Tory Oliver Letwin, on the other hand, chose this week to try and help business put yet another boot in: this time in the guise of tax structure.
Companies doing business in the UK already contribute less than in any other country in Europe, but this wasn’t enough for Mr. Letwin, who believes those much-maligned do-gooders the rich are being “squeezed for every penny” by being forced to pay VAT. He described the
Government tax laws as “effectively providing a subsidy of 17.5% to people who want to go offshore”. Quite unsurprisingly, his desire is to reduce the “tax burden” on businesses operating here!

A Tory solution, but like so many others, implemented with vigour by a Labour Party eager to please it’s corporate masters. Capitalist control has already managed to reduce the average level of corporate tax in the 30 richest countries from 37.5% to 30.8% in just seven years. A report on this change by accountancy firm KPMG argued that the “competitive advantage in attracting inward investment was at risk” if the government didn’t further slash the tax rate.

Along with politicians eager to do the work of capital, these threats help the capitalist class displace cost from its own shoulders and onto ours. Professor Prem Sikka, a leading accountancy specialist, estimates that up to £85bn is lost to the treasury each year just through the use of offshore tax havens. The Economist reported that in the four years to June 2003, Murdoch's News Corporation paid £128m in corporate taxes worldwide. That translates as just 6% of the pre-tax profits for the same period, despite no country in which it operated having a tax rate of less than 30%. During the nineties, he paid a
grand total of no tax whatsoever in the UK. For some reason, his mouthpieces the Times, the Sun and Sky seem to be much more interested in putting the spotlight on working class “dole scum” and asylum seekers than on their masters.

In addition to all the corporate lawyers and accountants marketing legal tax avoidance schemes to the boss class, business regularly pursues illegal routes to reduce tax payments. Whilst our communities are plastered with scare-tactic advertisements warning us that the benefits agency “are onto us”, the state seems remarkably less interested in pursuing tax cheating by the rich. Whilst the Benefit Fraud Inspectorate releases figures estimating that the unemployed manage to get up to £2 billion pounds a year fraudulently, Inland Revenue statistics reveal that the top 1000 businesses alone cheated by at least that amount last year.

But it is not just blame that gets targeted at us. The avoidance shifts the tax burden onto the working class, whose council and income taxes go up to compensate for the shortfall. Taxes extracted from workers increased by over 120% between 1989-90 and 2002-03, whereas corporate tax collection increased by just 36%, despite a massive rise in corporate profits. As property widow Leona Helmsley once said, “We don’t pay taxes. Only little people pay taxes”.

The anarchist case that parliamentary democracy is simply a method of managing society in the interests of capitalists is cast into sharp relief when the minutes of meetings between the Inland Revenue and top corporations reveal promises "not to examine in any detail" fraudulent tax payments. Companies have also been invited to rewrite the rulebook on how the Inland Revenue should investigate them. Unsurprisingly, the blind eyes shown to this behaviour are put down to the threat by capitalists to call a strike on nvestment (or ‘capital flight’ as it is euphemistically known). Insiders say the revenue has come under pressure from the government to attract multinational investment. As one said, "It may be very important to get business here, and tax may be part of that”.

In interrevolutionary historical periods like the one we are currently living through, the low intensity of class conflict means that the class war is rarely promulgated using guns and gallows. Class warfare today uses what Marx called a “refined and civilised method of exploitation”, using weapons like taxes, productivity deals and ‘outsourcing’ to grind us down. But the “little people” also have weapons - like our non-payment of the Poll Tax, and the intensity of our resistance to the ongoing attack is cyclical. It is all too easy to forget that interrevolutionary periods inevitable give way to periods of revolutionary activity. The little people will not put up with losing the class war forever.

by Mark Devine

Freedom, Anarchist News and Views is an anti-capitalist newspaper founded in 1886, published every two weeks. For a free sample copy to anywhere in the world email us on info (at) freedompress.org.uk