California: tax the billionaires at 5%, without touching what makes them rich

According to Le Monde, voters in California are due to decide on Tuesday on an exceptional 5% wealth tax aimed at billionaires. The daily recalls that, in the United States, the debate over taxing wealth resurfaces whenever the accumulation of riches becomes exorbitant, and it places this referendum against a backdrop of rising inequality. The dispatch we have is brief: we do not know here the details of the text, the number of taxpayers affected, the expected yield or how the revenue would be spent. We will not invent them.

What follows is therefore our reading, not an established fact. And it begins with a clarification: this vote deserves to be taken seriously. Making those who hold the most pay, in the state that houses a large share of the American tech industry, is no small matter. If the yes side wins, it will be a political signal.

But look at what the tax targets: a stock of wealth, not the relationship that produces it. In Marxist analysis, a billionaire's fortune is not a jackpot that fell from the sky. It is, for the most part, the accumulated form of surplus value, that unpaid labour time workers supply beyond what covers their own reproduction. Record profits alongside stagnant wages: that is the relationship, made visible. A one-off 5% levy skims the result; it changes neither who owns the means of production, nor who decides what gets produced, nor how the value created each year is divided.

It will be objected that this is already not nothing. Granted. But the history of the wealth tax is one of modest exercises: the word "exceptional" in the title says a great deal. An exceptional tax is, by construction, a safety valve: it releases social pressure without altering the boiler. The wage relation, meanwhile, is renewed tomorrow morning, with its reserve army of unemployed and precarious workers that keeps the demands of those in work in check.

Note the vocabulary too. We read that debates "arise" when accumulation becomes "exorbitant", as if wealth swelled on its own, like the weather. This slight fetishism erases decisions: those of companies that set wages, of states that cut capital taxation, of shareholders who capture productivity gains. Inequalities do not "rise"; they are produced, and therefore revisable, but not only through the tax office.

The Californian test is thus twofold. First test: how far can a democratic society tax accumulated capital in the face of the usual threat of taxpayers leaving? Second test, more awkward: if 5% is enough to trigger such a battle, what would a discussion about property itself look like? Tax reform can correct the distribution at the margins. It says nothing about production. The result of the ballot: Tuesday night, subject to the details the dispatch does not give.