Anarchists oppose the state. But there is one area that anarchists sometimes neglect to criticise; that of taxation. It can seem that only right-wing (so-called) ‘libertarians’ oppose this area of state functioning. But anarchist opposition to taxation has a long history, from Proudhon, who as part of his famous quote stated that “To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction…taxed.” Peter Kropotkin supported tax resistors in France, and in Fields, Factories and Workshops wrote about farmers and how “taxation… keeps them always as near as possible to the margin of starvation.” In the more modern era, Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin writes in Anarchism and The Black Revolution that “the rich and their corporations pay virtually no taxes; it is the poor and workers who bear the brunt of taxation.”
Indeed, one of the most impressive working-class victories in the UK against the government in the last 40 years was against a tax – the poll tax. While this was co-ordinated by a Trotskyist group, and it was replaced by council tax, it would have had no traction at all if there was no groundswell of popular hatred against yet another unfair tax.
Ask any working-class person how much tax they’d really like to pay. The answer will likely be: none. Contrary to liberals who believe we are part of some kind of ‘social contract’, that we never signed or consented to, everybody knows, and not very far beneath the surface, that they are being robbed, swindled, purloined, plundered, and extorted.
We also know that the very great majority of tax is paid by the average person. The billionaire Warren Buffet once asked why he paid less tax than his cleaner. Amazon, which makes vast profits for itself and its founder, paid zero tax last year. The majority of tax is paid by the average working-class person.
Despite this injustice, and despite the obvious resentment, indignation and howling rage that taxation stokes up among people, criticism of taxation seems to appear relatively rarely in modern anarchist literature in the UK. Perhaps this is because opposition to taxation is such a preoccupation of the rich. But for the rich, this is because they are interested in preserving their wealth and power. We, on the other hand, are interested in creating a better world. So rather than argue with those who would argue that taxation is theft, we ought to agree with them – and point out that we’re happy robbing from the rich, rather than the stealing from the poor as under the current system.
The state, who administers the tax system, is essentially a mafia who actually accomplished its goal of taking control. And like the mafia, the government runs a protection racket; give us your taxes (known as ‘pizzo’ in Italian organised crime circles), and a portion of every transaction (we call it VAT, perhaps the most unjust of all the taxes) and we’ll “protect” you; or if not, we’ll come and commit acts of violence upon you, until you pay up. The cartels, such as the Camorra of Naples and the Matamoros of Mexico even provide social welfare to people in need, just as our state does. In Guadalajara, aid packages even bear the printed image of “El Chapo,” leader of the Sinaloa cartel.
Extorting poor people of what little money they have in return for dubious claims of ‘protection’, and claiming to help the poor via meagre welfare, appear to be additional definitions of the state, in addition to the primary one of claiming a monopoly on violence within a territory. Taxation is the grease by which this system turns. Let us oppose taxation on everyday people today, and lets destroy it and the entire capitalist system in the future.