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Tax Strike Tactics

Take Other Forms of Mass Action in Response to Arrests

Tax resistance campaigns have used arrests as triggers for coordinated action—such as strikes, civil disobedience, or even volunteering to turn themselves in to be prosecuted as well.

Example Australian Miners

When Australian miners refused to pay a license tax in 1854, they resolved that if any one of them were arrested: “it should be reported to the [tax resistance] committee by the nearest observer; they would immediately call a monster meeting, and the whole of the people would deliver themselves into custody.”

In 1921, Australian miners were at it again, this time resisting the income tax. They voted on a resolution that said, in part, that upon “any member being sent to prison for refusing to pay, that all unionists be called on immediately to stop work, and refuse to recommence until such member is released, or the garnished money is refunded.”

Example Beidenfleth Farmers

In Beidenfleth, Germany, between the World Wars, farmers were unable to keep up with their tax payments. They decided to stop paying rather than see themselves further impoverished. When fifty-seven of them were indicted for interfering with a tax seizure, hundreds of others who had been involved with that action (or who wished they had been) demanded to be tried alongside them:

[A] fever seemed to grip the countryside. From far and wide the peasants poured into Itzehoe, where the case was to be tried, with wild cries of self-accusation. The public prosecutor could not walk down the streets without being at once mobbed by powerful, earnest men begging him to lift the heavy weight of guilt from their shoulders and to restore their inner peace of mind by issuing a writ against them.

Notes and Citations