[lbo-talk] Taxes and bailout

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Thu Oct 9 01:22:32 PDT 2008


Lenin's tomb wrote

"This isn't coming from today's federal budget. It is going to be paid for by increased taxation, mostly on the working class. They call it 'tightening your belt'."

I don't know if I am appealing to a common language that we do not share, but in the Marxist tradition, it is not usual to take taxation seriously as a deduction from workers wages, but rather to see gross pay as a legal fiction, and take home pay as the reality. The standpoint of the taxpayer is more typically the middle class outlook than the working class. Tomorrow's federal budget, like today's is not truly in the hands of the people (itself a mythical construction) except as an ideological claim.

There is indeed a threat to the working class in the current difficulties, and that is a threat to homes, jobs, wages and welfare payments.

Marx:

"If all taxes which bear on the working class were abolished root and branch, the necessary consequence would be the reduction of wages by the whole amount of taxes which goes into them. Either the employers' profit would rise as a direct consequence by the same quantity, or else no more than an alteration in the form of tax-collecting would have taken place. 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).



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