When the phrase ‘class warfare’ is used nowadays, it’s usually to criticise the messages of left-wing parties.
Earlier this year Jeremy Corbyn proposed that demographic data on the ethnicity and social backgrounds of employees should be publicly available, and the Daily Mail reacted by accusing him of declaring “class war”. In 2014 Tory MP Henry Smith responded to a Labour Party political advert by accusing them of using a “tired old class-warfare message”. In America the centrist Democrat Barack Obama was regularly accused of waging class warfare. In 2015 Orrin Hatch – one of the most senior Republican Senators – accused him of class warfare because of proposals to close tax loopholes.
In the UK the use of the phrase ‘class warfare’ tends to overlap with the phrase ‘politics of envy‘. The common right-wing argument, in short, is that what Karl Marx identified as the ‘class struggle’ (between workers and those who own the means of the production) is a thing of the past, and the left is drudging up outdated and divisive ideas to win votes. But not everyone agrees with this analysis. Some members of the super-rich are willing to acknowledge that the rules of modern capitalism are tilted in their favour, the American investor Warren Buffett being one of them.
“What I paid was only 17.4% of my taxable income – and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33% to 41% and averaged 36%. My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.”
In 2011 Buffett made what was probably his most iconic and widely remembered criticism of modern American tax laws, pointing out that his secretary pays a lower rate of tax than he does.
“The 400 of us pay a lower part of our income in taxes than our receptionists do, or our cleaning ladies, for that matter. If you’re in the luckiest 1 percent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 percent.”
Buffett has been a long-term supporter of the Democratic Party. Speaking at a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in 2007, Buffett made a similar argument, broadening out his criticism to point out the problem of lower tax rates for investors is a systemic problem.
“When you get rid of the estate tax, you’re basically handing over command of the country’s resources to people who didn’t earn it. It’s like choosing the 2020 Olympic team by picking the children of all the winners at the 2000 Games.”
In America, estate taxes are taxes the richest 0.2% pay on death – paid only by those who leave more than $5.49m to their inheritors. Quoted by Barack Obama in The Audacity of Hope, Buffett pointed out the irrationality of giving an economic head-start to a privileged few. All of us (except the untalented children of the super-rich) lose out by living in a society that gives more opportunities to those who haven’t proven themselves capable of making the most of those chances.
“There’s class warfare, all right. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
Quoted by Republican speechwriter and commentator Ben Stein in an article for the New York Times in 2006, this is probably Buffett’s bluntest statement of his belief that class warfare is occurring.
A belief in a class struggle or class warfare doesn’t mean a belief that there’s any secretive gatherings in darkened rooms. But the things that are in the self-interest of the labouring class are different from the things that are in the self-interest of those who own the means-of-production. Though Buffett is certainly no communist, he seems to agree with one of the core arguments of Marxist thought. Left-wingers and centrists can agree that capitalism is a game that’s rigged in favour of those who are already rich, it’s the political right who are in denial about the nature of the system that we live under.
Happy Sisyphus 