Ask People to Vow to Resist When a Critical Mass of People Take a Similar Vow

Some tax resistance movements design campaigns in which people pledge to begin resisting taxes together as soon as a critical mass of people also take the pledge.

This can have several advantages:

People may be afraid to take an action by themselves but would not be so frightened if they were part of a large group of people.
People may be reluctant to resist because they feel that unless many people resist, their own resistance would be practically ineffective. By waiting for a critical mass, you reassure such skeptical resisters that their resistance will be valuable.
By waiting to resist until a critical mass of resisters is available, you may be better able to overwhelm your opponents’ defenses. This way your resistance may be more effective than if it started gradually.

Example South African Miners

Miners at the “New Rush” in Kimberly, South Africa in 1874 signed a pledge of tax resistance, mutual protection, and boycott of non-resisters. It included a minimum-signers trigger:

This pledge is to become operative, and shall be enforced, when signed by 400 men.… This pledge is a serious matter. If it is passed to-night it will only be a Resolution; but as soon as it is signed by 400 men, which will most likely be on Monday next, it will be the law of the people which must be abided by and ruthlessly enforced.

Example American Women’s Suffragist Activists

Women’s suffrage activists in Wisconsin in 1903 created a tax resistance pledge of this sort. One version said “when 10,000 names have been secured to a pledge, the women will refuse to pay taxes, and the questions involved will be taken to the courts.” Another version of the pledge put the number at 5,000 and was more vague (or at any rate less revealing) about what they were pledging themselves to:

We, the tax paying women of Wisconsin, hereby agree to do what we can by protest and argument to emphasize the fact that taxation without representation is tyranny as much for American women today as it was for American colonists in 1778. And we also pledge ourselves that when 5,000 or more women in Wisconsin shall have similarly enrolled we will simultaneously take action by whatever method may seem best in accordance with official advice from the Wisconsin Suffrage Association to the end that public attention may be thoroughly and effectively called to the injustice and injury done to women by taxing them without giving them any voice as to how their money should be employed.

Example American War Tax Resisters

The American anti-war activist group Code Pink launched a campaign called “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” in 2007:

When there are 100,000 of us who have the courage to pledge no more money for war, we will join in an act of mass civil disobedience and refuse to pay the portion of our taxes that represents the % we spend on the U.S. military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The campaign’s ambitions were a little too high, as it turns out, but they did get over 2,000 pledges, and started many conversations about war tax resistance among anti-war activists, so the effort may not have been for naught.

Words of Warning About This Tactic

I have seen several examples of campaigns that have tried conditional commitment pledges like this, and I’ve seen more of them fail than succeed. They do sometimes succeed, but they often don’t.

Part of the difficulty is that your trigger number (how many people have to sign on to the pledge before it takes effect) has to be high enough to be impressive, but low enough that you will actually meet it. It can be difficult to determine that target number.

Code Pink’s campaign, for example, started during the height of the Iraq War and the protests against it. They had a flashy website and an easy-to-use sign-on form. When people signed on, they could add a comment about why they were pledging. Every time you visited the site you saw this list scrolling by of people’s names and the reasons why they were willing to resist.

It was very inspirational, and in the early days of the campaign many people signed on. It looked like it was going great. But then it lost momentum.

They didn’t, as it turned out, have the capability to get to that 100,000 pledge-taker level. It was an aspiration, it was a hope, but Code Pink didn’t have what it took to actually make it happen.

After the excited early-adopters pledged, sign-ups began to slow to a trickle. Code Pink were so discouraged that they just quietly dropped the program and it didn’t end up going anywhere.

How can you avoid that sort of failure? Here is my advice:

When people sign on to the pledge, stay in regular contact with them. Give them some alternative ways to resist while you’re waiting to meet your pledge number.
Depending on which method of tax resistance you’re going to use when the trigger condition is met, there may be ways people can prepare for it before they begin resisting.

For example, in the United States, if you’re going to resist the income tax, you usually do so in April when you file your tax return for the previous year. But you can only resist if you owe money at that point and then refuse to pay it. Most people who file their taxes in April don’t owe money. More typically, the government owes them a refund because they had too much taxes withheld from their paycheck during the previous year. So if you want to resist in April, you should take steps some time in the previous year to reduce what gets withheld from your paycheck.

If I were to create a pledge like this for income tax resisters in the United States, I would make sure to say, “sign the pledge now, but stop or reduce your withholding now as well. That way you can decide in April whether you want to resist or not.”
Think carefully about the trigger number that you will use to bring the pledge into effect. Don’t just throw out a number that sounds good, or that would be impressive, but ask:
- Do we really have the institutional capability to find that many people?
- Have we surveyed our potential audience of campaigners to see how many people would be willing to sign a pledge like that?
- If we did get that number, do we have the organizational capacity to organize that many people to do resistance, or would we have to build that capacity over the course of the pledge; and if so, how would we do it?
You might also consider establishing a deadline for when the pledge must be fulfilled. This gives you the ability to “fail fast” rather than just letting the pledge wheeze on life support long after it has become hopeless. If you have a cut-off date, you can say “OK: that didn’t work; let’s move on to something else.”
Which brings me to the last point: Have a Plan B. If you fail to reach your trigger number, make sure, now that you have this nice list of people who are at least interested in doing this sort of thing, that you have something else you can recommend. Maybe reach out to those who signed on and say, “We didn’t get as many pledgers as we were hoping to get, but let’s come together and decide what we can do with the numbers we have.”

Notes and Citations

“Further Correspondence respecting the Affairs of Griqualand West and the Diamond Fields” Correspondence Relating to the Colonies and States of South Africa (Harrison & Sons: 1876) p. 22
“Rebellion in Wisconsin” New York Times 22 May 1903
Youmans, Theodora W. “How Wisconsin Women Won the Ballot” The Wisconsin Magazine of History Sept. 1921, p. 18
The “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” text comes from the default message people were encouraged to email to their friends from the “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” website.