Free-Thought in the Social Sciences (Routledge Revivals) by J. A. Hobson

Author:J. A. Hobson [Hobson, J. A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Finance, Economics, Economic History, Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Political Science, Politics, History & Theory, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781136972614
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2010-01-20T05:00:00+00:00

taxes as a source of public revenue must be attributed to the wisdom and expediency of State financiers rather than to general considerations of ethics and economics. In every country, owing to the growing requirements of public revenue, there is a disposition to test the extreme limits of ‘ability to bear’ in this source of taxation. It is recognised as the line of least resistance to the increased demands of the tax gatherer. The possessing classes, confronted by alternative methods of ‘confiscatory’ taxation, usually regard as lighter and less reprehensible that which diminishes the income of their heirs and assignees, than that which assails their own. The difficulty of tracing and measuring the surplus as it passes into income limits the effective yield of income taxes and makes it seem the more desirable to tap great wealth when it changes hands. Though reformers and revolutionists are willing to avail themselves of this method of securing ‘surplus’ wealth for society, they have devoted little thought to it. They are apt to regard it as a concession intended to buy off cheaply the wider cause of economic justice. The fact of the concessive attitude arouses the suspicions of ardent reformers eager for the fight as much as for the fruits of victory. Sub-consciously they are unwilling to attack the dead hand. They require a living personal foe, a wicked exploiter who is alive. They do not wish to get economic justice by a number of intricate readjustments of property rights within the system. They want to see the system dramatised in the personal devil of a sweating, exploiting capitalist, the sight of whom shall rouse their fighting spirit.

This brings out the double nature of the ‘myth’, the false abstraction by which it furnishes intellectual comfort to the ‘faithful’ and the dramatisation that provides the fighting force. The pseudo-exactitude of the mathematical ‘marginalism’ which wins for the ‘Cambridge School’ the title of defenders of the capitalist faith, is confronted by a similar feat of ‘abstraction’ performed by the Marxian theorists in anchoring their faith upon a principle of value based on “abstract necessary social human labour”, measured in time units so as to determine the exchangeability of the various sorts of concrete goods, or services involved. Confronted with the same difficulty as met the ‘marginalist’, namely, the reduction of qualitative to quantitative differences, Marx and his adherents resort to an extraordinary device best described in Marx’s own language:

“Skilled labour counts only as simple labour intensified, or rather as multiplied simple labour, a given quantity of skilled being considered equal to a greater quantity of simple labour.”

But how is this done, how is the standard applied? He replies:

“The different proportions in which different sorts of labour are reduced to unskilled labour as their standard, are established by a social process that goes on behind the backs of the producers, and, consequently, appear to be established by custom. For simplicity’s sake we shall henceforth account every kind of labour to be unskilled, simple labour; by this we do no more than save ourselves the trouble of making the reduction.

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