Give Your Campaign a Tune-Up

Now it’s time to apply what you’ve learned to strengthen your own tax resistance campaign. In this exercise, you’ll methodically and carefully examine your campaign, looking at its strengths, its weaknesses, its vulnerabilities, and its potential. You’ll then choose some new tactics to strengthen your campaign on the fronts where it is weakest or most vulnerable.

Download the worksheets

If you plan to complete this exercise along with other people in your campaign, consider going through the steps once on your own first, or maybe in pairs or small groups, before coming together to do the exercise as a full group. That way you’ll avoid groupthink and your campaign will be nourished by the broadest set of ideas you can come up with.

You may find (and you may find it surprising) that your group gets hung up on the very first step—defining your goals. This may be because your campaign includes resisters with a variety of motives and a variety of ideas of what tax resistance is meant to accomplish. But this may also mean that your campaign could benefit from better-articulating its goals. Even if your campaign already has a “mission statement,” it is worth revisiting the question of whether that statement aligns with the hopes of the people in your campaign, and with its actual activities.

If your campaign struggles with this question, I recommend that you devote some extra time to it before continuing with the rest of the steps in the worksheets. It is only when you have your goals well-articulated that you have a good yardstick by which you can measure the effectiveness of your activities and tactics. When you make your goals explicit and keep them at the front of your mind, you can more quickly and confidently judge your activities and tactics and decide which ones really do further your goals and which ones you are pursuing for other reasons—perhaps because they have become a comfortable habit, or because that’s what other groups have done.

In the next section I will show you an example of this exercise as though it had been filled out by the planners of the 1928 Bardoli tax strike.