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Tax Strike Tactics

Without the Personal Revolution, No Other Revolution Is Worth It

 Some, belike,
Groaning with restless enmity, expect
All change from change of constituted power;
As if a Government had been a robe,
On which our vice and wretchedness were tagged
Like fancy-points and fringes, with the robe
Pulled off at pleasure. Fondly these attach
A radical causation to a few
Poor drudges of chastising Providence,
Who borrow all their hues and qualities
From our own folly and rank wickedness,
Which gave them birth and nursed them.

—Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Fear in Solitude

A mass, peasants-with-pitchforks sort of revolution is frighteningly unreliable. You put everything on the line, shed buckets of blood, endure betrayals and unfriendly alliances and hard compromises, and finally (if you’re lucky) you cut off the tyrant’s head and take charge… and then what? It seems that as often as not, you end up with something as bad as before.

Political revolutions, says Hennacy, “only changed masters.”

We made a revolution against England and are not free yet. The Russians made a revolution against the Czar and now have an even stronger dictatorship. It is not too late to make a revolution that will mean something—one that will stick: your own one-man revolution.

Tyranny is not something that infests only the top of the org chart. The tyrant doesn’t cause tyranny, but is its most obvious symptom. Tyranny lives as tenaciously in the tyrannized as in the tyrant. This is why Thoreau was careful to say (emphasis mine):

“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

Not, “when the workers seize power” or “when we get money out of politics” or anything of that sort, but “when men are prepared for it.” We must prepare ourselves, one personal revolution at a time, and when we have (and, unfortunately, until we have), we will get the government we deserve.

The revolution is not accomplished when the last faction standing wipes the blood from its hands and sits down behind the presidential desk to issue its first decree, but “when the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned his office”—that is, when tyranny has been purged from the bottom of the org chart.

Notes and Citations