"Marx certainly describes the system of robbery that is state debt as primitive accumulation."
Does he? He does credit the state with a key role in primitive accumulation, as the institution of coercion, and indeed does indicate that state debt and taxation are a burden on the worker. ______________
righto. Understood like a true libertarian. ________
However, he checks himself (and others) with the following:
"The great part that the public debt and the fiscal system corresponding with it, has played in the capitalisation of wealth and the expropriation of the masses, has led many writers, like Cobbett, Doubleday and others, to seek in this, incorrectly, the fundamental cause of the misery of the modern peoples." Capital Vol 1, L&W, p 708
Elsewhere, Marx makes it clear that taxation will always be peripheral to the fundamentally unequal (if superficially equal) exchange between capital and labour, _______________
I don't see how quotes will settle this. At any rate, no one is saying that the principal source of capitalisation is primitive accumulation. But why write off as unimportant or marginal analysis of the whole public debt/private complex? Of course at present public debt is a vent for overaccumulated capital (and so will soon grow the importance of securing privileged foreign investment outlets for overaccumulated capital) whereas public debt was once the means by which capital was sufficiently engorged to make large scale industrial investments. The return of primitive accumulation in form does not mean that it is the same in substance. Oh, I don't know--perhaps Grossman is more important than I thought. ____________
and that taxes are typically a tax on surplus value already created in production:
"Our argument is that although some taxes are paid by the working class, the burden of taxation rests on the capitalists and has to be paid out of the profit accruing to them in the form of rent, interest and profit, the basis of which is the unpaid labour." ("Criticism and Critical Morality", Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 6). ________
the tax system has since changed since the early writings of Karl Marx. It is true that taxes from the working class could have been appropriated as extra surplus value, but the point is that regressive taxation may depress wage below value of labor power. This seems to be America's future.
Abu Hartal
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