How you can resist funding the government →
a survey of tactics of historical tax resistance campaigns
Over the past several months I’ve been compiling lists of examples of a variety of tactics that have been used by tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns — tactics in addition to tax resistance itself.
Today I’ll give an overview of the whole series:
Why have I bothered to catalog all of these techniques of historical tax resistance campaigns?
I hope to help future tax resistance campaigns be more successful.
Many of the campaigns I researched that seemed best-organized and most-successful have also had good awareness of their predecessors.
For example, the resisters of taxes for sectarian education in Britain around were well aware of the earlier tithe resistance of the Quakers or the Irish Catholics; the tax resisters for women’s suffrage who followed took lessons from the education tax resisters and carried with them a banner featuring 17th century English tax resister John Hampden; Gandhi took notes on the suffragists and the education tax resisters when he was forming his own tax resistance campaigns, and, along with the more recent Poll Tax resisters, hearkened back also to the 14th century resistance of Wat Tyler, and he fashioned his khādī (homespun) campaign after that of the American revolutionaries, who had also spun and woven their own cloth to boycott British textiles during their struggle to break from that Empire.
Sometimes, tax resisters I meet seem to have a magical view of activism in which one day they take a noble and confrontational conscientious stand and the following day the government sorrowfully repents and rescinds its unjust policies.
In reality, the successful tax resistance campaigns I have studied have involved struggles on many fronts, using a variety of tactics, and with a great deal of hard work and organizing behind the scenes — the dramatic sit-ins and salt-marches and so forth are just the fruit of well-tended trees, where much of the work is happening at the roots.
You are unlikely to have a successful tax resistance campaign if you limit it to tax resistance.
To be most successful, your campaign must also develop strategies to support and sustain resisters, recruit new resisters, deploy additional techniques of resistance, frustrate the government’s countermeasures, and amplify its effect with good publicity.
These are some of the fronts on which a successful tax resistance struggle takes place, and the tactics I have categorized address these various fronts.
When I say that I hope my work will be helpful to future tax resistance campaigns, I don’t mean that every tax resistance campaign deserves help.
Some historical tax resistance campaigns have been in the service of unsavory causes — for instance the campaigns to reinstitute white supremacist government in the post-Civil War American South.
But I am of the opinion that coercive taxation is itself bad, and that institutions that enforce it can be assumed to be at least to that extent pernicious, and that therefore a tax resistance campaign, whatever else can be said about it, at least has one thing clearly in its favor.
In my survey of historical campaigns I have much more frequently been sympathetic with the resisters and their cause, than with the taxers and theirs, and so I am happy to offer constructive advice to the tax resistance campaigns of the future, sight unseen.
I know that this is currently an unpopular opinion, and that readers may come to my book eager to learn how to help their own tax resistance campaign, while seeing their campaign as an exception to the general rule that taxes are good and ought to be paid and make us all better off in the long run.
I hope that my book will be just as helpful to resisters like these as it will be to skeptics of the value of taxation like myself.
To find tactics that the American war tax resistance movement could unite around, we can start by using a process of elimination.
First, let’s eliminate the ones that require violence against people, since many war tax resisters are pacifists, and many of the ones who aren’t are still opposed to the use of violent tactics or are skeptical of their efficacy.
That crosses the following tactics off the list:
There are also examples of violence directed at property.
These pass muster with some pacifists but not with others, so we’ll drop those from the list too:
Some other tactics on the list may or may not include violence.
Rather than screen them out entirely, for the purpose of this exercise we’ll just stipulate that in our case violent methods of implementing the remaining tactics will be excluded from consideration.
Next, let’s try to find tactics that will be attractive both to those war tax resisters who support the existing government (by and large) and see its militarism as a flaw that they hope to correct, and also to those resisters who oppose the existing government and see its militarism as an essential component that can only be combated by weakening the government as a whole.
