Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Malaysia → tithe resistance after 1960

James C. Scott, in a paper in the Copenhagen Papers series (“Everyday Forms of Resistance,” 1989), looked at tax resistance as one of the varieties of behind-the-scenes peasant resistance to exploitation.

In particular, he investigated resistance to mandatory tithing of rice yields in Malaysia. This tithe was a traditional Islamic zakāt that had been made mandatory and brought under the control of the central government in 1960, in the course of which the government also added an invasive bureaucracy that “mandated the registration of acreage and yields in order to enforce its collection.”

Says Scott:

Opposition to the new tithe was so unanimous and vehement in the villages where I conducted research that it was a comparatively simple matter to learn about the techniques of evasion. They take essentially four forms. Some cultivators, particularly small-holders and tenants, simply refuse to register their cultivated acreage with the tithe agent. Others underreport their acreage and/or crop and may take the bolder step of delivering less rice than even their false declarations would require. Finally, the grain handed over is of the very poorest quality — it may be spoiled by moisture, have sprouted, be mixed with straw and stones so that the recoverable milled grain is far less than its nominal weight would suggest.

Scott says that the government, in one local sample, got only one-fifth of the grain that it would have if people had complied with the tithe law. But though this was a largely successful tax strike, it was also a quiet one:

There have been no tithe riots, no tithe demonstrations, no petitions, no violent confrontations, no protests of any kind. Why protest, indeed, when quieter stratagems have achieved the same results at minimal risk? …it is the safer course for resisters to leave the tithe system standing in name while they dismantle it in practice… without affording the state an easily discernible target. There is no organization to be banned, no conspiratorial leaders to round up or buy off, no rioters to haul before the courts — only the generalized non-compliance by thousands of peasants.

Scott says that there are three factors that aid this mode of resistance:

1. “a palpable ‘climate of opinion’ ” — that is, a widespread belief that the tithe is unjust and that resistance is proper
2. “a shared knowledge of the available techniques of evasion”
3. “economic interest” — that is, the fact that it is personally economically advantageous to resist paying the tithe

(He refines this in another work to: “the conjunction of a folk culture that encourages some forms of resistance, a set of habits and practices that are part of the practical heritage of the peasantry, and a shared material interest in thwarting appropriation [that] can produce a form of tacit coordination that mimics or substitutes for formal organization.”)

Also important is the political context. The authorities could, Scott says, crack down on evasion, though this would be costly and difficult. But it would also hurt political support for the ruling party among the peasantry.

Scott says that once tax resistance “has become a customary practice it generates its own expectations about what is permissible [and] raises the political and administrative costs for any regime that subsequently decides it will enforce the rules in earnest. For everyday resisters there is safety in numbers and successful resistance builds its own momentum.”

He also notes, in another context, that “the social historian could profitably examine the role of petty tax resistance in producing, over time, the ‘fiscal crisis of the state’ which frequently presages radical political change. Here too, without intending it, the small self-serving acts of thousands of petty producers may deprive a regime of the wherewithal to maintain its ruling coalition and prevail against its enemies.”

In another paper (“Resistance without Protest and without Organization: Peasant Opposition to the Islamic Zakat and the Christian Tithe,” 1987), Scott compared the Malaysian zakāt resistance to earlier resistance to mandatory Christian tithing in France, in support of his thesis that…

…a vast range of what counts — or should count — as peasant resistance involved no overt protest and requires little or no organization.

This look at what Scott calls “everyday resistance” is in reaction to our normal tendency to concentrate on more organized, visible, acute uprisings and to consider other forms to be inchoate, immature forms of real rebellion. Because the duration of and the number of participants in such everyday resistance may be greater than of more well-recognized revolts, their effect on the balance of power between the ruling class and the exploited class may be proportionally greater as well.

By itself, the peasantry’s most common and durable weapon is an everyday resistance that stops short of the more dangerous forms of overt protest and confrontation.

Because members of the exploited class lack access to the legislative and administrative levers of power, they take their political stand instead at the point of enforcement. As Thoreau put it:

I meet this American government, or its representative the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year, no more, in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the indispensablest mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then.

Scott gives a pleasant oceanographical metaphor about this sort of resistance:

Everyday resistance does not throw up the manifestos, demonstrations, or pitched battles that normally compel attention. It makes no headlines. But just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political and economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any movement that is particularly newsworthy. And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck (for example, a fiscal crisis) itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts that made it possible.

The paper goes into more detail about the Malaysian resistance, and shows how effectively the peasants essentially set their own tax rate rather than complying with the official one. When improvements in irrigation allowed the rice farmers to plant two crops instead of one during the course of a year, which officially subjected them to twice the tax, they instead “simply compensated by paying less than half of what they paid earlier on a single crop.” Collectively, they reduced a nominal 10% tax to an actual 1.5% one.

