Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Spain →
comprehensive disobedience movement →
Handbook of Economic Disobedience
Over the past few years, an interesting hybrid has developed in Spain: a combination of elements from the traditional war tax resistance movement, which in Spain has a largely pacifist or anti-militarist conscientious objection focus much like the war tax resistance movement in the U.S., and elements of the critics of neoliberal state capitalism who emerged in new forms during the recent economic crisis — roughly the counterparts of the “occupy” movement in the U.S.
I’ve been keeping an eye on this for two reasons: first is that it’s obviously an interesting development in terms of this blog’s subject matter and my pet interest, and second is that people in NWTRCC have been toying with the idea of trying to increase their influence in activist circles by reaching out to other movements and trying to find ways of linking up — and this looks like one possible model they could consider.
So to the end of understanding this a little better, today I’m going to try to translate the introduction to the second edition of the Manual de Desobediencia Economica, which recently came out, and represents some of the ideas that are fermenting in this hybrid movement:
In these times when corruption has become unmasked, we live at a turning point of a historical cycle at which the portrayal of the State can no longer hide the extent of its villainy.
The impunity enjoyed by the usual suspects contrasts with the criminalization of all social movements and the persecution of all those people who daily tell themselves: enough.
In this context, disobedience and rebelliousness transcend a purely ideological issue.
It’s about giving some meaning to the word justice.
It’s about our dignity, but even more, of shedding fear, because they want to take everything from us except for the right to consume and the duty to obey.
There is much that we can recover if we also disobey fear: another social order in which the people are the most important.
We have much to do, and who knows how far we can go this time… we’ll see you on the road.
In this second edition of the Handbook of Economic Disobedience, we invite you to take some steps to make your life more in line with your manner of thinking and feeling.
Specifically, we address those of you who may want to stop acting under the force of economic pressure and instead to dedicate your time to activity that would really make you feel accomplished.
Also, those who want their money, as the fruit of their labor, to go to what they believe and not to the banks, or politicians’ salaries, or armaments, or grand infrastructures… among other misuses with which we do not want to collaborate.
The State is paying to indulge and engorge the fortunes of the banks and other financial speculators — more money than it has been “forced” to cut from various budget items.
Throughout this Handbook, we take part in a call to initiate and extend an action of tax resistance against the Spanish State and those who control it, and consistent action to demonstrate that we will not pay their debts, because we do not recognize the current Constitution nor the current government which is a puppet of global financial capitalism, nor the 2013 State Budget.
In place of this we put our money towards self-managed taxation.
This way we will funnel the resources we do not want to pay to the State into self-managed projects that are helpful for meeting the needs of the people.
Although the Handbook, to the extent that data, laws, and experiences are referenced, is written for the Spanish State, we hope to inspire disobedience anywhere on the globe, since the situation we are living out in the Spanish State is common to many countries in the world.
In this way we hope to have the cooperation of dozens of volunteers to translate it into multiple languages.
The centralized distribution of this Handbook of Economic Disobedience on paper will only be made thanks to funding from the CoopFunding crowdfunding campaign “Disobedience Cannot Be Imprisoned” and is available on derechoderebelion.net and in the offices of economic disobedience with the corresponding local appendix of self-managed projects, where we hope that they can self-publish copies as needed and possible.
Much of the funding for starting up this project, as I understand it, came from an interesting bank robbery masterminded by Enric Duran.
Duran took out loans from dozens of banks under false pretenses and then donated most of the money as start-up capital for these radical self-managed projects, went bankrupt, and then went underground to escape prosecution.
This raises the question of how self-sustaining this movement really is (that is, how dependent it is on this one-time influx of funds) and also how grassroots it really is (does this manifesto represent the gestalt of a movement, or just the axe being ground by its sugar daddy).
If I have time and interest, I’ll try to translate some other sections of the Handbook.
The usual disclaimers apply about my sub-par command of Spanish.
My Spanish is pretty poor, so I may be missing some nuance, but the tone of the handbook strikes me as a little off-putting in the way a lot of leftist manifestos can be.
I get the feeling of being spoken to from on high by someone with an encyclopedia of theoretical edifices at his disposal.
It is interesting to me how much of its historical underpinning of the justification for civil disobedience draws on non-Spanish sources: Henry David Thoreau, the American civil rights movement, and the Indian independence movement.
(The theoretical underpinning, too: Gandhi, Ronald Dworkin, Hannah Arendt.)
Is there a lack of good examples of civil disobedience in Spain?
Introduction to Civil Disobedience,
Economic Disobedience, and Comprehensive Disobedience
“When injustice has become the law, rebellion becomes a duty.”
“As soon as one realizes that to obey unjust laws is contrary to one’s dignity as a person, no tyranny can overpower one.”
— Gandhi
“…we have asserted that civil disobedience is a special sort of denial of certain contents of the law by some citizen of groups of citizens.
By this we mean that although all civil disobedience is an act of disobedience to the law, not every act of disobedience to the law is an act of civil disobedience.”
— Ronald Dworkin
What is Civil Disobedience?
By civil disobedience we mean a public, nonviolent, conscientious, political activity, contrary to a law or order of authority that is considered unjust or illegitimate, that civil society undertakes with the objective of nullifying said law or order and inaugurating a new legal order in which those social and civil rights that the law denies in practice are recognized.
When, as in the Spanish State, the ways of political expression are limited to the institutional channels and a vote every four years, without any existing direct mechanisms of participation and consultation, civil disobedience becomes an indispensable tool for denouncing and voicing rejection of an unjust policy or law.
Some characteristics:
In general, it is practiced by people who are conscientious and engaged with society.
These are what Hannah Arendt called qualitatively significant minorities, which leads them to be so active as critics of certain political decisions that have become law.
The activity displayed by those who practice civil disobedience is so intense and of such a character that overflows the usual channels of forming and executing the political will.
Citizens who practice civil disobedience are able to imagine a better social order and in its construction civil disobedience becomes a useful and necessary method.
It is understood that the behavior of these citizens is not motivated by selfishness but by the desire to universalize proposals that objectively improve life in society.
This requirement does not deny that, on occasion, personal or corporate interests may coincide with interests of a general nature.
It simply demonstrates that it would be impossible to build a civil disobedience movement that was solely limited to defending special interests.
Consequently, citizens who practice it feel integrity in the way they think and behave.
For them, civil disobedience is more of a civic duty.
It is a demand that proceeds from certain convictions to which it is possible to attribute an objective and constructive value.
So it is easy to guess that the exercise of civil disobedience must be public, which also contributes to the aim of those who practice it to convince the rest of the citizenry of the justice of their demands.
The consideration of civil disobedience in a political system like democracy must necessarily begin from the fact that this is an illegal activity because it violates valid and enforceable legal norms — though they may be morally and legally reprehensible — that is committed in order to produce a change.
In this sense, civil disobedience does not only violate legal norms, but bypasses those ordinary channels, both legal and political, that in a democratic system exist for the purpose of changing governmental laws or policies — that is to say, it is located outside of the rules of the game that sustain this political system.
Before any act or process of opposition to a law or policy adopted by an established government, the actor must be aware that their acts are illegal or of questionable legality, and that they will be performed and sustained in order to obtain particular social ends.
Historical precedents for Civil Disobedience
there was a war between the United States and Mexico.
In , at the beginning of the conflict, Thoreau announced his refusal to pay taxes for two specific reasons: he opposed financing the military conflict, and was not inclined to contribute financially to the maintenance of a government that continued to regard slavery as legal in the United States.
Gandhi’s campaigns of civil disobedience were a form of protest that consisted of refusing obedience to certain laws; that is, they refused compliance with them when they were considered unjust or illegitimate.
This form of nonviolent struggle had the goal of publicly demonstrating the injustice of British colonial laws.
Their struggle for the independence of India was based on the right of resistance, which took on a collective, public, and peaceful form.
When members of the Congress Party were arrested, they did not recognize the authority of the English courts to judge them.
The noncooperation movement against the British authorities included the resignation from their posts of Indian officials.
Other historical examples of actions of disobedience or resistance to the law may include refusal to comply with mandatory military service, desertion in exceptional circumstances (as occurred with young Americans during the Vietnam War), or, in the case of blacks in the United States, sitting in a public place barred to people of color.
Right of Rebellion.
The initiative to generate a strategy of mass civil
disobedience
As a people, if we organize, we will be able to create and defend spaces free from control and submission to power.
When we achieve this, the power will not be blocked immediately, but will try to overthrow our people power in order to entrench itself as the only legitimate power in the area.
So we are entering a time in which the strategies of action will have to be very well defined to become solid options that include a significant portion of society.
In this context we suggest civil disobedience to state decisions that affect us.
As individuals, as free beings, we have in civil disobedience and in self-management, two essential tools of political action.
As people organized on a mass-scale we have the responsibility to make the world in which we live and act what we want it to be.
We understand by civil disobedience an illegal action performed conscientiously and performed publicly in order to achieve a partial or complete transformation of society.
The commitment to civil disobedience is a commitment to education through action, to the generation of a constructive way of visualizing the struggle, to communication by example and by personal and collective engagement.
It is a course of action that empowers the grassroots and has had important precedents in the history of the last century.
One of the current strategies in the context of disobedience is the “We Will Exercise the Right of Rebellion” initiative, started in , declaring the lack of legitimacy of the management institutions of the State by means of the Manifesto that led to this initiative.
We are millions of people willing to act.
We must free ourselves from our fears and insecurities in order to publicly acknowledge our commitment and share with those around us the experience of dignity, facilitating the liberation of each of us to live consistently with our deepest values.
Economic disobedience for self-management
The proposal of the Right of Rebellion is not only a proposal for coordinated civil disobedience, but also a strategy of action that wants to develop a worldview committed to self-management.
This is why we put special emphasis on economic disobedience, which would be all those modes of civil disobedience focused on freeing ourselves from the private or state economic power, so as to direct our resources to the construction of alternatives to the present economic system.
