[lbo-talk] Taxes and bailout

[Carrol Cox]

It seems to me that there is a real agitational and organizing problem
here in that the needs of agitation clash with a theoretical
understanding. I think James is right here -- or rather Marx is. From an
abstract perspective (and that is the correct perspective) state
expenses MUST be seen as part of surpluss value. The capitalist class
'owns' the state as it were, and (by various empirical routes) pays for
the operation of that state out of the surplus value it extracts from
the working class.

Even in agitational terms, I think the various slogans with "taxpayers"
as their grammatical subject are misleading. Talk of "costing the
taxpayers" belongs to populist politics, not to class politics.

Nevertheless, the common sense ("common sense" is merely a synonym for
capitalist ideology) is that workers pay taxes, and I can't imagine an
agitational slogan demanding (in effect) a rise in what everyone will
regard as a tax on the worker. So there is a problem.

Carrol

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. 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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