Be reasonable, demand the impossible.

[Thinking Man's Idiot]

A down at heels balls to the wall communist blog so ultra left even Pannekoek's mother wouldn't recognise it. Be reasonable, demand the impossible.

• The Socialist Programme against the cuts

I think this point needs to get across. the left are wetting their knickers over the increased toprate of tax.

Lets get down to socialist brass tacks on tax. The burden of taxation doesn't fall on wages/salaries. That is, when taxed, formally, wages/salaries adjust so that the loss, the pain, falls elsewhere, mainly on capitalist profits.

The real wage, the take home wage, the money in your pocket is, to borrow a Darwinian term, the unit of selection. It is take home pay that drives the market, it's rises and falls in real wages that prompt market behaviour. If a tax hike lowers real wages, then wages were due to fall anyway under prevailling market conditions, and tax has stepped in a taken the share that would have gone to the employer.

Ordinarilly, however, market pressure, through individual informal and formal action (and preferably through collective union action) would act to restore the previous status quo.

What this mweans is that our "immediate" objective is to shore up our unions, they are the only hope of seeing this through - although when unemplyment rises, they'll be shredded too. So we urgently need to organise a conscious and explicitly socialist movement, not for taxrises or capitalist bailouts or passing the burden back and forth, but clearly and resolutely set on the abolition of capitalism. This is the only practical self defence we have.

Really, seriously, get your mates, get anyone you've ever heard, meet together, debate, discuss. Form a socialist group. Form an international. Form a reading circle. Join the Socilaist Party. Set up workers' councils. Whatever you do, raise the banner of "the abolition of the wages system" now, before its too late.