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Tax Strike Tactics

Boycott Government Monopoly Goods or Particularly Taxed Goods

You can deprive the government of funds by boycotting goods sold by the government (or by government-protected monopolies that subsidize the government), or goods that are subject to a particular tax.

Example Revolts in British Colonies

The British government enforced a monopoly on tea imports in the American colonies. This was “equal to a tax” in the eyes of Samuel Adams and his fellow patriots. Resisters boycotted monopoly tea, and backed up this boycott with actions like the Boston Tea Party, in which they destroyed monopoly tea before it reached the marketplace.

Other monopoly British imports that suffered from the American boycott included paper, cloth, dye, house paint, and glass. One patriotic song celebrated the boycott (while at the same time educating listeners about its extent) in this way:

The use of the taxables, let us forbear:—
(Then merchants import till your stores are all full,
May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!)…

…rather than freedom we part with our tea,
And well as we love the dear draught when a-dry,
As American Patriots our taste we deny—
Pennsylvania’s gay meadows can richly afford
To pamper our fancy or furnish our board;
And paper sufficient at home still we have,
To assure the wiseacre, we will not sign slave;
When this homespun shall fail, to remonstrate our grief,
We can speak viva voce, or scratch on a leaf;
Refuse all their colors, though richest of dye,
When the juice of a berry our paint can supply,
To humor our fancy—and as for our houses,
They’ll do without painting as well as our spouses;
While to keep out the cold of a keen winter morn,
We can screen the north-west with a well polished horn;

The Indian independence campaign also boycotted British-monopoly goods like salt and cloth. The campaign not only encouraged people to wear only Indian-produced fabric and clothing, but it also held bonfires and asked people to burn all of the British cloth they owned.

Example American War Tax Resisters

During the American war on Vietnam, “[o]ne pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.”

As internet telephony started to become an option, some American war tax resisters realized they could avoid the federal excise tax on telephone service by getting rid of their phone lines and switching to such internet-based plans.

Example Quakers

When the Continental Congress imposed a tax on postage stamps to help pay for the American revolutionary war effort, Quaker James Mott stopped using the mail. He wrote to a friend shortly before the tax came into effect:

Must our correspondence by mail be at end, in consequence of the extra postage? or shall we pay it, and thereby contribute a mite to the support of measures calculated to destroy men’s lives and property? Perhaps I may be alone in refusing to pay postage on letters. Only a few cents—what can this do, it may be said, towards enabling government to prosecute the war? Very little, I own: but the great sum required is made up of littles; and if all those littles are withheld, the effusion of human blood may be at an end.

Many years later, Congress issued revenue stamps that it required people to purchase and to apply to certain types of documents. One Quaker wrote in 1900:

I am one of those (I suppose there are others), who have felt an extreme unwillingness to help maintain our wars by the use of the revenue stamps, which were legalized expressly for war uses. Our forefathers would have made an emphatic protest against it, if indeed they would not have refused entirely to use the stamps, and borne the consequences, whatever they might have been.… at least we could restrict the use of checks (for example) wherever possible, and diminish in this way our contributions to the war fund.

Other Quakers, like Isaac Martin, refused to use or to deal in imported goods, so as to avoid paying import duties that were directed to military expenses:

[A] weighty concern attended my mind on account of a tax on shop keepers who dealt in foreign articles, to be appropriated towards carrying on the war against England.… I believed my peace of mind would be affected if I paid the said tax. So I resigned myself to the Lord’s will, let the event be as it may. But scarcely a day passed, that I had not to turn customers away who applied for articles which I had on hand, but could not sell, on account of the heavy penalty.

Many Quaker meetings also had a policy of warning their members against “sharing or partaking in the spoils of war by purchasing or selling prize-goods”—that is, goods seized from the ships of enemy nations by government-sanctioned pirates.

During the Vietnam War the North Columbus, Ohio, Friends Meeting was unable to agree on whether to reluctantly pay the federal excise tax on its office phone (a tax that had been extended to help pay for the war) or whether to illegally resist it. As a compromise, the meeting decided to discontinue its phone service entirely.

Example Anti-Czarist Activism

In Russia around the time of the Vyborg Manifesto, a report noted that “the peasants are deciding to boycott all state-owned businesses.” For example: “they have undertaken a concerted abstention from vodka, the manufacture and sale of which intoxicant was made a Government monopoly… [which] has since constituted one of the principal sources of the public revenue.”

