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Tax Strike Tactics

Conduct Hartals and Business Strikes

The influential Ayn Rand novel Atlas Shrugged is a fantasy in which the entrepreneurial wealth-creators in the United States quietly go on strike, one at a time, until the government finds itself with less and less to siphon off and has to resort to increasingly desperate (and eventually fruitless) measures to stay afloat. Rand’s working title for the novel was “The Strike.” But strikes by business people are not only a thing of fiction.

Business strikes can add emphasis to a tax strike. They also, by reducing the base of taxable commercial transactions, can be a form of tax resistance.

Example Indian Hartals

In 1810 in Benares, the British imperial government tried to impose a house tax. The residents responded with a hartal, or general strike:

[T]he shops were closed, every kind of occupation was abandoned… a solemn engagement was taken by all the inhabitants to carry on no manner of work or business until the tax was repealed. Everything was at a stand: the dead bodies were cast unceremoniously into the river, because there were none to perform the obsequial rites; and the very thieves refrained from the exercise of their vocation…

The extended hartal was successful, and the Raj dropped the offensive tax.

The later Indian independence movement frequently used hartals and strikes, sometimes in coordination with tax resistance tactics such as the salt raids. During the Bardoli tax strike, for example, shopkeepers frequently shut down their operations whenever officials came to town, and hartals sometimes broke out spontaneously on other occasions.

Example Bob Williams

When American farmer Bob Williams was filling out his tax return in 2008, he reflected on the “bombs and bullets” that his tax dollars would help to pay for. “I thought, ‘This is terrible, I don’t want to open,’ Why should I make this extra money?” He decided that from then on, he would donate all of his produce to charity rather than sell it for taxable income.

Example Palestine

During the first intifada in Palestine, the Unified National Command responded to a crackdown on the tax strikers of Beit Sahour by calling “an unprecedented five day in six general strike,” while “[s]torekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months…” The Israeli practice of seizing equipment, supplies, and goods from businesses that refused to remit taxes also had the effect of putting those businesses into a state of strike whether or not that was their intention.

In 1981, in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.

Example Ruhrkampf

In the Ruhr, during the French/Belgian occupation of 1923, businesses shut down rather than pay reparation taxes:

The owners of the German coal mines and foundries in the Ruhr are determined not to pay the 10 per cent. export tax imposed on coal by the French… The owners will refuse to export an ounce of coal or coke. They will dump the supplies in the yards, and are prepared for a long siege.

This was accompanied by a large-scale labor strike, which the German government helped by giving direct financial support to the individual strikers.

Notes and Citations