Kto Kogo

It is of course always dangerous to quote Vladimir Lenin as an authority on any political question, not quite as dangerous perhaps as quoting Hitler but dangerous nonetheless.  After all, Lenin led the Bolshevik coup that brought the Communists to power in Russia.  He then instituted a reign of terror to effect Communist control over the former Russian Empire.  Lenin is not a hero in my book.  He is in fact a real villain for the way he ushered in Communist totalitarianism in Russia.  That being said, however, it is nonetheless true that Lenin had some valid political insights.  The same can be said of Karl Marx, whose political philosophy Lenin claimed to be implementing.  That Marx was profoundly wrong at the most fundamental level of his thinking, at the level of his dialectical materialism, does not negate the valuable insights that he had regarding the operation of domination based on economic class.  That Lenin created a system that was not only brutally flawed in its own right but led the way to the much worse catastrophe of Stalinism does not negate the validity of those political insights of his that were actually correct.

Lenin expressed one of his most valuable political insights with the nearly untranslatable Russian phrase “kto kogo?”  Pronounced kto kovó despite being spelled with a g in the second word, it is a question that literally means “who whom?”  It was for Lenin the foundational question to ask of any political agenda or policy.  He meant that in evaluating any such political agenda or policy we are to ask “In that agenda or policy, who does what to whom?”  That is, we are to ask who gains and who loses?  Who comes out on top and who suffers?  Who gains wealth or power and who loses wealth or power if this policy or agenda is implemented?  It is a question that unmasks policies and agendas that claim to be for the common good, or for the good of the people, that actually operate only to benefit a particular group within the society.  Lenin, being a Marxist, understood the question in terms of economic class.  He would ask what class benefits from any political action, the bourgeoisie or the proletariat?  We are not so given to rigid class analyses in this country, but it is nonetheless a useful question for us to ask “who whom” of any proposed course of political action.

After all, in a society as socially, economically, and demographically complex as the United States no political act is likely truly to benefit all Americans.  The interests of different groups and classifications of Americans are simply too disparate for that to be true.  At the risk of sounding perhaps more Marxist than I actually am, let me say that the interests of the wealthy financial mavens of Wall Street simply are not the same as the interests of most Americans.  The economic interests of the wealthiest one or two percent of Americans who control by far most of the wealth in this country simply are not the same as the interests of the other ninety-eight or ninety-nine percent of us who share what’s left.  This disparity of interests is particularly visible in regard to the question of tax policy.

The Republican Party has made it an iron rule of Republican orthodoxy that no taxes should be raised.  On anyone.  Ever.  For any reason.  The Republicans in Congress extorted from President Obama a commitment to extend the Bush tax cuts for the very wealthy as a condition for passing any legislation on economic issues.  They forced the Democrats to accept an appallingly bad law regarding reducing the national debt and the budget deficit in order to get an increase in the national borrowing limit that was necessary to avert a worldwide economic catastrophe, a law that deals with the deficit only through spending cuts with no tax increases even on the wealthiest Americans.  For many years now Grover Norquist’s group Americans for Tax Reform has required Republican politicians to pledge never to raise taxes on anyone in order to gain the group’s endorsement, and most Republican politicians have made that pledge.  Back when he was running for President George H. W. Bush famously said “Read my lips:  No new taxes!”, mouthing the Republican party line.  His subsequent reneging on that promise and proposing some tax increases was a major reason why he wasn’t reelected.  No tax increases, indeed extending tax reductions for the very wealthy that were enacted under President George W. Bush, has become the foundational economic policy of the Republican Party.

And no one asks of that policy “kto kogo?”  “Who whom?”  Whom does the policy benefit and whom does it burden?  Whose life does it make better and whose life does it make worse?  Who wins and who loses?  The Republicans have done a masterful job of getting a great many Americans never to ask that question by convincing people that all taxes are bad and that everyone should want themselves and everyone else to pay as little in taxes as possible.  But what answer do we get when we do ask the question “kto kogo” of the Republican dogma of low taxes, or at least low taxes for the wealthy?

The answer that we get is undeniably that the anti-tax policy of the Republican Party benefits only the wealthiest Americans and burdens everyone else.  To see that effect of Republican tax policy all we need to do is to compare the tax structure of the 1950s with that in  effect for the last thirty years and its effect on the great American middle class, the vast majority of Americans.  Under President Eisenhower (a Republican who wouldn't even recognize today’s Republican party) the marginal tax rate for the wealthiest Americans was 91%.  Today it is 35%, just over one third of what it was under the Republican Eisenhower.  Even under the more conservative Richard Nixon that top marginal income tax rate was 70%, twice what it is today.  The 1950s and 60s, when the top marginal income tax rates for the wealthiest American were essentially confiscatory, were the decades of the growth and prosperity of the American middle class.  Working men and women could earn a living wage working only one job.  Unemployment, while it of course fluctuated some, was relatively low.  The federal budget wasn't balanced, but it wasn’t as badly out of balance as it is today.  Perhaps most significantly, while significant inequality in income distribution has always been a fact of American life, that inequality is at an all time high today.  It was much lower in the 1950s. 

I don’t mean to paint the 1950s as some kind of lost utopia.  We had lots of social problems back then, and some aspects of American life have improved since the 1950s.  Most significantly, although racism remains an issue among us, America was far more racist in the 1950s than it is today.  The civil rights movement was just getting going, and women’s liberation and gay liberation weren’t even much on our national radar.  Still, the 1950s prove that the policy of reducing taxes on the wealthiest Americans that every president since Ronald Reagan has pursued or at least tolerated benefits only the wealthy and greatly burdens most Americans.  It exacerbates our already grossly inadequate social safety net.  It pushes more and more Americans into poverty.  It makes the rich richer and even more politically powerful than they were before.  The 1950s prove that high marginal tax rates on the rich are not a drag on the economy, and low marginal tax rates on the rich do not create jobs, as the Republicans claim they do.  The Republican policy of lowering taxes on the rich, which Democratic presidents and Democratically controlled Congresses have done nothing to reverse, undeniably benefit the wealthy, burden average Americans, and do not lead to general prosperity and wellbeing in our country.

    So:  Kto kogo?  The rich the rest of us.  The process of concentrating more and more wealth and more and more political power in the hands of a very small number of very wealthy Americans that has been under way now for several decades has the wealthy doing it to the rest of us.  The level of inequality in the distribution of wealth, the levels of unemployment, the size of the federal budget deficit, and the size of the national debt are reaching unsustainable levels.  The massive disparity in wealth between the wealthiest Americans and the rest of us will, in the long run, produce social instability and unrest.  Yes, for now the Republicans have misled a significant number of Americans into believing that low taxes on the rich are good for everyone, but that lie cannot hold forever.  Sooner or later the American people will wake up.  We can only pray that they wake up before the inequality created by Republican policies produces a violent rather than a merely peaceful political upheaval.