The Tax Justice Network (www.taxjustice.net) thinks that world poverty can be effectively tackled by reforming the international system of taxing profits so as to eliminate tax havens and tax dodging – “profit laundering” as they aptly call it – by capitalist corporations.

This would make no essential difference. World poverty is not caused by corporations behaving badly. Their “bad” behaviour as identified and described by the Tax Justice Network is not bad from a capitalist point of view. It is normal, and in fact it is not possible to alter it – either by legislation or by appealing to the “morality” or “ethics” of corporate leaders. It’s the way the capitalist profit system works and can only work. As long as you’ve got capitalism, in the famous – or infamous – phrase, there is no alternative. No alternative, that is, to capitalist corporations pursuing the maximisation of profits above all else. This is not a matter of choice by corporate executives. It is not because they are personally greedy or insensitive and deliberately choose to run their corporations in this way. It’s the reflection in their minds of the underlying logic of the system of which in the end they – like the rest of us in fact – are just cogs.

But what is this underlying logic? What is capitalism?

Capitalism

Basically, it’s the market system. Not just markets – they existed before capitalism – but a whole economic system where every aspect of the production and distribution of wealth takes place via the market, by means of a vast network of buyers and sellers. This includes the buying and selling of labour – or, more accurately, of labour-power, of a person’s ability to work. In fact, capitalism is based on the existence of a class of people whose only productive resource is our ability to work in some capacity or other (whether so-called manual or so-called intellectual) which we are obliged to sell on the labour market for a wage or salary. But sell to whom? To those who own the other resources essential to production: land and natural resources, and mines, factories, transport, communications. In other words, capitalism presupposes the division of society into two classes: those who own the means of wealth production and those who don’t. This is not a 50:50 division, more like a 5:95 one. So capitalism is a class society. Like everything else under capitalism, the relationship between these two classes is a market one, one of buying and selling.

But there’s more to this particular market relationship than to that between other buyers and sellers. In other cases, it is a simple exchange of something of one value for something else of an equal value. Such an exchange of equal values is also involved in the wage contract – we get as our wage or a salary more or less the value of the labour-power we are selling – but human labour-power has the unique property of being able to create new value. The difference between wages and salaries and the new value added in the course of producing some good or service is the source of profit, which it is the aim of every capitalist and every capitalist enterprise to extract and maximise.

Some of this profit is creamed off by fat cat directors and owners to support an extravagant life-style but most of it is re-invested. If a capitalist firm did not do this with a view to keeping its productive methods up to date so as to be able to produce as cheaply as possible, it would lose out in the battle of competition with its rivals and, eventually, either go bankrupt or be taken over by one of them. So, under the pressure of market competition, capitalist firms are forced to accumulate most of their profits as more capital.

This competitive struggle to make and accumulate profits as more and more capital is the essence of capitalism. It’s an impersonal economic mechanism that imposes itself on all enterprises involved in producing for the market, whether they are owned by individuals, corporations, the state or even by a workers’ co-operative. The logic of profit always ends by imposing itself, even on governments, and there’s nothing that can be done to stop this as long as capitalism lasts.

Taxes

Despite what some ideologists of a “pure capitalism” claim, capitalism cannot exist without the existence also of a coercive state – and never has. In fact, the state helped capitalism come into being, as by establishing trading monopolies like the East India Company and as by driving peasants off the land and into factories. But the state produces nothing (unless it is itself involved in production, as it sometimes has been) and so has to be financed by a levy on those who possess wealth or who control the production of wealth, i.e. by taxes. As the 19^th century economist (and MP) David Ricardo showed a long time ago, in the end the burden of taxation falls on property and property-incomes such as rent and profit (any taxes on wages are passed on to the employer). Taxes on profits of course reduce the wealth of capitalists but they generally accept the principle of paying taxes as they recognise the usefulness of the services that the state provides them, not least the armed force to back them up in conflicts with other capitalists supported by their state over markets, trade routes, sources of raw materials and investment outlets. But they are not masochists; they’ll only pay the taxes they absolutely have to. And a whole business has arisen to advise them how to minimise their tax burden.

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