Could there be any less philosophically interesting subject than taxation? The life of the button down accountant seems the purest antithesis to the impractical speculations of the philosopher, but in fact, the numbers and repellent jargon of tax law conceal important philosophical principles. Surprisingly, the most important of these principles is the one which Marx thought would govern production and distribution in a mature communist society: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” Is this not the very principle which, although unacknowledged, justifies the principle of progressive taxation? And might there not be some sort of unconscious recognition of the hidden radicalism of the practice that fuels its ruling class opponents?
People who fancy themselves revolutionaries in the global north are rarely concerned with the mundane details of how a socialist society would operate. The poetic imagination paints inspiring pictures of a future world as a harmony of harmonies. Clean energy and artificial intelligence will free life from the bounds of material necessity and all people, as individuals and freely self-organizing groups, will simply pursue their interests unencumbered by the prosaic demands of life under capitalism. Far be it from me, philosophical dreamer that I am, to close the poetry book. But before one can transcend the workaday grammar of prose one must first learn its rules. It is easy to imagine a world in which all material problems are overcome. But social life is not a figment of our imagination. If it were, we would have solved all of our problems by now. Alas …
What I am trying to say is: socialism will require accountants, not to help citizens to avoid paying taxes (as at present) but to organize the rules by which the wealth produced by collective labour will be divided between funds for re-investment in plant and equipment, funds for investment in public goods, and appropriation by private individuals for their own self-directed use. The Critique of the Gotha Programme— the short work which contains Marx’s famous aphorism– wrestled with these general problems, but in a sketchy and and speculative manner. I do not want to examine that text here (but a new critical edition with an introduction by Peter Hudis is worth exploring). Instead I want to trace out some of the implications of the principle that are most relevant for contemporary public policy.
A principle of reciprocity underlay Marx’s conception. Note that he does not calibrate individual appropriation to the extent of contribution but to need. That is, one does not withdraw from the commonwealth in proportion to one’s contribution but contributes according to talent and interest and takes according to need. As Marx well-understood, both contribution and appropriation pose substantive accounting challenges: how to compare contributions in the first case and how to limit needs in the second. In a capitalist society these problems are settled by money: the ‘value’ of a talent is determined by the income it can command (which means, perversely, that a money-speculator who contributes nothing to the satisfaction of any need appears hundreds of times more ‘valuable’ that a sanitation worker, even though the latter’s work is far more life-valuable than the former’s). So too need: capitalism does not recognise the category of need as a normative term. Instead, it counts only “effective” demand: one needs only what one can purchase. If one spends one’s money on gold jewelry to the point where one cannot afford food, then one in effect says that they need jewelry more than food. From the capitalist perspective the objective harm that such behaviour would cause does not register as harm. The rank order of the purchases is an expression of consumer sovereignty.
But in a developed socialist economy money would no longer serve as a universal equivalent, means of exchange, and measure of value. Much of the Critique is devoted to dismantling the German’ Social Democratic Party’s efforts to work out an alternative means of value-measure and exchange. The details need not detain is here. Instead I want to focus on the implications of the aphorism itself.
The first point that I want to make is that while Marx saw it as applicable only in the distant future of a mature, stable socialist society, it underlies (but not explicitly) actually existing institutions like progressive taxation. The underlying idea behind progressive taxation is that society is a cooperative endeavour. Even if individual freedom is the highest good, people cannot simply will themselves free but require means, and some means are more efficiently procured as public goods. But public goods require public funds, public funds must be funded, and taxation is the method by which those funds are raised. Unlike Marx’s version, the principle of progressive taxation adds an element of proportionality (which would be irrelevant in the case of socialism, because there would no longer be class differences), but the more basic and important idea still operates: free citizens want to contribute to collective well-being, and a free society creates opportunities for everyone to contribute.
In a capitalist society, labour markets are not governed by the principle of careers open to talents but demand for labour power. Profitable industries will hire, unprofitable industries will go under, and workers must content themselves with what jobs that they can find. Since the nature of the jobs is also determined by considerations of labour productivity and not talent and interest, labour is doubly alienating: people are compelled to find work and they have to do what they are told while working. Labour thus appears to be an imposed and oppressive burden, when at a deeper level, if we abstract from its capitalist form, it is the practical expression of our world-building, creative capacities. As Marx also says in the Critique, once the alienated form of labour have been overcome, it will become our primary need. Freed of the need to work for a living, life will become centred around the free, creative contributions that we make to the common wealth, the fund from which each of us will draw to satisfy our needs. The developed socialist economy will be a virtuous circle: everyone willingly contributes and freely appropriates their share of the wealth that they have helped to create.
The so-called “free-rider problem” (brilliantly solved in the tale of the Little Red Hen), would be overcome because people would be motivated by an inner drive to do the necessary work. In the tale, the little red hen goes around the barnyard asking for help with the various jobs that need doing to bake some bread. One after another the animals tell her to get lost, but once the bread has been baked, they all want to eat. But now she she tells them to get lost: since they did not contribute, they have no legitimate claim on the product. They wanted to free ride, she puts a stop to it by refusing to share: If you want to eat you have to work.
