Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Russia →
Vyborg manifesto period, 1905–07
, a coalition of anti-government groups in Petrograd decided to call for tax resistance and other forms of economic rebellion against Russia’s czarist government, and composed the following manifesto to announce their campaign:
The government is on the brink of bankruptcy.
It has reduced the country to ruins and scattered it with corpses.
The peasants, worn out by suffering and hunger, are incapable of paying taxes.
The government gave credits to the landowners out of the people’s money.
Now it is at a loss as to what to do with the landowners’ mortgaged estates.
Factories and plants are at a standstill.
There is unemployment and a general stagnation of trade.
The government has used the capital obtained by foreign loans to build railways, warships, and fortresses and to store up arms. Foreign sources have now been exhausted, and state orders have also come to an end.
The merchant, the supplier, the contractor, the factory owner, accustomed to enriching themselves at the treasury’s expense, find themselves without new profits and are closing down their offices and plants.
One bankruptcy follows another.
Banks are failing.
All trade exchanges have been reduced to the barest minimum.
The government’s struggle against revolution is causing daily unrest.
No one is any longer sure what the morrow will bring.
Foreign capital is going back home.
“Purely Russian” capital is also seeping away into foreign banks.
The rich are selling their property and going abroad in search of safety.
The birds of prey are fleeing the country and taking the people’s property with them.
For many years the government has spent all its state revenue on the army and navy.
There is a shortage of schools.
Roads have been neglected.
In spite of this, there is not enough money even to keep the troops supplied with food.
The war was lost partly because military supplies were inadequate.
Mutinies of the poverty-stricken, hungry troops are flaring up all over the country.
The railways are economically sick through the government’s fault.
Many millions of roubles are needed to restore the railway economy.
The government has pilfered the savings banks, and handed out deposits to support private banks and industrial enterprises, often entirely fictitious ones.
It is using the small saver’s capital to play the stock exchange, where that capital is exposed to risk daily.
The gold reserves of the state bank are negligible compared with the existing claims of government loans and the demands of trade turnover.
It will be reduced to nothing if gold coin is demanded for every transaction.
Taking advantage of the absence of any control of the state finances, the government has long been issuing loans which far exceed the country’s means of payment.
With these new loans it is covering the interest on old ones.
Year after year the government issues false accounts of expenditure and revenue, showing both to be less than they are in reality and robbing indiscriminately to show a surplus instead of an annual deficit.
Officials are free to rob the treasury which in any case is already exhausted.
Only the Constituent Assembly, after the overthrow of the autocracy, can halt this financial ruin.
It will carry out a close investigation of the state finances and will draw up a detailed, clear, accurate, and certified balance sheet of state revenue and expenditure (budget).
Fear of popular control which would reveal to all the world the government’s financial insolvency is forcing it to keep putting off the convening of the people’s representative assembly.
In order to safeguard its rapacious activities the government forces the people to fight unto death.
Hundreds of thousands of citizens perish and are ruined in this fight, and industry, trade, and means of communication are destroyed at their very foundations.
There is only one way out: to overthrow the government, to deprive it of its last strength.
It is necessary to cut the government off from the last source of its existence: financial revenue.
This is necessary not only for the country’s political and economic liberation, but also, more particularly, in order to restore the financial equilibrium of the state.
We have therefore decided:
To refuse to make land redemption payments and all other payments to the treasury.
In all transactions and in the payment of wages and salaries, to demand gold, and in the case of sums of less than five roubles, full-weight hard cash (coinage).
To withdraw deposits from savings banks and from the state bank, demanding payment of the entire sum in gold.
The autocracy has never enjoyed the people’s confidence and has never received any authority from the people.
At the present time the government is behaving within the frontiers of its own country as though it were ruling conquered territory.
We have therefore decided not to allow the repayment of loans which the government contracted while it was clearly and openly waging war against the entire people.
In , the Czar dissolved the first Russian popularly-elected legislature (duma), which had only been reluctantly permitted by the Czar , and which had been elected in .
The members of the duma fled to Vyborg, Finland, and reconvened.
There, they issued the “Vyborg Manifesto,” which follows:
Citizens of All Russia: Parliament has been dissolved by ukase of .
You elected us as your representatives and instructed us to fight for our country and freedom.
In execution of your instructions and our duty, we drew up laws in order to insure freedom to the people.
We demanded the removal of irresponsible Ministers who were infringing the laws with impunity and oppressing freedom.
First of all, however, we wanted to bring out a law respecting the distribution of land to working peasants and involving the assignment, to this end, of Crown appanages, monasteries, and lands belonging to the clergy, and compulsory expropriation of private estates.
The Government held such a law to be inadmissible, and upon Parliament once more urgently putting forward its resolution regarding compulsory expropriation Parliament was dissolved.
The Government promises to convoke a new Parliament .
Russia must remain without popular representation for , at a time when the people are standing on the brink of ruin and industry and commerce are undermined, when the whole country is seething with unrest, and when the Ministry has definitely shown its incapacity to do justice to popular needs.
For the Government will act arbitrarily and will fight against the popular movement in order to obtain a pliable, subservient Parliament.
Should it succeed, however, in completely suppressing the popular movement, the Government will convoke no Parliament at all.
Citizens, stand up for your trampled-on rights, for popular representation, and for an imperial Parliament.
Russia must not remain a day without popular representation.
You possess the means of acquiring it.
The Government has, without the assent of the popular representatives, no right to collect taxes from the people nor to summon the people to military service.
Therefore you are now the Government.
The dissolved Parliament was justified in giving neither money nor soldiers.
Should the Government, however, contract loans in order to procure funds, such loans will be invalid.
Without the consent of the popular representatives the Russian people will never acknowledge them and will not be called upon to pay them.
Accordingly, until a popular representative Parliament is summoned do not give a kopeck to the throne or a soldier to the army.
Be steadfast in your refusal.
No power can resist the united, inflexible will of the people.
Citizens, in this obligatory and unavoidable struggle your representatives will be with you.
The Czar’s government responded by banning the Manifesto’s signers from politics and prosecuting them for treason, and prohibiting its publication and distribution in Russia.
The New York Times commented:
Practically the question of the payment of the taxes is the issue on which the battle for popular rights is to be fought out.
It is well that the leaders of the movement for the security of those rights have succeeded in restraining the extremists from plunging into a general strike or trying to set up a provisional Government.
Aggressive and radical action of that sort requires means, which the people have not.
It requires not only men, but arms and supplies and organization, and it is exposed to the danger of forcible repression through the banishment or slaughter of the leaders.
But passive resistance, if the people are equal to it, is much more likely to win.
It throws the burden of affirmative action, with all the expense involved, on the Government; it cuts or weakens the sinews of war; it impairs the credit of the Treasury; it alarms foreign investors, and strongly and directly affects the public opinion of the world.
But the duma was premature and overconfident in calling for a nationwide tax strike.
Kellogg Durland, who was in Russia at the time, reports that the appeal fell on a skeptical peasantry:
I was recommended to several typical peasant villages within a radius of fifty miles of the town of Kostroma as worth my visiting.…
A local Zemstvo official, known to the peasants, offered to accompany me to the village, to introduce me and to vouch for the fact that I was seriously interested in knowing the precise feelings of the peasants in regard to the dissolution of the Duma, their attitude toward the government at that time, and their state of mind toward the next Duma.…
Our troika pulled up before a tea-house, near the close of the day.…
When our steaming, fragrant tea had been set before us, my companion told the men, briefly, that I had come all the way from another country to talk with them.
Their interest was fixed instantly.
Within a very few minutes the number in the room had swelled to nearly one hundred, and so intent did we all become that several hours slipped by all too quickly.…
“Have you seen the Viborg manifesto?” I asked
“Of course we have read it,” they exclaimed, laughing.
“What do you think about it?”
“It is foolish,” answered one of the older men, “Stop paying taxes?
We have not paid direct taxes in .
Of course we shall not pay any .
But can we stop drinking tea and vodka?
Can we stop using matches?
As for not sending soldiers to the army — suppose we don’t.
Five soldiers are soon due from this village.
Suppose we don’t send them — what will happen? Cossacks will come.
The whole village will have to defend those five men. That will mean bloodshed.
Is it not better that we should get every one of those men to promise that they will never shoot at their brothers?
If we do this we can accomplish the same result without spilling blood in the streets of our village.”
One of the Constitutional Democratic Duma deputies from this province was urging a group of peasants to accept the Viborg manifesto, when up spoke a canny muzhik and said:
“You ask us to stop giving taxes to the government.
That means stop drinking tea and vodka. Very good.
But you are a lawyer — will you stop putting stamps on all of your papers, and documents, and letters?”
These peasants, so far as I talked with them, had lost faith in the Constitutional Democrats.
They felt that the members of this party were not always single-eyed; and in the Viborg manifesto they showed their lack of understanding of the peasants by asking them to do several ridiculous and impossible things, and then dropped into private life, leaving the peasants to muddle through with the practical side of the manifesto as best they could.
