Marx, in the Grundrisse, makes an interesting remark about
war:
War was developmentally prior to peace. The way, through war
and armies, etc., certain economic relationships, such as wage labor, machinery
etc. are developed earlier than in bourgeois society, Even the relationships of
productivity and commerce are particularly visible in the army.
Still, Marx clung to the bourgeois imagining of war as
something that is not itself a system: “War is self evidently to be understood
as though it were immediately economically the same as though the nation
through a part of its capital into the water.”
In other words, Marx ultimately sees war as non-productive –
even as he sees that it can be developmentally prior to peace. In his list of
war’s innovations, one notices that he does not include credit and taxation. As
is well known, Marx did not have a developed sense of credit, which he saw as
parasitic on productivity. It is, and it isn’t. A parasitic relationship is not
necessarily a subordinate one, after all.
Thomas Pynchon, in the novel Gravity’s Rainbow, has a more
acute sense of war as a system. He doesn’t, of course, develop this sense as a “theory”,
but it becomes a strong narrative thread in Slothrop’s peregrination through war
ravaged Europe.
What was happening on the American home front in World War
II has been seen through many lenses: the greatest generation unity of the
country, the enormous burst in productivity, the end of the Depression. But the
lens that might be most interesting to us right now is that WWII marked a decisive
change in the tax structure, which has had an enormous bearing on the peculiar
American structure of class feelings – that lack of solidarity and identity of
the working class that has determined our politics.
In part, this is simply racism. In as much as the upper
class in America has been and continues to be overwhelmingly white, the sentimental
outbursts of racism are rarer there. This is why the press, when it looks
around for racists, finds plenty wearing baseball caps and having trouble with
spelling – and doesn’t look to the almost all white system of prep schools, the
Ivy leagues, the boards of corporations, etc.
However, there are other roots of labor’s odd affection for
its exploiters.
Which gets us to war and taxes. In WWI, Wilson’s government
had a newly established tax system – the internal revenue. Internal revenue was
designed as a class tax. Before you had to file a return, you had to make a
certain amount of money, far above the average salary. In World War I, this
changed – those families with incomes above 2,000 per year, for the first time,
had to pay a tax. However, that only added about 3 million to the tax rolls –
and eventually that figure rose to 6 million. The government really relied on
its hikes on corporations and wealthy individuals. From 13 percent, the tax
rate for those making above 2 million rose to 67 percent. Since the major
source of federal income before that – the tariff – was, so to speak, in suspension,
corporate taxes – billed as taxes on ‘excess war profits” – and borrowing made
up the rest of the war expenditure.
The borrowing prevented the Republicans who came in after
the war from immediately undoing the taxes on the wealthy. Mellon, perhaps the most powerful Treasury
secretary the U.S. ever had, didn’t really want to abolish the income tax, as
the radicals in the Republican party did, and replace it with a sales tax.
Rather, he saw the advantages of this kind of revenue, and the advantages that
came with tax loopholes – a tool used ever since to nourish one or another
wealthy interest.
It was WWII that marked the true transition in the tax
regime, however. The income tax remained a “class tax” up to the 40s. The
masses didn’t generally pay any income taxes. As Sarah Kreps points out in Taxing
War, “At the beginning of World War II, for example, only 3.9 million Americans
were paying taxes, compared to 43 million by the end of the war. Income
generated through taxes had gone from $2.2 billion in 1939 to $35.1 billion by
1945.
2 The
fiscal sacrifice was enormous, and despite these demands for revenue, public
support remained high throughout the war—as did the belief that the system of
taxation was appropriate, with individuals stating overwhelmingly that their
tax levels were fair.”
In the sixties, leftist critics of the New Deal attacked it
as a means to preserve an inherently unequal socio-economic capitalist system.
Since the Reagan years, though, the critique has generally vanished. It is now
viewed as a gold standard even by lefties. Yet the sixties critics were
accurate: the creation of the mass tax turned out to be a great class
dissolvent. Both the wealthy and the worker were paying taxes, and sooner or
later the wealthy would figure out that a tool had been given to them: that the
cry of being taxed too much would echo among the mass of taxpayers, who indeed,
one could argue, were being taxed too much, especially in relation to the
services provided for them by the government – which, at the same time, were
being chipped away by political groups generally working in the service of
capital.
Kreps points out that American wars – and pick the year for
the last sixty to one hundred years when America wasn’t waging war – used to
fall within the liberal framework that claimed that wars were a sacrifice –
much like Marx speaking of the nation “throwing” its capital into the water.
However, it is not clear that this has ever been so. There is a school – which again
was stronger in the sixties – that pointed out the predatory nature of America’s
wars. These wars, in short, created the vast geopolitical entity of the United
States, with all the resources that went with it. One could say, as well, that
the wars undertaken or supported by America since and including World War II have
created a world-system on American terms that has been enormously profitable
for the American economy. In fact, this perception has long been abroad in
American culture: under the official rhetoric about the “sacrifice” of war,
there is another that sees war as a solution to economic problems: what we need
is a war.
Kreps is right, I think, to see the shift in the way America
does war as a symptom of the decline of democracy as an ethos and ideal in the
American republic. Not only has conscription gone, allowing American leaders to
use their volunteer troops as monarchs used theirs, without fearing any radical
public complaint, but the wars are also put on the ticket – taxes are not
raised, but even lowered as wars are fought and the war industry grotesquely
inflated. Krebs view of democracy is that it requires a certain Pavlovian
mechanism – the administration of pain by the governing class should create a
response by the governed class. When the pain is anaesthetized, the governing
class has a non-democratic leeway, and the governed class feels cheated and
baffled.
The governed class is just Slopthrop magnified. Something
terrible happened to the child, and the man feels a strange hardon whenever his
ESP picks up the presence, or the future presence, of a missile. Pynchon plus
Marx: our guide to the present disorder.