Scott then looks at the French tithe resisters in the light of this. He notes some overt, acute resistance (“In 1615, the residents of one commune refused to pay the wine tithe and threatened to throw the collector into the Rhône. In 1682, another village, led by its curé, stoned the monks and their tithe agent when they came to collect the grain. In 1736, peasants wearing disguises sacked the granary of the tithe collector, and no witnesses could be found to testify against them.”), but is more interested in the “everyday resistance,” finding that in France the techniques “were far more elaborate and varied.”

These techniques included:

• introducing novel crops or growing marginal ones that were not covered by existing tithe laws
• growing taxable crops alongside or interspersed with non-taxable ones and then claiming the whole field as exempt
• opening new, hidden plots of land to planting without declaring them
• planting tax-exempt “gardens,” “orchards,” or “meadows” that were functionally equivalent to taxable fields
• harvesting and hiding a portion of the crop before the tax collector arrived
• assembling sheaves in such a way as to conceal valuable grain in the non-taxable base
• taking advantage of the rounding-off process in counting the grain to make large portions of the harvest effectively exempt

Much of this is simply clever loophole-hunting, aided by a culture of tax disgust that celebrates and spreads it. Each technique alone was a petty nuisance to the tax-gatherers, but in the aggregate they took a huge bite out of their cut — one complained “of thirty sacks, it is plausible that they pay only one.”

This individual, canny, shoulder-shrugging, “who, me?” resistance was made possible by “a generalized, often unspoken complicity… the French sources frequently refer to ‘tacit consent,’ ‘unanimity,’ the refusal to give testimony, and conspiracies of silence.”

The story of the birth of Jesus, as given in the gospels, begins with his pregnant mother and her husband on the move to Bethlehem in order to enroll in the census that Caesar Augustus had launched as part of his plan “that all the world should be taxed.”

A government doesn’t launch a census just because it’s curious, but usually, as with Augustus, as the prelude to a tax. It’s the government’s way of “casing the joint” before the big heist.

And so some tax resistance campaigns have started by resisting a census. Today I’ll review some examples.

Poll Tax resistance in Thatcher’s Britain

Refusal to register was one of the ways people resisted Thatcher’s Poll Tax. And the government’s difficulties in tracking people as they moved from place to place, and from one council’s jurisdiction to another, made enforcement difficult.

Resisters also successfully refused to provide information about their employment that could be used to seize taxes from their paychecks. According to one account:

[T]he councils still had one insurmountable headache. They had to find out where people worked. This was a real nightmare because other than asking the people concerned, they had no real way of getting the information they needed. When a liability order was granted by the court, non-payers were sent a form which requested details of employment. Failure to fill it out carried a fine of £100 and £400 if the non-payer provided false information. But this didn’t act as a deterrent either, because, if people couldn’t pay the Poll Tax itself (and the court costs which were added), then it made little difference if the council added another £100. A survey carried out by the Audit Commission in late 1989 showed that, nationally, only 15% of people who received the form actually sent it back. Like electoral registration, it was widely ignored even though this was a criminal offence.

Household Tax resistance in Ireland today

The Household Tax resistance movement in Ireland is defined by refusal by households to register to pay the tax.

This is not a charge to fund your local community, it is a tax to fund private speculators, bondholders and the bailout. Our incomes and services are being decimated to pay this private debt. Now people have a chance to register their opposition by not registering for this tax. By not registering, we can make this a referendum on the bailouts for the rich and the cuts for us.

When the registration deadline hit at the end of last March, only about half of Irish households had registered. Ruth Coppinger of the Campaign Against Household and Water Taxes declared victory:

This is more than was achieved by Poll Tax non-payment which started off at 15% in the first year, 1989, and which only reached 45% boycott in the year of its abolition.

Episcopalians in Scotland

The official church of Scotland had a habit through the centuries of taxing everyone in Scotland for the support of that church, whether they were members or not. This tended to annoy those who belonged to other churches. And this annoyance became especially loud whenever the “official” church got swapped from one denomination to another.

When the Presbyterians replaced the Episcopalians in the official chair in 1688, one way the Episcopalians resisted was by refusing to pay the tax and refusing to participate in a church-run census. William Maitland, in his History of Edinburgh, fretted over difficulties in estimating the population at this period of time, noting:

[T]he greatest Defect is owing to the Episcopalian Inhabitants, who, being of a different Communion from the established Church, are not subject to the Controul and Examination of its Ministers; wherefore, many of them refuse to give Accounts either of the Names or Numbers of Persons in their Families.