So economic disobedience includes all of those forms of civil or social disobedience that have as their objective empowering ourselves as free people, breaking the chains that enslave us to the current capitalist system.
This Handbook is meant for all those who want to take steps to make their lives an example of the way they think and feel.
Specifically, for those who want to quit acting under coercion from economic pressure and who want to dedicate their time to an activity that is genuinely creative.
Also, for those who want their money, as the fruit of their labor, to go only for what they believe and not to the banks, or the salaries of politicians, or armaments, or grand infrastructures… among other misuses that come to mind.
Therefore, we call for complete tax resistance to the State in order to redirect our taxes to self-managed budgets from self-managed, local collectives that are much more deserving of sovereignty than the governmental institutions that the people are subject to.
derechoderebelion.net has coordinated the creation of the first and this second edition of the Handbook of Economic Disobedience.
Also, in parallel, proceeds the creation of offices of economic disobedience, which are tools to support initiatives like tax resistance, unionizing of debtors, and bankruptcy as a form of action.
You will find more information about all of these items in the following chapters.
Here’s another section from the latest edition of the Handbook of Economic Disobedience, as I’ve tried to translate it from the Spanish original.
I’ve translated previous sections of the handbook for the and Picket Line entries.
Exercise the Right of Rebellion
Join the Manifesto of a New Rebel Dignity
“When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and the most indispensable of duties.”
— Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793
The current Spanish Constitution, dictated by international capital and approved behind the backs of the people, not only does not represent us, but we do not recognize it as binding upon us.
In article 135.3 it says: “Loans to meet the interest and principle of the public debt of the Administration shall always be included in the statement of expenses in the budgets and their payment shall have absolute priority.”
With the approval without referendum of this constitutional change it has been demonstrated definitively that popular sovereignty does not control the State, which has been hijacked by financial power.
A government that acts for the benefit of a few is illegitimate.
According to the Spanish Penal Code: “Those are guilty of the crime of rebellion who rise up violently and publicly for any of the following purposes: to abrogate, suspend, or modify all or part of the Constitution.”
Therefore, and given the hasty, biased, and undemocratic character of this recent constitutional reform, we can determine that criminals are in the government and the structures that go along with it.
The right of rebellion has been recognized for more than two centuries by international law, through, for example, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” of 1793.
Its function is to assert the right to rebel for the common good in situations like the one in which we live.
Faced with the rebel putsch from those above, the right of rebellion from those below.
We are committed to the common good and so, following our legitimate right as citizens, we declare ourselves rebels against the constitution, unsubmissive to the State, and disobedient to all authority that it represents.
For this reason we declare ourselves citizens of the popular assemblies and of the assemblies of postcapitalist projects in which we participate.
This is the way we exercise our sovereignty.
We promise to do everything we can to construct a new popular power that will enable a new society where decisions are really made for the people.
We understand that after the avalanche of indignation we have lived through, the best way to regain dignity is by means of rebellion.
We understand as dignity our capacity to disobey unjust laws and/or those that are contrary to the welfare of the people.
Therefore, we commit ourselves to a call to initiate and extend an action of complete tax resistance to the Spanish State and to those who control it, and to consistent action, in order to demonstrate that we will not pay “their debts,” because we do not recognize this Constitution.
Tax resistance serves to feed the grassroots assemblies and, from there, to give “absolute priority” to participatory financing of the resources we really consider public.
Since the situation we are living through in the Spanish State is similar to many countries in the world, and since the financial powers that rule are global, we encourage human beings around the world to assert their right of rebellion, by means of manifestos like this.
Tax resistance was one of the strategies of civil disobedience that led India to independence from the British Empire; now it may be a key strategy for us all to gain independence from global capitalism.
We have already passed the stage of indignation, now we are a new
rebel dignity!
You can join this Manifesto and these distinct forms of civil disobedience.
From this manifesto, we envision complete tax resistance to the State in order to redirect our taxes towards self-financed popular local assemblies, arising in many villages following the 15-M Movement, and in some cases connected at the present day into an integrated cooperative.
The local assemblies and integrated cooperatives that are continually being built are some of the examples of self-managed alternatives to the current system, these examples are much more worthy of the investment of popular sovereignty from people who participate daily in politics since the popular assembly movements than are the institutions of the Spanish State.
Some of the best ways to work together can be to organize into a collective, to participate in local assemblies, to create an office of economic disobedience, or to join with people form your area to participate in an integrated cooperative.
And now the Disobedience Becomes Comprehensive
While we live out this new world we are constructing we must take account of the attempted interference of coercion and assimilation this provokes from the states without thereby losing sight of our main goal.
It might be the most revolutionary act to dismiss all of them and ignore the masters without slaves, but since those in power cannot do without us, we have no recourse but to disobey; we are attacked by the normality at which we flout authority, whether it be judicial, health, intellectual, cultural, economic, or political.
This is why we chose Comprehensive Disobedience as a necessary condition for construction.
To facilitate the understanding of this term, we will introduce the concept of “social contract.”
The social contract is a philosophical and political concept that justifies the foundations that link an individual to society.
Comprehensive Disobedience involves breaking the social contract with the State of a territory where one lives, in order to bring into being a new social contract with a community with which the individual is really linked.
As the Comprehensive Revolution progresses, new model communities are going to arise where people will go to be welcomed and we can actively participate in the process of defining the rights and obligations inherent in this social contract that makes it possible to live in society.
A self-managed rural community, an autonomous zone, or an integral cooperative would be three examples of these new institutions with which we choose to make this new social contract.
In place of delegating our sovereignty to a supposedly democratic parliament, we participate directly in the decisions through genuinely democratic assemblies.
By passing from an implicit contract that in reality we never signed to an explicit contract, we are making a leap of empowerment in order that to live in society will also be to live in freedom.
In this process, we can at the same time choose to be part of multiple communities among which we divide our participation and commitment; from the more spontaneous and small, to the more structured and extensive, many of which can complement each other because none is totalitarian as though it were the State, and therefore none pretend to control all aspects of the individual but only to cover those areas in which each person decides to join.
The local assemblies, which try always to be more constructive assemblies, self-managed spaces for meeting community needs and integrated cooperatives that are coming into being every day, are some of the exponents of the Comprehensive Revolution, examples much more worthy of the investment of popular sovereignty from people who participate daily in politics since the popular assembly movements than are the supposedly democratic institutions of the State.
When we conduct Comprehensive disobedience, we are dismantling the legitimacy of the system of State capitalism, and offering our legitimating participation to a new system.
Now or Never
Martin Luther King said more than 40 years ago: “We shall have to repent in this generation, not so much for the evil deeds of the wicked people, but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
We cannot let history repeat itself with our generation.
A gang of financial criminals has kidnapped what little there may be of democracy in the states and is carrying out a premeditated plot to cut our social rights, just to increase their profits.
This situation aggravates the serious ecological, energy, health, social, and values crises that accompany the decline of the capitalist system.
We are lucky to be the most-informed generation in history.
We have learned that there are millions of people willing to act.
Now there are no excuses.
Indignation is not enough.
And only the commitment that is accompanied by an attitude of refusal in the face of the political-financial power can lead us to achieve our objectives.
There is no short-term safety that can serve as an excuse to put off our social commitment for later.
With mutual aid we can help each other through challenges; with self-management we can solve the problems of our neighbors much better than the State is doing.
To go out in the street and exhaust ourselves is not enough; we must stop obeying, stop doing what we’re told, stop paying your mortgage, stop paying your taxes to the State so you can pay them directly to the people, stop buying from multinationals, stop accepting discrimination of any kind.
Whatever your chains are, break them.
There is a lot of ambition and vision here, and some zig-zagging between exhortation and theory, and no small amount of repetition, but I’m becoming a little impatient to see what is happening in practice when the manifesto-writers step away from their keyboards and try to put this vision into practice.
How are these mosaics of overlapping autonomous zones to create and arbitrate these explicit social contracts?
Can I see some examples?
In earlier Picket Line entries, I’ve attempted to
translate sections from the latest edition of the Spanish
Handbook of Economic Disobedience (see , , and ).
I was starting to attempt to translate another section, but it looked familiar,
and it turns out I already translated an earlier version of it as it appeared
in a booklet called ¡Rebelaos!
last year.
This seems to be an expansion of the original, however, so I’ll work my way
through it again:
Tax resistance as a strategy of rebellion
As has been explained earlier, civil disobedience is a fundamental tool for
raising popular empowerment on the path to self-management.
The General State Budget for 2013 poses another attack on the needs of the
people. It cuts among others 14.% from the education budget, 19.6% from
culture, 3.1% from health (added to 6.9% from last year), while increasing
by 33% the payment of interest on the debt.
While a progressive privatization of all that is public takes place, while
blaming the crisis for causing a lack of resources, while pilfering public
money in the interest of those on high, the genuinely public projects on which
we are working below generally suffer from a lack of such resources which
would enable them to develop. To reverse this situation, it is necessary to
derive a significant amount of these resources by direct means through tax
resistance.
For this reason, with this publication, we share in the call to begin and
extend an action of tax resistance against the Spanish State and towards
those who control it, with consequent action to demonstrate that we will not
pay their debts, because we do not recognize the present Constitution. Tax
resistance that serves to fund the self-management of assemblies and
collectives, and from them, to give absolute priority to the participatory
funding of resources that we consider genuinely public.
Practical guide to income tax resistance
This is a suggestion for people who make their tax return for 2013 and
subsequent years.
It is a manageable option for people who want to (or need to) remain part of
the official economy, and therefore cannot afford fines or similar penalties.
This is a proposal inspired by war tax resistance, which for years has worked
successfully in the Spanish State, performing this action concerning the 6%
of the tax return that corresponds to military spending. But in this case,
added to this percentage would be other items that we consider unjust.
You can choose these items according to your own criteria, or join in the
proposed campaign of tax resistance launched by Right of Rebellion, which
will be more than 25% of each participant’s income tax, and consists of the
following parts of the State budget, from a total of €408,033 million,
which is the budget for 2013.
