04.06.2008
'Green' taxes hit the buffers
A planned hike in fuel duty has run into trouble, with lorry drivers protesting. James Turley argues that communists must take the issues seriously
On Tuesday May 27, several major roads in England and Wales were paralysed by long queues of lorries. The M4 and the A40 in particular were severely obstructed. Estimates for the turnout range from 300 to 500 trucks.
The hauliers were protesting an increase in fuel duty of 2p per litre, originally slated for April, but delayed by the government until October. It was an echo of similar protests in 2000, an early attack on a then-strong Blair government.
This time, New Labour is in disarray on the matter. Several Labour backbenchers have demanded the scrapping of the 2p increase; some call for further cuts. In response, the treasury and cabinet ministers point out that the immediate cause of high petrol prices is the massive increase in the market price of crude oil.
Nevertheless, at present, diesel sells for between £1.15 and £1.40 per litre, of which 65p is fuel duty. Campaigners are demanding that this be slashed by 25p - in effect, a kind of fuel subsidy, with the state taking the hit from the soaring oil prices.
The issue has been complicated by its binding up with more general political questions on the roads. The truckers command quite wide support from automobile-owners, because targeted increases in road tax are also planned for owners of fuel-inefficient cars. This has drawn particular controversy, since the increases are partially retroactive - they apply to all cars purchased since 2001. While the 2p increase is not explicitly a ‘green’ measure, it has been seized on as such by the usual environmentalist campaign groups.
The bourgeois media is divided on the issue. The ‘liberal’ papers have generally opposed the protests: “Don’t be yellow, Gordon, be green,” suggested The Independent.1 The rightwing press has been more supportive, particularly that petty bourgeois bible, the Daily Mail, which ran a long article backing the truck protests on the same day.2 Unsurprisingly, the Mail focuses on the decline of “another once-proud British industry” in unabashedly chauvinist terms, together with all sorts of sound-bite sob stories from truckers and their families.
The Independent’s painting of the issue as a simple green matter is obviously misguided. People, to be blunt, do not drive trucks around for kicks. In the event that duty does go up significantly, no less fuel will be burnt by haulage companies - which will, rather obviously, attempt to pass on the increase to retailers. To the extent they are able to do so, it will be a question of consumers at the sharp end receiving another spike in commodity prices. To the extent that any reduction in carbon emissions is achieved in this manner of one-sidedly ratcheting up fuel taxes, it will fall overwhelmingly and disproportionately on ordinary workers, forcing Ford Fiestas off the road and leaving the Mondeos rolling.
This, predictably enough, was the core argument of the Socialist Party’s paper, The Socialist3 (Socialist Worker is notable for its silence on such matters). It was a marked improvement on Peter Taaffe’s intervention last time round in the September 22 2000 issue of that paper, which in true Taaffeite style saw in the fuel protests then the beginning of the much vaunted ‘crisis of expectations’ in New Labour that never really arrived, and predicted “an upheaval which could take a ‘spontaneous’ character to begin with, but which would quickly raise the possibility of organisation, of programme, and of ideology, thereby laying the basis for a rapid growth of socialist ideas.” As we wrote at the time, this would amount to a pre-revolutionary situation. Better luck next time, comrade Taaffe.
Fuel protests and class
In order to gauge accurately what prospects exist for further militancy out of such actions, Marxists must start by asking themselves - what class is moving in these events?
Visible this time are fractions of three classes. The first is a small section of the lower layers of the bourgeoisie. The haulage companies tend not towards hegemony over great monopolies, but towards an effective reliance on those monopolies, in much the same manner as even large-scale capitalist agriculture relies on the big supermarkets, etc. A typical capitalist involved in this protest will own 30 or 40 lorries - not a significant fraction of those travelling the motorways as a whole, and not allowing for a large enough profit margin to easily absorb the costs of fuel price rises.