First, let’s eliminate those tactics that assume the goal of weakening or eliminating the government as a whole (or of wholly withdrawing allegiance from it):
(There are a few other tactics that arguably belong on this forbidden list, but that I think could be finessed in such a way as to appeal even to the most dyed-in-the-wool anarchist.)
There’s also one that could be finessed in such a way as to appeal either to government-supporters or government-opposers, but I can’t imagine how it could appeal to both simultaneously:
We can also eliminate a few tactics that, while they were useful to some tax resistance campaigns in some times and places, have no real use for the modern American war tax resistance movement:
There are also some tactics that, while not being theoretically useless to the modern American war tax resistance movement, are not currently practical given the movement’s size and capabilities:
Okay… now, of the remainder, are there any methods that would be deal-breakers for any of the four varieties of resister I identified as being components of the modern American war tax resistance movement coalition?
the conscientious objector to government spending
the civil-disobedient protester
the practitioner of “people power” conflict
the person asserting a legal right to refuse
A conscientious objector is likely to object to any methods that involve giving the government resources or making yourself more vulnerable to taxes and property seizures (at least so long as the government is engaged in its objectionable policies).
So that eliminates these:
A civil disobedient protester will not be satisfied with tax resistance techniques that remain under-the-radar without being in open confrontation with the government.
For this reason, tactics like the following are unlikely to be appealing to them:
Someone whose aim is to succeed in changing government policy via a campaign of nonviolent resistance that includes withholding funds from the government is not going to be satisfied with tactics that are merely symbolic or communicative (except possibly in the course of recruiting new resisters or weakening the resolve of government agents), but will have no reason to oppose such tactics so long as they are secondary and in service to the more practical main thrust of the campaign.
The only remaining tactic that I can’t see as having much of any appeal to a resister from this camp would be:
Finally we have the case of war tax resisters who are motivated by a belief that conscientious objection to military taxation either is legal (via the Nuremberg Principles, other international legal agreements, or an enlightened interpretation of the U.S. Constitution), or ought to be legal.
The purpose of their resistance is largely to help convince the government to enforce this legal interpretation.
Folks in this camp have a goal in which people who for reasons of conscience cannot financially support war have a legal option that respects this.
They see tax resistance as a stop-gap measure that conscientious people must resort to because the government does not offer such a legal option at present.
They will only be interested in tactics that are plausibly in the service of the goal of changing the law in this way, although, as with the nonviolent resisters, they may also be comfortable with other tactics so long as they are secondary and in service to this main goal, or they help resisters during this stop-gap period.
Their approach rules out one tactic in particular, since the approach presupposes splitting the tax resistance movement into those who would stop resisting once given a legal option and those who would not:
Now, not all of these may be good ideas, or ones the movement would really be capable of carrying off in its current state, but these at least are ones that remain worth considering.
Many of them are already being put into practice in some form (but perhaps not the most effective form).
Those and the ones that remain unimplemented ought to make for good food for thought for people trying to make the modern American war tax resistance movement more effective.
Remember that some of these tactics would have to be conducted in a certain way or in conjunction with other tactics in order to appeal to tax resisters with particular goals in mind (like civil disobedients who need to be in open confrontation with the government, nonviolent resistants who need to make practical dents in the government’s resources and capabilities, and legality advocates who want to make strides towards legalization).
I tried to get a little buzz going in American war tax resistance circles by highlighting my articles on
Larry Rosenwald wondered whether it was worthwhile to try to pick tactics that appeal to all factions of the modern American war tax resistance movement.
Might it not be better, he suggests, to select the most powerful tactics, even if they’re ones that not all resisters will be interested in signing on to?
He may be right about that, but the example he chose to illustrate it — “the peace tax legislation activism that’s the heart of many European war tax resistance initiatives, and the American campaign for a peace tax fund” — strikes me as the least powerful and among the most divisive of the possible tactics we could be considering.
This just goes to show how difficult it may be to get the movement, such as it is, to rally around a particular set of effective tactics.
