10 Membranes

Occupy Tax Havens, Not Cities

The Occupy protest movement has attracted a fair amount of criticism and acclaim, David Cameron helpfully informing us that protesting is something he believes should take place on two feet. Presumably surrounded by pepper-spray wielding policemen intent on causing maximum intimidation and harm, but only if you are a harmless student. 

Like many people, Vince Cable and Ed Miliband included, I sympathise with the motivations behind the protest: widening inequality seems to be a function of an extractive elite taking an ever larger slice of a pie that is getting smaller or remaining about the same. Like them I share some reservations about the nature of the protest and also its goals, which are too open ended, utopian and unworkable on the one hand, too alienating and useless on the other. This is because the Occupy movement isn’t (yet) thinking strategically, and is basically a bunch of crusties having a whale of a time camping outside St. Pauls. 

If the movement did decide it was serious, here is what I would suggest.

Occupying large cities is functionally useless for a number of reasons. Firstly because a city like London is large enough to swallow almost any protest of this nature, which is so geographically focused that it can never really disrupt the rhythms of the city, can never put off tourists, or business travellers or have any impact other than to me a mild inconvenience and eye sore on one of our greatest buildings. Trading has not stopped on the LSE because a man with unwashed hair is waving a placard outside; the protest is asymmetric with the forces that it is arrayed against; it is but a drop in the ocean and doesn’t scale up to the opponent, in this case the most powerful and effective organisational system we have ever known. Secondly the protests fail to account for the utterly mobile nature of contemporary capital - even if they did truly occupy London, capital would simply decamp to Geneva, or somewhere else, and so on. 

Ok, the protests might get media coverage, which in the heads of those participating is a great achievement, but is actually rather lame, a fall back position of the left over the past 30 years that has resulted in the untrammelled triumph of the neoliberal economic agenda. If the sole aim of your protest is galvanising the public through your heroic actions of peeing in Starbucks, well, good luck. 

A far better, more practical, focused and impactful version of the protests would be to occupy selected tax havens. Typically tax havens are very small jurisdictions, without large state and security apparatuses, that are very dependent on the outside world, and as Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands makes clear, play a vastly disproportionate role in the imbalances of the global economy. More companies are registered in the minute Virgin Islands, than any other territory. 

This means - tax havens are vulnerable to small numbers of people. A sit in over just a couple of hundred at the port and airport of an island like Jersey would quickly paralyse the society. Moreover most tax havens are not tinpot dictatorships, but in some sense dependencies of countries that would not allow indiscriminate treatment of protesters, ensuring some degree of safety. Crucially it would be easy to establish clear goals for the protests: an end to tax regimes that allow for global tax evasion on a vast scale, or at least repatriation of certain amounts of tax. Suffice to say the goals could be a little more concrete and achievable than “the end of global capitalism” even if they aren’t exactly easy. 

Plus it would still be a global struggle. Britain would take the Channel Islands; France could have Monaco, which would fall like a pack of cards; Germany could take Lichtenstein; the US could have the various Caribbean tax havens. Occupy camps are everywhere - I saw one recently in Hong Kong - and everywhere there are tax havens. Tax havens as a whole are not subject to the mobility of capital we see in the major states as there is only a finite number of such entities, and major nation states will never be able to compete on tax rates. It is possible for the world to run low on tax havens in a way that it isn’t for financial centres. 

I should say I am not advocating this strategy; just that if the Occupy movement where serious about making a change, there are more effective means of protesting than camping in big all consuming cities, at the heart of a big all consuming system. Attack the system at its weakest points, not its strongest, and you are more likely to see real gains, not just hot air.