From: OPE-L Administrator (ope-admin@ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu)
Date: Tue May 25 2004 - 14:40:33 EDT
Reply by JB to Paul B's question./In solidarity, Jerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> Sent: Tuesday, May 25, 2004 8:35 AM Subject: Re: (OPE-L) Re: taxation and public finance Time does not permit me to track this whole quotology through again, it's in there somewhere, maybe I get around to it later if I survive this. I don't normally like talking about advanced issues in political economy, because then you get all this nonsense from doctrinaire Marxist dorks and their fake orthodoxy. I have already quoted on OPE-L what Marx said about it just before publishing Capital Volume 1, but, he also raised the topic in many other discussions e.g. about free trade, in the Grundrisse, in other economic manuscripts, and in Das Kapital. As Angus Maddison notes, Marx wrote about 12,000 pages of unpublished manuscript in total and then you could go many ways with it. Marx said things about taxation also in regard to Ricardo, and in fact if you go to http://www.marxists.org and type in '"tax" you will find 385 references and that should be enough for your creditable scholarly Marxological article on tax in Capital & Class or something. Or look at http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me09/me09_075.htm or www.praxisphilosophie.de/hosswert.pdf and so on. For the rest, in modern scholarship "taxation" is just about porno so it is not possible to have a meaningful discussion about it beyond pomo waffle. Basically Marx considered taxation as a derived source of income, the levying of which is responsive, or reacting, to more basic socio-economic relations and value-creation. Therefore, the struggle over taxation itself, does not yet get to the real nature of what the class conflict is about. But Marx also admits, that tax becomes part of the cost-structure of social production, and that it can can independently influence commodity prices, and alter value-magnitudes. But the Marxist treatment of taxation by the epigones is usually simplistic, vulgar and silly because they don't understand Marx's dictum that "capitalist production is the unity of the production process and circulation process." And then the Marxist-fundamentalists say oh well "tax is just surplus-value" and forget about it, but this is obviously just a static, crude and vulgar economics that has little to do with reality. The core class content of taxation was sketched by Karl Marx in his brilliant article "Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality; A Contribution to German Cultural History Contra Karl Heinzen" (in MECW Volume 6, p. 312, October 1847). This article, if you read it through, is in some ways far more important than ""The German Ideology" in understanding Marx's rapid evolution in those years from democratic liberalism to a communist/socialist position. I will just quote a few bits leading up to the essential quote: "We are therefore faced with two kinds of power, on the one hand the power of property, in other words, of the property-owners, on the other hand political power, the power of the state. "Power also controls property" means: property does not control the political power but rather it is harassed by it, for example by arbitrary taxes, by confiscations, by privileges, by the disruptive interference of the bureaucracy in industry and trade and the like. In other words: the bourgeoisie has not yet taken political shape as a class. The power of the state is not yet its own power. In countries where the bourgeoisie has already conquered political power and political rule is none other than the rule, not of the individual bourgeois over his workers, but of the bourgeois class over the whole of society, Herr Heinzen's dictum has lost its meaning. The propertyless of course remain untouched by political rule insofar as it directly affects property. Whilst, therefore, Herr Heinzen fancied he was expressing a truth as eternal as it was original, he has only expressed the fact that the German bourgeoisie must conquer political power, in other words, he says what Engels says, but unconsciously, honestly thinking he is saying the opposite. He is only expressing, with some emotion, a transient relationship between the German bourgeoisie and the German state power, as an eternal truth, and thereby showing how to make a "solid core" out of a "movement". (...) The question of property as it has been raised in "our own day" is quite unrecognisable even formulated as a question in the form Heinzen gives it: "whether it is just that one man should possess everything and another man nothing.... whether the individual should be permitted to possess anything at all" and similar simplistic questions of conscience and clichés about justice. The question of property assumes different forms according to the different levels of development of industry in general and according to its particular level of development in the different countries. (...) The question of property, which in "our own day" is a question of world-historical significance, has thus a meaning only in modern bourgeois society. The more advanced this society is, in other words, the further the bourgeoisie has developed economically in a country and therefore the more state power has assumed a bourgeois character, the more glaringly does the social question obtrude itself, in France more glaringly than in Germany, in England more glaringly than in France, in a constitutional monarchy more glaringly than in an absolute monarchy, in a republic more glaringly than in a constitutional monarchy. Thus, for example, the conflicts of the credit system, speculation, etc., are nowhere more acute than in North America. Nowhere, either, does social inequality obtrude itself more harshly than in the eastern states of North America, because nowhere is it less disguised by political inequality. If pauperism has not yet developed there as much as in England, this is explained by economic circumstances which it is not our task to elucidate further here. Meanwhile, pauperism is making the most gratifying progress. (...) But by "the connection between politics and social conditions" Herr Heinzen actually understands only the connection between the rule of the princes in Germany and the distress and misery in Germany. The monarchy, like every other form of state, is a direct burden on the working class on the material side only in the form of taxes. Taxes are the existence of the state expressed in economic terms. Civil servants and priests, soldiers and ballet-dancers, schoolmasters and police constables, Greek museums and Gothic steeples, civil list and services list - the common seed within which all these fabulous beings slumber in embryo is taxation." http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/10/31.htm So there you have it: "Taxes are the existence of the state expressed in economic terms." and then the issues are the class content of taxation and the socio-political mandate for taxation. Marxists don't understand this, and then they try to derive the form of the state from the logic of capital and so on, but as Ernest Mandel pointed out long ago in his article on the state-derivation debate, this fake, dogmatic Hegelianising ignores completely that the bourgeois classes historically took over an existing state apparatus, and modified it, and that the struggle over taxation was crucial to the bourgeois bid for state power in the first place. I have no time to work on these issues now but have a look at http://www.oecd.org/statisticsdata/0,2643,en_2649_37427_1_119656_1_1_37427,0 0.html and then you will see that tax is between a quarter and half of the annual value-added in developed capitalist societies, yet the Marxist literature has almost nothing to say about it. I mentioned previously that the US federal tax take only (this does NOT include US state & local taxes) is equal to the official GDP value of the Russian federation. Only a brainless economist would therefore ignore the importance of taxation for value theory. My main experience with modern social scientific academia is that few people understand what the questions are, and they all reject theory, and they are unwilling to systematically study any empirical data, and therefore little good research gets done anymore, it's just a lazy porno-pomo mishmash which from a scholarly point of view is banale crap. However a Marxist economist who thinks ahead, rather than being backwardlooking, would concern himself with taxation and intellectually prepare the radical movement for what is to come. Jurriaan
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