Western Sahara: the UN mission is winding up, and we know almost nothing

The facts first, according to Al Jazeera: the UN warns of security risks in Western Sahara as MINURSO, the peacekeeping mission, comes to an end. Present in this disputed territory since the 1991 ceasefire, it is therefore leaving. That is all our dispatch contains. We do not know the reasons for the mission's end, the exact nature of the risks mentioned, or the timetable for the departure. We will not invent them.

We were also asked to judge "Proposition 40", that tax on billionaires' wealth in California. We have no facts on it: no amount, no threshold, no vote timetable. With no material to work from, we will not comment. A labour columnist who claimed to dissect a text he had not read would be overzealous, and overzealousness is not a virtue we want to encourage in workers, still less in ourselves.

That leaves the underlying question, which the brief raised and which this dispatch, indirectly, sheds light on. Can a wealth tax touch the class relations that produce extreme inequality? Our reading, and nothing more: probably not on its own. According to the Marxist analysis of surplus value, workers are paid enough to reproduce their labour power, but work longer than that time requires. The surplus becomes profit, and profit becomes wealth. The exploitation is structural, not a matter of a cruel boss. Taxing the stock of wealth means skimming the result. The relation that produces it keeps turning.

Marx himself liked to read accumulation in tax statistics. In Chapter 25 of Capital, he follows the profits and rents subject to income tax in Britain and shows that they grow far faster than the population. The taxman, he said in substance, provides the surest basis for measuring enrichment. Tax is therefore an excellent thermometer. But the thermometer does not cure the fever.

That is not to say we should forgo it. Making those who have the most pay is just, and the Republic, which promises equality before public burdens, should remember this more often. But the real battle is fought upstream, over wages, the length of the working day and the power to organise, that is to say over the share of life-hours that go to those who spend them producing.

As for Western Sahara, we will come back to it when we know what is at stake. Thirty-five years of mission, then a departure accompanied by a warning: the matter deserves better than a paragraph and guesswork. So we ask our sources what we always ask of the bosses: figures, dates, names.