In these budgets for 2013, the % of items that we have chosen as the most
repulsive, rose up to 31.39% while in 2012 they remained about 29%.
Similarly, and because the main thing is to reach more and more people, we
have fixed on this 25%, that is ¼ of the State budget, which is already a
major challenge.
Item
2013 Budget
Percentage
Total Tax Resistance
€128,083,979,200
31.39%
Total State Budget
€408,033,918,210
100%
Public debt redemption
€62,319,842,350
15.27%
Public debt interest
€38,589,550,000
9.46%
Military defense
€13,708,330,000
3.36%
Security police
€1,209,238,886
0.30%
Prison system
€1,129,743,730
0.28%
Monarchy
€7,933,710
0.01%
Senate
€51,900,640
0.01%
Elections and political parties
€67,439,960
0.02%
Church
€110,000,000
0.03%
The filer, as a tax resister, must file the tax return; it won’t work not to.
If you work as an employee, your company already pays your taxes directly to
the State for you, so your tax resistance can only be applied as an
application for a refund.
With your tax return, you can declare as tax resistance all of those items
that you don’t agree to pay taxes for, and reclaim the money.
You can then distribute this money in a manner that you consider more
consistent with your notions. To do this, at the time of filing, you must
follow these steps:
Always make out your tax return.
Do not simply assent to the estimates filled in by the Treasury. It could
be that the Treasury had some error in the data. It is difficult to have
considered all of our possible deductions, or if it has, on more than one
occasion there have been errors (and often not in its favor).
In the case of not reaching the established minimum it is not advisable to
stop filling out your tax return.
Anyone can do this. You do not have to be an employed worker or to have
formal income. You can object as a retired person, a student, or an unemployed
person, since the state grabs taxes from everyone with both hands and this is
the only real opportunity to recover some of this exaction.
If you do not reach the minimum established by law for making a tax return,
it is still important that you do (or at least that you do the calculations),
since you will probably come out with a refusal (they have to refund money).
If you determine that you come out with a payment, it does not follow that
it is necessary to submit it.
How to make an income tax return for individuals practicing tax
resistance
The first thing you have to do is to fill in the forms for your income
tax return. This can be done by hand or with the
PADRE program. The other methods
(confirmation of the statement by telephone or Internet) do not allow
for tax resistance.
At this point your return is filled out up to the point of the tax
liability (box 741) with the amounts withheld by your employer and by
banks. Next, in box 752, you must specify a percentage of tax resistance,
depending on one or many budget items you have chosen to resist (see the
image below) and fill it in. If box 752 is already filled in, you can use
one of the other free boxes between 742 and 751. From here, we end the
tax statement by calculating the resulting tax.
To complete the statement you must pay the calculated amount of resisted
tax to the usual account of the entity, collective,
etc. you have
chosen. Specify on the accounting: “Income derived from the 2013 tax
resistance” and keep the statement that the bank provides. It is
important that you allocate this money to projects near you, so you can
directly verify how you yourself, with your taxes, are nourishing a
nearby project, while at the same time your money is not going towards
purposes you do not believe in.
Then all that remains is to send a letter from the resister to the Treasury Department, which will be attached to the return, along with a receipt of payment to the chosen entity, collective, or project.
You can take as a model the letter in the appendix; download it from the website of Right of Rebellion:
www.derechoderebelion.net/modelo-de-carta-para-hacienda/ or else go to the nearest office of disobedience.
It is very important that in the letter you specify the budget items to which you are declaring your tax resistance, and that the amount calculated is the sum of the percentage of these chosen items.
The next step is to deliver the return to whichever tax office or else
to the bank branch where you have an account. In doing this, whether in
one place or the other, they will certainly tell you that they want only
the tax return and not your other statements. You have to explain to them
that we are doing tax resistance (and we can seize this opportunity to
explain to that person what this consists of), that the responsibility is
ours, and that we want to put into the tax return envelope the three
documents: the tax return, the letter of resistance, and the bank
receipt.
Finally, it is important that you provide the information about your
resistance to the Office of Economic Disobedience, so that it does not
remain an individual act between you and the Treasury. It is critical
to know the number of people who have used their right of tax resistance,
so we urge you to fill out the tax resistance census sheet. You can also
ask for a paper version. This census is purely statistical.
Some reflections on the experience of tax resistance last year
It appears to be the case that if the tax return is filled in by hand, it
is more expensive for the Treasury to examine it and therefore it is more
difficult for them to detect the resistance.
There have been some cases in which the Treasury has sent a request asking
for the amount resisted, ignoring the declaration of resistance. These
cases have always been of large quantities. It appears that in general,
they don’t examine quantities less than 150 euros.
Based on the previous points, it is especially important to strengthen
the tax resistance budget so that it can respond in a collective form to
the needs for help from resisters. You can make this helpful resistance
with your resistance budget. Also to be attempted will be a crowdfunding
campaign on the internet to help this resistance budget throughout the
year.
Auditing the national debt, a tool to defend the refusal to pay an odious debt
As you have read on previous pages, the principal item toward which tax
resistance is directed is the external debt (23%). So we added information
specific to the motivation of tax resistance against this item.
As has happened in other countries, and in the light of 15-M, in Spain a
campaign to audit the external debt has been generated. The reform of the
Spanish Constitution that made the payment of interest and principal on the
debt the top priority of the general budget, gave more force, if anything,
to the need for this audit.
As auditoriaciudadana.net says:
“A debt that we were never aware of and that we were unable to review or
assent to. A debt that is essentially of private banks. A debt that, now,
they point out to us as the worst of the problems and that they make us
directly responsible with a constitutional obligation to repair it. A debt
that forces us to cut our investment in our social services and that condemns
us to the worst of the social distresses.”
We do not want to pay your debt!
Consequently, the Spanish people are put with the debt under the blackmail
of the financial markets. It is illegitimate debt which is newly contracted
to pay old debt and to implement policies that harm the social and economic
rights of the citizenry.
A large part of the debt is illegitimate because it stems from a policy that
has favored a tiny minority of the population at the expense of the
overwhelming majority of citizens.
The State has guaranteed the private debt of private companies and financial
institutions to enable them to borrow at an adequate rate of interest. This
implies that, subsequently, the ratings agencies issued a poor assessment
of the capability to repay the debt and that the risk premium of the State
soars. Therefore, the fact of endorsing private businesses or financial
institutions make the State (and therefore the citizens) have to pay higher
interest on the debt.
To guarantee private entities entails that creditors require an increasing
ability to pay on the part of the State which stops concerning itself about
other essential functions which, itself, it has to take on.
Can a government legally decide not to pay its debt because its population is
in danger? Yes, because the legal argument from necessity of the State fully
justifies it. The State of necessity corresponds to a situation of danger to
to the existence of the State, for its political or economic survival. The
economic survival relates directly to the resources that a State can provide
to continue to satisfy the needs of the population, in matters of health,
education, etc.
Mechanisms for resistance to the VAT
There are a variety of techniques available to a self-managed company or
cooperative to stop paying the
VAT to the State
and to dedicate that payment to a self-managed project.
Some of them are:
Declaring, if the
VAT is yours to
pay, an amount smaller than that which would apply, and with this,
financing an assembly or project of your choice.
To justify this lower payment you must gather various invoices in your
name. These invoices can be made in various ways without endangering the
legal cover of the action.
If you are certain that your company will not continue and is going to
close, in place of paying the State you can begin to send the
VAT amounts, or
the part of them that you assume, to the assemblies in your zone or to
self-managed projects, whichever you most prefer.
If you want to continue as a company and need a way to make this process
sustaining, you can open and close a business every 3 or 4 years. In this
way, when the Treasury goes after you to pay your
VAT, the
company would be bankrupt and you would generate another.
If you are a member of a cooperative or nonprofit entity that declares
VAT, you can
ask for a receipt for your personal expenses with the
VAT
identification number of this entity and donate these receipts to have
them deducted from your income and not to have to pay
VAT.
If, after all of these receipts, your self-managed cooperative has to
pay VAT,
you can make receipts with your personal
ID number;
simply after receiving the money billed, donate it back to the same
cooperative.
To put these options in context, we have to take into account that the
inquiries the Treasury makes to people or businesses who send receipts,
in order to monitor the payment of taxes, are limited and easy to foresee.
By model 347 of
VAT, by 30 April,
you must present a list of clients and suppliers with whom you have had more
than €3,000 in annual business. Therefore, nothing prevents us from making
receipts, as an individual and in a completely anonymous form, to a
cooperative for less than €3,000 and not to make a
VAT declaration.
Even though the cooperative does make one. That is, while the cooperative
accounted for it in order to deduct it from the
VAT to pay, the
individuals who billed do not declare it as income.
Since the cooperative is not obligated to declare who are its suppliers,
the Treasury will not have information about our irregularities. The only
information with which it can count on is the global balance of
VAT, from which
they cannot identify this type of irregularities, since one cannot know that
the VAT has passed
between individuals and has also been interlinked between businesses.
Resistance to the quarterly personal income tax: usually the cooperative
will pay the Treasury the quarterly personal income tax from the person who
has invoiced it, but it is not required to do so if this is not specified on
the bill, so also in this case if there is any irregularity, it is the
individual who is responsible for it and not the cooperative.
In this sense, the current Individual Income Tax Law, Law 35/2006 of
28 November, established four tax brackets and a top marginal rate of 43%.
Brackets:
Up to €9,050 gross annually, the withholding is 0%.
Between €9,051 and €17,460 gross annually applies a marginal rate of
24%.
Between €17,361 and €32,360 gross annually applies a marginal rate of
28%.
Between €32,361 and €52,360 gross annually applies a marginal rate of
37%.
After €52,361 gross annually applies a marginal rate of 43%.
Therefore, it is reasonable to have receipts without quarterly personal
income tax and that the cooperative does not have to withhold, because,
when this happens, it can be understood that the party issuing the invoice
is in the 0% personal income tax bracket, and for this reason does not pay
said tax.
