Some Basic Marxist Concepts to Help Understand Income Tax

Abstract

The paper introduces readers to some basic Marxist concepts to give us the building blocks for an alternative understanding of tax and perhaps even to inspire some to use these concepts and ideas in their future research. It argues that the tax system reflects the phenomena of wealth and income and that there is a deeper reality obscured and ignored by the income tax system as an outcrop of a capitalist system which does the same. This deeper reality is that capital exploits workers and that profit, rent, interest and the like are the money form of the unpaid labour of workers, what Marx called surplus value. Tax is a deduction from that surplus value.