Men Who Signed Appeal to People to Refuse Taxes on Trial Today
ST. PETERSBURG,
. — The trial of 169 members of the first
duma
who signed the Viborg
manifesto , calling
upon the citizens of Russia to stand up for their rights, for popular
representation and for an imperial parliament, will begin tomorrow before the
court of appeals. The former duma members are charged with high treason and
with the promulgation of an appeal to the people to refuse to pay taxes or
serve in the army or navy.
The verdict of guilty is anticipated, as the gist of the accusation is
established by the text of the manifesto, and only a technical defense can be
interposed. But there is no reason to anticipate the infliction of the
maximum penalty, which is death. The majority of the defendants have
abandoned all hope of acquittal, but are looking forward to a light sentence,
such as a year’s imprisonment or some similar punishment.
The prominence of the accused, however, among whom are Professor
Serge Mourmtseff,
former president of the lower house; Petrankevitch and many other liberal
leaders, and the total ineffectiveness of the Viborg appeal may induce the
government to further leniency.
Seven of the leading lawyers of Russia, headed by Vassili Maklakoff, leader
of the constitutional democrats in the second duma, and M. Talako, will
appear for the defense. The trial is expected to last 10 days.
And this comes from the
edition of the New York Sun:
PRIESTS MISLEAD PEASANTS.
Circulating Fictitious Viborg Manifesto About Duma Dissolution.
St. Petersburg,
. — The priests of the Orthodox Church are enthusiastically following the
Government’s behest to suppress “political error” among the masses. A message
from Niegin in the province of Tchernigoff announces that a new ikon has been
placed in the Glinfkaia hermitage, representing pictorially the great day of
judgment. In the foreground are sinners burning in hell fire, the central
figure being easily recognized as a likeness of
Count Tolstoi.
Many priests are also helping to circulate a fictitious Viborg manifesto
dated , when the former members of
the Duma really met. It has 181 signatures, which is the exact number who
signed the genuine Viborg manifesto; but instead of its contents being a
summons to refuse to pay taxation for recruits, the bogus manifesto declares
that the Jews and false masters (that is, the educated people who agitate
radical politics) broke up the Duma and defeated the peasants’ hope for land.
For this reason, says the manifesto, they must be slaughtered.
is , who drafted the Vyborg Manifesto in which the exiled Russian Duma urged Russians to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
St. Petersburg, . — The Viborg manifesto is producing an effect, many peasants refusing to pay taxes.
Advices from the centre and south state that peasants are preparing for widespread disorders after harvest.
Sixty revolutionary agitators at Odessa have started for different villages.
A girl, armed with a bomb, and fifteen anarchists, including compositors, all armed with revolvers, seized a newspaper office in the centre of Odessa and locked up the proprietor and employees while they printed a proclamation.
They then departed unmolested.
As there is unrest among the troops at Odessa the authorities are closely watching.
Vast Membership of Peasants’ Union Startles Russia.
Will Not Pay Taxes
Members Decide to Boycott all State Owned Business.
Refuse to Join Militia
Workmen’s Union Welcomes Co-Operation But Says Armed Revolt Is Sole Way to Reach Democracy’s Ideal.
(Special Cable Service.)
St. Petersburg, .
— (Via Fyatunine.)
— The swift organization and vast membership of the newly-formed peasants’ union proves even more startling than the revolutionary organization of the workers in the towns.
The great districts in the provinces of Southwest Russia are joining the union en masse.
In thousands of instances the people prove that they are much less simple and poor than they are usually said to be.
They are largely able to buy rifles without extraneous subscriptions, and they agree in electing district committees.
Their attitude towards the Government is similar to that of the urban artisans, but whilst the latter seek to destroy the regime by strikes and mass, the agitation in the great towns, the peasants are deciding to boycott all state-owned businesses, and refuse both to pay taxes or to supply the annual rolls of military conscripts.
The enlistment department of the War Office, which should have now nearly prepared the lists of the conscripts for 1906, has been unable to obtain any names or figures in the large provinces.
The workmen’s union, in welcoming the co-operation of the peasants’ union, tells them that the proletariat is struggling under the banner of social democracy, and will not limit its action to the foregoing means, but only when armed will the nation in revolution be able to repulse reaction and reach the democracy’s ideal.
Today, some news briefs from reporters covering the Russian Revolution of , in which tax resistance played a role.
First, an excerpt from a brief dispatch from London sent on :
The peasants in the Radoni district have refused to pay the taxes and have offered armed resistance to the tax gatherers.
Next, a longer article, written calling on Russians to refuse to pay taxes and to resist conscription:
Russia’s Dilemma.
“The Duma is dead; long live the Duma,”
The phrase is perhaps the best which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman has ever coined.
It suggests, as a British premier should, that free institutions, once established, are ineradicable.
Whatever reason impelled the Czar to establish the Duma — whether he did it in good faith, or merely to stave off revolt — whether he acted on the caprice of the moment, or in accordance with some too subtle scheme of dishing his foes — there is no doubt that he gave to the party of freedom, a first step in the direction in which they can best make progress.
Russia never has had a free Parliament, and yet already the Duma, in its manifesto to the people, declares as clearly as could any English legislature, that “the Government, without the assent of popular representatives, has no right to collect taxes, or to summon the people to military service.”
That is the high appeal on which the Duma joins issue.
What says the Czar?
His manifesto is certainly remarkable.
After very specious arguments as to his reasons for calling the Duma, and threats as to what will follow on disobedience to the imperial will, there is a promise of increased lands to the peasants, the calling of a future Duma, and the vague hope that “We believe that giants in thought and action will appear, and thanks to their assiduous efforts, the glory of Russia will continue to shine.”
Making the usual allowance for pious persiflage, this resolves itself in a documentary justification for a relapse into despotism.
A far better indication of the Czar’s real intentions can be seen in the great massing of troops in St. Petersburg, and in the Jewish belief — so often sadly justified in the past — that fresh massacres are impending.
The mailed fist is apparently now to have its chance.
There was some ground for the recent rumours that the Kaiser of Germany and the Emperor of Austria were conspiring to interpose with armed forces in Russian Poland, in support of the Czar’s rule, and it is also significant that the Czar’s summary action in dissolving the Duma was taken on the receipt of a long cypher telegram from the Kaiser.
What will be the result of it all?
That revolution is written broad across the face of events in the land of the Slav, it would be idle to deny; with too fatal accuracy, all the steps in the sinking of the French monarchy, over a century ago, are being reproduced.
The Bourbons fell because they forgot nothing and learned nothing.
Similarly Byron’s biting words apply to Nicholas as accurately as they did to his predecessor of an earlier day —
Both the Czar and Duma appeal to the peasant.
The Czar stands for authority; the Duma for freedom.
From the throne the troops are marshalled, but the Duma repeats Tolstoi’s great appeal to the men of the provinces to offer passive resistance — to pay no tax and give no recruit, and thus strike at the very roots of imperial power.
And to the bondholders abroad it has addressed a potent argument in declining to guarantee any loans raised by the Czar without the consent of the representatives of the people.
Already, while New South Wales 4 per cents are at £108, Russian 4 per cents are down to £67½.
Today I’ll continue our look at the violent side of tax resistance campaigns by giving some examples of attacks on police and soldiers when they attempt to enforce tax laws or to take reprisals against resisters.
, a crowd of people on the Greek island of Hydra attacked local police after they detained a restauranteur for tax evasion:
[T]he inspectors wanted to transport the restaurant owner to Athens, an hour’s ride away by fast boat.
They were set upon by a local crowd, which also attacked the boat’s crew.
The police, along with the restaurant owner, had to retreat to the island’s police station, which was besieged until riot police arrived .
Locals cut off the station’s electricity and water supplies.
a police bus on fire in Zhili, China
In , protesters in China “overturned police cars and blocked roads over plans to more strictly enforce payment of taxes.”
In another mob of tax protesters in China destroyed ten police vehicles including an armored car.
There were battles between police and protesters during the Poll Tax rebellion in the Thatcher years.
In Bristol, the crowd charged the police and rescued arrested demonstrators.
“One police officer was kicked unconscious when he tried to make an arrest.
Six more were dragged out of their van.”
In London, “As the police baton-charged the crowd… they were resisted by a hail of bricks, bottles, and stones.”
Police brutality turned a peaceful demonstration into a riot in Trafalgar Square.
“Mounted riot police baton-charged the crowd.
The crowd, angered by this violent provocation, retaliated by throwing sticks, banner poles, bottles — anything they could find.
Young people, armed only with placards, fought hand to hand with police.
… As the missiles began to rain down the police retreated:
…Pedestrian isles were being torn up and real serious lumps of concrete being thrown at the romper-suited police.
I found myself with rock in hand.
The first I threw was aimed at a group of police.
I watched it bounce off a shield.
My second rock was more specifically aimed at their front line.
Again, it was well-deflected.
I saw a rock strike a policeman’s visor and he didn’t even blink.
The police were shielding themselves from the missiles raining down, but they were vulnerable to rocks aimed at their legs and midriffs.
The police were taking a battering.
Every now and then a policeman would crumple to his knees and the crowd would roar.”
