Who really pays all the taxes?

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Part one of a two-part series This month we are inaugurating a new column, written by Barry Sheppard, National Organizational Secretary of Socialist Action. Sheppard will use the column each month to explain basic Marxist ideas.

Every worker knows that the federal, state, and local governments have been raising our taxes, especially taxes that hit working people the hardest, like sales and property taxes. At the same time, government social services that benefit working people like unemployment checks and education have been cut.

Just what are taxes? What do socialists say should be done about them from the point of view of what's good for working people?

Of course, the answer to the first question seems easy: Taxes are monies collected from the population by the government to pay for its expenses. But where do these monies come from?

Money, under capitalism, is a measure and embodiment of economic value, among its other functions.

But there are two different meanings of value. One meaning of value is everything that contributes to the well-being of humanity. Value in this sense comes from the interaction of nature and human labor.

Nature provides us with many things—the earth, air, water, sunlight, plants, animals, and everything else that occurs "naturally," including ourselves insofar as we evolved as animals.

But human beings do not just use nature as they find it. They improve upon it through labor. Human labor acts upon nature to create useful, valuable things for human survival and betterment. So far as things that are a product of nature or nature acted upon by human labor are useful, we say they are valuable, have a value.

There is another meaning to the word value, however. This other meaning is expressed when we bring a product of human labor to market and exchange it for another product.

What is exchange value?

In primitive barter, for example, I might bring to market a pair of shoes that I made, and find that I can exchange them for a bushel of apples. In this sense, a pair of shoes is "worth" a bushel of apples.

If I tried to barter with producers of other goods, I would find that I could exchange my shoes for all kinds of things, as long as the proportions were right. I might find that I could exchange 100 pairs of shoes for a small canoe, for example. The seller of apples would find that it would take about 100 bushels of apples First, we note that products of pure nature that have had no human labor expended upon them have no exchange value. You can't go to market and sell sunshine or air. No one would exchange anything for these very useful things because everyone can get them "for free."

So we see that all commodities have human labor bound up in them. In fact, they have nothing else in common, so it is labor that must be measured by exchange value!

But it is not a particular kind of labor—like apple growing, shoemaking, mining, or canoe making-that is being measured by exchange value, because each commodity embodies its own unique kind of human labor, and they are not the same.

What is common to all commodities is that they are the product of some kind of human labor, human labor as such, abstracted from its particular type. How is human labor as such measured? By the time expended in labor.

In our example above, the labor time expended to produce one pair of shoes would equal the labor time to grow and pick a bushel of apples. It would take 100 times as much human labor time to make one canoe. (This is approximate. The intensity of the labor and some other factors also must be taken into account, but on the whole and on the average, it is human labor time that determines exchange value.)

What is money?

In the course of the development of the market in human history, money arose. Money is a commodity that is used to represent the value of all other commodities. Any commodity can do this, as we saw that one bushel of apples can represent the value of one pair of shoes. But over time, certain commodities (the precious metals like gold and silver) were singled out to serve as money.

This was because of their physical properties-they don't rust and can be divided easilyand because a small amount represents a lot of labor time in their production. Thus, gold and silver can be divided up to represent the value of any commodity accurately, and you don't have carry around a lot of either to buy other commodities. The development of money greatly facilitated the process of exchange of commodities.

We have come far afield from the question of taxes, but since taxes under capitalism are monies paid to the government, we had to get some understanding of what money is, to come to our first conclusion, which is rather startling at first glance.

All goods produced capitalistically in our society are produced by workers hired by capitalists. Most goods are produced this way in the United States. All these goods are produced for sale on the market. The exchange value of all these goods, represented by a certain amount of money, is equal to the sum total of all the labor time expended by all the workers in their production.

Now we know that the capitalists somehow rip off the lion's share of the exchange value the workers create. We'll discuss just how in our next article. But the point we want to look at first is that no matter how they get their hands on a big hunk of the total exchange value, the taxes they pay come from that very pool of total exchange value the workers created.

So all the taxes, whether actually paid by the capitalists or by the workers, come out of the total exchange value created by the workers. In this sense, we pay all the taxes!

For a more exact and complete explanation of exchange value and money, interested readers are referred to "Wage Labor and Capital" and "Value, Price and Profit," two pamphlets by Karl Marx-as well as the first chapters of Marx's book, "Capital."

Next month we'll discuss what socialists advocate about taxes.

Finally, consider what happens when you have a milieu where the air is full of talk about a tempest in a teacup. If one has to learn a new language to feel worthy of a "political" group, that's one more obstacle keeping people out.

An art teacher once said, "If you do not understand the French language, how do you expect to ever understand art?" And some people think that if you don't understand "art," you can't leam to understand politics.

Don Simpson, Concord, Calif.

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