“We are all complicit,” Nathan Robinson of Current Affairs wrote recently regarding the war in Iran. “If you are an American, you paid your government to murder those little girls and those Tehran cafe-goers. Money was withdrawn from your paycheck in the form of federal income taxes.” He goes on to do some missile purchase accounting to further a rather axiomatic point: tax dollars tie us to our government’s actions: to the war in Iran, the genocide in Palestine, and the twenty-odd years of who knows what in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At face value, I can’t say it makes much sense to think that my median-income adjacent tax contributions funded the massacre of schoolgirls. Moreover, I — alongside Robinson and much of the nation — are not complicit in war and genocide through the faux umbilical cord of federal taxes. What I am, rather, is increasingly tired of virtue signaling by self-flagellation (a turn of phrase I should credit to my sister).

There are two main issues with Robinson’s complicity narrative, one of which is material and the other psychosocial in nature. But there’s also the literal meaning of the word: if you didn’t support or personally conspire in the war on Iran or in Israel’s carnage around the Middle East, then you simply aren’t “complicit.” Yet instead of releasing ourselves from shame-infused soliloquies and toward the harder job of creating effective resistance, we insist on hitting ourselves over the head with such terms like a 2×4.

My argument here is not that we shouldn’t be desperately spurring action against the war in Iran. That’s exactly what’s needed. But it’s worth stressing that the terms of said action are important. The idea of “complicity” isn’t helpful here. The war on Iran is, like many things, partisanly understood. We know by now from personal and political outcomes that calling people out as “complicit” doesn’t land on the doorsteps of the other side. It’s something the Left should have learned by now: to think hard about what kind of psyches and strategies this approach to people incentivizes.

To make this point clearer, let’s use an example. Follow a young man, born in 1960s Tehran but escaped during the revolution, leaving his family behind, fleeing to Europe and then ultimately landing in the United States, now an American citizen. Who among us believes that his income taxes make him “complicit” in the bombing of his motherland?

There’s No Money. . . for Who?

Robinson is not alone in this. Esteemed sociologist Victoria Reyes penned an apology last year addressed to Palestinians. In it, she wrestles with the idea that her tax dollars are “used to slaughter and maim” the Palestinian people. The piece is moving. But it is this schema that forms the root of much of our resistance: taxes pay for wars. To address the material issue with our complicity-through-taxation narrative, we have to revisit a recently retired macroeconomic framework: modern monetary theory (MMT).

After several years of debate in this magazine and every other, the inflation of post-COVID funding packages finally laid MMT to rest. As a reminder, this theory posits that governments are not constrained in their spending by what they can tax. The idea that decision-makers are bound in this way, moreover, serves the interests of austerian politicians and budget hawks from both sides of the aisle.

I won’t retrace the argument in full here. What’s important for our purposes is that by 2022, we mistakenly threw the baby out with the bathwater. This isn’t an argument for MMT, which was a failed experiment. But it’s worth recognizing that, like other misguided systems theories, it hosted insights en route to false conclusions.

The enduring wisdom of MMT is that it reverses the order of federal spending. The government does not tax to spend; it spends to tax. Why does a rhetorical shift like this even matter?

Your taxes are the end of a dollar’s circulation, not the beginning; when a government wants to spend, in the words of Ben Bernanke, they use a few keystrokes and credit accounts, they won’t wait for your taxes to arrive by mail next month. Sovereign governments with sovereign currencies use taxation, successfully or otherwise, to stem inflationary pressures by manipulating the amount of currency in circulation, direct our course of action as currency users, and redistribute capital according to their priorities.

To believe otherwise is to provide fodder for the household finance fallacy of federal spending. President Barack Obama advanced an idea, staring down a global recession, when he was asked by the press, “At what point do we run out of money?” “Well,” he responded, “we are out of money now.” It’s a more digestible way of saying we are out of money for you. Spending has inflationary constraints, but we’ve come to be self-governed by the idea that we are in need of balanced budgets or that current deficits will be the ball and chain around the ankle of future generations.