So, to sum up all that has been said, the only irregularity on the part of
individuals corresponds to the action of not paying the
VAT. To this end
it is important to add that the people who enlist in self-managed projects
that have a low billing rate are not so obligated, so in order to protect
themselves legally, a person can bill the cooperative, and at the same time,
pay another professional for certain services (or pay daily expenses) to
balance their VAT.
So, in a totally legal manner, he could declare each trimester a
VAT near zero.
It would be indeed a way of moving from an individual
VAT payer to an
individual who cancels out his
VAT.
Another circumstance entirely would be that of bankrupt persons. You can
issue bills for your work in a completely carefree way, because in the
course of an inspection, the most that you could receive would be a fine,
which they would have no way to make you pay. This way, bankrupt people
have the easiest time of anyone in supporting these processes of reducing
VAT payments in
favor of cooperatives and entities who collaborate.
Note: There are some guidelines to follow so that you avoid the
risk of criminal sanctions from actions of this sort:
It is necessary to have a document that certifies the expense.
Invoices must be sent by someone who really does engage in the activity
being billed for, so that it can be demonstrated that the activity took
place. And there must be economic transactions or billing declarations
between the two parties (see the graph on the center pages)
Okay… with that I’m going to call it a day. There’s a lot more that follows,
but there’s only so much translating I can do at a stretch.
In earlier Picket Line entries, I’ve attempted to
translate sections from the latest edition of the Spanish
Handbook of Economic Disobedience (see , , , and ).
Today I’ll continue:
Total tax resistance by making yourself bankrupt
This action consists of stopping all payment of personal income tax,
VAT, and/or all
those that you can, with prior action generating a situation of irrevocable
insolvency. Taking into account that not paying taxes is only a criminal
offense starting at €120,000 per year, there is much margin for disobedience
without the risk of criminal charges and for dropping out of the system,
supporting a widespread and massive process of social self-management.
Additionally, through your personal action, you can support other businesses
and cooperatives that are not insolvent, generating receipts to help them
balance their accounts.
From tax resistance to fiscal autonomy
Some of the mechanisms that we provide on this page resemble the tricks also
used by people for selfish ends of dubious ethics. If these also form part of
our proposals, this is because the depth of social autonomy that we propose
will require a great deal of resources in order to make it happen, which can
be generated in part by the ability to work and the generosity of many people;
so long as the minimum necessary economic resources go along with it to make
it possible.
We mean by fiscal autonomy all of these paths of redirection that make sure
taxation remains in projects that will really result in benefits for the
people. This is to say that the part of the work that each person is
responsible to contribute to the common good can be directed to new public
services that really prioritize the basic needs of people in the highest
scale of priorities.
For this reason, in the face of the squandering of our resources on the part
of the State, it is a priority and nothing less than essential to create
ever more massive dynamics of civil disobedience and to redirect our resources
for popular, grassroots self-organization.
A difference from last year, when during the organizing of the Handbook we
collected a list of the projects that were registered to receive funds from
tax resistance, this year the lists are prepared in a decentralized way in
the various territories, so that in this edition that you are reading, you
should find an appendix with those projects from the territory where you are.
If not, you can look on the web
www.derechoderebelion.net
where we will publish a list of projects from all of the territories.
How we will organize if we are holders of unpayable mortgages
In recent decades, the necessities of the real estate market and the coverage
of the neoliberal propaganda apparatus have generated the false necessity to
embrace (private) homeownership. This has led millions of people signing
mortgage contracts that, surely, not even their heirs can assume. Meanwhile,
banks, housing, construction, real estate, and vultures in general, saw their
businesses flourish, but the lives of millions of families withered when the
terms for making the mortgage payments were not longer sufficient. This is
the harsh reality in which the weakest level in the social pyramid is steeped
today, now. The question is: What can we do to stop the forceful expropriation
of the legitimate right to housing?
The commendable work of the Platforms of People Affected by Mortgages
throughout the region has demonstrated that we can defend the right to
housing in the streets and through various forms of social pressure, greatly
reducing the number of people evicted from their homes.
From there, and with the base of disobedience, we propose extending the lines
of action that permit us to self-manage the right of housing for the long
term.
Strategies to impede the legal process
Various Platforms of People Affected by Mortgages suggest that when a notice
of unpaid mortgage arrives, demand free legal aid. Whether it is granted or
not, the very process of making the claim extends the interval between the
notice and the auction. If it is granted, it will be important to count on
trusted lawyers who provide free help in order to ensure that the rights of
the debtor are properly defended.
Furthermore, if we are aware that in the short term we cannot afford to pay
our mortgage, we can rent it at a low price to someone trustworthy and who
can make use of it, integrating a network of cross-linked rentals. By renting,
we can block the evictions from properties for at least five years.
Caution: there has been a lot voiced about how only a nominal rent
would be sufficient to keep the house. In light of this it would be wise,
since there is the legal concept of “legally fraudulent contract” issued at
the whim of a judge, which could lead to an eviction order. Given this, it is
important:
That the new tenants inhabit the house.
That the price is credible, even though it be low in comparison to
others.
That the economic transactions of rent actually take place and can be
demonstrated.
That the direct deposit of receipts and so forth is changed.
In other words, you have to prepare in the face of the law with complete
thoroughness, because what you have to do is to demonstrate to the judge that
a true contract is at issue.
See article 14 of the Tenancies Act concerning “Transfer of leased housing.”
As much as some judges, leaning in favor of the banking sector, argue that
the Mortgage Law or even the mortgage deed itself limits the right to rent
mortgaged homes, there are numerous rulings that demonstrate that the
Tenancies Act must prevail during the first five years of the contract,
since it forms part of the guarantee of the basic right of a tenant.
You have to take into account also what it says in the Civil Procedure Act
with concern to renting a foreclosed property: “In the mortgage process
there is one event concerning possession and that is when the judge evaluates
all of the details of the contract in order to adjudicate whether it must or
must not be respected.”
Following this are excerpts from Article 661 of the Civil Procedure Act that
I couldn’t be bothered to translate but I assume continue to back up the point
that renters of a property that is seized from its owner via foreclosure are
not thereby automatically evicted.
A subsequent paragraph recommends that people begin the process of renting out
their soon-to-be-foreclosed homes quickly when it becomes clear that they will
not be able to keep up with the payments, and that they file official paperwork
about the rental right away so it goes on record before the foreclosure process
gets started.
Social housing cooperatives as a tool for our self-management
As we anticipate foreclosures and eviction attempts, we can respond by going on the offensive, creating cooperative social housing.
In order to convert “social renting” [a government program that helps people who have been foreclosed on to move into rental flats] into an option that fights in an organized way the problem of unaffordable mortgages, the best option is to create a collective tool that allows for putting into place social housing cooperatives that lease mortgaged homes and thereby assure social housing to the debtors who cannot continue paying their mortgages.
This is the case with CIC-HS, the social housing cooperative Cooperativa Integral Catalana that you can find at habitatgesocial.cat, and that could be a model to follow in other areas.
This cooperative also has already obtained in the past year a judgment declaring that its social renting is legitimate because it has the social purpose of obtaining affordable housing for its members, in spite of the fact that it concerned Roig 21, a residential block that the cooperative rented less than a month before the auction date.
This precedent demonstrates the viability of a cooperativist strategy that has broad mandate to extend between people with difficulty of access to housing and especially between people with mortgages.
The basic operation of a social housing cooperative dedicated to providing an alternative to people with mortgages is as follows: the owner who cannot continue paying the mortgage will rent the flat for five years to the cooperative and become a partner with it.
This will take care of assigning another rental unit from the stock of rental housing.
Rentals will have a social price.
Likewise, there will be a waiting list to create social rentals with the transfer of use from future interested members.
A cooperative like this can aspire to generate a social fleet of homes to offer its members under a transfer of use.
Debts and bankruptcy
Currently there are many people in bankruptcy, some of them have become so for ideological motives and many others in more involuntary ways.
At a time when millions of people are debtors, by means of our union for debtors we can recover the freedom to stop being looked down upon.
The economic power manipulates it so that people in debt are to be seen as
social outcasts. Instead, debtors, even should it follow from making poor
money management decisions, stop being part of the consumerist system and
that gives them an opportunity to learn to live in another way.
In fact, many of us have decided on bankruptcy as a useful tool for our daily
lives. The combination of the antidemocratic practice of political power and
the current legislation makes bankrupt people able to enjoy many more civil
liberties than the others; the State can punish us with fines but has no
tools to make us pay them.
It is for this reason that since the publication We Can (enricduran.cat/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/02podemos_cast.pdf) we began creating tools for making contact with all the people who are in bankruptcy or who want to get there.
And to use this new freedom that we enjoy for the benefit of society and each other.
Bankrupt people can organize ourselves in order to take collective action without suffering any economic reprisals on the part of the State.
Our freedom permits us to take civil disobedience actions or to carry out
tasks that for our more creditworthy comrades would be much more risky:
refusal to pay transit fares, distribution of bulletins from social
collectives, sticking your neck out at assemblies, taking positions of
responsibility in collectives, or making invoices for self-managed
cooperatives with a
VAT less than
€120,000 in order to avoid having to pay
VAT.
So we present here bankruptcy as a tool for social transformation. If you
want to participate, we will enumerate what you need to know:
How do you go bankrupt?
From the moment you decide to stop struggling with your debts and mortgages,
it is advisable to make a review of the past work of study and more specific
documentation of your particular case with the intention of anticipating the
subsequent events that will be triggered and protecting yourself from possible
seizures.
With this section we will make this job easier by providing some general
applicable guidelines, being careful in order to minimize any eventuality.
It is important to be conscious of the personal situation in which you find
yourself, with all of the particulars that will shape the process.
For this reason, before you give up struggling with your debts and mortgages,
the main concern will be in letting go of present and future assets.
The equation is very simple: If you don’t possess anything = They cannot
seize anything.
You do not have to make any declaration of bankruptcy before a State
institution, but simply put into practice certain measures: do not have
real estate or vehicles registered in your name.
