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Tax Strike Tactics

Varieties of Tax Resister

People resist paying taxes from a variety of motives and with a variety of goals in mind. This book examines many tactics that augment tax resistance campaigns, but some tactics are only appropriate for some varieties of tax resister and only help to meet the goals of some types of resistance campaign.

What sort of tax resister are you? What are the goals you hope to accomplish? You need to consider those questions before you can choose tactics that are appropriate for your campaign.

In this chapter you will learn about four common varieties of tax resister and their goals. You’ll also learn what to do if your campaign contains resisters of multiple varieties who, as a result, may find it hard to agree on tactics. As an example of such a conundrum, I’ll discuss the modern American war tax resistance movement, which is challenged by containing resisters of all four varieties:

  1. the conscientious objector
  2. the protester
  3. the nonviolent resister
  4. the legal challenger

The Conscientious Objector

Goal: To avoid complicity with unethical government acts.

Tax resisters who are motivated by conscientious objection are profoundly opposed to the unethical activities of the government. They feel that to pay taxes would make them complicit in those activities. They consider the risks of tax resistance to be worth taking because they believe the risks of behaving unethically are worse.

The classic example of this is a pacifist who is unwilling either to take up a weapon to kill in war, or to pay for somebody else to do so by paying a war tax.

Conscientious objectors may be more concerned with whether their taxes are paid voluntarily than whether they are paid at all. In other words, they may be satisfied if the government eventually gets its hands on the money, so long as they did not hand over the money willingly themselves. As one conscientious objector put it:

[T]here is all the difference in the world between a payment handed to an official, and being compelled by process of law to pay an official. For a man to voluntarily bow to an idol would be sin; if he were by sheer force brought to his knees and held in an attitude of worship, no sin would attach to the act so far as he was concerned.

The goal of conscientious objectors is to wash their hands of complicity. Such resisters don’t necessarily care if the government knows about their resistance, and don’t necessarily feel like they need to be part of a movement. Resisting taxes is itself the right thing to do, they feel, and they would resist even if they were alone in doing so and even if nobody else were aware that they were resisting.

Henry David Thoreau explained his tax resistance in the language of a conscientious objector:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the most enormous wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.… I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico,—see if I would go;” and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute.

The Protester

Goal: To use civil disobedience to amplify one’s protest.

People who resist taxes as a form of protest, on the other hand, very much want others to know about what they are doing. They want to amplify their complaint by publicly breaking the law and inviting the legal consequences. This communicates the strength of their beliefs and their willingness to sacrifice and take risks for them.

If the government responds to their tax resistance by seizing money from them, that doesn’t necessarily represent a defeat to protesters. Their tax resistance is more about principled opposition than about the actual money involved.

For example, tax resisters in the women’s suffrage movement in the U.K. wanted to demonstrate the self-serving hypocrisy of a male-exclusive government that treated women as people when it came time to tax them, but as non-people when it came time to ask for the consent of the governed. These resisters openly defied the government and dared it to arrest them or seize their property. Then they used such reprisals as opportunities for further protest. They were civil-disobedient protesters, and their tactics reflect this.

The Nonviolent Resister

Goal: To deprive resources from the government to force political change.

“Withholding payment of taxes is one of the quickest methods of overthrowing a government,” said Gandhi. Resisters who hope to reduce the resources available to the government and thereby force it to change (or perhaps even to weaken and then overthrow it), are using tax resistance as a form of nonviolent conflict.

Such resisters need many people to join them in the struggle, and they prefer those tactics that cost the government the most. Unlike the above two varieties of resister, they are not satisfied with forms of tax resistance in which the government eventually gets the money anyway.

For example, tax resisters in the movement that pressed for the Reform Act 1832 in the U.K. wanted to “stop the supplies”—that is, to withhold enough money from the government that it would be crippled and would be forced to grant the movement’s demands. To this end, they augmented their tax strike with a run on the Bank of England. They used tax resistance as part of a campaign of nonviolent conflict meant to force political change.

Some tax resisters resist because they conclude that the tax they are resisting was enacted illegally, is being imposed without proper authority, or is being illegally applied to them in particular. They resist in anticipation that such a legal theory will be validated, and the tax legally abolished.

For example, property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago refused to pay while they pursued a legal challenge to property assessments. Those assessments had left many wealthy and well-connected property owners suspiciously exempt. The resisters eventually won their case, which found the assessments—and therefore the taxes based on them—to be invalid.

Resisters from Multiple Categories

Some resisters belong to more than one category. For example, a tax resister may be initially motivated by conscientious objection, but may also hope to also make their tax resistance a public protest. Or a resistance campaign may believe a tax to be illegal and it may advise people to resist on that account, while also believing that if enough people resist the government will be forced to acknowledge their legal interpretation.

There is some natural overlap between the four varieties of resister. It’s possible for your campaign to include multiple varieties of resisters without this being confusing or causing problems.

But I’ve also noticed some tax resisters get confused. They believe they can “mix and match” tactics and rhetoric from various categories without giving much attention to whether their mix makes for a coherent recipe.

For example, some war tax resisters use the rhetoric of conscientious objection to explain the motives for their resistance, but then choose symbolic tax resistance tactics (like refusing to pay only a certain percentage of their tax). Such tactics are more appropriate to someone who resists as a form of protest and wouldn’t meet the goals of a true conscientious objector.

Because confused tax resisters like these have disconnects between their motives, tactics, and goals, they are less effective in meeting their goals and also less convincing when they try to get support or sympathy for their stand.

Notes and Citations