Government's cannot simply print “money” as Richard and the MMT believe, they can only print currency/money tokens, and the more they print, the less each token is worth, the less social labour-time it represents. That is what Russia found, both under the Tsar, in Marx's time, and under Stalin. Government's, in specific conditions, described above, can use Keynesian demand management, to cut short crises of overproduction of commodities, but governments cannot create money or capital out of thin air. If the government runs a budget deficit, to stimulate aggregate demand, it can only avoid doing the opposite later, if the consequence of its actions results in an increase in real capital accumulation, and consequent rise in the mass of surplus-value, out of which future taxes are deducted.
That is, also, why the alternative put by Gary of having the government raise taxes, is in the end, also, flawed. Where Gary is correct, however, is that this is where, in current conditions, wealth taxes have the advantage. It was the dissolution of the wealth of the old landed aristocracy that undermined their position as ruling class, as their revenues from rents declined relative to the rising revenues of the bourgeoisie from profits and interest. As I have described, elsewhere, taxing wealth, whether in the form of landed property, or of fictitious-capital, does nothing to undermine real capital accumulation, in theory.
Real capital accumulation is driven by the incessant need of capital itself to accumulate. Capital accumulates by using the surplus value that is produced each year, to invest in additional buildings, machines, materials and labour-power. Taxing wealth, rather than profits, therefore, does not diminish the amount of that surplus-value/profit one bit. Indeed, as I have set out before, if the government taxes things such as dividends, interest and rents, i.e. the revenues deducted from profits, rather than the profits themselves, that leaves those profits available to be invested, thereby creating growth.
In practice, of course, because the ruling class have assigned to themselves, as shareholders, control over capital they do not own, they can simply respond to any increase in tax on their revenues, by deducting even more from profits in the form of those dividends, interest and rent, just as, when relative wages rise they seek to protect profits by raising prices. It is why, the unjustified control of companies given to shareholders has to be ended, but that, of course, is tantamount to saying the reign of the ruling class must end, which they are not going to simply sit back and allow to happen. Similarly, the ruling class will respond, in practice to any effective imposition of wealth taxes, buy selling its assets in that tax regime and moving its ownership of assets elsewhere. As I have described, if it wants to sell its shares, bonds and so on, fine, so long as the real capital itself remains in the ownership, and under the control, of the workers in those companies.
You can see, therefore, why social-democrats like Richard and Gary prefer the technical, managerialist solutions to these questions. They do not require a socialist revolution. But, those social-democratic solutions of either variant - taxes or inflationary currency printing – are both flawed, in the end, precisely because they do not address the fundamental issue, the property question. So long as the control of capital remains in the hands of the ruling-class, it is its interests, the rules of the capitalist system that will rule.
No comments:
Post a Comment