Do not have bank accounts in your name, although you can be a co-signer.
Do not have traded funds or shares of stock. Do not have a regular salary,
pension, unemployment or any similar official income (except that which is
below the minimum wage that is allowed, as will be explained below).
Also, being in debt is not listed as an offense in the Penal Code. It is only
a breach of contract that depends on the Civil Code. You must forget the
association of trials with criminals. You are no criminal. You are free to
travel when and where you want.
Stopping the payment to creditors only shuts the door to asking for new
loans. It can lead to a seizure of bank accounts or salary and of present
and future assets, but the law has provided that some assets and income are
unseizable.
There are many personal situations that make bankruptcy difficult in the
short term, for instance perhaps the part about not having a salary, a
pension, or any other State payment, is the most difficult hurdle for
bankruptcy. Even so, the seizure of a part of the salary can leave more
on account of continuing paying debts and fines.
How much of my salary can they seize?
(Also for pensioners, self-employed, those on leave, and the
unemployed)
In the case where your salary is below the minimum wage, it cannot be seized.
For the minimum is €645.30 (it rose a scant 0.6% from ). Amounts above this can be seized according to the levels defined in article 592 of the Civil Procedure Act, which will usually be much less than what you pay to banks.
And furthermore, in the case where the debt is for an unpaid mortgage, the
minimum unseizable stays at €967.95 under the new law of .
Other things to consider before stopping payment
A default can be managed ethically. You first pay your friends if you owe
them money and your suppliers that are small and mid-sized businesses,
stopping your payment of taxes to the State and, above all, to the
multinationals and the banks.
If you have any property that you need to get rid of, do this before you
begin to default on a debt, or as soon as possible once you decide you are
not going to pay more fines. Finally, before they can seize them you can
sell any shares, take the money, and close your accounts.
In this section you should take into account that there is a crime of
criminal bankruptcy (popularly called ditching goods), and for this reason it
is important how and when you get rid of your property. If you do so at the
time you have a creditor’s claim in hand, you risk being charged criminally.
Unless you do so by means of a sale at market price — in which case we are
in our rights of managing our property — or by using it as social capital for
a cooperative — in which case it will be difficult for the creditor, as the
social capital of a cooperative is not seizable for the debts of one of the
partners, and at the same time, the certificate from the allocation of social
capital will demonstrate that there is still a proprietary relationship
between the person and the property, such that he cannot be accused of
criminal bankruptcy.
Other personal advice when facing the impossibility of paying debts
If you are no longer able, immediately stop paying credit cards and other
such accounts; prioritize your health and the basic needs of your family
before paying debts to the banks.
If you are a married couple and one or both have debts that you are
going to stop paying, it is important to be in a system of separate
property, because they will seize from both accounts and, also, will add
both debts in order to calculare the amount to seize. Separate property
can be done by mutual agreement before a notary and may not cost more
than €150.
Before selling a car or putting it under another name so that it is not
seized, check with the department of motor vehicles to see if there are
any blocks on the title. Cars with blocks on the title cannot be sold
without canceling the debt.
Pay no mind to the telephone calls or letters that will come in the
future, no matter how threatening they are.
If they notify your neighbors, you can report them for violating the
Private Data Protection Act.
As soon as possible, adopt a new financial life. Without bank loans,
credit cards, or purchases on installment. You can live well, we can
assure you of that.
In earlier Picket Line entries, I’ve attempted to
translate sections from the latest edition of the Spanish
Handbook of Economic Disobedience (see , , , , and ).
Today I’ll continue:
How to stop collaborating with the banks
We share this information for people who want to join in the option of
closing their current accounts in private banks and savings banks, which are
fusing more and more, and of which it is hard to tell the difference between
the two.
The question comes when you want to totally abandon conventional banking and
need to have a current account in order to cash your paycheck, pension, or
to pay a bill that would not be easy to pay in some other way; here you do
not have it easy in the Spanish State.
The necessary structure for permitting daily operations, using credit or
debit cards and moving cash, makes it difficult for small entities and those
with few branches.
The Fiare project, while not being credentialed as a
credit union, operates as a commercial branch of the Italian People’s Ethical
Bank [Banca Popolare Etica],
has reported that it hopes to be able to open current accounts starting in
.
Currently the only bank with ethical investments operating in the Spanish
State in which you can open a current account is in Triodos Bank. You cannot
make withdrawals at the branches of this entity, but they do allow you to have
a debit or credit card with the bank.
People seeking to break with capitalist banking, for the moment, as a lesser
evil, can use a credit union with an ancillary account at the Triodos bank,
or as a provisional option until a stronger alternative is fortified.
You can find the credit unions in the Spanish State at
www.unacc.com.
These entities tend to have the operational advantage that they do not
charge commissions, or very little anyway. On the other hand they have few
branches, but the operation of automatic tellers and the internet is quite
broad and in some cases they can operate through arrangements with other
entities.
Also, by being cooperatives, they function in a somewhat democratic manner.
And by being small, even if their investments should be conventional, the
harm they can do is low and we imagine (we have not been able to confirm)
that their managers are paid considerably less than in bank accounts.
That said, what we are recommending is to use them only operationally and not
to save money for the long term. Another option more coherent with economic
disobedience to banking that we propose is to reduce as much as possible the
use of personal bank accounts, and to use them collectively via the projects
of social and alternative financing, such as those found in the section of
alternatives to the current system. This will allow the management of our
money to be linked directly to the support of projects contrasting with
capitalism, although this may mean reducing the convenience of personal
direct deposit combined with the payment of bills at the counter, with the
collective bargaining for basic services.
If you are moved to take action from the Move Your Money Campaign, which
is promoting an action of transferring deposits from conventional banks into
social financial entities and alternatives like Coop57, Fiare, Oikocredit,
Som energia, and CASX. You can find more information from the campaign at
www.remuevetudinero.net and from
some of these alternatives in the section on alternatives to the current
system.
Depositors are those that have the most important role in determining the
funding of the productive initiatives in the current economy and therefor
carry the main burden of creating another economy.
Therefore the transfer of deposits to an ethical and cooperative bank is an
important step towards a financial system that guarantees the development of
projects aimed at the viability of a more humane and just future for all.
In earlier Picket Line entries, I’ve attempted to translate sections from the latest edition of the Spanish Handbook of Economic Disobedience
(see
,
,
,
,
,
and
).
Today I’ll continue:
Collective Actions
The free collectives in the face of current law
We define “free collectives” as that association of people constituted with
an aim of transforming society through its social, economic, and political
activity. These collectives encompass all types of organizations so long as
their purpose is transformative; but in this article we will focus on those
free collectives dedicated to the production of goods and services. The name
matters less than the fundamentals of the collective. And keep in mind that
these days the name cooperative often obscures a capitalist enterprise, while
hiding behind a corporation can be an authentic cooperative.
The State regularly encourages cooperatives with subsidies and tax
preferences. And the secret of this permissiveness is in the laws that
regulate the functioning of cooperatives, in which the self-management
fundamentals have been largely replaced by capitalist intentions.
The law concerning cooperatives permits private ownership of the means of
production, and not only collective ownership. And that law accepts the
subsequent division of a sort between the owning members of the cooperative
and the non-proprietary salaried workers. The counterrevolutionary action of
the false cooperatives, that is of the capitalist enterprises incorporated
under the Cooperatives Law, has come to discredit the revolutionary work of
the authentic cooperatives in many associationist circles, dissuading many
producers from the sincere practice of this transformative path.
On the part of these free collectives, deceit has historically been resorted
to defensively, a necessary camouflage strictly necessary for survival. Since
the beginning of the struggles for social emancipation, the free collectives
have seen the need to operate in the shadows and to change their identity in
order to evade the State’s persecution. The first syndicates were posing as
relief societies; the anarchist collectives, as cooperative societies.
Whether revolutionary or ordinary, as collectives we must put our ideals into
practice. It does not matter that those who join to work together are few,
because what matters above all is to test the effectiveness of the idea in
practice.
Twenty industrial workers, or fifteen farmers, for example, want to come
together and work in common. Who can prevent this? If the capitalist regime
prohibits collectivism, we can build a production cooperative. What does
the name matter‽ The interesting thing is to work collectively.
What is it if not a Limited Liability Corporation? We know of collective
businesses that, with the name of production cooperatives, have functioned
miraculously.
They have overcome the capitalist system and have conquered it even in the
field of commerce. What if there is no revolution? It doesn’t matter. The
collective must be created, whatever the number of collectivists and the
social environment in which it will reveal itself.
In historical periods like the present, in which the correlation of forces
between the collectives and the State is so unbalanced on the side of the
latter, it is the most important time to be familiar with the law so as to
find the points of weakness that permit us to conquer it at the lowest cost.
This section has been written with the aim of offering practical information
to protect self-managed collectives from the predatory action of the State.
From here, the Handbook takes a close look at the law as it currently exists in
Spain… something that probably has limited interest to the English-speaking
audience (and also something that requires a more legalistically-tuned
translation apparatus), so I’ll skip over it.
Part of what it covers are the advantages and disadvantages of legally
incorporating, compared to those of being an unofficial, unregistered
association. It discusses the varieties of forms of legal corporations, and how
they compare.
It also warns readers not to choose their legal form of corporation based on
its name. In many cases the official forms for, say, a cooperative or a labor
union have been designed to neuter those types of organizations rather than to
facilitate or empower them, so such groups might be better off choosing another
form of organization. And the “non-profit” designation may sound appealing, but
can be more restrictive and less useful even to groups that have no interest in
turning a profit.
“Legal persons” and limited liability corporations are good ways to shield
conspiracies of individuals from the repercussions of their collective criminal
acts, say the authors, and they think that capitalists shouldn’t be the only
ones who get to play that game.
The handbook covers a few varieties of legal corporate structures in depth and
talks about their possible advantages for providing cover for cooperative
economic disobedience, and gives some pointers as to what to look out for
whichever path you choose.