More than 100 police officers would be treated for injuries sustained during the riot.
A spokesman for the police said, “I have never seen such sustained and savage violence used directly against the police.”
During the Poujadist tax rebellion in France in , “unabashed Poujade vigilantes went right on chasing tax collectors down the roads, mobbing police and defying troops assigned to escort them.”
At the tail end of the Dharsana Salt Raid, some Indian nationalist sympathizers, disregarding Gandhi’s guidelines and “abandoning, it was said, all pretenses at non-violence, stoned guards and police.
Five police and three excisemen were injured by the pebbles.
Six police who went to the rescue of some hardly pressed excisemen were themselves surrounded by the mob and obliged to retire.”
In Spain in , when guardsmen tried to disperse protesters angry at the arrest of a tax resisting cattleman, the crowd fought back — “two persons were killed and five wounded.
Among the latter is a Sergeant of the Civil Guard.”
After the Russian duma-in-exile issued a tax resistance manifesto, the government said that if people refused to pay taxes, it would send in troops who would show no mercy.
“Without waiting for soldiers to put the threat of the government into execustion the peasants have inaugurated a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the troops already in the province.
… Within the last few days a number of military sentinels have been shot down in ambush or attacked by the peasants.”
In , the military were called in to Guerrero, Mexico, to put down a tax rebellion.
Instead, the rebels defeated the troops and took General Ranjel prisoner.
“Half-breeds” (people of mixed European immigrant and Native American parentage) in the Dakota Territory refused to pay taxes in .
When the Sheriff tried to collect, “the half-breeds assembled from all directions, and pressing about the Sheriff and his one man they forced him to surrender his well-earned pittance of taxes … and say they will resist to the last man.
Sheriff Flynn has been notified that he will be shot on sight if he again makes a similar attempt.”
“When a deputy sheriff went to make seizures” against Irish settlers in Canada who were resisting taxes in , “the residents threatened to string him to the nearest tree.
Finally, they compelled him to eat the writs he had, and then gave him a limited time to get out of the township.”
A sheriff trying to enforce the “foreign miners tax” in California “in attempting to compel the foreigners to yield, was killed by them, and one or two of his posse wounded.”
The Rebecca Rioters in Wales targeted the constables who tried to stop or investigate the riots, or to conduct tax seizures:
Two or three hundred Rebeccaites met at a Pontyberem village, and while there “made some special constables promise not to serve, and took away their staves.”
“They then attacked the house of the blacksmith, who had previously said he would face fifteen of the best Rebecca boys, and who also had been sworn in as a special constable; according to his own statements he was a man devoid of fear.
The smith — fearless man of Vulcan — had, however, departed; but smash! went in his door and windows, and his deserted smithy was practically destroyed.”
“At the outset of these proceedings the toll-man ‘Dick’ contrived, by running over ditch and dell, to warn a parish constable, one Evan Thomas, otherwise ‘The Porthyrhyd Lion,’ of his own mishap, as well as the peril to which he thought him exposed, Evan being somewhat unpopular in the neighbourhood.
On receiving this hint, away bolted ‘Ianto,’ scampering over the ditches and fields until he found a cow-house where he lay concealed in anxious suspense the remainder of the night.
Notwithstanding the retreat of ‘Ianto,’ about seventy of the tribe visited his domicile, smashed in his windows and doors, destroyed his shelf and dresser, and all his crockery, as well as the spokes of a new cart, put a cheese on the fire, cut down some of the trees in the garden, and then simultaneously raised the cry, ‘Alas! poor Ianto!’
… Evan the constable… if found, was to have his ears cut off.”
“These riotous proceedings caused considerable excitement and alarm… The different persons in the neighbourhood who were sworn in as special constables… gave up their staves, with the determination of refusing on any future occasions to interfere with the movements of Rebecca or the protection of the toll-house.”
“John Evans and John Lewis, two Sheriff’s officers from Carmarthen, were sent… to make a distress on the goods and chattels of William Philipp… They were attacked by about twenty-five of the ’Beccas, and beaten in a dreadful manner.… John Evans was compelled to go on his knees before them, and put the distresses and authority to distrain in the fire.
He was then made to take his oath on the Bible, which one of them put in his hands, that he would never again enter the premises to make another distress.
He was compelled to make use of the following words: ‘As the Lord liveth, and my soul liveth, I will never come here to make any distress again.’
After taking the oath, he was set free, and the two bailiffs returned to town.”
William Chambers, who led a police unit that wounded and arrested some Rebeccaites, was targeted multiple times.
On one occasion, a stack of his corn was burned, on another, a stack of straw met the torch.
Later his farm and outbuildings were all engulfed in flames.
A horse of his that had been rescued from another of his farms as it burned down was later shot.
This panel from the Carrickshock memorial depicts an attack on British troops during the Irish Tithe War.
During the Tithe War in Ireland, British troops killed 18 resisters who were trying to reclaim distrained livestock.
In return, the resisters killed 18 troops in an ambush:
A number of writs against defaulters were issued by the Court of Exchequer, and intrusted to the care of process-servers, who, guarded by a strong force, proceeded on their mission with secrecy and despatch.
Bonfires along the surrounding hills, however, and shrill whistles through the dell, soon convinced them that the people were not unprepared for hostile visitors.
But the yeomanry pushed boldly on: their bayonets were sharp, their ball-cartridge inexhaustible, their hearts dauntless.
Suddenly an immense mass of peasantry, armed with scythes and pitchforks, poured down upon them — a terrible struggle ensured, and in a few moments eighteen police, including the commanding-officer, lay dead.
The remainder fled, marking the course of their retreat by their blood… In the mêlée, Captain Leyne, a Waterloo veteran, narrowly escaped.
A coroner’s jury pronounced “Wilful murder.”
Large Government rewards were offered, but failed to produce a single conviction.
In Issoudun, France in , a general who was sent to try to quell a tax rebellion there “entered the town only through a capitulation; the moment he reached the Hôtel-de-Ville a man of the Faubourg de Rome put his pruning-hook around his neck, exclaiming, ‘No more clerks where there is nothing to do!’ ”
During the Fries Rebellion in the early United States, “it came to the knowledge of the authorities that several of the magistrates themselves were disaffected, and others were prevented doing their duty through fear of injury.”
During the French Revolution, when the people of Peronne and Ham got wind that an order had been issued to rebuild destroyed toll-houses, they destroyed the soldiers’ barracks.
In another case: “M. de Sauzay, commandant of the ‘Royal Roussillon,’ who was bold enough to save the [tax] clerks, is menaced, and for this misdeed he barely escapes being hung himself.
When the municipal body is called upon to interpose and employ force, it replies that ‘for so small a matter, it is not worth while to compromise the lives of the citizens,’ and the regular troops sent to the Hôtel-de-Ville are ordered by the people not to go except with the butt-ends of their muskets in the air.”
As internet telephony started to become a real option several years ago, some American war tax resisters realized they could avoid the federal excise tax on telephone service by getting rid of their phone lines and switching over to such internet-based plans.
In , as the U.S. was launching its attack on Iraq, anti-war activists from other countries began to promote a boycott of the products of U.S. government contractors, and even of U.S. companies in general.
“The U.S. economy is strung out across the globe,” wrote Arundhati Roy.
“Its economic outposts are exposed and vulnerable.
Our strategy must be to isolate Empire’s working parts and disable them one by one.
No target is too small.
No victory too insignificant.”
When the Continental Congress imposed a tax on postage stamps to help pay for the revolutionary war effort, Quaker James Mott decided to stop using the mail.
He wrote to a friend:
Must our correspondence by mail be at end, in consequence of the extra postage?
or shall we pay it, and thereby contribute a mite to the support of measures calculated to destroy men’s lives and property?
Perhaps I may be alone in refusing to pay postage on letters.
Only a few cents — what can this do, it may be said, towards enabling government to prosecute the war?
Very little, I own: but the great sum required is made up of littles; and if all those littles are withheld, the effusion of human blood may be at an end. …
I cannot… believe it best for me to pay the present demand of additional postage, little as it is, and alone as I may stand.
Many years later, Congress issued revenue stamps that had to be purchased and applied to certain types of documents.
One Quaker wrote in :
I am one of those (I suppose there are others), who have felt an extreme unwillingness to help maintain our wars by the use of the revenue stamps, which were legalized expressly for war uses.
Our forefathers would have made an emphatic protest against it, if indeed they would not have refused entirely to use the stamps, and borne the consequences, whatever they might have been.
… at least we could restrict the use of checks (for example) wherever possible, and diminish in this way our contributions to the war fund.
Other Quakers began refusing to use or to deal in imported goods, so as to avoid paying import duties that were being directed to military expenses.
Joshua Evans wrote:
About , I understood a law was made for raising money to defray the expenses of war, by means of a duty laid on imported articles of almost every kind. …
I had felt myself restrained, for thirty or forty years, from paying such taxes; the proceeds whereof were applied, in great measure, to defray expenses relating to war: and, as herein before-mentioned, my refusal was from a tender conscientious care to keep clear in my testimony against all warlike proceedings.
