This article reconstructs the suggestions, and also the problematic knots, contained in the formula relaunched by Piketty of a «participatory socialism». The contradictions of the social system of late modernity, according to the French economist, cannot be dissolved with the recourse of pure ethical-linguistic models. Not even the populist paradigm, which postulates a high-low clash, according to a
polarity no longer linked to social conflicts, appears to be a solution for him. Piketty’s belief is that a recognition of the new social question is needed through the lens of property and the social relations of production. The re-proposition of the socialist project envisages, in this perspective, a critical reading of the dynamics of the age of globalization developed in terms of an investigation into social classes. From the aporias of possessive individualism, Piketty derives the foundation for a credible exit strategy from capitalism through major legislative reforms, radical fiscal measures, organizational and managerial changes in the business model. The theoretical question that still remains open in Piketty’s framework concerns the reconstruction of the profile of an organised politics. A socialist alternative to the ideology and the real domination of capital in fact refers to the specification of the social subject on which to graft a political project of transformation to plan the overcoming of capitalism. A policy of innovation cannot be pursued without the identification of a laboratory (institutional, corporate, trade union) that is at least European.