Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty

PART ONE
INCOME AND CAPITAL

{ONE}
Income and Output
On August 16, 2012, the South African police intervened in a labor conflict
between workers at the Marikana platinum mine near Johannesburg and the
mine’s owners: the stockholders of Lonmin, Inc., based in London. Police
fired on the strikers with live ammunition. Thirty-four miners were killed.
As often in such strikes, the conflict primarily concerned wages: the miners
had asked for a doubling of their wage from 500 to 1,000 euros a month.
After the tragic loss of life, the company finally proposed a monthly raise of
75 euros.
This episode reminds us, if we needed reminding, that the question of
what share of output should go to wages and what share to profits—in other
words, how should the income from production be divided between labor
and capital?—has always been at the heart of distributional conflict. In
traditional societies, the basis of social inequality and most common cause
of rebellion was the conflict of interest between landlord and peasant,
between those who owned land and those who cultivated it with their labor,
those who received land rents and those who paid them. The Industrial
Revolution exacerbated the conflict between capital and labor, perhaps
because production became more capital intensive than in the past (making
use of machinery and exploiting natural resources more than ever before)
and perhaps, too, because hopes for a more equitable distribution of income
and a more democratic social order were dashed. I will come back to this
point.
The Marikana tragedy calls to mind earlier instances of violence. At
Haymarket Square in Chicago on May 1, 1886, and then at Fourmies, in
northern France, on May 1, 1891, police fired on workers striking for higher
wages. Does this kind of violent clash between labor and capital belong to
the past, or will it be an integral part of twenty-first-century history?

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty