Cleaning the Muck of Ages from the Windows into the Soul of Tax
| Author | John Passant |
| Position | PhD candidate, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National University A.C.T. AUSTRALIA 0200; former Assistant Commissioner, Australian Tax Office (retired 2008) |
| Pages | 177-216 |
Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies 5 (2016), DOI: 10.1515/bjals-2016-0006
C M A W
I S T
John Passant*
Australian National University, Australia
ABSTRACT
The aim of this paper is to provide readers with an insight into Marx’s me-
thods as a rst step to understanding income tax more generally but with
specic reference to Australia’s income tax system. I do this by introducing
readers to the ideas about the totality, that is, capitalism, appearance, and
form, and the dialectic in Marx’s hands. This will involve looking at income
tax as part of the bigger picture of capitalism and understanding that all
things are related and changes in one produce changes in all. Appearances can
be deceptive, and we need to delve below the surface to understand the reali-
ty or essence of income and, hence, of income tax. Dialectics is the study of
change. By developing an understanding of the processes of contradiction and
change in society, the totality, we can then start to understand income tax and
its role in our current society more deeply. To do that, we need to understand
the ways of thinking and approaches that Marx and others have used. Only
then, armed with the tools that we have uncovered, we can begin the process
of cleaning the muck of ages from the windows into the soul of tax and move
from the world of appearance to the essence of tax.
* PhD candidate, School of Politics and International Relations, Australian National Uni-
versity A.C.T. AUSTRALIA 0200; former Assistant Commissioner, Australian Tax Ofce
(retired 2008). Contact: en.passant@bigpond.com.
CONTENTS
I. I .......................................................................179
II. O I T A ...................... 182
A. The Tip of the Iceberg .......................................................184
B. The Sea of Fluidity and the Totality of Life .......................187
III. M’ V ................................. 188
A. Marx’s Viewpoint ..............................................................188
B. Abstraction .......................................................................190
C. Cleaning the Windows ...................................................... 192
© 2015 John Passant, licensee De Gruyter Open.
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License.
178
5 Br. J. Am. Leg. Studies (2016)
D. The Dialectic .....................................................................193
E. Appearance and Reality .................................................... 202
IV. T D .........................................................205
A. The Establishment of Capitalism in Australia
and the Imposition of Income Tax ..................................... 206
B. Class Antagonisms in the Tax System ................................209
C. I’m Walking Backwards for Cacus .................................... 210
V. C ..........................................................................216
179
CLEANING THE MUCK OF AGES FROM THE WINDOWS INTO THE SOUL OF TAX
I. I
Drawing on Marx, and those who have followed in his footsteps, this pa-
per introduces readers to a number of related and interrelated approaches
and methodologies1 for understanding tax and tax reform in Australia. It
introduces readers to the idea of depth and hidden meaning in tax. The pa-
per considers tax as part of the societal totality that includes capitalism. In
doing this, I hope to make a small contribution to the ways that taxpayers,
tax teachers, tax administrators, tax practitioners, politicians, economists,
commentators, and interested bystanders can—and do—understand tax
in both its specic detail and its position and role within capitalism and,
at least partially, in understanding capitalism itself. All are interconnected.
They are parts of the same coin if you like. The key is in guring out how
they relate to each other and the whole coin.
Indeed, it is arguable that all three sides of the coin2 are themselves
reective of the coin. That is, they are the coin. The coin and its sides make
up the area under examination, which is more than the coin and its sides.
They are all linked, related, and in constant interaction with each other and
the rest of the totality to produce the coin itself. Thus, major tax reform
remakes not only the relations within the tax system but also the capital
accumulation process and Australian capitalism itself, remembering that
the relations that make up Australian capitalism are themselves part of the
global system of capitalism and interact within it in a range of ways.
The paper uses concepts such as totality, appearance, and reality and
the dialectic process—totality, contradiction, change, all combining other in
constant contradictory motion3—to lay the intellectual framework for ex-
amining income tax in Australia and to help us get a deeper understanding
of the tax system. In doing that, some basic ideas of Marx such as the labor
theory of value, surplus value and capital, and the state as a band of hostile
brothers can then become tools for a further dialectical examination of the
income tax system, taking various areas of that system and, using Marx’s
1 There is much debate in Marxist circles about whether Marx, in fact, had a method or
even methods. The term here is used to describe the dialectic—totality, contradiction,
change—and its application by Marx and others to subsets of the totality of society,
including tax, through processes such as abstraction.
2 Who imagined only two sides? Indeed, could coins not be multisided depending on the
view one takes of them and what one determines to be a side? For example, a serrated-
edged coin could arguably have many sides. This raises the question of individuation—
what is the unit under examination and is that not also a totality? No, because the totality
is society, and we, doing what is humanly possible, examine important subsets of that
totality such as the mode of production—capitalism today—and subsets of the important
subsets, such as tax.
3 John Rees, The AlgebRA of RevoluTion: The DiAlecTic AnD The clAssicAl MARxisT
TRADiTion 5 (Routledge ed. 1998).
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