Examples Obstructing in Addition to Boycotting

You can augment a boycott by obstructing the sale of boycotted goods:

  • In Wales, truckers blockaded a Chevron refinery and called upon the tanker operators to join them in shutting it down, to protest the government’s tax on fuel.
  • Farmers in Argentina decided in 2009 to “halt sales of grains and livestock for a week, setting up roadblocks and hampering exports to press for lower taxes.”
  • In Greece, resisters to taxes that were added to utility bills barricaded the offices of utility companies.
  • In France, during the gilets jaunes protests of 2018 against increased gasoline taxes, demonstrators also blocked access to ports, refineries, and oil depots. This, in combination with their highway blockades, led to fuel shortages and closure of fuel stations in some places.
  • In a similar protest in 2019 against increased diesel fuel tax increases in France, truckers blockaded highways and fuel depots, leading to hundreds of gasoline stations shutting down for lack of anything to sell.

Examples Divestment and Boycotts of Nations

In 2003, as the U.S. was launching its attack on Iraq, anti-war activists from other countries promoted a boycott of the products of U.S. government contractors, and even of U.S. companies in general. “The U.S. economy is strung out across the globe. Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable,” wrote Arundhati Roy. “Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one. No target is too small. No victory too insignificant.”

Similarly, the “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement aims to boycott businesses that profit from Israeli settlement expansion in occupied Palestine.

The model for this approach is the movement that promoted divestment from apartheid South Africa. That movement, which peaked in the 1980s, successfully pressured businesses, governments, and other institutions around the world to restrict or abandon their economic support for the regime and for those businesses that helped to prop it up. Universities, targeted by persistent student activists, were among the more prominent institutions to divest from companies doing business in South Africa. In one fell swoop in 1986, the entire University of California system divested itself of some $3 billion in apartheid-tainted investments.

Example Polish Jews

Poland’s Jews were denied citizenship in the early 19th century. When Poland instituted a “kosher tax” on meat consumed by Jews, communities of Polish Jews responded by abstaining from meat.

Example Fare Evasion

If the government runs the transit system, fare hikes are another form of tax, and fare evasion is another form of tax resistance. This was put into practice by the pos me salto movement in Mexico and the movimento passe livre in Brazil, for example.

A similar movement in Sweden went a step further by initiating a mutual insurance plan. For a €12 monthly fee, the plan insured contributors against any tickets they are given for being caught without a ticket—compare that to €100 for a monthly transit pass, or €150 for a fare evasion citation. The plan ran at a healthy profit; taking in about twice as much from grateful subscribers as it had to pay out in fine reimbursements.

In Greece, resisters deployed a smartphone app that tells public transit users which stations are currently staffed by ticket auditors and which are free-and-clear.

Example The Guinea-Pig Tax

You may have noticed that in the late 18th century, men liked to wear powdered wigs. What you might not know is the role taxes played in bringing that fashion statement to an end.

British prime minister William Pitt’s administration was cash-strapped as a result of expenses from war with France. So they instituted a variety of new taxes, including, in 1795, a new £1.1s charge for a license to use hair wig powder.

Pitt’s opponents called it the guinea-pig tax (on pig-tails) and ceased to wear wigs; it eventually ended the fashion…

Example Radical Reformers

The advocates of expanded democracy known as “Radical Reformers” launched a tax resistance campaign in the U.K. in 1819. They urged supporters to “abstain[] as much as possible from exciseable articles, in order that, by circumscribing the revenue, the governing powers might be deprived of the means of oppressing the people, and withholding from them their just rights.”

To help people understand which items should be boycotted, they created placards which they paraded through town during their rallies. A news account describes one of them:

A board to which were appended, a tea-kettle, a coffee-pot, a snuff-box, a tobacco-box, a broken wine glass, two short old black pipes, a quart and a pint pot, and a broken ale glass. These were all empty and turned up-side-down, as indicative of uselessness, now that the radicals are determined to abstain from taxed commodities.

Organizers explained the theory behind the boycott this way:

That the exciseable articles particularly referred to, are tea, which pays a duty of cent. per cent. or just one half, consequently, every five ounces of tea consumed by any family, pays a soldier a day’s wages to prevent the people obtaining their rights and liberties; tobacco and snuff pay threpence an ounce, so that five ounces of these articles pay a soldier a day’s wages; spiritous liquors pay 11s. per gallon, or better than fourpence per noggin, consequently, every four noggins that a man drinks, he not only abuses his own constitution, impairs his finances, benumbs his understanding, and paralizes all the noble faculties of his soul, but pays a hireling soldier to keep him in subjection to a cruel and merciless task-master. Ale, which pays duties equal to spirits, may be viewed in the same light, as being equally destructive to the morals, the finances, and tends to the support of tyranny.

This was also seen as a test of resolve of the resisters, as one speaker noted:

By giving up these silly articles, we afford evidence that we are hearty in the cause, and are willing to sacrifice our appetites for the general good. If we cannot suffer in a trifle, how are we to stand in the field of battle?

Notes and Citations