In earlier Picket Line entries, I’ve attempted to translate sections from the latest edition of the Spanish Handbook of Economic Disobedience (see , , , , , , and ).
Today I’ll continue:
Alternatives to the System
Constructing a form of life at the margin of the current system:
Integrated cooperatives
On the previous pages we have seen distinct lines of action linked to economic disobedience.
Some of them, as in the case of bankruptcy, mean turning your back on full participation in the current system as a way to prevent the State or the bank from getting away with our money which we believe does not belong to them, and, instead, to dedicate it to construct projects based on self-management.
In this chapter we will look at different initiatives that will allow us to realize that a new economic system is being created in which we all can participate completely.
Additionally, we can learn a little more about projects that can become the purposes of our tax resistance actions.
Integrated cooperatives are being built as a model for subverting the savage reality we suffer as a society and as a those involved in the capitalist system of domination, managed by a few and supported and maintained by the state apparatus that feeds it.
This is a tool for constructing a countervailing power from below, starting from self-management, self-organization, and direct democracy, allowing us to transition from the current dependence on the structures of the system towards a scenario of full freedom of conscience, free of authority and where we all can fully develop equality of conditions and opportunities.
It is not therefore an escape for a few, nor a partial escape, but a constructive proposal of generalized disobedience and self-management in order to reconstitute society from below, in all of its facets and in an integrated manner, recovering human and affective relationships, from proximity and based on trust.
The basic principles are the minimal agreements that must be taken by all those processes that interact in the context of an integrated cooperative.
It is also crucial to respect autonomy and capacity by means of solidarity, eliminating the bureaucracy and building confidence and free choice.
Participation must be completely open (as the foundation of the assembly) and free (apart from being associated or not), and it is fundamental that decisions are made by consensus, in order to ensure respect for the diversity of opinions and positions while at the same time promoting group cohesion for the optimal development of the process.
The best form of self-organization is that which is organized around a decentralized network; which is the most effective method of self-defense and survival that exists.
If any of the nodes is attacked or is corrupted from within, the network will maintain its robustness thanks to the many redundant reciprocal interconnections that exist between the nodes that participate in it.
When we say node we refer to any group active in the network which acts, produces changes, and interfaces with the rest.
The network is composed of different self-organized spaces according to the territory they cover.
Autonomous projects are initiatives that bring to life a specific activity and that are based on the mutual trust of all of their members.
The cores of local self-management or local integrated cooperatives are zones of interaction based on proximity where collective initiatives and self-managed projects interact with a high level of trust.
The territorial benchmark would be a neighborhood of a city, a mid-sized village, a collection of small towns near each other, etc.… Bioregional self-management networks (also called ecoxarxes or ecoredes) are the bioregional space or district where the above-mentioned elements interact on an equal footing.
At this level a counter-hegemonic economy takes form, promoting the use of alternative currencies, which serves to strengthen the local economy and relationships of trust.
Finally, an integrated cooperative is a basis of reference and coordination, within which collaborative and collective means are generated according to the previously-mentioned process, that can choose and use tools from legal ones (cooperatives) through on-line ones, and, especially, methods and plans of action to deepen self-sufficiency and self-organization.
Integrated operations spread in the region
Currently there are about 20 integrated cooperative developments active in the region.
Last April 25–28 the second meeting without borders of integrated cooperatives took place, where more than a hundred people from these projects met to exchange experiences and to move forward from there.
Some of these projects have already been able to legalize their first legal tools so it is expected that next year there will already be many of these integrated cooperatives up and running.
It is important to highlight that the major objective of an integrated cooperative must be that of meeting the basic needs of all of the participants, by means of self-managed and collective action.
Some of these basic needs would be food, education, health, housing, transportation, and energy.
It is for this work that the integrated cooperative reclaims the commons, understanding the commons as a collective, neither government-run nor private, but a primal form of management born from cooperation between humans.
This means that, on the one hand, we must promote the collectivization of goods, land, housing, and on the other, the recovery of public health and education, with self-managed services outside of the monopoly doctrine established by the State and capital.
The basic cooperative income or allowance is a project to generate common resources (monetary or not) to guarantee the basic necessities of the people who form part of a community (and therefore, of society), resource allocation that cannot be accumulated, because its object is to cover a minimum welfare.
As a transition tool, people most involved in the processes of dynamization can be the first to receive this income that the collective is charged with balancing with, for example, community work.
The cooperative labor exchange is another tool with which people or projects that need resources can interact with other ones.
This way the relation between the offerer and the bidder will be completely on an equal level and without intermediaries.
And the remuneration can be either monetary (in euros or alternative currencies) or non-monetary.
Already in Catalonia the development has begun of a Cooperative Public Health System, in which the provision of funds from the Catalonia Integral Cooperative for the health system goes toward developing a pooled, mutualist system of financing of various health nodes.
Among these the Center of Self-managed Primary Health of AureaSocial has already been initiated in Barcelona.
The dominant economic system is, currently, a complex system protected by the State and its tentacles of social control, beyond the reach of ordinary people, the people who interact at the local level and in communities.
So it is no accident that in the economics academy there is not a single class dedicated to addressing questions of substance for today’s world, such as the creation of money from debt or the control over fluctuations in the financial markets.
The reality of economic relations is much more simple and comprehensible for most human beings.
This is why our responsibility is to develop tools that facilitate economic interrelationships that promote collective self-sufficiency and networking.
In these pages we share proposals and experiences concerning a new, public, self-managed system, assembly-oriented and locally-based, that will guarantee the maintenance of basic needs above any particular interests.
That said, following will be some tips for constructing an integrated economic system of transition capable of interacting with the reality of the capitalist economy, with an objective of leaving it behind, one step a time.
I’ll stop here for today.
My first impression is that there’s an awful lot of utopian-sounding theory about how these integrated cooperatives ought to work, without a whole lot of humble recounting of how they have worked in practice.
This makes me pretty skeptical.
I’d much rather hear from experienced people saying “these are the ideals we went in with, these are the challenges we faced, these are the compromises we made, perhaps you can learn from us” than from idealistic people saying “in the future everyone will be happy, free, and equal and will be guaranteed an income, healthcare, housing, education, transportation, and energy!”
In earlier Picket Line entries, I’ve attempted to translate sections from the latest edition of the Spanish Handbook of Economic Disobedience
(see
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
and
).
Today I’ll continue:
The community economy
It can be defined as the pooling of resources for the collective enjoyment of
the people who interact, without accounting for the flow of trade. It
functions under spontaneous reciprocity, relationships of affinity, mutual
aid, and high levels of trust; without expecting compensation in return for
what has been shared.
Some ecovillages and repopulated cores spent years functioning with a community economy such that all members of the community held their income and expenses in common with the aim of covering their basic needs.
This is the case, for example, of Lakabe, in the valley of Artzibar, Euskalherria.
In many places they include free clothing stores and all sorts of second-hand
goods, which are left behind and taken without any sort of auditing. The
freestores, like libraries but for any sort of thing, are collective
warehouses where everyone leaves what they only use occasionally in order that
other people can also use it.
Community gardens, resistance boxes [places where people can deposit extra
money, or get money when they’re in need, named from their use during labor
strikes], public free meals, are among the other ongoing or periodic examples
that show us how a market-free economy is not a utopia but increasingly a part
of our reality.
Barter
Non-monetary acts of the exchange of goods, services, and know-how. A direct
verbal agreement between the offerer and bidder that satisfies the claims of
both parties in relation to the fairness of the exchange.
Multi-reciprocal barter: Alternative currencies
Alternative or local currencies are a tool that goes beyond direct exchange,
facilitating multi-reciprocal exchanges and establishing value for goods,
services, and know-how that are exchanged. They are also part of the key to
relocalizing the economy, promoting human relationships and economies of
proximity at the local and bioregional level. It generates a social market
open only to activities that incorporate ethical, ecological, and social
criteria that permit all people to interact fairly and without middlemen.
Alternative currencies are an opportunity to reduce the hegemony of
capitalism. They could gradually replace the euro while guaranteeing
abundance, as each individual participates in the creation of resources to
meet collective needs, putting their skills and know-how at the service of
the community.
An exchange network can be put into motion by a small, critical mass (30–40
people near or far would be sufficient) who associate at the local level to
boost economic relations based on trust and proximity, over a range of
bioregional action.
As a tool of the transition that inevitably coexists with the capitalist
economy, we must promote a mixed system in which the
LETS
system and the exchange of money complement each other. The
LETS
(Local Exchange Trading System) system establishes the guidelines for
promoting networks of local exchange in which there is no interest on the
exchanges. Currency is generated when an exchange takes place (the bidder has
a positive balance equal to the agreed value of the exchange, and the claimer
is dinged with an equivalent negative balance), permitting a deficit
according to the rules of the network.
When it comes to currency exchange, it is usually allowed to change official
money (Euro) for liberated money but not the reverse, since the undertaken
path is to reduce the hegemony of the capitalist economy.
In addition we mention the transparency required for this new way of
understanding the economy based on trust. For this, we use the virtual systems
of administrating networks of exchange, which are nothing more than internet
software applications and that serve to register the exchanges.
These software applications are much like those used in banks to manage our
accounts, with the difference that the basic data of balances and transactions
are accessible to all members of the network.
The systems that are supported by the exchange of paper money are essentially
fragile, besides the danger of counterfeiting and the cost of printing the
currency, they hide fluctuations that occur in the system because we do not
know the quantity of money that each person has.
The CES
(Community Exchange System) is a management system for alternative currency
(online software) with more than 10 years behind it, developed in South
Africa. It has thousands of users and more than 500 exchange networks spread
throughout the world. The diverse integrated cooperatives and bioregional
networks of exchange (Ecoxarxes) that exist so far in the
state are being the drivers of
CES
up to the point where in three years there are already 150
CES
networks in the state, being far and away the most prolific place in the
world in this system of exchange. However, despite its potential, this
software has some weaknesses that limit its expansion and use, so that a more
intuitive and agile version is in the works for their next version: the
Integral CES.
