From: OPE-L Administrator (ope-admin@ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu)
Date: Wed May 26 2004 - 04:59:16 EDT
Jurriaan regretted the tone of his last message and suggested that the following edited version be posted./ In solidarity, Jerry ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@hetnet.nl> I cannot find the exact quotes I am looking for just now, regret to say. I have 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 As Angus Maddison noted, Marx wrote about 12,000 pages of unpublished manuscript in total and then you could go many ways with it.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. Or have a look at http://www.mlwerke.de/me/me09/me09_075.htm or www.praxisphilosophie.de/hosswert.pdf and so on. From memory there was an article in Marx-Engels-Forschung about Marx on taxation, but I cannot recall an exact reference. For a brief article by myself on tax (in reference to John Kerry's proposals), see: http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/03/27/232230&mode=nested&tid=10 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 processes on which it depends. Therefore, a struggle over taxation itself, does not yet get to the fulcrum of the conflict between social classes. 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. That is, taxation has an important effect on real investment behaviour, commercial trade, and pricing. The larger the amount of capital involved, the more important the tax levy becomes. Marx defines surplus-value usually in terms of profit+interest+rent, but tax is often a larger portion of income than net interest receipts and net rent receipts. The Marxist treatment of taxation is often too simplistic I think, because people don't recognise the importance of Marx's dictum that "capitalist production is the unity of the production process and circulation process." And Marxist-fundamentalists often say oh well "tax is just surplus-value" and forget about it, but this I think is a mistake. 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 satirical article, if you read it through, is in some ways more important than ""The German Ideology" in understanding Marx's rapid evolution in those years from a democratic liberalism to a communist/socialist position. I will just quote a few passages 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. (...) 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. If Marxists try to derive the form of the state from the "logic of capital" they forget that the bourgeoisie historically took over an existing state apparatus, and then modified it, and that the struggle over tax collection and spending 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 the total tax take equal to between a quarter and half of the annual value-added in developed capitalist societies, yet the Marxist literature has little 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. It would therefore be unwise to ignore the importance of taxation for value theory. We are talking about a gigantic claim on the new wealth created. The ideological importance of taxation is that, if everybody pays PAYE tax, including unemployed people and so on, then the impression is reinforced that everybody has an equal stake in the state, and that the state is there for everybody. That is to say, the inclusion of all citizens in the aegis of tax collection suggests that the state represents everybody, on a pluralistic democratic basis - even if the reality is much more contradictory. 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. Regards Jurriaan
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