Quaker shopkeeper Isaac Martin decided to stop dealing in imported goods rather than pay an import duty:
[A] weighty concern attended my mind on account of a tax on shop keepers, who dealt in foreign articles, to be appropriated towards carrying on the war against England.
I felt much scrupulous in my mind, respecting the consistency thereof with our peaceable principles. …
I believed my peace of mind would be affected, if I paid the said tax.
So I resigned myself to the Lord’s will, let the event be as it may.
But scarcely a day passed, that I had not to turn customers away, who applied for articles which I had on hand, but could not sell, on account of the heavy penalty.
Quaker meetings also had a policy of warning their members against “sharing or partaking in the spoils of war by purchasing or selling prize-goods” — that is, goods seized from the ships of enemy nations by government-sanctioned pirates.
Government bonds are an obvious boycott target for people trying to restrict the resources available to the government.
John Payne wrote a tract in entreating Quakers to divest from government bonds that went to pay for wars:
[T]he King [once] had the power of summoning the barons to the field, and the barons their retainers: by these means armies were raised, fields fought, and blood-stained laurels acquired.
But now immense sums are wanted; and without them War would be an impossibility.
The magnitude of the money necessary, infinitely exceeds any resource which the kingdom can immediately supply: therefore the ingenuity of ministers has recourse to the aid of Funding; that is, of establishing a fictitious capital, which shall bear a certain rate of interest; and any person, purchasing of Government a portion of this fictitious capital, is put into the receipt of interest according to the sum he purchases, and the country is burthened with taxes to support the payment of such interest.
No man hazards his veracity by saying that War cannot be now supported without the Funding System.
As no man then can deny this solemn truth, is it not astonishing to find Quakers holders of stock, not only in their individual, but in their collective capacity?
What then is the conclusion?
The Quakers, at the time they declare their fundamental principles prohibit War, are actively and voluntarily supplying the only prop by which the modern system of War is supported.
Payne himself went even further.
Eager to avoid as much as possible paying money to the British government that was fighting the American revolutionary war, he bricked up a third of the windows of his home to reduce his property tax (which was assessed based on the number of windows), he disabled his coach to avoid its license fee, and he rode miles out of his way to avoid road tolls.
Upset at the government siphoning off a portion of pew rents in establishment churches “to relieve the embarrassments in the city finances, occasioned by an extravagant self-elected magistracy,” some people in Edinburgh around the time of the Annuity Tax resistance there proposed also refusing to rent pews until government spending were to become more responsible.
The “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” movement aims to boycott businesses that profit from Israeli settlement expansion in occupied Palestine.
The “Potato Movement” in Greece is trying to circumvent the over-taxed middle-men of the above-ground commercial market by directly connecting producers and buyers in a way that is mutually-beneficial to them and less profitable to the state.
The British government’s enforced monopoly on tea imports into the American colonies was “equal to a tax” in the eyes of Samuel Adams and his fellow patriots.
Boycotts of monopoly tea were widespread, and were famously backed up by acts like the Boston Tea Party, in which monopoly tea was destroyed in bulk.
Other monopoly British imports that suffered from American boycott included house paint, cloth, glass, paper, and dye.
One patriotic song included the lyric:
The use of the taxables, let us forbear:—
(Then merchants import till your stores are all full,
May the buyers be few, and your traffic be dull!)
Boycotts of British-monopoly goods like salt were also, of course, big parts of the Indian independence campaign led by Gandhi.
During the tax resistance and protests that accompanied the campaign for the Reform Act of , “associations were proposed of persons who would undertake to use no excisable articles.”
In Russia around the time of the Vyborg Manifesto, a report noted that “the peasants are deciding to boycott all state-owned businesses.”
For example: “they have undertaken a concerted abstention from vodka, the manufacture and sale of which intoxicant was made a Government monopoly… [which] has since constituted one of the principal sources of the public revenue.”
Another report said that “[t]he leaders of the workingmen’s organization have taken the lead in placing fresh obstacles in the way of the government raising money at home by advising their followers to refuse to use spirits upon which the government collects an enormous tax.”
In the Vietnam era, “[o]ne pacifist, imprisoned for draft refusal and therefore lacking income to refuse taxes on, gave up smoking because the cigarette tax brings the [U.S.] government more revenue than any other single consumer-commodity tax.”
Another possibility is to obstruct the sale of such goods:
In Wales, truckers blockaded a Chevron refinery and called upon the tanker operators to join them in shutting it down, to protest the government’s tax on fuel.
Farmers in Argentina decided in to “halt sales of grains and livestock for a week, setting up roadblocks and hampering exports to press for lower taxes.”
In Greece, recently, resisters to taxes that were added to utility bills have barricaded the offices of utility companies.
Some tax resistance campaigns have tried to partially or completely secede from the government that is taxing them, or to set up alternative parallel governmental or quasi-governmental institutions to compete with or crowd out those of the established government.
When white supremacists in Louisiana lost the gubernatorial election to a reconstructionist candidate in 1872, they formed their own parallel government led by the losing candidate, with their own separate legislature and their own separate militia (with which they briefly occupied the statehouse).
They insisted that they were the legitimate government of Louisiana and recommended that people pay taxes to them and not to the usurpers in the statehouse.
They asserted:
Public opinion throughout the Union is against the usurpation, and our only danger, if there be any, will come from ourselves.
If the people of Louisiana will sanction, by obedience and acquiescence, this Government, they will give it the only validity it can ever acquire.
It is only by our own submission that our cause can be defeated.
We recommend the people of the several parishes, for the purpose of most effectual resistance to this usurpation, and of mutual aid and defense, to join the People’s League of Louisiana by the formation of Parish councils in correspondence with the Central Council at New-Orleans.
We must remember that there can be no de facto government as against a de jure government in a State, and that the only way by which the [governor] Kellogg usurpation can become established as a government is by acquiescence of the people… The people of New-Orleans are not to pay taxes, can not, in fact, pay them, nor are they giving any recognition to the usurpers.
The existence of this shadow government was not only a direct threat to the Kellogg government, but also indirectly made it difficult for it to raise funds because of the uncertainty.
One editorialist explained:
[Kellogg] can borrow no money, for his government is so notoriously illegal that no lender would expect payment.
If he should undertake to sell property for taxes, there would be no buyers, because an illegal Government could not give a valid title.
Hence he is reduced to the necessity of resorting to bluster and threats.
The Rebecca Rioters, confident from their success in destroying tollbooths, started to step in and adjudicate disputes in a quasi-governmental fashion.
For instance, they would visit the homes of fathers of illegitimate children and exact promises from them that they would provide support for the mothers.
During the tax strike that erupted in the French wine-growing region, local government officials resigned en masse and “local Separatist committees professed to take the Government’s place and set up a sort of provincial government.”
The decentralist Liberal Democratic Movement of Carabobo, Venezuela hinted at a tax resistance campaign in .
Upset at deteriorating public safety and infrastructure, and alleging that local taxes were being siphoned off to wasteful federal spending and a bloated local bureaucracy, Enio Daza, autonomism director of the Carabobo branch of the party, suggested that locals organize their own, independent tax office, and pay their taxes there where they could exercise local control over the spending.
The Zapatista movement in Mexico established municipios autónomos (autonomous towns) in regions where they were active:
The Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, and Chol Indians (among others) who lived in the autonomous townships called their political philosophy resistencia: civil resistance to government authority.
In the late 1990s there were thirty-eight Zapatista townships in Chiapas, including less than 10 percent of the 700,000 Indians in the state, but with a political impact in the indigenous communities that far outweighed their size.
The Zapatistas sought not to found a new Indian nation but to make a place for Indian self-determination within the Mexican state.
In their townships they kept their own birth and death records, discouraging followers from registering with official bureaucracies.
They stopped paying taxes to any government and refused to allow social workers from government health and welfare agencies to set foot inside what they considered their boundaries.
They opened their own health clinics staffed by volunteer Mexican and foreign doctors and local herbal healers and organized agricultural and crafts cooperatives that operated mainly through regional barter.
In some townships they held trials and set up jails.
Some people in the present-day Catalan independence movement have started paying their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government rather than to Spain.
An ongoing Spanish tax resistance movement is urging people to create a new, bottom-up, autonomous government of their own, and encourages them to redirect their taxes from the existing government into these new government-like projects:
[T]he construction of autonomy will require a lot of resources.
This process should be based on the ability to work and the generosity of many people, but needs to rely on these resources to make it possible.
By fiscal autonomy we mean all the pathways of redistribution that will make the tax system support initiatives that will really benefit people.
That is to say that the portion that each person is responsible of providing for the common good must be destined for new public services that really place the basic needs of people higher on the scale of priorities.
Therefore it becomes a priority, and all but essential, to generate dynamics of ever more massive civil disobedience against the pilfering of our resources on the part of the state, and to reclaim them for popular self-government.
In the Māori government in New Zealand instructed its subjects there to begin paying a dog tax directly to it, rather than to the New Zealand government-approved County Council.
When the Czar dissolved the Russian Duma in , the Duma refused to dissolve, meeting in Finland and declaring that they were the only government body with the authority to collect and spend taxes, and that therefore so long as they were abolished — so were taxes.
