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The red corner
Sunday, August 17 2008 - 10:51 PM Persevere. Member: Peace & Freedom Party (1988-1990) Listen to non-commercial, listener-sponsored Pacifica Radio (tune to 90.7 FM, KPFK; 98.7 FM, KPFK in Santa Barbara County. Please note that any and all childish comment posts directed to this thread will be deleted, as will any and all comment posts containing more than fifty-percent cut-and-pasted material.
The distraction known as taxation
RealSteve: "But, hey, [Matt Keltner], you’re so young that I’ll be collecting my SS [Social “Security”] while you’re [still] slaving away and being taxed like crazy while I’ll be enjoying my retirement." (See the eighth comment post.)
The simple truth of the matter, however, is that taxes, either directly or indirectly, are paid by way of surplus value [parent-posting; seventh paragraph] – that portion of the economic wealth, included within the commodities and services that we workers produce, that is seized by our “employers.” That is precisely the reason why taxation should not be an issue of concern to workers. For, in my opinion, taxation is nothing more than a distraction from that which should be of enormous concern to workers: the economic exploitation of workers by capitalists and petty capitalists.
No doubt that, as exemplified by the concerns of RealSteve and many others, it is quite easy for workers, including myself, to become preoccupied with the deductions that are printed on our paycheck stubs; falsely believing that those listed deductions exhibit the economic wealth that is rifled from us. The much more significant robbery, however, lies in the gargantuan amount of surplus value that is created via our labor power and/or our intellectual power, but that we never enjoy due to its being stolen by our capitalist masters at the point of production.
I believe the key to understanding the way in which we workers are robbed is to understand that wages are not a reflection of the value of the commodities and services that we workers produce. Rather, wages are the price of our labor power and/or our intellectual power, or, simply, our ability to work. Within the capitalist system, we workers, in order to earn a living, are compelled to sell our labor power and/or our intellectual power, as a commodity, in the labor market in which capitalists and petty capitalists are the buyers. (See my Wage Slavery (Part I), Wage Slavery (Part II), and Wage Slavery (Part III).)
Within the capitalist system, there exist certain, unalterable economic laws – chiefly, the law of economic value – that hold sway over the price of goods and services. Like all other commodities (e.g., cattle and cocoa), labor power and intellectual power possess a well-defined exchange value, toward which the price (wages) will tend to gravitate, independent of fluctuations having to do with supply and demand.
Essentially, capitalism’s economic laws are such that workers, on average, are allowed but a “living wage.” There are, of course, variations for various types of labor power and intellectual power – a physician, for example, will receive a greater wage than, say, an iron worker. Nevertheless, we workers receive just enough of the economic wealth that we and we alone produce to support ourselves and to raise the next generation of workers/wage slaves. The value of a workers’ labor power and/or intellectual power and the value of that workers’ product or service are, however, two entirely different things.
Hypothetically, in, say, an eight-hour workday, the value of the products and services that workers produce in approximately the first one-hour of work will be equal to that of their wages. For the remaining seven hours, workers are producing surplus value, which is expropriated by the largely idle capitalists who employ them. That is exactly what we socialists mean when we state that capitalists and petty capitalists exploit their workers. It is, in fact, from surplus value that all capitalists derive their net profits; that amount that is left to them after they pay off the other capitalists they owe with respect to rent, utilities, advertising, etc., etc., and pay the taxes that are required to support what can only be considered as their government – their political state.
To me it is quite clear, when workers concern themselves with the various efforts toward “tax relief,” be such measures Republican-inspired or Democratic-inspired, they fail to notice the much larger picture that they should concern themselves with: surplus value itself. Moreover, even when “tax relief” measures are enacted, any so-called gain that workers receive is insignificant, at best; so too is it fleeting. For capitalism’s economic laws quickly act to modify wages accordingly, to the point to where workers’ actual net pay ends up just about where it was before (or even lower, when combined with other economic realities that serve to lower wages generally).
Hence, the taxes that are, in name only, derived from workers’ wages carry but a temporary effect on the true wages that workers receive. It is, in actuality, the employing capitalists and petty capitalists who, indirectly or directly, pay the taxes – out of the substantially larger surplus value previously stolen from workers. Therefore, the issue known as taxation is a capitalist’s issue not a workers’ issue. The notion that workers have a stake in the many debates over taxes is, I believe, a distraction. One result of accepting this distraction is that many workers, most especially those who have allowed themselves to be indoctrinated into believing that they are members of the so-called middle class, become involved with tax-cutting stratagems intended to benefit the interests of certain capitalists. In becoming so involved, these workers help to make it much more politically acceptable to slash funding for services that many of their working-class brothers and sisters – the retired, unemployed, disabled, and otherwise poorer members of the working class – depend upon.
