Bert Picard is an activist, having retired as a Teamster truck driver who has organized with various unions and a workers’ center over the decades.
GUILFORD-Make Billionaires Pay was the theme of a recent protest here in Brattleboro, and I heartily joined in. However, while the simplicity of the slogan is seductive, it also gave me some unease.
Not that the rich should not pay more taxes — far from it. But the slogan ignores that wealth is not capital, and just making the rich pay their taxes will not return us to a golden age. We are not going back to the 1950s, either with MAGA policies or a liberal New Deal.
We must make the distinction between two very different appearances of money: as personal wealth, riches, excesses such as personal jets and yachts, and as capital, which is wealth that is not hoarded or amassed but put to use to multiply itself, invested productively.
Capital grows and must grow to keep the whole system running and reproducing itself. The capitalist system must generate not only enough profits to supply the personal riches of the few but also must actually create much more profits than that relatively small amount, to reinvest as more capital to keep the wheels ever turning. Otherwise, the whole shebang comes to a stop.
Capital cannot stop growing, or it is no longer capital — it then would become just more money, and capitalism would stop. It would collapse.
That is why no climate agreement ever holds: No politician or nation — even if well meaning — has ever known how to stop destroying the climate.
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If we look back at slavery, no one today has trouble seeing it as, in its essence, a relation between two human beings: the enslaved human, and the master, who enriches himself from the unpaid labor of the enslaved worker.
Likewise, capitalism is, in essence, a human relation, a relation between the owner of capital, and the worker who owns only the ability to labor for a wage. And not at all incidentally, living labor — a commodity to be bought and sold under capitalism — is the only commodity you can purchase that can create more value than it is paid.
And thus, capital is money that grows through the miracle of paying less to the worker than the value of the work that the worker performed. Even if the worker is well paid, modern labor is incredibly productive when harnessed to the latest machinery and is, indeed, the only source of profit — capitalist profit, not speculation.
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Which brings us back to why “Make Billionaires Pay” and free buses, while good for a start, is not enough.
Even if we were able to seize all the riches of the billionaires, it would amount to only a small sum of money compared to the vast capital necessary to keep the wheels of modern industrial society turning.
Why is the infrastructure of this country crumbling? Why are they gutting the schools, health-care spending, food assistance? Why are we all working harder and getting poorer? It is not just to fund tax cuts for the rich but — more importantly — tax cuts for the corporations: their profits are not sufficient to create more capital, and politicians hope the tax cuts will help them invest.
Problem is, because the return on investments is not as high as they want, they take that tax cut money and speculate with it instead. They use it for stock buybacks, Ponzi schemes like Bitcoin, and stock market manipulation (hedge funds).
But why is the capital not sufficient? Why are the profits not what they were?
With each new invention, each newly automated state-of-the-art factory, the amount of capital needed to build it dwarfs the few humans who will be put to work. And human labor is the only source of more value than it is paid, even if workers are very well paid.
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Look at the trillions of dollars being invested in the latest thing: gargantuan data centers for AI. All this capital, just to hire relatively few workers. Same with the new battery plant Hyundai is building. Government money (taxes) has to be poured in, too, and pay for all the infrastructure these plants and centers need, to supplement private capital.
All this to say: The rate of capital needed compared to the rate of profit (from living labor) is just not satisfactory, and so most capitalists prefer to gamble with their funds — and AI is the latest, hugely expensive gamble.
Which means we will not tax our way out of this — neither in little Vermont, where we face the loss of millions of federal dollars, nor at the federal level, where the rate of profit means so much capital is needed it is hard to keep the system going, which it does by cutting all social costs.
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Even if we can seize all the personal fortunes and get free buses and child care, the laws of capitalism will continue to apply.
Whether we call it democratic socialism or a (capitalist) liberal welfare state, we’ve been there, both here and in Europe. Policies have not stopped the laws of motion of capitalism. European workers have spent the last decades fighting a slow war of attrition, trying to hold on to their crumbling welfare states.
It is not just evildoers or greed (though there is plenty of that). Capital must grow, at all costs. Some of those costs: immiserating the working class, destroying the climate, and bombing the hell out of other nations. Capitalism will have its way.
So let’s tax the billionaires, get free buses, freeze the rents, take a moment to hoist a beer in celebration, and then be clear-eyed about what we have to do next. The hardest work will be ahead, and there is as yet no clear guidepath.
As we organize for these immediate victories, we will become clearer about the next steps we must take. We will have to make the road by walking.
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