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Tax Strike Tactics

Convince Existing Organizations to Adopt or Endorse Tax Resistance

If you convince influential organizations to endorse tax resistance or to recommend that their members begin resisting, this can be a great boost to your campaign. Here are a few examples:

Example Queensland’s LPAs

An existing network of “Local Producers’ Associations” was crucial to the mass-adoption of tax resistance by agriculturalists in Queensland, Australia, in 1927 and to the success of their tax resistance campaign. The Associations used their preexisting communication and organizing infrastructure to call meetings, to create an information-sharing network across Queensland, and to coordinate policies. This allowed them to put forward a bold and united tax resistance front so quickly and convincingly that their campaign succeeded in convincing the government to rescind its water tax after only a month.

Example The British Women’s Suffrage Movement

The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom was not unified. There were tactical, ideological, and personal divides that fragmented the movement into several groups.

The Women’s Freedom League was an early adopter of the tactic of tax resistance, in 1908. In 1909 it spun off a sub-group—the Women’s Tax Resistance League—devoted to that tactic. This spin-off group tried to be ecumenical, accepting into its ranks activists from various factions, and trying in turn to spread the tactic of tax resistance to the various groups that made up the suffrage movement.

The gambit worked: In 1910 they won the endorsement of the Women’s Social and Political Union, and in 1913 that of the Federated Council of Suffrage Societies.

Example Peace Churches

Since the founding of the Society of Friends (Quakers), it instructed members to refuse to pay government-mandated tithes to rival churches. This policy soon extended to war tax resistance. Quakers were instructed not to pay taxes for “drums, colors, or for other warlike uses” and not to pay fines that the government assessed for their refusal to participate in the military.

Quaker meetings would codify policies like these in “books of discipline.” Quakers who deviated from these policies would be subject to a process of correction, or, if they continued to defy the policy, “disowning” (something akin to excommunication). Here is one example of a Quaker policy on war tax resistance, from the rules of discipline of the Rhode Island Yearly Meeting:

It is the concern of this meeting, to recommend to the several monthly meetings, that they, consistently with our ancient testimony, refuse the payment of all taxes, expressly or specially for the support of war, whether called for in money, provisions, or otherwise… and that such friends as do actively pay such taxes, be dealt with as disorderly walkers.

Such rules of discipline might change over time, and could differ from meeting to meeting. Heated argument might break out about how strict a standard of tax resistance Quakers should be held to. This frequent debate helped to sustain awareness of tax resistance in the Society.

In 1971, after much debate (and decades of slowly-building momentum), the General Conference Mennonite Church ratified a statement on war tax resistance:

The levying of war taxes is another form of conscription which, along with the conscription of manpower, makes war possible. We are accountable to God for the use of our financial resources and should protest the use of our taxes in the promotion and waging of war. We stand by those who feel called to resist the payment of that portion of taxes being used for military purposes.

In 1978 three American “peace church” denominations—Quakers, Brethren, and Mennonites—issued a rare joint statement. It called for war tax resistance among their 350,000 church members, and asked their congregations to “uphold war tax resisters with spiritual, emotional, legal, and material support.”

Example The General Conference Mennonite Church

In the 1970s, a General Conference employee named Cornelia Lehn asked the Conference to stop withholding war taxes from her paycheck. There was at the time a lot of sympathy for war tax resistance in Mennonite circles, but it was controversial, and a lot of Mennonites thought it should be at most a matter of individual “nonresistant” conviction and not of institutional defiance by church bodies. Lehn’s request kept the issue of war tax resistance hot in Mennonite circles for years:

  1. The Commission on Home Ministries’ Peace and Social Concerns Reference Council recommended that the General Conference honor Lehn’s request and stop withholding such taxes.
  2. The Commission on Home Ministries’ executive committee put that on its agenda and tentatively approved it “but referred [it] for further study by the Division of Administration and the General Board.”
  3. The Division of Administration wasn’t enthusiastic, thinking that the consequences hadn’t been fully considered. So the General Board asked the Division of Administration to come back to them later with their ideas.
  4. When the General Board met again, they decided to wait to decide until their next meeting.
  5. At the next meeting, the Council on Commissions asked the Commission on Home Ministries to prepare a study process in advance of the next triennial conference so everyone would get a chance to vote on it.
  6. The General Board agreed that the Conference triennium should decide as a body.
  7. The triennium decided to commit itself to 18 months of “serious study” on the matter, followed by a special midtriennium conference at which they would decide once and for all.
  8. Educational materials were prepared and distributed, and an invitational consultation on civil responsibility was held to help prepare people for the responsibility that had been put upon them.
  9. The midtriennial conference was held, and they decided “to engage in a serious and vigorous search to use all legal, legislative, and administrative avenues for achieving a conscientious objector exemption from” withholding, and to try again if they couldn’t come up with anything like that within three years.
  10. The General Conference established a board to implement this, which later expanded to be a multi-sectarian task force on war tax issues.
  11. The task force quickly ruled out administrative avenues as being frankly unavailable and began to explore legislative ones.
  12. That seeming just as unlikely, “a resolution seeking approval to initiate a judicial action to exempt the General Conference from withholding taxes from the income of its employees” was prepared for the next triennial, which passed it 1,156 to 353.

All of this bureaucratic buck-passing looks a little comical when it’s written down like this. But the effect was extraordinary: several columns of Mennonite periodicals over many editions were devoted to the debate, and just about everybody in the Conference was called upon at some point to come down on one side or the other. Lehn gets a lot of credit for keeping war tax resistance at the forefront of Mennonite deliberation for years, simply by making her request, explaining herself, and holding firm.

Notes and Citations