Something similar happened in Germany in , when the military and executive tried to break up the parliament.
The parliament then called on the people to refuse to pay any more taxes to the government.
When the government responded by trying to cut off funds for parliament, “the people insisted on making the payment, in spite of this prohibition.”
A very frequently-used tactic of tax resistance campaigns is to take public oaths or sign public pledges of resistance.
This signals to potential resisters that they will not be alone, and is a show of defiance to the authorities.
I’ve collected dozens of examples, which I’ll summarize here:
When Gandhi launched his first satyagraha-based campaign in South Africa in , a member of the meeting asked everyone present to take a solemn oath of opposition.
Gandhi remarked:
There is no one in this meeting who can be classed as an infant or as wanting in understanding.
You are all well advanced in age and have seen the world; many of you are delegates and have discharged responsibilities in a greater or lesser measure.
No one present, therefore, can ever hope to excuse himself by saying that he did not know what he was about when he took the oath.
I know that pledges and vows are, and should be, taken on rare occasions.
A man who takes a vow every now and then is sure to stumble.
But if I can imagine a crisis in the history of the Indian community of South Africa when it would be in the fitness of things to take pledges, that crisis is surely now.
… Resolutions of this nature cannot be passed by a majority vote.
Only those who take a pledge can be bound by it.
This pledge must not be taken with a view to produce an effect on outsiders.
No one should trouble to consider what impression it might have upon the local Government, the Imperial Government, or the Government of India.
Every one must only search his own heart, and if the inner voice assures him that he has the requisite strength to carry him through, then only should he pledge himself and then only would his pledge bear fruit.
His entire speech, which reflects on vows and the responsibility of vow makers, is worth reading in this context.
In , “98 per cent of the merchants at Stuttgart and… 60 out of 60 merchants at DeWitt,” Arkansas, signed pledges to refuse to collect a new sales tax from their customers or to pay it to the government.
Also in , in Verdun (then a suburb of Montreal), 164 shopkeepers, including the mayor, signed a pledge to refuse to collect or pay a Montreal city sales tax.
, merchants in Gadsen, Alabama followed suit: gathering and voting unanimously to refuse to collect or pay a sales tax.
In Ghana, in , the Akuashongs met and “swore not to… pay any tax, even if the government should fight with them, and to make war with any party breaking the agreement.”
In several French newspapers printed the text of a pledge in which French liberals vowed to resist any taxes that the monarchy instituted without going through constitutional channels.
The newspapers were themselves prosecuted for this.
However, in court, they pointed out that the King himself, before he took the throne, had signed a tax resistance pledge of his own, along with three other members of the nobility, as a protest against republican infringements on their privileges.
In Castine, Maine, in , the pledge took the form of a vote: the town voted 125 to 65 at a specially-convened town meeting, to refuse to collect a school funding tax in defiance of a superior court order to do so.
In , some 5,000 businessmen in Belfast vowed to “keep back payment of all taxes which they can control, so long as any attempt to put into operation the provisions of the Home Rule Bill is persevered in.”
In the Women’s Tax Resistance League, members signed “pledge cards” that indicated which taxes they would be resisting if the government persisted in denying women the vote.
The Reform Act agitation really hit its stride in when a huge rally, 150,000 people strong, vowed as a group to stop paying taxes until the Act’s passage.
One account of the meeting read:
He declared before God, that, if all constitutional modes of obtaining the success of the reform measure failed, he should and would, be the first man to refuse the payment of taxes, except by a levy upon his goods [tremendous cheering, which lasted some minutes].
I now call upon all who hear me, and who are prepared to join me in this step, to hold up your hands [an immense forest of hands was immediately elevated, accompanied by vehement cheering].
I now call upon you who are not prepared to adopt this course, to hold up your hands and signify your dissent [not a single hand appearing, loud shouts and cheers were repeated].
In South Africa’s “New Rush” in , a number of miners signed a pledge reading, in part, “I promise on my honour and in presence of the people that I shall not from this day forward — until released from this obligation by the officers of the League — pay any taxes or impositions whatsoever to the Government, id est, for the support and maintenance of the Government of this territory; and that I shall buy from, sell to, or deal with only such men as have also taken this pledge or obligation; and that I shall to the utmost of my power, with purse and person, protect any and every officer and member of the League against coercion or consequences of what nature soever arising out of the action necessitated by this pledge.
At least 1,000 taxpayers in Elmira, New York, signed a declaration in saying that “The undersigned taxpayers… believing the county, city, and school tax rates as levied are too high, hereby refuse to pay until the budget has been thoroughly examined by the committee of the Taxpayers’ league.
We also refuse to pay penalties until such revision has been made and a lower tax adopted.”
500 taxpayers in Cadillac, Michigan, signed a petition in in which they vowed to refuse to pay taxes for two years unless the local government cut its budget by 20%.
In , 36 New Jersey residents signed their name to a petition to the home country in which they declared that they would refuse to pay any further taxes so long as a Roman Catholic was in charge of tax assessment.
At a “monster meeting” at Castlemaine in Australia in , a group of miners unanimously adopted a resolution to refuse to take out licenses.
Taxpayers in Zeehan, Tasmania, met in an open-air meeting in and passed a resolution stating that they “hereby express our solemn determination to passively resist the payment of the unjust income tax imposed by the late Government.”
A Queensland, Australia stealth tax on rural irrigation improvements, was resisted by the farmers there in , who, organized in groups called “Local Producers’ Associations,” passed motions vowing to resist.
For example, the Association in Rockhampton “unanimously decided that all members pledge themselves to offer passive resistance to the operation of the Act by refusing to make the required applications or to furnish any returns, or to make any payments as demanded by the Act.
Further, it was decided to invite all other LPAs and kindred bodies to adopt a similar attitude.”
, about twenty households near Paddock Wood, England, “signed a declaration to withhold [tax] payments” to protest the lack of government action against vagabonds camping in their neighborhood.
When the Russian Duma-in-exile issued the Vyborg manifesto in , calling on Russians to refuse to pay taxes to the Czarist autocracy, a number of villages responded by voting whether or not to heed the call and then taking the results of the vote as a pledge they were bound to abide by.
In , 149 members of a Catholic War Veterans post vowed to refuse to pay their real estate taxes unless the government dismissed a Communist Party member from his post as an advisor to the Borough President of Manhattan.
At a meeting of the Charleston Board of Trade in South Carolina in , the white supremacist group unanimously passed a series of resolutions declaring that they considered debts incurred by the reconstruction government to be illegitimate and that they would resist the payment of taxes meant to pay them off.
At a mass meeting of white supremacists in Louisiana in , they passed a resolution vowing that “we will pay no more taxes to State or city.”
Some resisters of Thatcher’s poll tax made their resistance dramatically public by burning their “final reminder notices” at demonstrations.
This tactic has been prominent in the American war tax resistance movement.
For example:
In the American pacifist group Peacemakers released a statement, signed by 59 members, in which “the undersigned state hereby that we are not going to pay our federal taxes.”
In , some 370 people signed a public oath saying “We will refuse to pay our federal income taxes voluntarily.”
In , more than five hundred writers and editors added their names to a war tax resistance pledge that appeared as a newspaper advertisement.
The names included James Baldwin, Noam Chomsky, Philip K. Dick, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Grace Paley, Susan Sontag, Benjamin Spock, Gloria Steinem, William Styron, Hunter S. Thompson, Thomas Pynchon, Betty Friedan, and Kurt Vonnegut.
Also in , a letter was circulated largely among academics, and signed by more than a dozen professors, among others, organized as the “No Tax for War Committee” in which the signatories pledged to “withhold all or part of the taxes due” and urged the recipients to join their public pledge.
A result of the Russian Revolution of was that the Czar was forced to share power with an elected legislature, or duma.
That legislature was elected , but the Czar ordered it to disband in .
The members of the duma reacted to the order by fleeing to Vyborg, Finland, where they reconvened and issued a manifesto urging Russians to refuse cooperation with the government — including by resisting taxes.
But there was tax resistance in the air before that.
Today I’ll present some articles from the English-language press around that include some examples.
First, an excerpt from an analysis piece from the The [New York] Sun of , which concerned the impatience of Russian liberals during the time between their victory in the recent revolution and the implementation of the demands they had won:
How long will the Russian Treasury be able to discharge its obligations?
The amount of purchase money taxes which was remitted to the peasant proprietors by the Czar’s manifesto of was $22,500,000 for and $15,000,000 annually hereafter.
Most of the peasants, however, are taking the matter into their own hands and are refusing to pay any taxes at all.
Moreover, they have undertaken a concerted abstention from vodka, the manufacture and sale of which intoxicant was made a Government monopoly by Count Witte when he was Minister of Finance.
This monopoly has since constituted one of the principal sources of the public revenue.
These are not the only ways in which the national income has been depleted.
Far from deriving any excise returns from the oil wells and refining works of the Baku district, the Treasury is now called upon to make advances for the purpose of reviving the petroleum industry, which was stunned by the recent insurrection.