For me, it’s a humbling thought experiment. What if the American war machine doesn’t run on our inputs? Downstream of that thought, we might conclude that our tax dollars couldn’t fund the last three decades of global warmaking — if we wanted them to, if we were all somehow complicit; it’s above our pay grade, literally and figuratively. The global bond-buying class — and the fictive cabal of oligarchic asset managers — which purchases our excess spending possess the power of financial protest that we are ascribing to ourselves as taxpayers. When bond markets talk, governments listen; but so long as the appetite for treasuries remains, there is little connection between our taxes and the missiles landing across Iran.

The Implied Class Analysis of Constant Complicity

I sense something similar in the “our taxes make us complicit in war” to Matthew Desmond’s recent reflections on poverty as a phenomena created and recreated through the middle class’s tacit consent. I reviewed his book for Jacobin here. The math in both cases doesn’t math. More than a quarter of the country qualifies for earned income tax credits (EITC), meaning their income tax impact is negative to say nothing of filling government coffers, if we were to suspend our prior analysis for a moment. Unfortunately, we’d prefer to conjure up our own class distinctions along marginal income differentials and do so inaccurately. One might’ve mistakenly thought that the fourth or fifth wave of white-collar wipeouts at Block would lead us toward new class alignments.

The bottom half of income earners make up about 2 to 4 percent of income tax receipts. Meanwhile 2 to 3 percent of income earners at the top pay out over 50 percent of federal income tax revenues. What’s harder than compulsive self-involvement in the ongoing genocide in Palestine or the unjust war in Iran is wrestling, rather, with our own obsolescence in it all. They don’t ask our (or Congress’s) consent, need our tax dollars, or give a damn what we do at all so long as we aren’t resurrecting lost labor unions. Since at least 2014 and the onset of Black Lives Matter, in various ways, we’ve been smashing the individual guilt, complicity, and accountability button — but to what end?

Think about it like this: we have two conceptual options. If we go the “our taxes fund war” route, we walk ourselves into a labyrinth where the elite are the truly indispensable members of society, the donors for all of our downstream social welfare programs. After all, taxes pay for government expenditures, right? For a taste of this, look at all the handwringing about billionaires leaving New York City after Zohran Mamdani’s election. With subsequent Trump administrations, we forget that the federal government could simply begin channeling funds to local governments again to avoid this insufferable condition. We did it during COVID-19, it worked, and we could do it again.

Alternatively, we can take the MMT analysis, without its call for endless quantitative easing, and find that investments in the productive economy pay themselves back in GDP growth. We can walk and chew gum at the same time with this issue, like supporting Bernie Sanders and Ro Khanna’s coming wealth tax bill and not acting as though those dollars are literally what will fund our welfare or health care projects. If we see the consent of the elite as the ticket to a new New Deal program or the funding of a federal jobs guarantee, we’ll forever be beholden to their veto or exit.

Maybe if you own a few hundred or a few thousand shares in Lockheed Martin or Palantir, we can have a different conversation about complicity. But otherwise we must stop regurgitating this maladroit paradigm at some point. It doesn’t take much mental effort to imagine myself walking through the south side of St Louis and informing folks that their taxes implicate them in an imperial project several shores away. How does this conversation go? This isn’t political education; it’s showering in public.

Government debt, a point the MMT-ists often make, could just as easily be called nongovernment surplus; every debit on the federal government balance sheet is a credit on someone else’s books. The fight, then, should be over who gets the investment — not getting stuck on how we will pay for it. On the other side of the coin, we must continue to ask ourselves what antiwar activism and effective communication might look like without the schema of federal taxation as personal complicity.

Our failure to do so up to now feels more or less emblematic of a nation bereft of unions and functional communities, where we’ve simply run out of ways to experience collective power over any level of rogue government action. In such a vacuum, individual pleas of guilt ring hollow.