Yours in revolution.
Guy Robert Marsh
Lancaster, 93536
Member-at-large (1990-present):
Socialist Labor Party of America (est. 1890)
Member: Democratic Party (1982-1988)
Member: Republican Party (1976-1982)
PKShaw says...
And if anyone is robbing workers of their surplus value it would indeed be, and only be, the government by way of the income tax.
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Randy Hall says...
“The much more significant robbery, however, lies in the gargantuan amount of surplus value that is created via our labor power and/or our intellectual power, but that we never enjoy due to its being stolen by our capitalist masters at the point of production.”
The surplus value argument is so utterly discredited I’m amazed redflag still makes it. Let’s take Exxon for example, they make $1,400 per second but pay over $15,000 per second in operating costs. If we took that “surplus value”/profit and added it in to the 15k operating costs you would only raise the wages of those toilers by a very small percentage. If you added the $4,000 per second the government steals from Exxon to the mix then you may make a house payment for the worker every two years.
Redflag is straining at gnats. He’s bought in to a faith-based mode of thinking that is no different from Christianity. Except in Christianity, we have proof of it working.
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Redflag says...
PKShaw: “The point of this story is that those people who are willing to not only work smarter but also take the risks necessary to build a business SHOULD reap the [economic] rewards of such endeavor.” [Emphasis in original.]
Once again I offer in response that which no one has ever attempted to counter. Our right-wingers simply and slavishly keep to that which they have been so completely conditioned to believe: “Profit is a reward for risk-taking. Profit is a reward for risk-taking. Profit is a reward for risk-taking. Profit is a reward…”
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Randy Hall: “Let’s take ExxonMobil, for example: [It] makes $1.400 per-second but it pays-out over $15.000 per-second in operating costs.”
By this “logic” it would be safe to assume that ExxonMobil declared bankruptcy several years ago.
Incredible.
Persevere.
Guy
Good day.
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Randy Hall says...
Redflag reconsider what I said, Exxon makes in profit $1,400 a second in the billion a day they operate on with $15,000 a second is operating expenses and $4,000 a second is the taxes they pay. Now do you get it?
To your credit I had MK make the same mistake you made.
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Randy Hall says...
Makes is the key word, profit is made after expenses are subtracted out. It’s called gross verses net. Like a paycheck, we could allow the worker his full measure of earnings but then you have to subtract the costs of doing business and the costs of government. In the case of Exxon’s profit it is much less than the government steals.
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PKShaw says...
We stubbornly hang on to the fact that profit is the reward for risk taking simply because it is true. If not for the possibility of profit why would anyone do it?
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Redflag says...
Randy Hall: “The ‘surplus value’ argument is so utterly discredited, I’m amazed Redflag still makes it. Let’s take ExxonMobil, for example: It makes $1.400 per-second but pays out over $15.000 per second in operating costs [sic].”
In response, I wrote: “By this ‘logic’ it would be safe to assume that ExxonMobil declared bankruptcy several years ago.” [Emphasis in original.]
In response to that, Randy wrote: "Redflag. Reconsider what I said: Exxon makes, in [net?] profit, $1.400 a second [from?] the billion-dollars a day [it “grosses”? – while incurring] $15.000 a second in operating expenses, and $4.000 a second in taxes…[sic]"
Then, in his usual and undeserved arrogant manner, Randy wrote: Now do you get it? To your credit, I had Matt Keltner make the same mistake you made." [Emphasis mine.]
Oh please, Randy! To tell you the truth, I’m not certain that I understood what you were trying to say even after doing my level best to correct and thus make sense of your incoherent writings.
So enough with the disordered hubris, all right?
Randy went to state that “‘Makes’ is the key word: profit is made after expenses are subtracted…It’s called ‘gross [profit]’ vs. ‘net [profit].’”
Indeed. Yet such a statement as that only serves to beg the question:
Did Randy bother to read that which he knee-jerked to? After all, I did in fact write: “It is, in fact, surplus value that all capitalists derive their net profits; that amount that is left to them after they pay off the other capitalists they owe with respect to rent, utilities, advertising, etc., etc., and pay the taxes that are required to support what can only be considered as their government – their political state.” [All emphasis in original. See the seventh paragraph in this thread’s parent-posting.]
So, yes, as both a studied Marxist as well as an individual who has been involved with the management of businesses since childhood, I am quite familiar with “gross profit” vs. “net profit” and so very much more.
