This is a challenge to an argument that increasing taxes on landowners and property speculators would lower business costs, allowing wage increases.

(drop down) There are some good arguments for a wealth tax.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9l7AYl0jUE (and see his other videos)
• Gary Stevenson’s website: https://www.wealtheconomics.org
• https://patrioticmillionaires.org
• https://patrioticmillionaires.uk/the-problem

This is a promising idea, tried before e.g. under the label ‘Keynesianism’, after John Maynard Keynes. Ultimately, it will fail.

Class composition

‘Business owners’, ‘land owners’, and ‘land speculators’ must be put into the broader political economic context. Each group is a different segment of capital. The idea of taxing rentiers to encourage business to pay better wages assumes there is a real struggle between ‘business owners’, ‘land owners’, and ‘land speculators’. This assumption forgets monopoly finance capital – imperialists – which subjugates other capital.

There are further strata within the bourgeoisie. Within each segment, there are two main strata: the haute (big) bourgeoisie and the petite/petty (small) bourgeoisie. E.g. there are corporate landlords with thousands of properties and individual landlords with one or two rental properties.

There are struggles between the big and small bourgeois and between finance capital and the other segments of capital. Overwhelmingly, though, all are subordinated to haute bourgeois monopoly finance capital. This is imperialism.

As Marx and Engels wrote in the Manifesto of the Communist Party:

Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie … has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat.

Conflicts between finance capital and industrial capital, agricultural capital, etc, can result in international war, where imperialists meet the resistance of other states that are e.g. industrial capitalist.

Lenin explains in ‘The three sources and three component parts of Marxism’:

By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labor and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labor is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.

Within the imperial core (mostly the Anglo-European states and Japan) and its peripheries (almost everywhere else), almost all capital is controlled by imperialists. These capitalists may go to war against each other, as in WWI and WWII, but they do not fight themselves.

Imperialist control

I’m not talking about inter-imperialist rivalry in this latter claim. What do I mean? As Lenin explains, imperialists use their finance to bankroll other ventures. This is the system of stocks and shares. With (at most) 50.1% of the shares in a company, the shareholder controls the company.

The imperialist buys half the share capital of a farm, a factory, a mine, etc. They buy a controlling share of a land and consumer-facing corporations. With that controlling share, they hike rent on land and force the business to suppress wages. This increases income and decreases outgoings. The landowner, speculator, and business owner are only competing on the surface. Behind the scenes, they are all on the same team, different capitals, bought by finance capital.

What about the small businesses?

One might contend, ‘But you’re only talking about the big chains and big speculators; most employers are small business owners.’ The small business owners and the landlords with a handful of properties get investment capital, loans, etc, from the banks – i.e. imperialists.

Landowners are required to raise rents and business owners are required to keep wages low because they are controlled by imperialists. This is true of the petit and the haute bourgeois. The petit bourgeois have much less choice in the matter; the haute bourgeois are complicit.

Lenin wrote about this problem, too:

(drop down) Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

Chapter 1 (bold and numbers in square brackets added for emphasis and clarity):

Less than one-hundredth [1%] of the total number of enterprises utilise more than three-fourths [3/4] of the total amount of steam and electric power! Two million nine hundred and seventy thousand [2,970,000] small enterprises (employing up to five workers), constituting 91 per cent of the total, utilise only 7 per cent of the total amount of steam and electric power! Tens of thousands of huge enterprises are everything; millions of small ones are nothing.

…As we shall see, money capital and the banks make this superiority of a handful of the largest enterprises still more overwhelming, in the most literal sense of the word, i.e., millions of small, medium and even some big “proprietors” are in fact in complete subjection to some hundreds of millionaire financiers.

In another advanced country of modern capitalism, the United States of America, the growth of the concentration of production is still greater. … Almost half the total production of all the enterprises of the country was carried on by one-hundredth part [1%] of these enterprises! These 3,000 giant enterprises embrace 258 branches of industry. From this it can be seen that at a certain stage of its development concentration itself, as it were, leads straight to monopoly, for a score [i.e. 20] or so of giant enterprises can easily arrive at an agreement, and on the other hand, the hindrance to competition, the tendency towards monopoly, arises from the huge size of the enterprises. This transformation of competition into monopoly is one of the most important—if not the most important—phenomena of modern capitalist economy, and we must deal with it in greater detail. …

Breaking monopolies?

You might then retort, ‘Break the monopolies; reintroduce competition’. Except it’s been tried before and failed every time. Without abolishing capitalist social relations, we end up back where we started. Lenin:

(drop down) ‘The critique of imperialism’

Source

The questions as to whether it is possible to reform the basis of imperialism, whether to go forward to the further intensification and deepening of the antagonisms which it engenders, or backward, towards allaying these antagonisms, are fundamental questions in the critique of imperialism. Since the specific political features of imperialism are reaction everywhere and increased national oppression due to the oppression of the financial oligarchy and the elimination of free competition, a petty-bourgeois-democratic opposition to imperialism arose at the beginning of the twentieth century in nearly all imperialist countries. …

In the United States, the imperialist war waged against Spain in 1898 stirred up the opposition of the “anti-imperialists,” … But as long as all this criticism shrank from recognising the inseverable bond between imperialism and the trusts, and, therefore, between imperialism and the foundations of capitalism, while it shrank from joining the forces engendered by large-scale capitalism and its development, it remained a “pious wish”.

…The petty-bourgeois point of view in the critique of imperialism, the omnipotence of the banks, the financial oligarchy, etc., is adopted by [several] authors[,] … who make no claim to be Marxists, contrast imperialism with free competition and democracy … which is leading to conflicts and war, utter “pious wishes” for peace, etc. …

“It is not the business of the proletariat,” writes Hilferding “to contrast the more progressive capitalist policy with that of the now bygone era of free trade and of hostility towards the state. The reply of the proletariat to the economic policy of finance capital, to imperialism, cannot be free trade, but socialism. The aim of proletarian policy cannot today be the ideal of restoring free competition—which has now become a reactionary ideal—but the complete elimination of competition by the abolition of capitalism.”

…And monopolies have already arisen—precisely out of free competition!

Conclusion

Businesses, large and small, do not keep wages low because rents are too high. Rather, they do so partly because they are controlled by imperialists who insist that landowners increase rents and that employers keep wages as low as possible. If rents are ever capped or lowered, employers keep the extra as profit; they rarely pass it on (without a union fight). This is how imperialists control every facet of the consumer process to reap maximum profits.