[lbo-talk] taxation on labour or capital?

Bill Bartlett billbartlett at aapt.net.au
Thu May 8 21:33:51 PDT 2008


At 11:07 AM +1000 9/5/08, Mike Beggs wrote:


>That was in 1847, pretty early in Marx's study of political economy. The
>logic is purely Ricardian - the sentence just before what you quote is
>"Competition necessarily reduces the average wage to the minimum, that
>is to say, to a wage which permits the workers penuriously to eke out
>their lives and the lives of their race."
>
>The context of this is the repeal of the Corn Laws, and Marx's views of
>the time - explicitly based on Ricardo - are elaborated more in a
>pamphlet of a couple of months later - "On the question of free trade":
>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/01/09ft.htm
>
>The logic doesn't hold if wages are not pinned by competition to a level
>"which permits the workers penuriously to eke out their lives and the
>lives of their race". Later Marx ditched this idea, e.g. in Capital and
>the Critique of the Gotha Programme.

So you concede that the logic does hold, to the extent that wages are reduced by competition to the minimum necessary cost of (re)production of labour? But you seem to believe that wages are outside of the influence of market forces?

Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas



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