Queensland water tax strike

In Queensland, Australia, in 1926, the government tried to sneak in a tax on farmers who used wells or water pumps to irrigate their lands. The farmers rebelled.

Since the “tax” took the form of a stiff fee accompanying the mandatory registration of such wells or water pumps, it was natural that the tax resistance included mass refusal to register. Local Producers’ Associations across Queensland gathered and voted to refuse registration.

A month after the tax went into effect, facing mass refusal, the government backed down and rescinded the tax… though without eliminating the requirement to register wells and water pumps. Some Associations continued to counsel their members to refuse to register even after the tax resistance victory. A Mr. Roome of the Woodmillar LPA put it this way:

A lot of farmers were under the impression that because of registration fee had been withdrawn, everything in the garden was lovely. But the regulations were still there, and farmers who were under that impression would receive a rude awakening. Only formal registration had to be made, but they would find that if they furnished the particulars asked for they would give the Government an opportunity to later on impose the charges. The danger was still there, whereas if they refused to register the onus was on the Government to get the particulars, and prove that the farmers put down wells or sunk dams, etc. Once they gave the information they were at the mercy of the Government. … The excuse by the Government was that they wanted to get a survey of the water facilities which was absolutely ridiculous. The whole thing was a farce, and an excuse to impose a tax. The only way was to refuse to register, which he hoped would be done by members of all branches, and also refuse to pay the tax.

A motion that the members of the Association refuse to register was passed.

Zakāt resistance in Malaysia

When the Malaysian government assumed control of the traditional Islamic religious tithe called the zakāt, made it mandatory, and fixed its rate based on the acreage and yields of farmers, this also meant that the government had to do a census of agricultural land and monitor the crop yields.

This led to widespread, varied, mostly quiet, but strikingly effective resistance. James C. Scott, who studied the resistance, writes of one technique:

Some cultivators, particularly small-holders and tenants, simply refuse to register their cultivated acreage with the tithe agent.

Resistance to a pre-tax census in Fiji

A poll tax on indentured workers from India was initiated in Fiji in 1924. The Indians had no political representation on the island, were banned from the schools, and could only emigrate on a single ship voyage offered once per year: they were essentially considered disposable migrant labor. The workers thought the tax, which amounted to the pay of 12 days labor, was a sort of bait-and-switch on the contracts that had brought them to Fiji, and vowed to resist. As one account put it:

A start will be made in January to register all those liable to pay the residential tax, and prison will be the fate of him who does not comply with the law. Leading Indians in every district declare that they will willingly go to gaol before they register their names, and a general passive resistance is highly possible, with all its attendant strikes and bitter feeling.

The British women’s suffrage movement

The women’s suffrage movement in the United Kingdom, more so than anywhere else, used tax resistance in its struggle. “No taxation without representation,” was the cry. Suffragists also resisted government attempts to get information from them, both because these attempts were part of the effort to tax them, and because the laws that governed such information-gathering were passed by a male-exclusive government.

In 1910, Winifred Patch wrote:

I have recently received a paper from the Inland Revenue Office headed “Duties on Land Values. Notice to Furnish Information,” asking for the names and addresses of any persons to whom I pay rent or for whom I may collect rents, a penalty not exceeding £50 being incurred if this information is willfully withheld. … As I am denied the rights of citizenship I absolutely decline to facilitate in any way the carrying out of the provisions of Mr. Lloyd George’s Finance Bill, and am returning my paper with this written across it. I am hoping, through the Women’s Tax Resistance League, of which I am a member, to obtain expert information which will enable me to make it impossible for the Government to exact the £50 penalty, and will leave them with no alternative but to imprison me in default. Will other women join me in making this protest? I feel that there must be many like myself who would gladly risk imprisonment for the cause, but who, for various reasons, find it very difficult, if not impossible, to take part in the more active protests which have hitherto brought women into conflict with the law. I cannot help hoping that we have here another vantage ground from which to attack a Government which refuses us justice.

Teresa Billington-Greig took up Patch’s suggestion and rallied the troops:

The famous forms on which the owners and lease-holders of the country have to prepare the necessary statistics for the levying of the new [land] tax have been issued now in practically all parts of England, and they will be issued in Scotland within a few days. Already these forms have been returned unfilled up, and with a curt comment as to the status of the women applied to, by some of our members in England. They will be so returned by many Suffragists across the border. Neither information nor money will be forthcoming in response to the Inland Revene Department’s demands. As far as possible this piece of Government business will be impeded first by the determined refusal of information, and, second, by the withholding of the money claimed in taxes.