The immense grain trade of Odessa is paralyzed by the inability of the railroads to move wheat to the port of shipment.
The coal fields of the Donety valley have been laid waste.
How then will Mr. Schipoff, the new Minister of Finance, who has taken office on the assumption that the political reforms exacted by the Zemstvo Congress will be carried out, be able to meet the enormous deficit in the budget of ?
He cannot reduce the Government’s balances in the hands of Western bankers, for these are needed to maintain confidence, for a while at least, in the payment of interest on Russia’s foreign loans.
He cannot borrow a ruble in Russia; the Government’s last attempt to obtain an internal loan was a disastrous failure, though it was made before the war was over, when as yet there was no sign of revolution.
Will Mr. Schipoff venture to encroach upon the gold reserve which guarantees Russia’s paper currency?
Or will the Czar relieve the necessities of the State by sacrificing a part of the crown estates, which comprise about a third of the best soil in European Russia?
An article on
which reported the attempted resignation of Sergei Witte from his post as Russian premier (sort of a prime minister), included this passage:
The people are now refusing to pay taxes, declaring that the government has no right to the people’s money until it proves itself willing to do what the people want.
This is one of the most serious features of the situation.
Many officials believe the government will not be able to pay salaries at the end of the month.
Signers of the Document Urge the People to Refrain from Paying Taxes and
to Withdraw Their Deposits from the Savings Banks in Gold — Plot to Capture Count Witte.
St.
Petersburg, , via Eytdkuhnen, .
— The proletariat organizations, through “the invisible government,” threw a bombshell in the camps of the government during the night by issuing a manifesto, following the form of a regular imperial document, declaring the bankruptcy of the treasury, ordering the proletariat army everywhere to refuse to pay taxes of any description, to insist on the payment of wages in gold or silver and to withdraw all their deposits from the savings banks in gold.
The manifesto is a terrible indictment of the manner in which the bureaucracy has brought the country to financial ruin, asserting that the government has squandered not only the country’s income, but the proceeds of the foreign loans on railroads, the army and the fleet, leaving the people without schools or roads, yet, it is declared, there is no money to feed the soldiers and everywhere there are insurrections of the beggared and starved troops and sailors.
The manifesto even charges the government with using the deposits in the government savings banks to speculate on the bourse and with covering up its chronic deficits in the interest of the immense debt by the proceeds of the foreign loans which are at last exhausted.
The rich, it is further declared, have already taken warning and are converting their property into securities and gold and sending them abroad.
The only salvation for the country, according to the manifesto, is the overthrow of the autocracy by a constituent assembly and “the sooner the government falls the better.
Therefore the last source of the existence of the old regime — its financial revenue must be stopped.”
The document is signed by the members of the workmen’s council, the committee of the pan-Russian unity and the central democrats, social revolutionists and socialists of Holland.
This great step of the revolutionaries which throws the gage of battle to the government, was prepared with such secrecy that the authorities were taken off their guard and did not even attempt to prevent its publication in the newspapers.
The revolutionary leaders expect it will be followed by reprisals and arrests, but all this has been foreseen.
The leaders laid their plans deeply before using the manifesto.
New committees of the various organizations have been elected in the third and fourth degree.
If one set of committees is put behind the bars another will take its place and carry on the work.
The League of Leagues was not asked to join in the manifesto, being regarded with some jealousy by the proletariat organizations, which claim to be bearing the brunt of the revolution and to be entitled to the fruits thereof.
The proletariat leaders claim to have absolute knowledge that the government has just issued $125,000,000 in paper money.
Under the provisions of the press law, the editor of every paper which published the manifesto has rendered himself liable to eight months’ imprisonment and $500 fine.
Now must come the test of the government’s power.
On the part of the government the immediate reaction was to confiscate all the newspapers that published the said manifesto.
So far as can be seen at present the much vaunted proclamation to the proletariat fell flat, inasmuch as government fours went up half a point and the Bourse was firm.
A in the same paper said:
The Public Prosecutor says that the trial of the editors whose papers were suspended cannot occur before the holidays, owing to the legal formalities.
Most of the publishers will have recourse to the old trick used in the days of the censorship of appearing under a new name.
Under the law, however, it requires a fortnight to secure a franchise, during which the government will enjoy immunity from the daily harpooning.
The Publishers’ union tried vainly to induce the Novoe Vremya and the Slovo to print the workmen’s manifesto in order that all the papers be in the same boat, whereupon the Workmen’s Council cooly stepped in, not with a request, but a command that the papers publish it, with the alternative of calling a strike in their offices.
Thus the matter stands.
The Union of Unions of all Russia will hold a congress in St. Petersburg on .
Arrangements have been made should the authorities attempt to suppress the congress to adjourn to Finland.
Another reported this news:
As a crushing reply to the manifesto issued by the various revolutionary alliances, and published by eight papers, troops surrounded the building of the Economical Company, where the Executive Committee of the Workmen’s Alliance, numbering about two hundred men, were assembled, and arrested the whole lot.
Almost all the delegates were found in possession of revolvers.
All had expected arrest and had made every preparation for it.
A decision had been previously taken that if military force were used no resistance would be made.
One of the delegates calmly talked over the situation with me before going to the Economical Building.
He said:–
“We all expect arrest.
I have said adieu to my wife and children and have settled my private affairs.
The Executive Committee consists of five hundred members.
Generally only one-half of that number attend.
“Everything is arranged for active continuation of the revolutionary movement after our arrest, which does not make any difference.
If the government does not release M. Krustaloff, then it might arrest all of us.
“We are each equally guilty now.
The movement is carried on by a superior committee composed only of a few men who have hitherto done the principal work.
“Our Executive Committee only worked up the details.
When these were arranged, it handed them to the superior committee.
Our meeting is for the purpose of arranging details as to how to meet the government’s repressive measures, which are going to become very severe.”
Another article in the same paper reproduces the government’s statement, which included this:
“…efforts were made to attack the credit of the country in the midst of a considerable panic.
Had the government allowed such efforts to go unchallenged it would have precipitated complete financial and industrial ruin.”
Tax resistance campaigns have sometimes tried to amplify their impact by encouraging bank runs — that is, asking people to withdraw all of their savings from banks, preferably in hard currency.
Sometimes this is meant to directly reduce the assets available to the government, other times it is more of an attempt to harm the economic system and thereby hurt the government more indirectly.
If the government forbids people from withdrawing their own money, or is unable to meet the sudden demands for currency, the credibility of the banking system is called into question, which can make it difficult for the regime to continue in business.
If the government allows people to withdraw their money, and if enough of them do so, this reduces the capital available to the banks, reduces their ability to confidently loan money (for instance, to the government), and can have similar effects.
The government may respond to such a crisis by further degrading the currency, but the long-term effects of this can also serve to undermine the government.
In the final days of the agitation in the United Kingdom that led up to the Reform Act of , the movement in favor of the act augmented its tax resistance campaign with a run on the Bank of England.
London awoke one morning to find its walls plastered with posters reading “To stop the Duke: Go for Gold!” (“the Duke” being the Duke of Wellington, who opposed the Reform Act and who was beginning to form a new government).
About £1.8 million in gold was withdrawn from the Bank of England in the first days of the campaign (out of roughly £7 million in the Bank’s possession).
Some commentators believe this to have been the turning point in the campaign.
The King turned his back on the Duke, and invited Earl Grey to form a government with the authority to pass the Reform Act into law.
In , Russian socialists issued a manifesto in which they called on the proletariat to withdraw all of their savings from the banks in gold.
They billed this as an act of self-defense, saying that the government had squandered its reserves on speculation, leaving it no money to pay its bills.
The manifesto said that the wealthy had already sent their wealth abroad to avoid the coming collapse.
Some modern war tax resisters avoid depositing money in banks as more of a boycott than a bank run — because banks operate as war financiers, because bank deposits are particularly vulnerable to government seizure, and because the profits of banks are taxable.
There was an interesting thread about banking on a war tax resistance email list a couple of years back.
The “Move Our Money” project claims that it has convinced Americans to shift more than half a billion dollars from banks to credit unions.
“We stand against the bankers, CEOs and lobbyists who have hijacked our democracy to serve themselves at the expense of everyone else.”
A government can fund itself in a limited way just by relying on its power to coin money, but this in turn relies on the willingness of people to accept the coin of the realm.
Some tax resistance movements have adopted the tactic of refusing to use government money.
Here are a few examples:
During the Russian revolution of , a coalition of anti-government groups issued a manifesto in which they made the case that the government was essentially bankrupt, and they urged people to withdraw their deposits from the banks in gold rather than in untrustworthy government notes, and to demand their wages in gold.
During the American revolution, the Continental Congress funded its side of the war by issuing its own paper money: “continentals.”
They demanded that these notes be accepted as legal currency throughout the colonies, even as they sank in value.
Refusal to accept continentals as real money was seen as traitorous to the revolutionary cause, and indeed could result in execution at the hands of a military court.
Many Quakers, however, who were unwilling to participate in war funding in this way, refused to use or accept continentals, and the Virginia Yearly Meeting formally forbade its members to use the notes.
