[ALB]

The passage you quote is a precis of chapter 6 of our pamphlet The Market System Must Go ! Why Reformism Doesn't Work. Unfortunately it left out this passage:

Quote:

That taxation is an issue for the working class is a delusion. Of far more importance for living standards is whether capitalism is in the boom or slump phase of its economic cycle, and on how effective working class organisation in the trade unions is at securing wage rises and better working conditions.

This dates from 1997 not 1943.I only referred to our 1943 pamphlet on Family Allowances in the context of "family income supplement" (to be renamed "Working Family Payment" from March next year) and tax credits, being, besides a wage subsidy to empliers, "a redistribution of poverty" amongst the working class (but it also shows we have long refuted the Stalinist and Trotskyist calumny that we reject trade union action as reformist) because it advised the working class, as long as capitalism lasts, to undertake trade union action to raise wages generally rather than be diverted by reforms aimed to benefit only selected sections of the working class, eg those with two or more children.

[ALB]

Keep it up Matt, if only to show that not everyone from north of the border is a private in the Scottish Borderers

[ALB]

alanjjohnstone wrote:

And ALB, if there isn't that necessary trade union action…and it does seem like it is lacking…what can our fellow workers expect?…Isn't it our wages driven to subsistence levels…or at least for large sections of it, the unorganised and the weakly organised.

Now it's Brother Fraser

alanjjohnstone wrote:

So they on minimum/living wages because of the tax allowance system escape the burden of tax (correct and clarify me on that issue)…

That's where the redistribution-of-poverty aspect of taxing wages comes in. Things are not so straightforward as in Marx's day.Here's is what we said in our 1943 pamphlet on Family Allowances:

Quote:

But the real issue is not that certain unscrupulous employers may seek to save out of wages amounts paid in Family Allowances, but that once it is established that the children (or some of the children) of the workers have been “provided for” by other means, the tendency will be for wage levels to sink to new standards which will not include the cost of maintaining such children.

and

Quote:

We would therefore ask the workers to examine the proposal for Family Allowances in the light of the foregoing remarks, bearing in mind that at best such a scheme can provide a slight and probably small improvement for a small section. Our advice to the workers is that they should not be fobbed off on the industrial field with small and doubtful gains for a comparatively small number, but that they should seize whatever opportunities may present themselves for winning improved conditions for all.

So we do link our theoretical analysis with calls for trade union action.

[ALB]

Here is Marx's reply:

Marx wrote:

…although, as we have seen, the abolition of a tax does not benefit the worker, he is harmed by the introduction of any new tax so long as the minimum has not yet fallen to its lowest possible level, and in this case with all perturbations and difficulties of civil relations (Wages, notes written in 1847).

At that time Marx still thought that the tendency under capitalism was for wages to be driven down towards the minumum subsistence level ( which would be different in different countries and "determined on average by the price of the most indispensable provisions"). The argument still applies, though, when the value of labour power is higher than this (as it was even in his day for skilled workers) : wages tend to sell at their value; a tax on wages reduces the money workers have to less than the value of their labour power; so, there will be a tendency for money wages to rise by the amount of the tax as labour power (like other commodities) tends to exchange at its value.In this case, what Marx was saying was that if workers are being paid more than the value of their labour power then a tax on their wages could/would harm them as it would reduce the price of their labour power to its value. And he didn't expect this reduction to be automatic but that it would be accompanied by "perturbations and difficulties of civil relations", i.e in his day, in Germany, by bread riots, etc; in our day of course (and later in his day) by trade union action.The only defence against this is trade union action even if this is only a rearguard to slow down the reduction. If this can't be done by trade union action, then it certainly can't be done by political action to reverse the tax increase.

[ALB]

Here's Marx's contribution to this discussion:

Marx wrote:

The level of wages expressed, not in terms of money, but in terms of the means of subsistence necessary to the working man, that is the level of real, not of nominal wages, depends on the relationship between demand and supply. An alteration in the mode of taxation may cause a momentary disturbance, but will not change anything in the long run. ('The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter, 1847]

Marx wrote:

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 today 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 taken place. Instead of the present system, whereby the capitalists also advances, as part of the wage, what the worker has to pay, he [the capitalist] would no longer pay them in this roundabout way, but directly to the state (Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality, 1847).