Unfortunately, the red hen has to resort to coercive measures because the other animals are lazy. But if we come back to the real world, laziness is not a character flaw but a function of the alienated nature of work: people avoid work because they are under the thumb of the boss, forced into it by material necessity, and unfree to determine how they accomplish the required tasks. Even when work is life-valuable, its organization and pace are not controlled democratically and few individual workers enjoy any freedom of action once they are inside the office or plant.
Passive and active strategies to avoid work are thus met with right wing charges of laziness (the more impoverished and powerless the group, the louder the denunciations). Especially harsh criticism is reserved for addicts and the homeless. The right advocates coercive schemes to deprive people of benefits, force them into workfare programs, or simply remove them to penal institutions. Sometimes these schemes are are justified on the grounds that the addicted and homeless are blights on respectable society. However, one can also sometimes detect an inverted echo of Marx’s aphorism. Conservatives will sometimes argue that work is character building and by tying benefits to labour workfare schemes are in effect tough love which will benefit the poor in the long run. The argument reminds me of an ironic prose poem by Baudelaire called “Let’s Beat Up the Poor.” A man and his partner are dining when outside a beggar peers in hoping to attract the attention of a generous diner. The man notices, gets up, and starts a fight with panhandler. In the poem the man feels like he is affirming the dignity of the beggar by engaging him in honest combat, much in the way that Hegel argues that our freedom depends upon our willingness to fight to death. There is perhaps too fine a point put on physical combat in these stories, but there is an element of truth in both, as there is in the justification of workfare schemes.
No human being should ever be regarded as nothing but a victim or pitied for whatever state they are in. Social democratic forms of public service provision are not rooted in pity, but they do sometimes, wittingly or not, treat those who need benefits as passive consumers. They thus share something in common with their right wing critics: both tend to see impoverished people as incapable of solving their own problems: the right believes that bad character and bad choices lead to bad socio-economic outcomes while the social democratic left tends to see them as victims of greedy people or an unjust system. But neither tries to think of ways in which existing resources could be marshaled to create spaces in which addicts, or the homeless, or other groups in need of public support could work together to change their own social and individual reality.
Marx confronted an argument analogous to contemporary workfare schemes in the 1848 Revolution in France. Louis Blanc, socialist member of the national Assembly , tried to pass legislating that would empower workers to organize their own enterprises. What he ended up with was a pale compromise which in effect forced workers into state organized schemes, “workhouses in the open,” as Marx dismissed them. Nevertheless, Marx understood that the principle that motivated Blanc was the correct one: freedom for workers means freedom to work in democratically organized, life-valuable industries and service providing institutions. From each according to their abilities was thus an affirmation not only of the dignity of working people, but also the life-value of creative labour, both for society and for the individual. Self-esteem, self-respect, and self-worth are tied up with our being contributing members of society. The difference between Marx’s understanding and the right-wing version is that for Marx the drive to change comes from within workers themselves. Conservatives not only want to impose it from the outside, but they also want forced labour to fuel capitalist profits. Workfare participants are in effect unpaid labour for the capitalist: the state pays their wages and the firm reaps the profits. Socialized labour, by contrast, would be democratically organised for the collective and individual good.
But where does that leave contemporary society’s approach to the growing problems of homelessness and addiction? Current policy is bifurcated: there is no willingness to seriously regulate housing markets to bring down house prices and no plans to undertake the construction of genuinely affordable housing at the scale required to provide housing to all who require it. Laws around addiction are changing to allow for safe injection sites and decriminalization of possession. Whether or not those make drug use safer they are not solving the problems that deep addiction causes addicts, not the least of which is that it renders them incapable of doing anything more than satisfying their cravings: a one-dimensional existence that robs them of the opportunity to think, feel, and do more than alternate between being being sick and high. While housing market regulation and national public housing projects are necessary and decriminalization a good first step, none on their own engages the energies and potential of homeless and addicted people as agents. We cannot go from capitalism to democratic socialism in one fell swoop, but was can re-think public service provision in ways that might contribute, even if only in a small way, to building the sort of civic agency longer-term and more fundamental transformations would require.
There are a number of projects that can serve as guides to the transformation of public policy from passive service provision to actively engaging people in self-organised projects of social and self-transformation. The one that I am most familiar with (I wrote about it in my book Democratic Society and Human Needs) was organised by the Parkdale Area Recreation Centre in Toronto. PARC serves the relatively high concentration of former psychiatric patients living in the neighborhood. Instead of simply buying a building, paying to have it renovated, and giving it to those in need of housing, PARC instead engaged the labour and intelligence of the people who would live there. They helped renovate the space and they drew up a constitution that would govern life in the building. Needs were met, not through the initiative of government bureaucrats and social workers, but the collective and individual agency of the future residents. Professionals helped initiate the project and were their to assist and guide but future residents worked to satisfy their own needs. They changed themselves as they created the space in which they would live.
Conservative err when they lecture people to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps because individual problems typically have social causes that individuals acting on their own cannot solve no matter how hard they try. But even here there is a grain of truth: the only lasting changes are those which engage the agency of the person involved. Victimization is real, but victims are human beings capable of changing themselves by working together to change the reality that victimized them.
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