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Tax Strike Tactics

Participate in Buycotts and Boycotts

Tax resistance campaigns can use boycotts (and their cousins: “buycotts”) to encourage businesses to support tax resisters or to withdraw their support from tax collectors.

Example The Addiopizzo Movement

Boycotts and buycotts are the signature tactic of the Addiopizzo movement in Sicily, which tries to convince businesses to stop paying taxes to the mafia. The movement launched with one hundred Palermo businesses announcing that they would no longer pay this “pizzo” tax, and 9,000 residents signing a pledge to only buy goods from businesses that joined the refusal. As one explained, “if my baker pays the pizzo, I am giving money to the mafia when I buy bread too, and so I submit myself to the mafia.”

The movement opened its own supermarket—“Punto Pizzofree”—that stocks products only from suppliers who have pledged to resist the pizzo. It also held annual “Critical Consumption” street fairs that highlight resisting businesses. If you’d like to take a look for yourself, you can pay a visit under the auspices of Addiopizzo Travel, which runs pizzo-free tours.

Example Poll Tax Rebellion

The threat of a boycott, if credible and well-timed, can also be effective. During the poll tax rebellion in Thatcher’s Britain, councils tried to recruit newsstands and convenience stores to be collection points where people could pay the despised tax. Poll tax resister Danny Burns recalls:

In Bristol, the city council identified twenty newsagents who they hoped would collect the Poll Tax. Within weeks of the list being circulated six pulled out. Local communities made it plain that they would no longer use the shops if they continued to collect.

Example German Farmers

During a tax resistance campaign in the German countryside between the world wars, the threat of boycott discouraged businesses from supporting government reprisals against resisters:

The carters refused, even with police protection, to carry off the distrained cattle, for they knew that if they did they would never again be able to do business with the peasants. One day three peasants even appeared in the slaughter yards at Hamburg and announced that unless the distrained cattle disappeared at once from the yard’s stalls the gentlemen in charge of the slaughterhouse could find somewhere else to buy their beasts in the future—they wouldn’t be getting any more from Schleswig-Holstein.

Example Liberty Bonds

The United States government raised money to fight World War I by selling “Liberty Bonds.” Some Americans who opposed the U.S. entry into the war threatened to boycott banks that handled the bonds. According to one newspaper account:

The President of a Wisconsin bank has advised the Treasury that his depositors, mostly Germans, or of German parentage, have withdrawn many thousands of dollars from his bank because he aided the First Liberty Loan.

These depositors, he added, had taken their accounts to two rival banks on the understanding that those banks would not aid the second Liberty Loan. The two banks, he reported, were not aiding the loan in any way.

Notes and Citations