Leave the Spending to the Voters

[Clues Only]

Basically, any money earned above a certain amount should be turned over to the voters, who would decide somehow to spend it. Put the amount in the x millions of dollars. What's wrong with this idea?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Alright, so, first of all, you need to keep in mind that you can invent the most wonderful scheme that, you are sure, will end world hunger and save the seals and make cable TV tolerable, but history moves according to its own laws. No one can hold the state down and force it to be what they want - it reflects, not the ideas of its founders or the population, but the bare class interests that lie beneath the superstructure of society.

And your proposal does not advance the interest of any historic class. As such, there is no one to implement it. Obviously it places burdens on capitalist accumulation and as such would be viewed as odious by the bourgeoisie. As for the proletariat, well, consider this. Obviously there would still be money in your proposal. What does that mean?

It means there would still be commodity production - objects would be produced, not to satisfy human need, but to be sold on the market. This means there would be a class of owners - who by their control of the means of production would hold decisive economic and political power - and a class of producers forced to sell their labour-power as a commodity on the market to survive, producing everything and receiving only what they need to reproduce their labour-power to work another day.

Production would suffer under what Marx and Engels call the "anarchy of the market", with resource allocation and production quotas being decided by the market, instead of being rationally planned to satisfy human need. This anarchy of the market, as well as the related need of the capitalist to keep the rate of profit in his enterprise higher than the rate of profit in other enterprises in the same branch (and profit comes from human labour, not from mechanisation), would retard the development of the productive forces.

All of the various mechanisms that the ruling class uses to secure its existence and power today - from the bourgeois family and the attendant homophobia, transphobia and misogyny, to racism and fascism - would still be needed as the bourgeoisie comes up against the proletariat on one hand and the cyclic crises of capitalism and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall on the other.

Finally, let's say some sum of money has been "turned over" to the voters. Voters are not some entity that exists in the vacuum, they occupy a particular context structured by capitalism. Even under the most formally democratic of the formal democracies, the results would tend to be in favour of the bourgeoisie and against the interest of perhaps the majority of voters (and if the proletariat is not the majority, communists don't propose to slavishly tail the majority anyway - we are a party of the proletariat, not "of the entire people"). What would the voters vote for? "Economic recovery", "less taxes", "growth", "development" - all code words for actions that benefit the bourgeoisie.