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Taxing
Problem
Dear Editors
In "My Cupboard is Bare" (Letters, Socialist Standard, November) the
letter writer states many inaccuracies - "he doubled the income-tax
burden on the poorest earners in society." - "The working-poor, whose
income-tax he doubled, do not bother to vote, (as he knows) for we, the
low-paid, realise that there is no-one worth voting for." -
"Middle-England, on middle incomes, voted Labour into power, and for
that voting-base income-tax was reduced in an attempt to retain support
for the Labour." - "If the British government makes yet another
"mistake" of having ordinary hard-working British citizens bail-out
British banks and the greedy millionaires who helped cause the
problem...". This might be worthy of comment.
GLASGOW BRANCH
Reply:
We published the letter as an expression of opinion by a discontented
worker. We agree that it is inaccurate to imply that income tax is a
burden on the working class and that it is workers who are bailing out
the banks.
Workers are exploited at the point of production but are paid more or
less the value of the working skills they sell, i.e., enough to buy
what they need to reproduce and replace them. If the government imposes
a tax on wages, this will eventually, after a struggle, be passed on to
employers as the cost of reproducing the workers' skills will have gone
up.
In any event, in Britain, most workers don't even personally pay income
tax as they do other taxes by going to the post office or writing a
cheque as this is deducted at source by the employer and paid by them
to the government. In this case what is important is take-home pay.
This said, when the government does change income tax the take-home pay
of some individual workers can go up or down for a time, and did go
down in the case the letter writer mentioned.
Although the money to bail out the banks will have ultimately come out
of the surplus value extracted from the working class, it has not done
so directly – the capitalist employer extracts the surplus
value, part of which is paid to the government as taxes, some of which
was used to bail out the banks – Editors.
In place of capitalism
Recently the word ‘capitalism’ seems to be on
everyone’s lips. The main reason for this is probably that
capitalism – also known as ‘the economy’
or ‘the market system’ is going through a bad
patch. The Labour government’s claim to have ended the cycle
of boom and bust has been proved disastrously wrong. The last boom,
during which food, energy, house and stock market prices rose at
unsustainably high rates, has given way to bust.
As usual, workers are the main victims. Many of us have lost our jobs,
can’t get new ones or can’t enter the labour force
for the first time. We have seen our outgoings soar, our incomes
squeezed, even our homes repossessed. Even if we have so far personally
avoided the worst of these fates, the worry that we may not continue to
do so can be very stressful.
Who or what is to blame for this sorry state of affairs? More
constructively, how can it be put right? Only the pitifully small
socialist media insist that we need to replace capitalism with
socialism. All the other media, which shout so much louder than we can,
say things like “We’ve got the wrong kind of
capitalism” or “Some people (bankers) have been too
greedy.”
There is a widespread and heavily promoted belief that
‘capitalism is the only game in town.’ Anyone who
disputes this, for example by advocating that all goods and services
should be available on the basis of need, not ability to pay, is
dismissed as idealistic or utopian. It is a classic case of
self-fulfilling prophecy: support (or at least acquiesce in) the way
things are organised today and tomorrow will be more or less the same.
But it doesn’t have to be.
Socialists urge that it is futile to try to reform capitalism
– the whole system needs to be scraped and replaced by
something better. As we explain in our pamphlet Socialism as a
Practical Alternative, this means being as constructive as possible,
not destructive. For example, such bodies as the World Health
Organisation and the Universal Postal Union can be adapted for
socialist purposes.
We have as our object the establishment of socialism. In a sense this
is true, but we also talk about a socialist movement in the here and
now. Every month we say in this journal ‘we are solely
concerned with building a movement of socialists for
socialism.’ We distribute paper and electronic
publications, give talks, take part in debates, run educational events,
make films, and much more.
With more members – and particularly active members
– we could do things and on a scale we are prevented from
doing for lack of human and other resources. For example, we could set
up socialist publishing houses producing, promoting and distributing
paper and electronic literature. We could organise socialist
educational networks at different levels: schools, colleges,
universities, distance learning – for potential socialist
citizenship, not capitalist employment. Other activities will no doubt
be suggested, tried out and perhaps become widespread – who
knows?
The point is that more of us will come to realise that we all live in
the real world, not with submission to endure it but with imagination
to revolutionise it.
STAN PARKER
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