[ALB]

Inspired no doubt by the current survey, Imposs1904 has reproduced on his blog the report of a survey 25 years ago of readers of the Socialist Standard:http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/readers-survey-results-1992.htmlIt's out of date now of course but there were some interesting results about what papers subscribers read and who they had voted for in the previous general election.

[ALB]

Yes, it is interesting how they start from the same assumption we make that what matters are net wages and that, in the end, taxes on wages are paid by the employer:

Quote:

In most countries employers and employees both contribute to the taxes (or social security contributions) levied on labour. Employers pay taxes on top of the wage they transfer to employees and employees pay income taxes on the money they receive from employers. For many decades, economists thought that it should not matter who pays. Employers were thought to care only about total labour costs (gross wage paid plus employer taxes). Employees were thought to care only about their net wage (what’s left of the gross wage after income tax). The gross wage itself should be of interest to neither of them, so it should not matter who pays the taxes.

They don't seem to be challenging the argument that, in terms of what workers get, net wages are what's important. Their argument is about how the method of collecting taxes is perceived and how it affects people's political attitudes, but we have never denied this. Our position has only been that in the end taxation is a burden on the employing class, with direct taxes on wages being passed on to employers (and indirect taxes too in so far as they effect the overall cost of living).The ideological aspect (that taxing workers gross pay gets workers to think that they are part of a tax-paying community) is important, but there is another aspect why governments wanted to tax wages — to "redistribute poverty", to redistribute the total wages bill so that nobody gets too much, i.e gets paid for something they don't need, eg from single workers to married workers and from workers without children to workers with children. This too of course has an ideological effect — it gets workers arguing amongst themselves as to who deserves what — but I don't think this was the reason this was introduced.

[ALB]

Actually, while other animals don't lack pain, they do lack "reason" in the sense of being able to think abstractly through symbols. Only humans can do this. That doesn't mean that we can treat other animals as we please. On the contrary, it means that we are the only species that can assume responsibility for other animals getting a better life..

[ALB]

Quote:

In sum, it was St. Thomas Aquinas who allowed the guilt-free usage of animals.

Isn't this putting the cart before the horse or, in Marxist terms, the superstructure before the base? In Mediaeval Europe animals were used as essential means of production and as means of consumption. Aquinas's views were an ideological reflection of this basic material fact. It wasn't because he taught this that animals were used for human ends but the other way round.

[ALB]

Just heard someone on the radio say that bitcoins were better understood as a "crypto asset" than as a "crypto currency", so I looked up "crypto asset". Clear explanation here:https://steemit.com/cryptocurrency/@cryptoassets/what-are-crypto-assets-and-how-do-they-workLike this articel, the person on the radio said bitcoins were more like gold than money, "digital gold" if you like which, like gold, people can use as store of value and speculate on its price going up (but it will go down as well of course).Made sense to me.

[ALB]

Vin wrote:

troobele –  arsole, moron, cretin, nob, imbecile

That won't work because he's a "knob", hardly a "nob".

[ALB]

From last weekend's i paper. Difficult but the answer is the Party case:

Quote:

Worker left after a long time in progressive movement (4,5)

[ALB]

Oh dear, John Oswald isn't going to like this title:http://socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.co.uk/2017/12/we-are-human-beings-not-animals.html

[ALB]

That will be the Deleonist one not the Scargill one of course.

[ALB]

In her Notebook column in yesterdy's London Evening Standard Lo Dico said she had met a "crypto-currency idealost" who claomed that

Quote:

had Karl Marx seen the power of computing he'd have seized on Bitcoin.

I don't think so.Meanwhile there's an article on blockchains in this month's Socialist Standard also out yesterday:http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2010s/2017/no-1360-december-2017/pathfinders-rattle-blockchains

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