- The Guardian
- Issue #2192
A few thoughts on where the money for the funding of Medicare, education, and other services to the people could come from.
- Address tax avoidance schemes such as negative gearing, capital gains tax concessions, export of profits offshore to tax havens, and end the massive tax concessions for the rich rorting the superannuation system.
- Increase company tax rate to at least 40 cents in the dollar.
- Impose a genuine super profits tax, not just for mining companies, but the big banks, insurance companies, investment houses and other corporations.
- Phase out government funding of private schools, universities and colleges.
- Cancel AUKUS, slash Australia’s bloated military budget to bring it into line with what is required for Australia’s defence (as against offensive capacity) and humanitarian, regional and domestic responsibilities (eg tsunamis, floods, earthquakes).
- Phase out the private health insurance rebate which is nothing more than a subsidy to an otherwise unsustainable private hospital system.
- Oblige industry and retail superannuation funds to invest a minimum of five per cent of their investments in public infrastructure.
- Income and low interest loans to government from the public bank.
- End government subsidies to fossil fuel polluters.
PARASITE(S) OF THE WEEK: the billionaire cry-poor corporates following the federal budget, wanting more – and more again – profits. Where are these profits to come from?
Marx knew that profits come from squeezing more out of workers. He wrote of workers selling their labour power (capacity to work) as one person sells a commodity to another. The purchaser of this labour power is the employer. “And the consumption of the commodity belongs not to the seller who parts with it, but to the buyer, who acquires it. To you, therefore, belongs the use of my daily labour-power. But by means of the price that you pay for it each day, I must be able to reproduce it daily, and to sell it again.”
That is certainly how the capitalist sees it. The worker’s capacity to work belongs to the employer. The more work the employer can extract in a day and the lower the price paid (wages) the bigger the profits (what Marx called surplus value – the value of the labour over and above what was paid for).
Marx continues: “We see then, that, apart from extremely elastic bounds, the nature of the exchange of commodities imposes no limit to the working-day, no limit to surplus-labour. The capitalist maintains his rights as a purchaser when he tries to make the working-day as long as possible, and to make, whenever possible, two working-days out of one.
“On the other hand, the peculiar nature of the commodity sold implies a limit to its consumption by the purchaser, and the labourer maintains his right as seller when he wishes to reduce the working day to one of definite normal duration.
“Between equal rights force decides. Hence it is that in the history of capitalist production, the determination of what is a working-day, presents itself as the result of a struggle, a struggle between collective capital, ie the class of capitalists, and collective labour, ie the working-class.
“The working-day is thus not a constant, but a variable quantity. One of its parts, certainly, is determined by the working-time required for the reproduction of the labour – the power of the labourer himself.”
