It’s because no one knows their own value but taxes are an easy to see number. The anger over taxes will be felt when the surplus value is quantified.
It’s how movie stars can argue they’re worth million-dollar salaries. They can point to movies with their faces and say “without my face you wouldn’t have made as much money.”
We can have that too, if we create and participate in good unions that can get access to that kind of information and negotiate for us.
Is it really that much more?
It depends on how much of your surplus labor your employer is stealing. It varies by many factors, not the least of which what kind of work you do, and very importantly, where you are in the world in relation to the imperial core, but in many cases, yes it is absolutely that much more, potentially even worse. But the graph isn’t meant to be read as an absolute metric, it can’t be since the size of each circle will vary so much depending on an individual’s circumstances. Rather the image is meant as a generalization to express some economic facts, basic Marxist principles that too few people understand.
It’s a trick. By using circles it follows naturally, but if you just use bars it is no longer inherently so. Whether it is true is hard to tell
If you make the green circle bigger, it’s even worse
No not really. I forget the figures because I haven’t done this in a while but if you take a corporations dividends/buybacks and divide by the number of employees it’s only like a few thousand or ~10k a year usually.
Even if those numbers were true, it isn’t simply something that happens in a single year, is entirely consumed, and then starts fresh the next. Surplus is used for expansion and accumulation, which leads to more expansion and more accumulation the next year, so on and so on.
Sure fine. Lets look at the fortune 50 that I work for.
2024, $5.5 billion in profit. 415,000 employees (probably mostly part time). About 13,000 per employee.
Yeah sure that’s life changing but that isn’t 4 times more than what people are getting paid like the image claims.
A majority of people are probably paying more in taxes than their amount of surplus value extracted by the capitalists. But one of these things is at least partially for the common good while the other is pure parasitism.
That’s pure profit, not counting surplus re-invested into production and expansion, and moreover this wealth extends year over year as reproduction occurs on an expanded scale.
Well it was net operating income, so before reinvestment expenses. But are you trying to count all future profits from reinvested wealth? Why not just say they extract infinite value then.
Fair, but my point is that the lion’s share expands exponentially, not linearly, nor is it all consumed every year.
Yeah from a macro perspective the snowball effect of capital leads to extremely unfair wealth distribution. But the image is from a micro perspective. Wages are closer to 60%-80% of profit produced and the image is claiming it’s like 20%.
The image is kind of a bad way to portray the underlying problem. The skimming of wealth from the working class is real but the rate isn’t as dramatic as the image claims.
Because we don’t just blanket support taxes either. What kinda tax? A sales tax? An estate tax? Income tax?
Communists should avoid promoting taxation that would disproportionately burden the working class.
Edit: Seems like we all are on the same page, maybe I could have framed my original comment better. I realize the memes purpose was to highlight the issue of surplus value extraction which absolutely should be peoples #1 priority, I just get a bit tense when people get too excited for taxes. There’s a right and a wrong way to do it and beating libs over the head with “lol taxes are good actually” isn’t (in my experience) an effective slogan. Usually better to focus on progressive taxation. Things like capital gains tax. Or straight from the communist manifesto “A heavy progressive or graduated income tax”. Promoting sales tax? Bad actually!
Non-communists should not say to communists what they have to do.
Good thing I’m a communist then.
Why can’t we take my taxes out the green part.
Be cool if we got a tinder like app to swipe on what we want our taxes going towards, everything would still get paid but wed feel better with our part going towards what we want. Youll have ppl exclusively funding education and some exclusively funding military it all balances out. In a fantasy world where ppl werent just exploiting the fk out of us and cared about democracy.
This is asking why you care about your own room/apartment/house more than the entirity of roads that you have walked upon.