See www.ces.org.za
and www.integralces.net.
The transitory relationship with the capitalist economy
To construct a counter-economy is a necessary duty if we want to expel the
capitalist economy from our lives. It is evident that for many of the projects
of transition we need injections of euros in order to set them in motion. To
make use of the capitalist economic resources of a legal character (wages,
unemployment, inheritances, scholarships) may not be enough, and here we come
to the role of actions of economic disobedience that we have discussed in
these pages.
This is a question about which we have to define our own strategy, on a case
by case basis. At last, we will have reference to a method that can be very
useful for driving the process of transition previously expounded:
crowdfunding or collective microfinance.
Crowdfunding is a system of co-financing of projects and initiatives through
collective cooperation, where each individual acts as a “patron” by providing
some amount of money to drive some project.
Its primary mission is to promote, beyond the individual rewards in exchange
for donations, the creation of common goods promoting liberated knowledge.
Some examples of this type of platform are
www.goteo.org or
www.verkami.com.
Among those on the point of launching is
Coopfunding.net specifically for helping
cooperative and self-managed projects, which has already been used in the
Beta period for the “Prison Cannot Hold Disobedience” campaign which, among
other projects, has served to assist in the dissemination of this handbook.
I’ll stop here today. There are about five or six pages to go.
In earlier Picket Line entries, I’ve attempted to translate sections from the latest edition of the Spanish Handbook of Economic Disobedience
(see
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
and
).
Today I’ll conclude:
Alternative finance
We can contribute to attracting economic resources in a collective manner
(savings or donations) and use them to finance grassroots, self-managed
projects, of diverse kinds, that nourish and strengthen face-to-face human
relationships, generating tools and alternatives for meeting basic needs
from a collective perspective.
With these goals, in a
self-financing social cooperative network emerged called
CASX.
Principal characteristics of CASX:
No interest
We are talking about the first banking structure (in the form of a
cooperative of financial services) in the Spanish State that will
operate without interest. This means that lending (loans) and deposits
do not generate interest for the participants; that is to say, money is
not created from money.
Self-management
Autonomy and the promotion of self-organization outside of the
State.
Decision-making
Assemblies and working groups open to all members.
Overcoming bureaucracy
Subverting the law and putting people before bureaucracy. The
collectives, projects, or assemblies that lack legal personhood may
participate in the project on equal terms.
So this revolutionary banking project is another tool to further grassroots
and self-managed financing, naturally with a clear desire to break with the
obsolete capitalist schemes of economic profitability.
One of the goals is to attract deposits (savings), promoting the reduction
of the need to have individual bank accounts, depositing our savings in
collective accounts and putting them at the service of the decisions of the
assemblies. This will also reflect donations that will serve to make such
financial projects sustainable and, ultimate, to make self-management viable.
It is the participants in the assemblies, through pertinent working groups or
commissions — which study the viability of the projects — who suggest their
financing.
In this system there is no use for fractional reserve banking, the standard
on which the world banking system operates, lending money it does not have.
This practice has led to 95% of the money not having any sort of backing,
which is to say, it does not exist. In the first system, deposits are
classified in this way: ⅓ are reserve funds (never moved and guaranteed for
the repayment of depositors), another ⅓ are invested in “safe” projects to
assist social initiatives, and the ⅓ that remain serve to promote grassroots,
self-managed projects.
In case a funded project fails, there are diverse mechanisms to make up for
it: through different forms of donations and/or agreeing to an alternative
path of repayment for the people responsible for the project. In this respect
CASX
has incorporated from the beginning the possibility of accepting alternative
currencies, goods, and services as a form of repaying a loan.
As for ethical financial cooperatives with interest, we find consolidated
situations like Fiare and Coop57.
Coop57 is a financial services cooperative that was created in
Catalonia in and from
began to spend throughout the Spanish State.
It currently exists also in Aragón, Madrid, Andalucía, and Glaicia. It
collects savings from people and entities, to allocate them to cooperative
projects and social initiatives. It is a fully consolidated reality that
currently has deposits of more than €15 million and finances more than a
hundred entities per year. Its structure is financed by means of the interest
paid by the financial projects. More information at
www.coop57.coop.
Fiare is a project of creating an ethical credit union, which is to
say, a financial entity valid by the rules of the central banks, and capable
of creating long-term accounts. Currently and until it becomes a credit union,
which is scheduled for , the Fiare
project still functions at a state level and offers accounts linked to the
Italian Banca Populare Ética. These savings accounts are only
available to legal entities, but they operate without being limited to those
in Italy. With these savings various kinds of cooperative projects are
financed, including mortgages for cooperative farms. Currently it manages
deposits totalling €29 million and has an equity capital of more than 4
million. More information at
www.proyectofiare.com
As we have mentioned in the section on denouncing banking in this handbook,
at present these proposals of cooperative and ethical financing are also
being disseminated through the
www.remuevetudinero.net portal
where you can find more detailed information about the various initiatives
and why to support them.
So it is necessary to assume that the relationship with the capitalist
economy is a relationship in transition, as part of the path ahead which,
inevitably, must start from the present order of things in order to reach
in the long term the generation of another economy outside of the established
one.
In this context, the deepening in the community economy, barter, alternative
currencies and moving from euros into self-managed projects, have to be
understood as complementary pivot points of the same strategy of transition.
Cores of local self-management
We understand by local self-management a way of taking control of our lives,
providing our neighborhoods and towns the infrastructure that allows for the
stable development of social projects organized from below. This serves to
break with our current dependence on the precarious systems of public or
private social provision, dominated by the State and the market.
It is at the local level where we can count on a larger capacity to extend
the self-management process. Our everyday life where we encounter our
neighbors and share our common problems is not to be sneezed at.
This means empowering ourselves, building integrated self-managed initiatives
based on proximity. By means of these projects, neighbors recover mutual aid
and regenerate community as a form of solving basic problems of our personal
and collective lives.
There are various experiences and proposals for action that have in common
the possibility of being applied in our neighborhood or town. If we can bring
them together, we can all expect an integrated system of social
self-organization. We list some of these proposals:
Neighborhood relations in the community, mutual aid and cooperation.
Social centers, free stores, resistance boxes, social libraries, etc.
Exchange (barter) of goods, services, and know-how; alternative currencies; social markets with participation from local businesses and professionals
Offices of economic disobedience, tax resistance, and unionizing of debtors.
Crowdfunding (collective microfinance) and interest-free credit cooperatives. Fiscal self-management.
Job pooling and help with the creation of self-employment projects.
Office of housing and resource bank of available properties.
Cooperative social housing.
Public self-managed health centers. Health facilitators.
Office of Education and spaces of collective learning.
Storehouses (supply and exchange places), consumer groups, shops of ecological products.
Community communication media.
Ecofabrication labs, open repairs and machinery.
Workshops on off-the-grid energy production.
Affinity groups of activists.
Popular assemblies.
In this way the cores of local self-management would be the primary space of
practical application of the project of integrated cooperatives. That is,
the area in which the diverse transition initiatives combine, particularly
those related to basic needs, in order to generate a way of life based on
making self-management widespread.
Living the Comprehensive Revolution
This past year the concept of the Comprehensive Revolution has been spreading
as a way of naming the process of radical transformation of society and of
our lives in which we are immersed.
The awareness that begins to grow today is accompanied by a radical rupture
with imposed needs, material or not; voluntary simplicity, but without
limitations on abundance from what is fundamental, in the stream of feelings,
the good life and living well. For this we are learning to self-manage
collectively the resources that will allow us to supply ourselves in a
dignified manner with that which we really need, with the construction of
ways of life that have as their basic foundation mutual aid and networks of
trust. At the same time, we must topple the pillars of support of this
society, and this will not be possible through passivity because the
structural violence of the system of domination requires a living and
organized response from the grassroots, with nonhierarichical projects of
political action and ideological emancipation.
It’s not about the right or the left, nor even about who is down and who is
up, but it’s about emerging together, all who want an organized way to reach
another system that prioritizes the value of common and relational goods,
cooperation, reciprocity, mutuality, and multiculturalism; assuming the
limits of the Earth and focusing on the care of our common home.
All of this evolution towards liberation and reconstruction of the collective
subject and of the conditions of our existence is what we call Comprehensive
Revolution. A process of construction from self-management that is based on
autonomy and the abolition of the existing forms of domination: States,
capitalism, and all that negatively interferes in human relationships and
in the relationship with nature. The Comprehensive Revolution implies a
conscious action to improve and recover the qualities and values of common
life and at the same time to construct new organizational forms that
guarantee equality of choice and equity in the meeting of vital needs.
Many individuals and groups have been on this path for some time. There are
even generations born in the heart of free and autonomous societies, free
from the grasp of the authoritarian claws of all known systems. An example
are the original peoples who resist with the awareness that their acts do not
only impact the here and now, but that care must be taken for everything that
allows a good life for all. They are the most radical anticapitalists, often
without knowing it, without putting any “anti” against some other thing.
Those who are living in the so-called West, also can retake the continual
construction of a collective identity and direct action in the exercise of
our rights, without asking permission of any authority outside of the local
assembly process, because we also have the capability of recovering the
identity of our people, of joining ourselfs with the elements of the
environment, and of recovering the ancient knowledge that combines with the
collective wisdom to give us the tools for the Comprehensive Revolution.
The Revolution is in those who live every day as they feel, in those who
rebuild step-by-step the community ties between neighbors, in those who do
not raise or lower themselves, in those who listen, those who laugh, those
who dance, those who know how to give a second chance, in those who know
when to break even their own rules, those who have no fear, those who trust,
in those who love… All these people are already making the Comprehensive
Revolution.
This is an attractive vision of transformation. But I’m a little skeptical.
Maybe there’s more to this, beyond this aspirational position statement, that
I’m not yet aware of. A little too much of this sounds like the sort of naive
utopian communism that wouldn’t pass the laugh test where I come from. And I
don’t see any sort of “we know this may sound like naive utopian communism,
but here’s why it’s different” disclaimer, which worries me.
