> It's worth noting that Piketty has an astonishingly basic misunderstanding/non-understanding of the marxist analysis of capitalism despite the titles of his books. He hasn't even read Capital. I like his politics relatively well as far as most liberals go but that is still pretty disappointing.
Economists use the word "capital" without making reference to Marx. Marx didn't come up with that word, it had a meaning in classical economics since Adam Smith (and maybe before).
I think the rest of your post is wrong too. Marx does argue for a "mechanical determination of ideology". For Marx, man is the animal that labors, not a rational animal or a political animal. What matters is what you make with your body. If you labor with your body then you're a proletarian, and you will experience class consciousness from that perspective. If you make money from other people's labor, you're bourgeois, and you will experience bourgeois class consciousness.
I don't know if Marx talks about bourgeois who consider themselves Marxists (like Engels -- Marx was not bourgeois).
> In general I think his analysis is that "capitalism should just change some specific things to reduce inequality" without any materialist, political-economic understanding of why inequality is so rampant in the first place - why capital's dominance comes from the structure of the economy. That is why marxism is interesting, marxism makes a very compelling argument for it, and liberals ignore it at their peril.
This is also bizarre. Piketty does have a theory about "why inequality is so rampant in the first place". He just thinks we can change the laws and fix it!