Job Scott wrote of this period:
I believed a time would come, when Christians would not so far contribute to the encouragement and support of war and fightings as voluntarily to pay taxes that were mainly, or even in considerable proportion, for defraying the expenses thereof; and it was also impressed upon my mind, that if I took and passed the money that I knew was made on purpose to uphold war, I should not bear a testimony against war that for me, as an individual, would be a faithful one.
I knew the people’s minds were in a rage against such as, from any motive whatever, said or acted any thing tending to discountenance the war: I was sensible that refusing to pay the taxes, or to take the currency, would immediately be construed as a pointed opposition to the present war in particular; as even our refusing to bear arms was, notwithstanding our long and well-known testimony against it; and I had abundant reason to expect great censure and some suffering in consequence of my faithfulness, if I should stand faithful in these things; though I knew that my scruples were unconnected with any party considerations, and uninfluenced by any motives but such as respect the propriety of a truly Christian conduct, in regard to war at large.
A number of modern critics see the government monopoly on legal tender as being a bulwark of tyranny, and are trying to attack it on a variety of new fronts, including modern twists on community currencies and entirely new plans empowered by networking and encryption developments.
One way a tax resistance campaign can claim victory is by convincing the government to either formally rescind the tax, or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.
Charles Ⅰ went around Parliament to create a new property tax, and John Hampden famously said “no” in .
He lost his court case, but the next Parliament legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship-writs” tax and declaring the court judgment against him invalid.
American Amish, after a long campaign of lobbying, lawsuits, civil disobedience, and public relations, successfully won an exemption to the U.S. social security system, including its tax, and also canceled the outstanding social security tax bills of 15,000 Amish resisters.
A number of pacifist groups, frequently including war tax resisters, have been trying to get their governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending that would permit conscientious objectors to pay their taxes in a way that would not pay for the military portion of the government’s budget: a “Peace Tax” as it were.
So far, none of these long-standing efforts — which have included legal challenges using a variety of arguments, lobbying, and appeals to international legal bodies — have borne much fruit.
Governments seem universally hostile to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have been unwilling to push the point.
Besides this, it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a separate “Peace Tax” plausible.
The American version of the “Peace Tax” legislation, for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects.
Italy has an otto per mille tax, which people can designate either for their church or for “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing — this resembles the sort of plan the “Peace Tax” promoters have in mind, but Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the funds off that way.
A tax resister who was opposed to the death penalty came to an agreement with the state of Delaware in which the state permitted him to pay his state taxes into a fund designated for paying state tax refunds of other taxpayers, rather than into the general fund that funded the prison system and executions.
American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector gave up.
“I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.”
Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a war tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the IRS formally lists the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment.
After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment hits a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.
American suffragist activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.”
Something similar happened to English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances.
Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”
Ellen C. Sargent patiently pursued legal challenges in California to try to promote women’s suffrage with a “no taxation without representation” argument.
She began by petitioning the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a refund of her property taxes, and then filed a lawsuit when this petition was denied (the lawsuit also failed).
When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in , the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu — it declared an agricultural emergency in the area which exempted those farmers from paying taxes.
Utah governor J. Bracken Lee stopped paying his federal income taxes in the hopes of prompting a Supreme Court test case that would invalidate what he considered to be extraconstitutional federal spending.
(The court declined to take his case.)
A group referred to as “the Texas housewives” resisted paying the social security tax on the salaries of their household help, and pursued a two-year parallel legal challenge to have the tax invalidated, before finally being turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won a court case that found property assessments in the city to have been performed incorrectly — with $15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans somehow left off the rolls — thus effectively legalizing the resistance.
“As the matter stands,” a newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them.
They are in revolt with legal sanction.”
During the Land League’s rent strike in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties, “[which] shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.”
When the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own, the legislature formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money.
Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the legislature, which then reconvened in Vyborg and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
According to a book on war tax resistance: “In Russia became the first country to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes.
Thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill.
Because some of the employees were Quakers, a petition was submitted to the Czar from the employees asking for freedom of conscience and an exemption from military service, church taxes for war, etc. The Czar issued a certificate which read ‘His Imperial Majesty has given his gracious assent to this petition … all … shall be exempted from all civil and military taxes … the sect of Quakers may now and in future be freed from war taxes for the support of the Military…’ Two English Quakers visiting Russia in found these provisions still in effect.”
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia began as a tax resistance and mutual insurance group, but was soon successful in convincing the government to rescind the offensive tax.
But history is also full of lessons about the foolishness of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help.
For example:
When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while negotiating with the King in , the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and told it that he would be their leader and would press for their demands.
Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion.
When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around , the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance as their Tory cousins.
The recent American TEA Party was quickly coöpted by the Republican Party, which learned how to lead it by the nose with witless rhetoric, but conceded nothing on the tax-and-spend big government front.
During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government passed something called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.”
Despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax, but merely concealed it with an aim to making it more difficult to resist.
marks the 108th anniversary of the issuing of the Vyborg Manifesto.
I thought I’d celebrate by digging through the archives and finding examples of how the English-language newspapers were covering the Russian tax resistance movement of the time.
A policy of passive resistance to the government, in an endeavor to cripple its power has been decided upon by members of the duma.
This course was voted , after the deputies had been in session continuously since their arrival here.
They are determined to issue a manifesto to the people, calling on them to follow out the passive resistance policy by refusing to pay taxes or serve in the army.…
The decision to offer only passive resistance to the government in retaliation for the dissolution of the Douma was not arrived at until after a long and somewhat stirring debate.
A number of the deputies urged the Douma to issue a fiery appeal to the people directing them to take up arms and overthrow the government by force.
Other speakers declared that the Douma must meet the Czar’s challenge by proclaiming that the country must have a constituent assembly and by drawing up an election program.
This suggestion was received with loud applause when it was first made and discussed seriously.
The agreement upon the passive resistance plan was a later decision, however.
It Urges the People to Refuse to Pay Taxes or Respond to Military Summons.
Viborg, Finland, .
— The members of the Douma who came here for a conference after the Russia Parliament was dissolved by the Czar were ordered by the government to disperse and were told that they would not be allowed to hold such meetings in Finland.
The order for their dispersal was too late to prevent the object for which they came here, namely, the adoption of a manifesto to the Russian people on behalf of Parliament and in defiance of the Czar.
While the members were in session at the Hotel Belvedere, the governor of Viborg went there and told them that he had been ordered by the governor general of Finland to close the assembly at once and to use military force, if necessary, to carry out his orders.
The work of preparing the parliamentary manifesto had gone on all night and was then in progress.
Before the members dispersed, the document was completed and was adopted by a unanimous vote.
Text of Manifesto.
The manifesto issued by the members of the Douma says:
To the people from the popular representatives of the citizens of all Russia:
The Douma has been dissolved by the decree of .
You elected us as your representatives and instructed us to fight for your country and freedom.
In execution of your instructions and our duty, we drew up laws in order to ensure freedom to the people.
We demanded the removal of irresponsible ministers, who, infringing the laws with impunity, oppressed freedom.
First of all, however, we wanted to bring out a law respecting the distribution of land to working peasants, and involving the assignment to this end of the crown appenages, the lands belonging to the clergy, and the compulsory appropriation of private estates.
The government held such a law inadmissible, and, upon the Douma once more urgently putting forward its resolution regarding compulsory appropriation, the Douma was dissolved.
The government promises to convoke a new Douma seven months hence.
Russia must remain without popular representation for seven whole months at a time when the people are standing on the brink of ruin, when industry and commerce are underminded, when the whole country is seething with unrest, and when the ministry has definitely shown its incapacity to do justice to the popular needs.
Arbitrary Action of Government.
For seven months the government will act arbitrarily, will fight against the popular movement in order to obtain a pliable, subservient Douma.
Should it succeed, however, in completely suppressing the popular movement, the government will convoke no Douma at all.
Citizens, stand up for the trampled on rights of popular representation and for the imperial Douma.
Russia must not remain a day without popular representation.
You possess the means of acquiring it.
The government has, without the assent of the popular representation, no right to collect taxes from the people, nor to summon the people to military service.
Therefore, you are, now that the government has dissolved the Douma, justified in giving neither money nor soldiers.
Should the government contract loans in order to procure funds, such loans will be invalid without the consent of the popular representatives.
The Russian people will never acknowledge them and will not be called upon to pay them.
Accordingly, until the popular representatives are summoned, do not give a kopeck to the throne or a soldier to the army.
Be steadfast in your refusal.
No power can resist the united and inflexible will of a people.
Citizens, in this obligatory, unavoidable struggle, your representatives will be with you.
The manifesto is signed by all the members of the Douma, except Mon.
Heyden and Stakhovitch, who abstained on the ground that they had only arrived in time to spend a short half hour in the conference.
After the manifesto was drafted a committee of six submitted it to the conference.
It met with some opposition.
Several hesitated to sign it.
While the discussion was proceeding the news of the governor’s threat to close the conference arrived.
Opposition almost immediately vanished.
