Whose command is the government under?

In the US, poor Trump thinks that he returned to lead the country through his own extraordinary skills and personal superhuman qualities. Alas!

I wonder, if it weren't for the anti-social devil known as Elon Musk and his ilk, could the tightrope-walking Trump, carrying the burden of conviction on his back, have come to power through the free votes of the people? Given the circumstances he was in, let alone coming to power, under normal conditions, Trump should have been rotting in a dungeon.

Ralph Miliband, one of the researchers who examined the relationship between capitalism and politics after the Second World War, explains the state's relationship with capital by saying that large capital companies infiltrate various government departments to get their business done from within the state. Nicos Poulantzas goes even further, writing that in bourgeois governments, there is no need to even plant people inside, as capitalist states are under the command of capital/the bourgeoisie.

Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in the US, who has set out to examine this issue, published a book whose main title is "Rigged"—which could mean equipment or hardware—and whose subtitle is, somewhat lengthily, "How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the Richer Richer."

This book has shown that bourgeois states are clearly under the command of capital, even surpassing Bob Jessop and James O’Connor, and even the duo of Baran and Sweezy, who defined imperialism.

In the Appendix at the end of the book, he writes which representatives of the 100 largest US companies are placed in which government departments and what kind of work they are responsible for.

In the explanation of the table, there is this interesting statement: "These directors may be useful to their companies in terms of contracting or setting regulatory rules related to [government-corporate] political connections, but it is doubtful that these connections mean the companies are well-managed and beneficial to shareholders."

The access information for the book is as follows; those who wish can take a look, and even the members of the group known as the "gang of five" can benefit from this information to increase the level of their effectiveness in their anti-social activities!

                Dean Baker (2016), Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were

                                                      Structured to Make the Richer Richer,

                                                      Center for Economic and Policy Research, Washington, D.C.

                                                      Research

While the misery of capitalism is evident, can retirees and laborers in Turkey be better off than their current situation? Well, are we going to sit back because these segments cannot be better off under these conditions? Of course not! Of course, we will try to claim our rights. However, we must obtain what we believe to be our rights in the short term, but we must also grow in our consciousness that our rights are not limited to what we want in the short term and shout it out strongly.

We must reach the consciousness that our rights, determined by the limits of the system, capital, and even trade union organizations, do not represent all of our rights. With this understanding, it is necessary to try to achieve trade union rights as a first step, but we must definitely keep politicization on the target for all of our rights.

The social opinion regarding the reflection of the burden placed on laborers and retirees by the decisions of politicians onto society is that this situation is related to the government's preference for resource allocation.

This perception is the result of the capitalist system's maneuver to save itself by pushing the malice of capital into the background and placing political agents in between. In a society where the total number of laborers and retirees as a crowd is greater than the bourgeois class, can it be seen as politically logical for governments chasing votes to neglect the large class and feed the small bourgeois class? It cannot be seen as such, but the truth of the matter is that the preferences reflected in public budgets are not the free political choices of governments, but political decisions made according to economic preferences under the command of domestic and foreign exploitative capital.

In short, the political decisions valid in capitalism are not the deceptive 'political democracy decisions' put forward by the French Revolution, but rather pro-capital political decisions that also eliminate the 'economic democracy' principle that prioritizes labor against the power of capital, which emerged during the 1840 British industrial revolution.

In the bourgeois system, which excludes political democracy and destroys economic democracy, what is important is not the number of votes, but economic power. Thus, the short-term demand for rights must be filled with demands for a populist system with such an understanding of the underlying fabric. Since this demand is related to the system, it goes beyond trade union struggle and enters the field of political struggle.

Let's look at the situation. What is the government doing through its spokesperson Şimşek, or rather, in which direction is it trying to steer things?

As the discussions regarding the tax regulations and the minimum wage mentioned at the outset heat up, strangely enough, our people think that the existing government is crushing them and that some improvements can be made with a change of government, without making any changes to the system and policy format.

It may be; the erasure of the AKP from the field of power could lead to some partial and short-term positives in justice, education, and even the tax and expenditure system, but the possible measures that can be taken are doomed to be within certain limits. The reason for this is that our current predicament stems from a systemic collapse. Interestingly, this collapse is not unique to us, but is a problem that applies to the global capitalist system in general. The reason why the problem is felt more mildly in advanced countries and more severely in ours is that we are at different stages of economic development. In fact, the rapid collapse experienced by peripheral economies like ours while transferring resources to the center is reflected in advanced countries as the maintenance of stability in their welfare levels.

While this is the general picture, is it not understandable that Mehmet Şimşek proudly puts forward the thesis that the tax burden in Turkey is 20.8%, which is lower than the 34% in OECD countries and 41.2% in European Union countries? But Şimşek does not do this: what share capital receives from the national income, what share laborers receive, and to what extent the segments possessing these shares contribute to tax revenue.

This ratio, known in public finance literature as the "tax pressure," turns out to be extremely high for laborers and extremely low for capital. We can confirm the tax pressure phenomenon, which can be revealed through detailed research at the doctoral thesis level, with Şimşek's own news. Namely, the weight of indirect taxes in the tax system, alongside the exemptions and amnesties granted to capital income, is proof that the tax pressure on laborers and retirees is higher than the tax pressure on capital. Especially, the relative narrowness of tax brackets in the progressive tariff and the worsening of the tax burden on laborers from the beginning of the year to the end make the distribution of the burden entirely unfair.

The appearance of both revenue and expenditure items in the budget clearly reveals whose command the government is under. However, since the net system is valid in the budget, the amount of tax expenditure created by tax offsets or amnesties and privileges granted to the capital segment cannot be seen. Thus, the state intervenes between capital and labor and the people, masking the intensity of capital's exploitation of the people. The interest burden that build-operate-transfer or public-private partnerships impose on the budget is perceived as a budget burden or budget deficit, ensuring that the malicious games of capital remain off-stage.

When social capital power is in the hands of certain segments, these segments also have the power to lighten their tax burdens and secure certain privileges. The main issue, as a condition of true democracy, is to socialize capital power and to grant political weight to every segment of society not according to their economic power, but according to their social weight.

Note: I apologize to my valued readers for the delay in sending my article due to my absent-mindedness.