Such refusal to yield to tyranny is always desirable. But at the present moment it carries an additional value in that it can be employed to improve the chances of the Conciliation Women’s Suffrage Bill. From now until the fate of the Bill is decided, every woman to whom any Government application for information or for taxes is made should not only refuse to comply because of the unrepresented condition of her sex, but should add a rider to the effect that she will gladly supply information and provide the money claimed if the Women’s Suffrage Bill at present before Parliament becomes law this Session.

Margarete Wynne Nevinson put it this way:

Here I have one of Mr. Lloyd George’s wonderful forms, with its numerous questions, to answer which intelligently I should require, apparently, the training of a lawyer and surveyor, and a fund of universal knowledge which I do not possess. I am asked to answer those questions, but am not considered fit to vote for a member of Parliament. This Form is addressed to me because I have a little freehold property, but it starts off with “Sir.” I am sending it back, pointing our that I must be addressed as “Madam,” and not “Sir,” and that as I have not vote, I do not see what this matter has to do with me. If you think of it, it is rather an insult to all women property holders to be addressed as “Sir,” and not by their proper title of courtesy. The State seems to take for granted that there can be no free women or women freeholders in the country, but that all the land must be owned by men.

The following year, Charlotte Despard announced that this strategy of non-cooperation would be extended to the census proper. One news account said:

The census would cost a great deal of money, said Mrs. Despard, and involve an enormous amount of labor. So far as they were concerned, this census should not be taken.

“We shall prove,” said Mrs. Despard, “whether there is a people, or whether there can be a people without the women. We shall call upon women householders and women lodgers all over the country to refuse absolutely all information when the census takers come round.”

Women, she went on, had been proud to belong to the nation, but they had been denied their citizenship. Was it not logical, therefore, that they should say, “Very well; citizens we are not, and we shall not register ourselves as citizens?” That was logical, as a protest should be, and it would be effective.

Speaking of the preparations for the census, Mrs. Despard asserted that the officials were trying to get cheap labor: little girls from the schools at six and seven shillings a week. Mrs. Despard added that the members were going to obstruct other Government business and make other protests, and they would stop the census boycott only when they had the promise of the Prime Minister that a Woman’s Suffrage Bill would be introduced this session.

If resisters can encourage more people to evade more taxes, even if they do so for non-idealistic reasons, this both takes resources away from the government and increases the number of targets the tax enforcers have to pursue, thereby taking some pressure off of the resisters.

Today I’ll cover how tax resistance movements can contribute to tax evasion in the culture at large. (At the same time I’ll give a sneak preview of some of the slides I’m preparing for my upcoming talk in Colombia — beware: I haven’t asked anyone to proofread my shoddy Spanish translations yet.)

Taxpayer compliance is a challenge for governments to create and maintain, and they spend a lot of effort trying to understand the mechanics of it and engage in a lot of propaganda and other forms of manipulation in order to bring it about.

I’m reminded of the Disney short The Spirit of [19]’43 which told theatergoers that it was Taxes that would Defeat the Axis… or the 1955 short film The Tsippori Affair produced by Israel’s propaganda department (with American help) that showed shocked audiences what would happen if nobody paid their taxes (for instance, the schools would all shut down, and school-aged children would lounge about playing cards, drinking wine, and smoking cigarettes).

I’ve noted before one of the ways the IRS supports this pillar. Every year they conduct something they call the “Taxpayer Attitude Survey” in which they ask a set of questions to 1,000 randomly-phoned American households. The survey contains carefully-loaded questions like these (emphasis mine):

• How much, if any, do you think is an acceptable amount to cheat on your income taxes?
• [Do you agree that] it is every American’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes?
• [Do you agree that] everyone who cheats on their taxes should be held accountable?

Predictably, people overwhelmingly report that cheating is bad and fair shares are good. The IRS then puts out a press release about how Americans overwhelmingly believe everybody should pay what the government tells them to. Typically the news media go along with it, composing stories that follow the press release script.

The government is always eager to draw your attention whenever it spends your money on something nice. There’s hardly a bridge, library, overpass, park, or other partially-public-funded thing in my town that doesn’t come with a plaque attached, listing the names of the city councillors and mayor who signed off on it — though that’s about all they had to do to get such credit.

This is why in the weeks before Tax Day, the IRS breathlessly announces indictments against famous people and big-time tax evaders. Don’t think of stepping out of line, they’re saying, because you’re sure to get caught. Anecdotes speak stronger than statistics here.

It takes a lot less work for the government to keep taxpayer compliance from slipping from 90% to 80% than it does for the government to raise taxpayer compliance from 80% to 90%.

