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The Morning Star 2026 Conference
Who reaps the benefits of taxation: capital or labour?
How is it the very richest pay so little tax while the rest of us are burdened with the cost of our own repression? The MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY asks what is to be done?
GAZILLIONAIRE: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s company paid £1.7million to HMRC last year; that’s less than 0.0002 per cent of its UK sales

A POPULAR view is that we all benefit, and there’s some truth in that.  

As long as we live in an economy dominated by the market, then taxation (of wages, profits, or capital) will be an essential element in the process of delivering the “social wage” — education and health services, public infrastructure as well as more dubious and contested elements of public expenditure such as “defence.”  

At a more subtle level, it can be maintained that to the extent that (as Marx argued) wages under capitalism always tend to fall to the minimum level required for the social and biological reproduction of labour, then the “costs” of taxation in the last analysis fall on the capitalist rather than on the working class. 

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