Paris is Burning: A Cautionary Tale about the Politics of Value

This chapter provides a discussion of certain features in the history of value theory. It details the story about corporate tax reform. The Physiocratic school theorised value as being created in the agricultural sector and modelled its onward circulation in other sectors in the form of agricultural produce. Alongside the expansion of the theoretical demesne of value into the domestic space, its expansion into the cultural space may also be understood as something political and historically contingent, and indeed likewise rooted in the end of the post-war “golden age”. Once upon a time there was a period of growing public uproar over the apparent scale of corporate tax abuse. The abuse was particularly, although by no means exclusively, associated with US web giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, and it seemingly amounted to a crisis of legitimacy for the entire international corporate tax system.