Now then, Randy, nowhere in your initial “response” did you employ the phrases “gross profit” and “net profit.” You wrote only that “…ExxonMobil…makes $1.400 per second…”
Now do you get it, Randy?
Persevere.
Guy
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Randy Hall says...
The profit Exxon makes is which the CEO said was $1,400 a second is further doled out to people like me stock owners.
If we did away with stock owners and gave all that net profit to those earning that profit for Exxon, you would raise the operating expenses from $15,000 per second to $16,400 per second. In other words you would be like giving a raise of a $1.4 per hour to a person that makes $15 per hour. But you then have taken everyone’s stock and made it disappear to create your scientific socialism.
The worker would have his surplus value but you would have taken it from the investor. The worker would benefit very little as a result that is why the surplus value argument is simply a waste of time.
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Redflag says...
PKShaw: “You [Redflag] say workers are robbed of their ‘surplus value.’”
No I do not. I say that we workers are robbed at the point of production of the bulk of the economic wealth that our labor power and/or our intellectual power produces. (This is no way intended to “split hairs” but, rather, to clarify where capitalist proselytism purposefully distorts Marxism in order to alter its meaning.) Therefore, surplus value is the aforementioned “bulk” of the overall wealth produced by workers that is expropriated by capitalists and petty capitalists through a sysytem of bourgeois “legality.” In other words, workers are not robbed of surplus value in and of itself simply because never do they possess it, though they certainly do create it.
PKShaw: “I say you cannot take that which is freely given. And it is freely given because employment is the choice they made.”
It is amazing: Despite the many times I have written, say, Workers “must sell their labor power and/or their intellectual power to one capitalist or another in order to simply survive” (parent-posting; third paragraph), or, say, I am “one whose material well-being is utterly dependent upon my continued ability to sell my labor power to one capitalist or another” (sixteenth from final comment post), never have any of our in-house capitalist hucksters so much as attempted to counter such an argument; they simply ignore it while searching for the next opportunity to regurgitate the likes of “Workers choose to work. Workers choose to work. Workers choose to work. Workers choose. Workers choose. Workers choose. Choose. Choose. Choose…”
PKShaw: “Such as it was your CHOICE [Redflag] to enter into a profession which more or less requires you to be an employee.”
Actually, having been born to a petty capitalist family that has been in the wholesale and retail meat business for more than one-hundred years now, I did not truly choose my profession. Yet even if I had so chosen, and even if I ever harbored a desire to be self-employed (never have I), it would have been a desire already sacrificed to the god’s of monolithic capitalism. For, and you and I have had this conversation before, Patricia, how many independent butcher shops do you know of today compared to, say, twenty-years ago?
Now, had I the desire to be self-employed, could I have entered another field in which to do so? Sure. But, as I discuss in Petty Capitalists and Socialism, materially speaking, the vast majority of petty capitalists find themselves to be no better off than most workers.
PKShaw: “…if anyone is robbing workers of their surplus value [of the majority of the economic wealth they produce], it would, indeed, be the government and only the government by way of the income tax.”
As a way of fattening the crux of this thread’s parent-posting, I offer the following:
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 our argument is that although some taxes are paid by the working class [i.e., sales taxes] the burden of taxation rests on the capitalist 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 [of workers] —Dr. Karl Heinrich Marx, Criticism and Critical Morality, 1847.
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Randy Hall: “Redflag is straining at gnats; he’s bought into a faith-based mode of thinking that is no different from Christianity.”
ROFLOL!
“…Except, in Christianity, we have proof of it working.”
Oh, indeed, it does work, Randy! Christianity works in the very way that it was intended to work. There exists no amount of doubt about that!
But so, too, do I have proof, Randy. I have something that proves that, despite your guileful protestations to the contrary – your idiotic suggestion that the law of surplus value has been “utterly disproved,” you know it in your heart to be true!
The proof:
A few months ago, Randy and I had a long and rather enjoyable conversation while sitting poolside in his lovely backyard. At a certain point in that conversation, I asked Randy (though I do not recall the context): “What, then, do you do with a troublesome yet talented mechanic?” Randy’s his response: “You [I] make money off them.”
And there you have it. Proof positive that Randy understands the one and only reason that he and his father employ other human beings: to make money “off them” – to extract surplus value from them. Like, duhhhh!
Mechanical work: $65.00 per hour
Mechanic’s wage: $20.00 per hour
Sitting on his ass posting to intheav whilst his wage slaves toil: Priceless.
Hugs and kisses, cuz. :-)
Persevere.
Guy
Good evening.
