Profit and Taxes. Wages and Profit.

Wages are the lowest that can be paid, remaining socially acceptable. The unpaid section of the workday, the surplus value, essentially what profit, is where taxes are divided off from. Escaping from this reality seems to be what is desired now, by cutting taxes for the wealthy.

If you cut taxes from profit and shift it directly on the workers back,. the taxes still have to be paid for. Workers work longer hours, what Marx referred to as increasing the absolute surplus value. But this too runs into resistance, as there are laws about how many hours workers are supposed to be able to work, 8 hours is the current one.

You have to work them overtime to make up for the loss of wages due to the tax

Longer hours, a wage cut… It makes one wonder where the support for this is coming from.

Privations by the proletariat would seem to be coming. You cannot simply raise the amount of profit. If you lower the amount of the taxes from profit the taxes have to come from somewhere.

And as the only thing that creates profit is labour,: lowering taxes on the wealthy is the same thing as increasing the profit kept by the capitalist at the workers expense.

Either the taxes are coming from the form of profit, or from making the worker privy to part of what was taken as surplus value directly by his employer by charging him yearly, like property taxes, or printing it on the paycheck as a deduction, it still comes from the worker. In either case, divided off of profit, or shifted on to the worker, the surplus value flows into the state.

The bourgeoisie claims the tax money as their own. Obviously for them it is part of their profit. State industry does not make a profit. It is privatized when it can make a profit, we saw this with recycling. Waste Management now runs the sorter. Money for the state can only come from taxes.

The wealthy can only cut taxes by increasing privations from its workers. Surplus value from the worker is needed to maintain the capitalist state. It is a bourgeois fantasy to massively defund the state. Perhaps some of the savings will come from the prisons, police, etc. whose social function becomes clear during unrest. Like that is going to happen. The whole purpose of the state from its inception is to keep the classes divided.

Perhaps it is more palatable to the bourgeoisie to consider taxing workers directly rather than making a profit and dividing it off to pay for the state. But in the end, it is all the labor of the workers that has to pay this, out of the surplus value they have created thorough exploitation of their labour.

Nicholas Jay Boyes

Milwaukee Wisconsin

American Democratic Republic