The dissenters waived their objections and signed the manifesto in rapid succession.
The members of parliament had been at the moment [when the Finnish authorities announced their intention to forbid the assembly] frantically hurrying forward their final discussion of the proposed manifesto and had hoped to be able to adopt it before the arrival of the troops.
The Constitutional Democrats were desperately fighting a demand of the Group of Toil members that the document should include a declaration against the payment of taxes.
The Radicals carried the day, and in the last hours of the meeting a proclamation was hurriedly adopted containing a protest against the illegal dissolution of the parliament and an appeal to the people to refuse to pay taxes or recruit the army or to recognise the issue of a government loan.
The former members of parliament then adjourned, realizing the helplessness of refusing to recognize the edict of dissolution in the face of the bayonets of the government.
Effect of Viborg Manifesto Begins to be Felt in Outlying
Regions — Government Issues Counter Appeal Asking People to Help to Restore Order.
St.
Petersburg, .
— The Viborg manifesto adopted by the Douma after its dissolution with its keynote “not a kopec to the throne or a soldier to the army” is beginning to reach the people throughout the country, and its effect is already noticeable.
Advices received show that in several villages where the manifesto has been distributed through revolutionary and underground channels the people have voted to refuse to pay taxes as the Douma advised.
The action has been taken quietly but the villagers have shown that they are determined to abide by their pledge.
The calm spirit of the people has been shown in that while voting to thus oppose the government at its weakest point the villagers have made provisions to take care of their own public needs without depending upon taxes.
The local schools, hospitals and other public institutions will be supported by voluntary collections.
A Counter Manifesto.
Realizing the effect which the Douma’s manifesto is certain to have upon the people especially in the outlying regions the government has taken steps to offset its influence by issuing a counter manifesto or proclamation to the people urging them to assist in preventing disorders.
The appeal is issued through the semi-official organ, the Rossia.
The people are implored to put down disorders.
The government frankly confesses it is powerless to restore and maintain order without popular support and tells people they must choose between a liberal government or suicide in a whirlwind of revolution.
the government took a new step to keep news away from the people by extending the censorship to include even foreign news brought into the country.
This is to prevent the people from reading the dispatches sent out from Russia.
The vulnerability of the government to attack upon its finances is well appreciated by the revolutionary leaders.
Plans are now being laid to weaken the government’s credit in every possible way.
The leaders of the workingmen’s organization have taken the lead in placing fresh obstacles in the way of the government raising money at home by advising their followers to refuse to use spirits upon which the government collects an enormous tax.
This is the first step toward reducing revenues and it is probable that the same appeal will be made to people in all provinces.
A separate article in the same issue characterized Russian Premier Pyotr Stolypin’s reaction to the manifesto this way:
The Viborg manifesto M. Stolypin described as an opera bouffe production, unworthy of criticism.
He laughed at the idea that the government had not arrested the signatories of the manifesto because of fear.
To have done so, he declared, would have made martyrs of them in the eyes of the undiscerning and gratified their petty vanity.
No steps, he said, would be taken against the members of parliament unless they attempted to agitate in their own constituencies or elsewhere in Russia.
If they did they would be promptly arrested.
St. Petersburg being practically under martial law, a large number of the Members of the Duma withdrew at once to Viborg, in Finland, to consider their position.
On they issued a Manifesto, which was signed by every Deputy present except Count Heyden and M. Stakhovitch.
The Manifesto points out that the Duma had only demanded what was inherent in its Constitution, — the dismissal of irresponsible Ministers.
Its agrarian policy was forced upon it by the needs of the country, and it would have been false to its trust if it bad shirked the task.
The prospect before them was seven months of military government, with “industry and commerce undermined and the whole country in seething unrest.”
The people must take the only remedy open to them.
Without the assent of the popular representatives the Government had no right to levy taxes or summon recruits to military service.
Let them, therefore, until the Duma was summoned again, “refuse a copeck to the Throne or a soldier to the Army.”
If loans were raised abroad, Russia would not acknowledge them.
“No power can resist the united and inflexible will of a people.”
We have dealt at length with the matter elsewhere, and need only add that the Czar’s action has been received with universal disapproval throughout Europe, and that its effect on the money market promises ill for the chances of any loan raised without the consent of the Duma.
Will Be Shot Down If They Refuse to Pay Their Taxes.
Odessa, .
— A determined attempt by the peasants of Kutals province, Trans-Caucasia, to live up to the program outlined in the Vibourg convention of deputies after the dissolution of the Douma of refusing to pay taxes, has resulted in serious trouble.
From all indications the situation is bound to become steadily worse, and fears are entertained that a general massacre of peasants by soldiers will be the outcome.
Fully 50,000 persons have joined in the movement not to give the government a kopec.
Notice has been given by the government that if the peasants do not pay within two weeks the troops will be sent into the district and they will be mercilessly shot down.
Without waiting for the soldiers to put the threat of the government into execution the peasants have inaugurated a campaign of guerrilla warfare against the troops already in the province.
Tax collectors who have insisted upon the payment of money have also been severely handled in several instances.
Within the last few days a number of military sentinels have been shot down in ambush or attacked by the peasants.
These murders have infuriated the troops on the spot who have demanded that they be allowed to attack the peasants.
A few more bits from the archives concerning Russia during the Vyborg Manifesto period:
Refuse to Pay Tax.
By Associated Press.
Odessa, . — In consequence of the
unanimous and unalterable refusal of the peasants in the Odessa district to
pay tax the local zemestvo has been advised by the government that it is
impossible to maintain schools and hospitals which must be closed.
Russian Peasants Refuse to Pay Tax.
It is Said Fully 50,000 Have Joined in the Movement.
Trouble is Feared.
Odessa, Russia, . — A determined attempt by the peasants of Kutauis province,
Transcaucasia, to live up to the programme outlined by the Viborg convention
of deputies after the dissolution of the douma, of refusing to pay taxes, has
resulted in serious trouble. From all indications the situation is bound to
become steadily worse and fears are entertained that a general massacre of
peasants by soldiers will be the outcome.
Fully 50,000 peasants have joined in the movement not to give the government a
kopec. Notice has been given by the government that if the peasants do not pay
within two weeks troops will be sent into the district and they will be
mercilessly shot down.
Without waiting for soldiers to put the threat of the government into
execution the peasants have inaugurated a campaign of guerrilla warfare
against troops. Tax collectors who have insisted upon the payment of money
have been severely handled in several instances.
Within the last few days a number of military sentinels have been shot down in
ambush or attacked by peasants. These murders have infuriated the troops, who
have demanded that they be allowed to attack the peasants.
Already the situation is nearly as grave as it could be. If the government
attempts to execute its threat of collecting taxes at the point of the bayonet
the soldiers are almost certain to get out of hand and a general massacre will
follow.
Replying to a deputation of municipal officials who complained of the
violences daily committed by members of the League of Russian People against
peaceful citizens, Jews and Christians alike, Governor General Kaulbars said
he personally doubted whether it was possible or even desirable to attempt to
suppress the exasperation of the loyal elements against the revolutionary
students, who were guided exclusively by Jews.
The tone of Governor Kaulbar’s speech, which is regarded as an open expression
of approval of the horrors of counter-revolution, has created much alarm.
Douma Members to Base Defense on Technicality
Alleged Traitors to Russia Will Urge That Crime Was Committed Outside
Country.
St.
Petersburg, . — Trial
of those members of the first Russian Douma who signed the Viborg manifesto
was continued this morning. It had been expected that today would see the
conclusion of the case, but owing to the decision of several of the defendants
to plead their own cause the hearing will go over until
. The final arguments will be brief
and formal. The prosecutor will limit himself to summing up the illegal nature
of the manifesto and the grave consequences which might have ensued had the
people heeded its appeal to resist tax gatherers. The defense will make its
strong point on technicalities, holding that the crime, if any, was committed
outside the country, and that the government has failed to establish the
individual responsibility of the defendants.
A few more dispatches from the Russian Revolution of
, from the
Taunton Courier and Western Advertiser on
:
Drain the Savings Banks.
Advice to the Workmen.
The Executive Committee of the Council of the Workmen’s Delegates has issued a
notice counseling the workmen to withdraw their deposits from the savings
banks. The effect of the proposal, if it should be generally carried out, may
be gathered when it is stated that according to the last returns, the
depositors numbered 5,261,660, and the cash deposits amounted to 943,000,000
roubles, with an additional 215,000,000 in securities.
Rushing to Bankruptcy.
Payment of Taxes Refused.
The Russian Government is rapidly moving towards bankruptcy. The
revolutionaries command all the workers, a large proportion of the peasantry,
and an increasing proportion of the Army and Navy. The peasants everywhere
refuse to pay any taxes, the workers refuse to allow the sale of Government
vodka in the towns, thus depriving the administration of one of the greatest
sources of revenue, which amounts to £40,000,000 annually.
Sugar merchants refuse to pay excise; Socialists refuse to pay their passport
fees and their house taxes. The revolutionaries are aiming to prevent the flow
of money into the Treasury, thus rendering inevitable the insolvency of the
Government.
