Not So Taxing Surely?

A repeated argument, put by Trade Union leaders, over recent months, has been that the Deficit could be covered by simply collecting the £120 billion, in unpaid taxes, owed by the rich and big companies. I agree. But then, such a suggestion is not that radical is it? In the election campaign, even the Liberals argued that they would plug part of the gap by collecting in just part of that £120 billion, they talked about collecting around a quarter of it. And people have looked askance at the fact that part of Greece's problems has arisen as a result of its failure to collect the taxes owed to it. Surely in Britain we should be able to collect the taxes that are owed. We have a large Civil Service, which employs lots of people, and even more complicated equipment in the form of computers etc linked up to all kinds of systems.

But, then I'm puzzled. The Trades Unions keep arguing for such a solution, even the Liberals propose such a solution. So the obvious question is, why isn't the tax being collected??? The Left in Britain frequently talks about "Workers Control", when it puts forward reactionary demands for Nationalisation. It used to argue for greater democracy and workers control, when it spoke about defending existing State Capitalist enterprises and services, though it has dropped such demands, of later years, as it sunk into just tailing the State bureaucracy. The PCS is a union with what is supposed to be a leadership of that same Left. And, of course, it is PCS members who are responsible for collecting those taxes, operating those computers etc.

So,why doesn't the PCS, with its Left leadership, simply put into practice its own rhetoric over "Workers Control"? Why doesn't the PCS leadership, with the backing of the whole TU Movement, and with the verbal authority of one of the Government Coalition parties - the Liberals - simply put in place a small piece of Workers Control over its members Work Process? All the leadership need do is to issue an instruction, to its own members in HMRC, to so organise their work process so as to prioritise the collection of this £120 billion.

I'm sure that if it announced what it was going to do, it would be the one single most popular action the Trade Union Movement could make to oppose the Cuts. It would have massive support, not only amongst workers, but within the ranks of the middle classes, who must be really pissed off that every Government taxes them while the Capitalists and super rich get away tax free! That after all is one of the positive Lessons Of UCS, which was occupied and run under workers control when its workers were facing closure. As I wrote there,

"More importantly, that response was to refuse to accept the sanctity of Capitalist property. One of the fundamental aspects of Marx's analysis of Capital as a social relation is that unlike previous modes of production, where the producer employed the means of production, under capitalism it is the other way around, it is Capital – dead labour – which employs living labour. Labour is allowed to work, only at the discretion of Capital, despite the fact that in its physical form as factories, machines, tools etc. this Capital is itself the product of Labour, of workers.

A fundamental aspect then of challenging Capitalist society is to break that social relationship, to break the domination of Labour by Capital. By seizing control of the shipyards that is what the UCS workers did. They asserted the right of living labour over dead labour, of Labour over Capital. They basically said, these yards, these cranes, this welding equipment and so on have been made by us the workers as a class, we refuse to accept that we can only work at the discretion of the needs of that Capital, whose function should, on the contrary, be to serve our needs. And, that message was further amplified by their decision to do just that – to continue to work, to employ those pieces of equipment – rather than to strike. In so doing they stopped that equipment being Capital, ended its dominance over them, and reduced it to its proper place, as simply means of production, to be used by the workers."

That is what such a decision would mean here. It does not change anything that the Capital exercising a power over workers is State owned Capital. The offices, computers etc., owned by the bosses' state, still exercise that power, over the workers in the Tax Office, as surely as if they worked in McDonalds. There is no reason that the computers and so on should tell the Tax workers what their work on any day should be, whose tax they should collect. The workers themselves should collectively make that decision, and use those machines for what they are, tools at the disposal of the workers, not vice versa.

There is nothing standing in the way of the PCS collecting this tax, apart from its own failure to decide to do so. No change in the law is required. This £120 billion is owed under existing Tax Laws. The PCS should just take a collective decision to, and instruct its members to do no less than simply do their job and collect it.