently critical, and his proposed changes to capitalist and political institutions are too narrow. Their merits notwithstanding, socialist strategy must go beyond Mouffe and Piketty.