Here’s a video of the talk I gave a couple of days back to the Extinction Rebellion group in the U.K. for the launch of their “Money Rebellion” project:
My talk concerned the variety of tactics available to tax resistance campaigns, and how to wisely choose among them depending on the specific needs and circumstances of your campaign.
I think it had about 200 people watching live, and who knows how many viewing the video afterwards.
Judging from all the comments on the Facebook event video, the audience was very interested and engaged, so I’m very happy with how it went.
I have released my book 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns as a free, on-line e-book.
I updated it with some examples from campaigns that erupted since its original publication.
I also changed the title to the snappier Tax Strike Tactics.
A tax resistance campaign will be more successful if it takes advantage of the rich resources history provides.
But there are better and worse ways to go about that.
Superficial fetishization of the theatrical residue of history gets you a renaissance faire, not a successful activist movement.
There are four common varieties of tax resister with distinct goals.
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, consider the modern American war tax resistance movement, which is challenged by containing resisters of all four varieties.
Your tax resistance campaign is less likely to succeed if it limits itself to tax resistance.
To be most successful, your campaign must deploy an appropriate and effective set of tactics on a number of additional fronts.
You also must decide whether to make a commitment to nonviolence.
Beware of the temptations to petulant protest or to make a fetish out of getting arrested, which can distract a campaign from its proper goals.
The heart of a tax resistance campaign is its resisters.
A successful campaign encourages, supports, and sustains these resisters, and facilitates their resistance.
Tactics in this category are also opportunities for people who are sympathetic to the campaign but who are unable to resist paying taxes themselves.
People who cannot resist taxes directly can support those who can and do.
For many tax resistance campaigns there is strength in numbers.
When enough people resist, the government’s ability either to fight back or to ignore the problem falters.
Successful tax resistance campaigns make it easier for people to begin resisting, and they also develop ways to reduce attrition in the movement.
Governments combat tax resisters and tax resistance campaigns with a variety of weapons.
They may arrest and detain resisters, seize and sell their property, declare them outlaws, exile them, and so forth.
Your resistance campaign should anticipate that as it becomes more successful, the government will use increasingly fierce and desperate methods to fight back—and you should be prepared to adopt tactics that limit the effectiveness of these countermeasures.
When you introduce new resistance techniques, you stay one step ahead of government countermeasures, you keep your movement from growing stale and becoming “yesterday’s news,” and you bring in new resisters who find the new techniques more appealing or practical than the old ones.
Communicating well can be crucial to the success of your campaign.
Evaluate your tactics with an eye not only to their primary effects, but also to the message they send.
In some cases, the message is the primary effect of the tactic (even when this is not what you had in mind).
Good communication helps you recruit resisters and blunts the effects of the government’s countermeasures.
It can also help your campaign develop the support and sympathy of non-participants, and even of former antagonists.
What does victory look like?
In some tax resistance campaigns, it seems obvious: perhaps it is the abolition of an odious tax, or the overthrow of the government, or the recognition of the rights of the disenfranchised, or a particular change in state policy.
But in some cases it is not so obvious, and in other cases the obvious answer isn’t necessarily the best one.
There are even campaigns in which the resisters don’t seem to have given much thought to victory at all—as though they were resigned to being a perpetual opposition movement.
Perhaps, contrary to what the organizers of the world are always telling us, the key to curing society’s ills is not necessarily to organize at all.
You don’t need to build a majority, or a critical mass, or a disciplined revolutionary vanguard.
Just get your own house in order and commit yourself to your own one-person revolution—that’s the most crucial, practical, and effective thing you can be doing right now.
So while the previous chapters have concentrated on tactics that help tax resistance movements succeed, this chapter will consider how tax resisters can succeed even without being part of a movement.
Now it’s time to apply what you’ve learned to strengthen your own tax resistance campaign.
In this exercise, you’ll methodically and carefully examine your campaign, looking at its strengths, its weaknesses, its vulnerabilities, and its potential.
You’ll then choose some new tactics to strengthen your campaign on the fronts where it is weakest or most vulnerable.
