However, this focus on distribution, rather than production, as well as breeding economism, and a bourgeois, trades union consciousness, also, drives a narrow sectionalism, and division within the working-class. The focus becomes one of protecting the poorer workers, by a whole series of benefits, administered by an overbearing, bureaucratic capitalist state, itself, thereby, absorbing huge amounts of tax revenues to maintain this ever growing, bureaucratic monstrosity. To pay these taxes, the emphasis on distribution leads to a narrow focus only on higher earned incomes, i.e. the wages and salaries of the better paid workers, thereby, robbing worker Peter to pay benefits to worker Paul. It sets up an easy target to foster divisions in the working-class, based upon notions of scroungers, as against “hard working families”.
As Alan Freeman noted some years ago, however, taking the working-class as a whole, in the period since WWII, when the welfare state was created, to provide health and social care, education, pensions, benefits and so on, the amount paid in taxes, by workers has exceeded the amount taken out in services, benefits and so on. In other words, the capitalist state, itself, makes a profit out of this welfarism. That is most obvious whenever, in order to reduce relative wages and boost relative profits, it simply cuts this “social wage”, by policies of austerity, in relation to public services, cuts benefits and pensions, as with Reeves measures on Winter Fuel Payments, Child Benefits, and austerity, and raising taxes.
Even where governments raise Corporation Tax, its important to remember what that is taxing. Corporation tax is levied on the profits of socialised capital, i.e. the collective property of the working-class. As with the interest/dividends of the ruling-class of speculators and coupon-clippers, it is a deduction from profits, and so from the ability to accumulate real capital – which means the ability to employ additional workers, and produce more goods and services. Think of the additional tax on a worker cooperative to see what that means. There is no reason why the ruling-class of speculators would reduce their own revenues – interest/dividends, rents – as a result, and, indeed, they have not done so. Rather those revenues have risen as a proportion of profits, over the last 50 years. It is notable that the taxation of those dividends, and of capital gains, is invariably treated more leniently than taxes on earned income. Yet, the petty bourgeois moralism – Sismondism – of today's “Left” has an economistic fetish of taxing and treating this large-scale socialised capital more harshly than the more reactionary relics of the monopoly of private capital, now relegated to the realm of small capital.
“... Herr Dühring tells us already on page 2 that,
his economics links up with what has been “established” in his “philosophy”, and “in certain essential points depends on truths of a higher order which have already been put out in a higher field of investigation”” ( p193)
And Duhring continues, saying we find,
“the most general natural laws governing all economy” (p 194)
Duhring must, however, explain why these same eternal, natural laws, then, result in such varying forms of society. His solution is not to have the mode of production the determinant of the political and ideological superstructure, but to stand that relation on its head. He says,
“But these natural laws permit of a correct understanding of past history only if they are “investigated in that more precise determination which their results have experienced through the political forms of subjection and grouping. Institutions such as slavery and wage bondage, with which their twin-brother, property based on force, is associated, must be regarded as social-economic constitutional forms of a purely political nature, and have hitherto constituted the frame within which the consequences of the economic laws of nature could alone manifest themselves”” (p 194)
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