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Stormy says...
I’m one of those Guy refers to as “petty capitalist” a derivative of Petit-bourgeois in Marxist theory. Being a middle class shop keeper and not one who sells their labor i.e. the working class, which the Marxist holds as pure and exploited, I somehow do not really “work” for the money I get except through the exploitation of the worker.
Convoluted isn’t it!?!
I’m not totally over with Randy in a dislike for labor organizations. I believe it is the job of labor to come to equitable terms with business for just compensation. Unfortunately, labor bosses are into power and not representing their members selling themselves out to politicians (usually Democrats) for posh positions where they are power brokers just like the businesses who do the same for the executive class.
Big labor bosses and business executives support illegal immigration which drives down wages.
THAT, my dear friends, is exploitation!
For your consideration,
Stormy——-
-———
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Redflag says...
(Yes, the difference between “petty bourgeois,” “petty capitalist” and “petit-bourgeoisie” is given to folk etymology. Both terms or perhaps all such terminology is acceptable in that Karl Marx, Frederick Engels and many others used and continue to use these terms interchangeably. I employ the “more-English” term petty capitalist due to its being more recognizable to English-speaking audiences.)
Stormy: “I’m one of those…petty capitalist[s]…Being a middle class shopkeeper and not one who sells their labor [power], i.e., member of the working class, which the Marxist holds as pure and exploited. I somehow do not really ‘work’ for the money I get except through the exploitation of the worker.
Convoluted, isn’t it?”
No. Not at all.
I’m not certain that I understand your reference to Marxists holding (up) the working class to some standard of purity. As anyone can see by reading my Petty Capitalists and Socialism, never would I nor any other Marxist ever state that the petty capitalist does not work for at least a portion of the economic wealth derived through his or her business or businesses (quite the contrary, actually). And the downward pressure upon wages within the context of the capitalist system is caused by the fixed economic laws of capitalism itself rather than undocumented immigration or any other capitalist-induced social pathology. Undocumented immigration as a corollary of capitalist rule may well serve to exacerbate the downward pressure upon wages (at least in the short-term), but wages would continue to decline either with or without the presence of undocumented immigration (read: The ever declining rate of profit that effects all capitalist firms independent of immigration or any other factor(s)).
Finally. Given time restraints, I would like to simply refer Stormy to my Trade Unionism for my perspective relative to trade unionism.
Persevere.
Guy
I’m out.
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Randy Hall says...
“And there you have it. Proof positive that Randy understands the one and only reason that he and his father employ other human beings: to make money “off them” – to extract surplus value from them. Like, duhhhh!”
What other reason is there? I’m pointing out how the surplus value argument redflag makes is so small that the worker would now be at risk with very little reward offered.
Take his job for example, Supermarkets make about 3% profit, and in that profit they risk buildings, capital, fines, ect. Share the wealth or profit then you raise each worker’s pay by so little I think most workers would reject the risk.
The second part is waste, if in redflag’s biz he and his fellow producers noticed a wasteful worker that was cutting into their surplus value increased pay, I’d expect a parking lot show down. We see that all the time in trade unionism.
Finally socialism is faith based because according to redflag it’s never been tried. Christianity has and it’s given us wonderful hospitals and schools. Socialism’s ardent supporters have given us oceans of blood in the 20th century that most certainly was the most deadly.
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PKShaw says...
My first real job (and last) was working for a large Japanese company that makes cars and motorcycles. I worked in the shipping/receiving department and had the attitude that if I was going to devote so much of my time to employment then I should strive to make as much money as possible and rise as high in the company as my abilities would permit. (I stress the point that I was very young or else would have known that American WOMEN do not succeed in such a company) I came in early, stayed late and in general worked much smarter than my pay grade in an effort to be noticed (and rewarded) by the higher ups. (All I accomplished was making my coworkers hate my guts – did I mention I was young?)
The day finally came that I realized my doing a week’s work in one day’s time, which freed me to re-organize other people’s departments in a more efficient manner, was not going to get me the reward for which I sought. So I left and have remained self-employed the remainder of my career. (Which btw, has afforded me the luxury of doing exactly and only what I want to do now.
The point of this story is that those people who are willing to not only work smarter but also take the risks necessary to build a business SHOULD reap the rewards of such endeavor. There will always be those unwilling to do such and those people are called EMPLOYEES. Nothing wrong with that as you can’t have one without the other.
You say workers are robbed of their “surplus value” – I say you cannot rob that which is freely given. And it is freely given because employment is the choice they made. (Such as it was your CHOICE to enter into a profession which more or less requires you to be an employee.)
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