On Oct 9, 2008, at 4:22 AM, James Heartfield wrote:
> 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...
> 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....
The theory that workers are not burdened by taxation is Ricardian, and the Marx quote comes from a time before he had fully criticized the Ricardian cost-of-production wage theory. Once one grasps that "between equal rights force decides"--that the level of real wages is set by class struggle and not by the "iron law" of physiological subsistence and that it includes a historically won substantial margin over physiological subsistence--one realizes that taxation is an area of class struggle and that the tax burden can be, and often is, a means by which capital seeks to force real wages back toward (or even below) the current historically determined *social* subsistence level.
Shane Mage
"This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire, kindling in measures and going out in measures."
Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 30