En Passant

This academic article of mine was published on Monday. It is about Marx’s methods and tax. ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to provide readers with an insight into Marx’s methods as a first step to understanding income tax more generally but with specific reference to Australia’s income tax system. I do this by […]

In this paper I use Marx’s analysis of rent to try to understand the complexities associated with the attempts to tax resource rents in Australia. To read this draft work in progress on SSRN click here.

This is very much a draft paper. I argue that taxing resource rents in Australia involves a battle between the state in its Commonwealth and State and Territory variations as landlord and mining capital as both a new landlord and exploiter of the land and the minerals therein. That battle is over the share of the economic rent which mining capital extracts from other capital in the process of distribution of the profit or more correctly surplus value arising in production.

Mark Konza, Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, told the Australian Financial Review Tax Reform Summit that ‘in 40 years of tax work he had not heard references to Marx…’ (Neil Chenoweth, ‘Equity sore point in foreign investment’ AFR Wednesday 23 September page 4.) Well Mark, you are in luck. My article, Some Basic Marxist Concepts to […]

I wonder first if Mandel’s analysis of Marx’s views on rent is correct and second whether it is useful for example in understanding super profits in the mining industry in Australia and their collapse in the last year or so, presumably because with increased mechanisation mining companies have broken down the barriers that are the ‘eternal’ monopoly of for example land, state ownership of minerals and their non-renewable nature, and ensured surplus value in the mining industry ‘enters the general process of (re)distribution of profit throughout the economy as a whole thrown their profits into the surplus value production.’

Absolute rent has caused great debate and controversy among left wing writers. Is it actually two concepts – monopoly rent and absolute rent, or just absolute rent arising from the low level of say capital investment in agriculture? [12] I adopt David Harvey’s approach, of distinguishing between absolute rent and monopoly rent. [13] Others, like Faysil Yachir, argue that despite a very high OCC in the mining industry there can still be absolute rent because of monopoly.[14] The two, as I have outlined above are different, but related, a matter which I hope becomes clearer when we work through the differences between State and Territory absolute rents such as royalties and Commonwealth monopoly rents in the form of rent taxes.

None of this means that there is never anything of interest in academic Marxism wrote Chris Harman. Just as with academic history or economics in general, among the piles of crap there is the occasional nugget of gold that no genuine Marxist can afford to ignore. What is more, even with the rubbish, it is sometimes necessary to make an effort to prove it is rubbish – as Engels did with Dühring.

But before you can do either task, you have to understand that revolutionary Marxism starts from different premises and has different aims to the academic version, and not confuse one with the other.

WORKERS OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

Over the following decades, this call to action would become the most important declaration of principles for the rapidly expanding, and increasingly international, socialist movement. The Manifesto introduced hundreds of thousands to the basic ideas of revolutionary socialism, and it continues to do so today.

International Socialist Review columnist Phil Gasper in Socialist Worker US challenges the myth that Marxism has nothing useful to say about the environment – with help from the old man himself.