This post is part of a dossier of texts “On Not Hating the State” that was initially generated for a panel with a similar title, “On (Not) Hating the State”, and organized by Rebecca Oh, at the 2026 American Comparative Literature Association Conference in Montréal.
On Taxes
Bruce Robbins
How does the slogan “tax the rich!” sound to you? New York City under its new Mayor Zohran Mamdani is not the only place where that slogan has been resounding lately, though of course it has run into stiff opposition, not all of it on the right—for example, from Gavin Newsom in California. If “tax the rich” sounds to you like a proposition that’s at least worth discussing—I’ll accept variants like “tax the 1%” or “tax the billionaires” or “tax secondary residences worth more than five million dollars”—then we might not have much to talk about, at least politically speaking. I mean, you may hate the state, but if you acknowledge as plausible the imperative to tax the rich in order to achieve a more equal redistribution of society’s goods and resources, you would also be accepting the state as the agent of that redistribution. Redistribution needs an agent. The state is the best agent of redistribution we have, perhaps the only agent. Politically speaking, end of story.[1]
If we may not have much to talk about, politically speaking, we may still have something to talk about when it comes to how the politics of the state connects with literature. That’s trickier. I took a stab at that question in my book Upward Mobility and the Common Good, where I tried—I don’t know how successfully—to read the emergent sensibility of welfare state institutions into the role of the mentor/mediator slot in the upward mobility story, as the figure who makes the protagonist’s upward mobility possible, a reading that is implausibly formal given the representational way the question about the state’s connection with literature is typically posed.[2] I’m sure other people have better ideas: ideas about how literature helps display not just that our intimacies are shaped by the social flows and structures around us, but that our intimacies are shaped by collective decision-making, however alien to personal experience the decision-making and the decisions appear.
In spite of general agreement on the need to appeal to the state as a provider of socially necessary services and a potential agent of redistribution, then, and thus also presumably agreement against the defunding and dismantling of the federal bureaucracy, the agents we have, it’s possible that we do still have things to talk about, politically speaking. Because there exists, of course, a lot of anti-bureaucratic feeling among progressive people. And there exists of course the old idea that a radically egalitarian redistribution would require something like a revolution, a revolution to topple all that bureaucratic machinery and overthrow the power of the state. I’m not sure there are many who would still want to pursue this argument, the prospects for revolution in the US being as unpromising as they are; but if so, I think it’s worth saying that for such a revolutionary event to happen, for a revolution to happen that would not fall back into authoritarian coercion, that is, for a successful revolution to happen, that revolution would first have to have won large-scale approval of the program of redistributing society’s goods and services in an egalitarian fashion. It would have had to establish radical redistribution as common sense, just as the graduated income tax very gradually established itself as common sense, and over stiff opposition. In other words, “tax the rich!” would have to have become common sense even among those who remain skeptical that the taxing powers of the state could ever serve as the proper agent of radical redistribution. One reason for staging this discussion at a conference devoted to literary culture is literature’s role in helping to shape a society’s common sense.
A recent essay by Michael Denning called “Tax Forms” is frankly skeptical that taxes can serve any desirable social purpose.[3] I suspect that the essay speaks to shared hesitations both about taxation and about the state in general. For Denning, it is a mistake to see the state as an agent to rein in the power of capital, even when forced to do so by pressure from below—as in my view it was forced by pressure from below to create and maintain welfare institutions. One key move in this argument is that Denning rejects the differentiation between the economic and the political. For him, the economic and the political are one; taxation by the state is just another means of exploitation, working alongside exploitation by corporations. There is no daylight between corporations and the state. The state is corporations; corporations are the state. (Literature is one agent allowing us to see some daylight between corporations and the state.) But if there is no separation between corporations and the state, then it is not wrong to hate the state, and the fact that it is the anti-statist right, not the left, that has made tax revolt a crucial part of its program is not an argument against tax revolts. On the contrary, the implication would be—this is just an implication, not something Denning actually says–that the right has been right to organize revolts against taxation, and following its lead might be a winning strategy for the left.