But it’s early in the life of the project yet, and future editions of this
Handbook may show us more concrete and down-to-earth examples of some of these
visions.
After the section I have just quoted, the Handbook continues with an appendix
that lists several “Offices of Economic Disobedience” around Spain (“spaces
where people with disobedient intentions meet to share questions and know-how…
collective learning spaces where through mutual aid and cooperation,
participants can create new ways to act in their personal and collective
lives”), and another that lists some other resources the readers might find
helpful. The final page is a sample letter that tax resisters can use to
accompany their tax forms:
Appendix: Sample letter for the Treasury
Mr./Mrs. Director of the State Treasury Agency:
With the payment of taxes I contribute to financing the expenses of the State.
For reasons of conscience, and after an analysis of the of the meaning of
these expenses for society, I cannot, I choose not to collaborate with all
of these that do not contribute to the common good and that will only go for
the benefit of a privileged minority, in the face of the needs of the great
majority of society. For this reason, I make a declaration of my status as
a tax resister.
Accordingly, I have sent __________ euros to the account of _______________
an entity or group that intervenes socially in an area necessary to create
resources that are really public ones.
As I explained above, this part of my tax, which I redirect to a socially
useful end, corresponds to the taxes I have withheld from paying to the army,
the debt, the church, the monarchy,
etc., which
negate the satisfaction of more important social needs.
I ask that you acknowledge the Tax Resistance by redirecting money from
injustice, not from a desire to defraud, as deduced by the publicity given
to the 2013 Campaign of Tax Resistance, and from the very letter I am sending.
It is mostly unchanged from previous editions, with a few updates, a slightly
expanded section on alternative currencies, and an expanded section on tax
resistance. I’d attempted a translation of an earlier edition in
, and you can find those
translations at the following pages:
Introduction
Introduction to Civil Disobedience, Economic Disobedience, and Comprehensive Disobedience
Exercise the Right of Rebellion: Join the Manifesto of a New Rebel Dignity
Tax resistance as a strategy of rebellion; Auditing the national debt; Mechanisms for resistance to the value-added tax
Bankruptcy, squatting, cooperative housing, and other techniques
How to stop collaborating with the banks
Collectives
Alternatives to the system; integrated cooperatives
The community economy, barter, alternative currencies, the transitory relationship with the capitalist economy
Alternative cooperative finance, self-management cores; Living the comprehensive revolution
Here are my translations of the new sections:
Practical Guide to Income Tax Resistance
Everyone can practice war tax resistance
The state collects taxes throughout the year from everyone in society, and it
does so in many ways, not only via the income tax. This money is destined in
large part for the army, internal security, payments on the debt, and other
undesirable expenses.
Your income tax return represents a magnificent opportunity to recover this
money and redirect it to a just end. Therefore:
Anyone, whether or not they have income, whether they get a paycheck or
not, whether they are registered or not, may fill out a tax return and
reclaim money from the state to redirect to an alternative and
constructive project.
The return can have an amount due, a refund, or a big zero; in each case
you can still resist.
What is tax resistance?
It’s the unwillingness to collaborate with the State in military spending,
the military, the internal security apparatus, the prison system, the
monarchy, the national debt, and other undesirable expenses — active
disobedience at the point of filing the tax return. It technically consists
of sending a part of those taxes to a project that works in the defense of
the progress of social solidarity. It is inspired by war tax resistance, which
for years has successfully operated in Spain, and extends this to other budget
items that we also consider unjust.
We call for complete tax resistance to the State in order to redirect the
taxes to a budget autonomously managed by local, grassroots collectives,
much more deserving of sovereignty than the government institutions that
force subjection on the population.
Where is the money redirected?
The redirected money promotes work for peace, social justice, cooperative
development, environmental improvement, human rights, the support of
transformative struggles in other nations,
etc.
With this money projects are able to be continue working for a more just and
equitable society. These are the redirection alternatives: any collective or
organization that works in a non-hierarchical form for a more just society.
Grassroots collectives and non-profit organizations such as associations,
ecological groups, cooperatives, cultural associations,
etc., that are
not directly liked to the Administration or to partisan politics.
What for?
As the crisis becomes more acute, people are becoming more and more familiar
with economic concepts. Debt, risk premium, liquidity, and one word in
particular: cuts.
The government scissors, held by capital on both handles, inside and out,
seem to have no restraint. The various government branches, whatever party
they belong to, cut spending here and there. Sectors as sensitive as health
care, primary education, or pensions are tapped.
“When the government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is for
the people and for each portion of the people the most sacred of rights and
the most indispensable of duties.” — Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen of
Tax resistance is, in reality, an assertion of the right of rebellion, to
disobey on behalf of the common good in the face of situations like those
in which we are living.
We are committed to the common good, and for that reason, we declare ourselves
rebels against the Constitution, unsubmissive to the State, and disobedient
to all of the authority that it represents.
Tax resistance was one of the strategies of civil disobedience that led India
to independence from the British Empire; now it may be a key strategy for us
to gain independence from global capitalism.
How is it done?
Here follows a technical discussion of how to use the electronic filing system
used in Spain to apply for a refund of taxes by filling in an amount “for tax
resistance” for a miscellaneous-withholding line-item.
Then it is reiterated that anyone can object in this way, regardless of their
employment situation or whether or not they will owe taxes on their return.
People are encouraged to decide for themselves how much to resist and redirect:
perhaps as little as €1, or an amount like €890.87 which represents the amount
of military spending per capita in Spain.
“In any case, tax resistance is, above all, a public and collective action of
denouncing the injustice of the economic system, and a challenge to society.
The act of resisting is much more important than the quantity resisted;
therefore, any amount, however small, is valid.”
If the Treasury rejects my resistance, what can I do?
Occasionally, the Treasury will not give up the money reclaimed or demands
what it was not paid on returns that demand refunds. It might be the case
this year that the Treasury will not audit us, and the next year it will. Or
the other way around (just because they don’t allow our resistance one year
is no reason to be discouraged to try it again next year). The Treasury could
even try to reclaim from us the amounts we haven’t paid or that — in their
opinion — they have over-refunded to us during various years. In such cases,
you should be aware that the Treasury cannot reclaim anything that is more
than four years old.
For this reason, and particularly for tax resisters who resist significant
amounts each year, the alternative destinations that receive the redirected
money must provide escrow accounts in which they keep at least a portion of
those funds during those four years.
The provisional or parallel returns (when the Treasury detects the resistance
and reclaims the redirected money) may be appealed, and this does not involve
any fees or expenses (sometimes one of those recourses is effective).
Given that, it is best to continue to rely only on people who, supported by
personally-known groups, want to conduct a campaign of denouncing undesirable
government spending.
What sanctions do I risk?
Once the provisional or parallel return is confirmed, if we don’t pay what
they demand of us, the administration may attach interest to the amount
starting from the filing deadline and continuing until the payment date.
This process is described in your tax return documentation; in no case is
the tax resister accused of anything or receives any sanction. There will
never be a criminal prosecution (a tax offense requires a larger “fraud” of
more than 120,000 euros).
What if I cannot afford to repay the amount I redirected?
The worst that can happen if the Treasury detects your tax resistance is that
you will be on the hook for double the amount: the money we redirect to the
alternative destination and, if we are unlucky and the Treasury discovers us,
we are required to repay the Treasury. In such a case, if we resist a small
amount, redirecting only a quantity that we judge will not be a problem for
our finances: 50 euros, 30, 10… so that, if the Treasury detects it and
charges us a second time, it won’t break our bank. We will have added one more
objection and with it our voice against these immoral, unuseful, and
undesirable expenses.
It is also true that the Treasury may wait some years before revising our
return, even after we have paid some amount in our tax return (with the
amount of tax resistance withheld) or we have had some amount refunded (with
the amount of tax resistance added).
The Treasury has a maximum of four years to reclaim from us what they call
errors in our return, or unjustified figures, or whatever legal terminology
that occurs to them to reject our position of tax resistance.
What can we do in such cases? There are distinct possibilities: the escrow
accounts mentioned earlier, or simply asking whoever you redirected your taxes
to for a refund, if the redirector cannot cope with the demands of the
Treasury, depending on the quantities involved and the personal situations of
the resisters, and keeping in mind that four year statute of limitations.
A Tax Resistance Fund is necessary as a common tool for everyone who
participates in a campaign of tax resistance. A common fund to cover costs
that may hit any person or collective that participates in this tax resistance
campaign, because of the consequences of the possible acts of the Treasury
against tax resisters.
The economic relations that exist in the autonomous economic system
(SEA) form part of the
theory of the social and solidarity economy. The
SEA has the objective
of developing and providing an economic framework to serve the people, that
satisfies their needs, by means of economic empowerment and collaboration.
Social currency represents and/or substitutes for an exchange relationship
between two people, created after offering something and not receiving
equivalent compensation at the same time. It does not represent a debt so much
as an agreement, or rather a confidence that serves us to close the circuit of
exchange, receiving that which we want or need. Thus, money vanishes, flows,
and allows for multi-reciprocal exchanges and puts into circulation new
products and services.
For this reason there must be tools designed that encourage a space for
exchanges (internet platforms) and that facilitate the extension of exchange
as a modus vivendi.
It’s important to pay attention so that the criteria of valuation do not
devolve into relations of exploitation or fraud that could affect the
confidence of people. In this sense, the personal dimension of the process of
exchange transcends the buyer/seller relationship. A reciprocal, supportive,
or exchange valuation can apply the same hourly rate.
Integrated cooperatives like the ecoxarxes form part of the same
autonomous economic system, and all of the money (each ecoxarxa has
its own currency) are interrelated and are reciprocally exchangable.
Lastly, the integrated cooperative is a point of reference and coordination
from which collaborative and collective means are generated such that any of
the previously-mentioned processes may be chosen and used, from legal tools
(cooperatives) to telematic or internet tools, and, especially, forms and
plans of action to strengthen self-reliance and self-organization.
