It's because no one knows their own value but taxes are an easy to see number. The anger over taxes will be felt when the surplus value is quantified.
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2026
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It’s how movie stars can argue they’re worth million-dollar salaries. They can point to movies with their faces and say “without my face you wouldn’t have made as much money.”
We can have that too, if we create and participate in good unions that can get access to that kind of information and negotiate for us.
The trick is also that taxes (in theory) go back to helping you and the world, while the stolen labour value just buys your boss their 900th luxury car
Cuz the ones who complain most about taxes don't do any real work to extract surplus value from
If you are talking about capitalists then yes,
But if you are talking about working class people, then your statement is patently false. The working class get's exploited, as is inherent in capitalism.
I assume they mostly mean petty bourgeoisie, like landlords etc, because the big capitalists don't even have any taxes to complain for usually
Is it really that much more?
It depends on how much of your surplus labor your employer is stealing. It varies by many factors, not the least of which what kind of work you do, and very importantly, where you are in the world in relation to the imperial core, but in many cases, yes it is absolutely that much more, potentially even worse. But the graph isn't meant to be read as an absolute metric, it can't be since the size of each circle will vary so much depending on an individual's circumstances. Rather the image is meant as a generalization to express some economic facts, basic Marxist principles that too few people understand.
It's a trick. By using circles it follows naturally, but if you just use bars it is no longer inherently so. Whether it is true is hard to tell
No not really. I forget the figures because I haven't done this in a while but if you take a corporations dividends/buybacks and divide by the number of employees it's only like a few thousand or ~10k a year usually.
Even if those numbers were true, it isn't simply something that happens in a single year, is entirely consumed, and then starts fresh the next. Surplus is used for expansion and accumulation, which leads to more expansion and more accumulation the next year, so on and so on.
Sure fine. Lets look at the fortune 50 that I work for.
2024, $5.5 billion in profit. 415,000 employees (probably mostly part time). About 13,000 per employee.
Yeah sure that's life changing but that isn't 4 times more than what people are getting paid like the image claims.
That's pure profit, not counting surplus re-invested into production and expansion, and moreover this wealth extends year over year as reproduction occurs on an expanded scale.
Well it was net operating income, so before reinvestment expenses. But are you trying to count all future profits from reinvested wealth? Why not just say they extract infinite value then.
Fair, but my point is that the lion's share expands exponentially, not linearly, nor is it all consumed every year.
Yeah from a macro perspective the snowball effect of capital leads to extremely unfair wealth distribution. But the image is from a micro perspective. Wages are closer to 60%-80% of profit produced and the image is claiming it's like 20%.
The image is kind of a bad way to portray the underlying problem. The skimming of wealth from the working class is real but the rate isn't as dramatic as the image claims.
The rate is massive at this point, considering how long it has been going on, especially due to imperierialism. You're referring to the labor aristocracy exclusively when you say 13,000 isn't life changing.
I said it is life changing and rate is not the same thing as extent.
The picture is closer to the truth when you factor in imperialism, and the actual wealth gap.
If you make the green circle bigger, it's even worse
Why can't we take my taxes out the green part.
Because we don't just blanket support taxes either. What kinda tax? A sales tax? An estate tax? Income tax?
Communists should avoid promoting taxation that would disproportionately burden the working class.
Edit: Seems like we all are on the same page, maybe I could have framed my original comment better. I realize the memes purpose was to highlight the issue of surplus value extraction which absolutely should be peoples #1 priority, I just get a bit tense when people get too excited for taxes. There's a right and a wrong way to do it and beating libs over the head with "lol taxes are good actually" isn't (in my experience) an effective slogan. Usually better to focus on progressive taxation. Things like capital gains tax. Or straight from the communist manifesto "A heavy progressive or graduated income tax". Promoting sales tax? Bad actually!
of course not, but we also recognize that whatever taxes there are, surplus-value extraction is way more. the labor aristocracy, especially the professional-managerial labor aristocracy, often opposes taxation/programs that would benefit them. they "pay too much" in taxes, but they don't even recognize their own surplus-value extraction.
I don't disagree. I was only adding some additional information.
Even if we do implement taxes in ways that do not impact working class people as much, we are relying on a capitalist ruling class to pinky promise to not skim money off the top and spend it on the things it says.
oh i was mostly just ranting about the pmc lol. you're totally right about the tax stuff and it seems like the only taxes we do get go directly to police and military
Non-communists should not say to communists what they have to do.
Good thing I'm a communist then.
Be cool if we got a tinder like app to swipe on what we want our taxes going towards, everything would still get paid but wed feel better with our part going towards what we want. Youll have ppl exclusively funding education and some exclusively funding military it all balances out. In a fantasy world where ppl werent just exploiting the fk out of us and cared about democracy.
This is asking why you care about your own room/apartment/house more than the entirity of roads that you have walked upon.