I don’t much like Denning’s argument, but I suspect that others will look more positively on it than I do, and not just because, as Denning does not need to say, the state has so often used its power shamelessly on behalf of enhancing corporate profit and to diminish the power of workers. If people are ready to assume, with Denning, that it’s a waste of time to try to glimpse any daylight between the interests of the state and the interests of the corporations, one reason might be a strong impulse, in the humanities, to reject distinctions like that between the economic and the political. The proposition presents itself to us more frequently with culture taking the place of politics, so that what’s rejected is a separation between the economic and the cultural. It may look like economics, but it’s turtles of culture all the way down. (On the left, we have to deal with the symmetrical illusion that it’s turtles of economics all the way down.) We who work in the cultural disciplines tend to smile upon the merging of the cultural with the economic, if only because what happens in culture can thereby borrow some of the aura of significance enjoyed by politics. What I’m trying to say, translating back from culture-and-economics to politics-and-economics, is that there is a cost to this refusal of distinction: the cost of losing the state as a potential political agent, an agent that’s not entirely separate from the corporate economy but that’s separate enough from the corporate economy so that, if pushed hard enough, it can be mobilized to rein in and regulate the corporate economy. Unsurprisingly, anti-statism being as entrenched in common sense as it is, the place to look for such a logic, however fragmentary, is among the comeuppances of greedy corporate villains in science fiction.
To my mind, the state/ corporation issue is of a piece with that of whether a line can be drawn between modernity and whatever came before modernity—the Bruno Latour, “we have never been modern” issue. (I had to take this issue on in writing a book about atrocity, a word that could not exist in its modern meaning until attitudes toward conquest and toward violence against noncombatants had changed radically.[4] One of the most complicated themes we could get to, in terms of hating or not hating the state, would be the meta-history of violence, or violence and modernity, and the place in that history of the state, as Max Weber said, coming to enjoy a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence. Can we assume that the state only exercises violence but does not in the slightest degree restrain it?) For some time sentiment has run with Latour, and against the modern/pre-modern line. To the extent that it has, it has also had to downplay the emergence of the modern state as a distinctive and consequential actor on the world stage.
In postcolonial theory, for example, Robert Young argues that colonialism remains a primary force in the world, so many decades after the success of the national liberation struggles, and the reason is that colonialism imposed on its colonies the form of the modern state, a legacy which is responsible for endless chaos and suffering.[5] The state is the definitive injury that the West has inflicted on the non-West. I think Young is overstating this case, but he’s right that the modern state form is indeed distinctive and consequential. In her new book, Reading Better States: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South, Rebecca Oh very rightly insists that despite all the harm for which it is responsible, the intervention of the modern state remains a legitimate addressee of appeals for improvement: “complaint about and desire for the state are two sides of the same coin” (2).[6] Legitimate and, I would add, unprecedented. For better and for worse, and taking our distance from Latour, there is indeed a significant line between modern and pre-modern. And with the state, we are on the modern side of the line.
Within the discourse of Marxism, which is where Denning locates himself, his argument fits into a recent tendency to give more agency to the state in the history of capitalism—more agency, but agency that is entirely on capitalism’s side. This tendency is associated with the phrase “primary accumulation.” The argument is about the origins of capitalism. It goes, very roughly, like this: in order for capitalism to come into being, with some people forced to sell their labor and others in a position to buy it, the sellers had to be impoverished by being uprooted from the land and the buyers had to be rich. How did this happen? Marx’s answer is that the buyers didn’t get rich by frugality, as Adam Smith had suggested; they enriched themselves by uprooting and impoverishing the others, that is, by means of violence, conquest, coercion. Once capitalism is functioning smoothly, this originary violence can be forgotten; now the rich get richer merely by paying their workers less than the value of their labor. That is, by exploitation, not by expropriation. Marx puts the discussion of primal accumulation at the very end of the first volume of Capital in order, it seems, to suggest that violence was a one-time moment, and that after this, capitalism would work mainly by peaceful exploitation, not by violent expropriation. The recent tendency in and around Marxist theory has gone in the opposite direction. Influenced by historians of colonialism and of slavery, thinkers have tended to see violent expropriation not merely as a founding moment that is then superseded–—no Manchester without Mississippi– but as a permanent factor in capitalism’s functioning. As Sandro Mezzadra puts it, “whatever happened for the first time at the origin of capitalism must logically repeat itself every day: this apparent paradox prevents us from seeing the historical time of the capitalist mode of production as merely linear and progressive” (104).[7] Those who are convinced that history cannot be “merely linear and progressive” will be drawn to this argument. Those who get stuck on the “merely,” less so. In any case, if you consider yourself progressive, you might want to reconsider: there is no doubt that history is not merely linear, but there is also no doubt that in some sense history is linear and indeed irreversible. Since the state is a and perhaps the primary dispenser of coercion and violence, the shift from primal, one-time accumulation to permanent accumulation gives the state a bigger role not just in capitalism’s history, but in its ongoing functioning. In this way lots of agency is attributed to the state, but it’s unambiguous bad-guy agency. It’s not the sort of relatively autonomous agency that would encourage strategies of redistributive taxation, or Wisconsin-style sewer socialism, as progressive goals.