Secondly, there are workers. Those people employed by the firm owners to drive the trucks are feeling the squeeze on their wages, and it obviously correlates with the well-known soaring price of crude. Therefore, they are driven into alliance with their bosses on this issue.
The most important section, however, is the petty bourgeoisie. Phasing into the lower capitalists at one end and the working class at the other, it is a class which, excluded from the higher echelons of politics, tends towards rebellion to achieve its ends. It is also a class that is constantly dislocated and apparently on the path to extinction - thus it acts as a host body for all kinds of ideologies, from fascism to ultra-left communism.
The petty bourgeois and small bourgeois leadership of the protests has meant that, apart from the raw demand for a tax-cut/subsidy, the overwhelming political coloration of the movement has been chauvinist in character. There has been much Brussels-baiting, and drivers are aggrieved that they are being forced off the roads, while European haulage firms pay no tax to Britain, and much less to their own governments than British truckers do to theirs. A comment on the Mail website grumbles that the reverse is not true - European countries charge British truckers for road tolls.4
The protest, then, is typical petty-bourgeois programmatic fare - artificial sustenance through protectionism, nationalism and subsidy.
Communists and the petty bourgeoisie
As principled internationalists, communists certainly cannot simply support this programme.
Lenin is instructive here. Writing against pacifism in 1916, he makes the point that “the bourgeoisie makes it its business to promote trusts, drive women and children into the factories, subject them to corruption and suffering, condemn them to extreme poverty. We do not ‘demand’ such development; we do not ‘support’ it. We fight it. But how do we fight? We explain that trusts and the employment of women in industry are progressive. We do not want a return to the handicraft system, pre-monopoly capitalism, domestic drudgery for women ...
“With the necessary changes that argument is applicable also to the present militarisation of the population. Today the imperialist bourgeoisie militarises the youth as well as the adults; tomorrow, it may begin militarising the women. Our attitude should be: All the better! Full speed ahead!”5
Equally, while we do not “support” the Brussels bureaucracy, we recognise nevertheless that the internationalisation of capital - to the limited extent that it breaks down borders per se - is progressive in an absolute sense - although the time when it was not relatively reactionary compared to the possibility of proletarian rule has long passed. Capitalist progress is, and always has been, built on mounds of skulls - in this case, the only ‘casualties’ will be the haulage firms, but the principle is the same.
However, in this instance the interests of the proletariat are similar in many respects to those of the hauliers. The green factor, as we have seen, is purely gestural, and has no effect whatsoever on cleaning up the atmosphere or slowing down climate change. All that is at stake here is a leap in the cost of running a truck - and thus, a leap in the price of basic commodities inside the truck (since more of the constant capital value is transferred to them).6
If the bourgeois state was truly serious about reducing carbon emissions, it would attempt to get more cars off the road not by penalising motorists, but by renationalising all public transport and subsidising it to the point that it was free or virtually free. The fact that to imagine it doing so is a utopian fantasy is one more argument for dispensing with bourgeois rule altogether.
Yes, the proletariat in power would subsidise fuel - for lorries, buses and trains. It is in the interests of everyone that we are able to eat, and get around beyond walking distance. Our long-term objective would be to eradicate cars almost entirely - not by fiat, but by rendering them superfluous.
As for our relations to the petty bourgeoisie, subsidies can only be offered if they are of benefit to our class. We do not object to the proletarianisation of this class - on the contrary, “full speed ahead!” However, compromises with it are legitimate and necessary. The availability of cheap credit, the cancellation of small business debts and even guarantees of the prompt payment of bills by the monopolies will all go some way to neutralising it as an enemy.
Notes
1. The Independent May 28.
2. Daily Mail May 28.
3. ‘Target “ecological” taxes at the rich’ The Socialist June 3.
4. Ibid.
5. The military programme of the proletarian revolution: www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/miliprog/ii.htm
6. K Marx Capital Vol 2, London 1992, pp226-27.
