Law and class struggle

Apr 24, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The first essay I read as a freshman at UG was an article with the above caption by Alan Hunt in a magazine titled, “Marxism Today.” That composition will remain in my mind forever because it was the first analysis I read to write my first assignment as a new entrant to university.
But there is another reason for the permanent presence of that item in my mind. That piece of political commentary had a profound effect on me. There are things that we encounter in our evolution as a person that subliminally effect in ways we may never know.
I was young when I entered UG and saw myself as a radical youth fighting for the rights of the poorer classes because I came from that stratum of the Guyanese society and I knew how the pangs of poverty could bite. In the midst of that kind of thinking, I read Alan Hunt’s brilliant research.
Hunt contends that laws were designed intentionally and specifically to benefit those with wealth and prestige because they were drafted by people with property, money and power. He looks at a wide range of legal rules from company law to taxation to divorce and he shows where these edicts run against the interests of the working people and women.
Hunt’s argument was a critique against British laws. But his evaluation could have applied to any former British colony because those ex-colonies took the legal documents from the former colony of the UK.
Chasing down the laws that we inherited from the British to prove their anti-working class bias is not a onerous task. Start with taxation. Take this writer as an example. Mr. Kurshid Sattaur, bossman at the GRA, sent me eight property tax forms and demanded that I fill them out and submit them.
It is called individual property tax. Now company property tax and individual property tax have different consequences. I cannot claim depreciation for any personal asset. So my car, furniture and stove do not depreciate. Their value remains the same.
The same value I put for my car last year, I have to put this year. But companies can claim depreciation. So the value of the machine that makes chocolate goes down for the company but not my car. I don’t care how learned you are you have to be asinine and downright idiotic not to see that this is class legislation.
A company can pay less property tax because of depreciation but an individual employee cannot. Take PAYE. All employees have to adhere to PAYE. But PAYE tax-payers are not entitled to reduction in taxes if they have loans; companies do.
Here is how it works. Let us say I earn a million dollars a month from UG and I borrow $10 million from UG to pay back each month. I still have to declare to the GRA that I earned a million monthly and give them PAYE based on that figure. GRA will not grant tax concession from the loan I am re-paying UG.
But if a company borrows, that burden on the company is given tax concession. There is a Bill before Parliament that will exempt small financial houses from paying taxes on the interest they earn on loans. But small people who earn interest on their savings in commercial banks have to pay withholding tax on that interest. All the poor folks that have savings in the banks have to pay taxes on the interests their savings generate for them
Take another example – violence under the law. The laws in Guyana today do not accept the deconstructed meaning of the word violence. So John Jones goes to a car dealer, puts down a million dollars on a car and is promised the car within a month. Six months pass and there is no car. John Jones calls in the police. There is nothing the police can do if the dealer comes up with two explanations. One is that the shipment is delayed in the originating country or the dealer got robbed by the manufacturer and therefore cannot repay. The police cannot do anything.
Now take a scenario where after six months, the buyer is getting the push-around and he damages the dealer’s property in anger. He will be charged. What then is the definition of violence? Isn’t violence being meted out to a poor man when a seller takes his money and cannot give him his car? I read the other day that a fellow went to jail for possession of a smoking utensil. Any government that can accept such a law does not deserve to be voted in.

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