In spite of my anxiety that all this may be too inside-baseball, I go on to one more facet of Denning’s argument in “Tax Forms.” Why doesn’t Denning see much promise in the precedent of the graduated income tax? For one thing, he says, because most Americans never fill out form 1040. “For three-quarters of US workers, the payroll tax—a pure wage tax—is the major tax, not the federal income tax. Thus, the famous 1040 form is not your tax form: or rather this document is part of what Marx called ‘the religion of everyday life,’” that is, one of “a host of fetishisms and mystifications.” There is no doubt that, as Denning goes on to say, the tax system brings into being the political identity of the taxpayer, and the political identity of the taxpayer does lend itself to possible mystifications. There is a dangerous illusion of equality in the idea that we all have our wages taxed given how much more income goes untaxed because it doesn’t come from wages but from investments, from wealth.
Still, when Denning inveighs against the payroll tax as “the major tax” on the majority of American workers, he is not saying something that in the context of hating or not hating the state very much needs saying. Money from the payroll tax goes directly into the funding of Social Security and Medicare, that is, into provision for old age and ill health for people whose old age and ill health are not otherwise provided for. I would not claim that Social Security and Medicare are fragments or foretastes of socialist utopia. But I’m simple-minded enough to deduce, from right-wing opposition to Social Security when FDR signed it into law in 1935 and onward to the present, and from the dismantling of so much of the federal bureaucracy that we have seen under the present administration, that the state has been doing things that the corporations have never wanted done. There are more things we can get it to do. The state is in crisis. We shouldn’t let the crisis go to waste.
There are many who feel, in Stefan Collini’s words, that taxation is a kind of “protection racket: pay up, and we’ll look after you.”[8] The assumption is “that the money is emphatically mine, and I’m prepared to let the government ‘take’ a portion only if in return it provides security and other services from which I benefit. But the basis of our existing tax system can’t be as simple as that even if, for the moment, for the moment, we leave aside the question of how the money came to be ‘mine’ in the first place’” (15). “Taxation is sometimes scanted,” Collini goes on, “as a superficial form of social-democratic tinkering that leaves the underlying structure of economic power untouched” (18). But if a focus on taxation can help raise “the question of how the money came to be ‘mine’ in the first place,” we will be doing more than tinkering. Consider this an invitation to join the hunt for examples.
Bruce Robbins is Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. He has authored several books, among them Criticism and Politics: A Polemical Introduction (Stanford, 2022). He is a long-time member of the b2 and b2o editorial boards.
[1] On the confused and confusing politics of taxation in the US, see Andrea Louise Campbell, Taxation and Resentment: Race, Party, and Class in American Tax Attitudes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2025.
[2] Bruce Robbins, Upward Mobility and the Common Good: Toward a Literary History of the Welfare State. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
[3] Michael Denning, “Tax-Forms,” in The Future of Totality: Fredric Jameson and the Prospects of Critical Theory.
Ed. Nicholas Brown, Maria Elisa Cevasco, Fabio Akcelrud Durão, and Robert T. Tally Jr. Durham: Duke University Press, 2026.
[4] Bruce Robbins, Atrocity: A Literary History. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2025.
[5] Robert J.C. Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001
[6] Rebecca Oh, Reading Better States: Utopian Method and Environmental Harm in the Global South. NY: Fordham University Press, 2026.
[7] Sandro Mezzadra, In the Marxian Workshops: Producing Subjectivity. Trans Yari Lanci. Rowman and Littlefield, London. 2018.
[8] Stefan Collini, “Where To Draw the Line,” The London Review of Books, 19 October 2023, 15-18.