If taxpayer compliance is high, taxpayers will convince themselves of the attitudes in the pillars. Why am I allowing myself to be fleeced like this? Well, I must have good reasons: it’s because I’m a good citizen, and I want to contribute to useful things, and besides if I don’t I’ll get caught. Everybody knows these things.

If taxpayer compliance is low, taxpayers have to be convinced — they ask instead: Why am I allowing myself to be fleeced like this (when so many other people aren’t)? Am I getting played?

It is easy to point out how many wealthy people and fat corporations get away with paying little or no taxes. I won’t list examples here as I’m sure you’ve heard plenty, but here’s one way a group of war tax resisters made this a little more in-your-face:

At noon on April 16^th, a merry band of activists from the local [Bangor, Maine] Peace & Justice Center swapped their cozy jeans & t-shirts for swanky gowns & tuxedos, hopped in a verrry conspicuous white stretch-limo, and motored their way to the P.O./Federal Bldg., to perform a bit of satire-filled street theater.

This division of the “Rich People’s Liberation Front” did a skit to expose the huuuge tax breaks which America’s corporations & our wealthiest citizens receive; then thanked intrigued passersby with Dum-Dum lollipops. (“Suckers for the suckers!”)

This is related to what tax geeks call the “salience” of taxation — that is, how aware you are of the hand that is picking your pocket. If you had to write a check to Washington every couple of weeks, your income tax would be very salient. If the money is automatically withheld from your paycheck before you get your hands on it, it’s less salient. If it’s invisibly included in the price of the goods you buy, it’s less salient still. Governments are eager to find ways to tax people in ways that make them less aware that they’re being taxed, because the less you’re aware of it the less you’ll resist.

There are many other similar examples, both from the war tax resistance movement and from other movements:

• The “Death and Taxes” poster is a great infographic about U.S. government spending priorities.
• The Tax Foundation raises a ballyhoo every year about what it calls “Tax Freedom Day” — “the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay off its total tax bill for the year” and which lately has been arriving about the same time as federal income tax returns are due, which increases the publicity impact.
• The Mennonite Central Committee turned the penny poll idea into an on-line game; another site put together a $3 trillion dollar shopping spree to give people an idea of what kind of cool things they could be investing in if the government weren’t spending all that money on war.
• Libertarian Party activists often will hand out fake million dollar bills, each one printed with an estimate of how quickly the government spends that much money. Another tack is to hand out “Certificates of Debt” that show how much government debt each American taxpayer is on the hook for.
• One war tax resistance group held a “Tax Day” protest in which they facetiously labeled the mailboxes down at the post office with the names of military contractors like Lockheed-Martin, Halliburton, and Bechtel, to point out where the money was really going to end up.
• “April 15^th is ‘Support the Pentagon’ Day” read ads in the New York Times shortly before Tax Day, 1970. Under this headline, a cartoon showed a hapless taxpayer with a bit in his mouth, with a load of generals, admirals, and armaments on his back.

On a few occasions, tax resisters have turned themselves in to law enforcement as a way of showing how little they are afraid of prosecution. For instance, in Australia’s Northern Territory in 1921, “the residents drew up a monster petition, which almost everybody signed, and insisted on the government standing up to its own laws by taking action against them. They also defied the government to put them into jail.” And in 2000, three war tax resisters went to the IRS headquarters in Washington to turn themselves in. “If the resisters are not arrested and prosecuted,” Mary Loehr of NWTRCC said (and they weren’t, and still haven’t been), “it will expose the myth that people go to jail for not paying their taxes.”

As professor James C. Scott said of his studies of resistance to government-mandated tithes in Malaysia, once tax resistance “has become a customary practice it generates its own expectations about what is permissible [and] raises the political and administrative costs for any regime that subsequently decides it will enforce the rules in earnest. For everyday resisters there is safety in numbers and successful resistance builds its own momentum.”

The examples I have given here are largely indirect ways of promoting a cultural atmosphere in which tax evasion seems like more of a good idea. But there are also more direct ways in which people can assist in the tax evasion of others. I’ve already mentioned the tactic of paying in cash so that your transactions leave less of a paper trail for the government to follow. Here are a couple of others:

• You can spread rumors that a tax has been abolished. This worked with great success at the time of the French Revolution, when such rumors became self-fulfilling prophecies. This was also common in Czarist Russia, when people extrapolated from the propaganda-fuelled image of a benevolent Czar to conclude that such a Czar must have abolished such awful taxes. And the present day United States has long had a cottage industry of people who are convinced (and convincing) that the real United States Constitution would never permit something as awful as the federal income tax.
• You can manufacture the paraphernalia of tax evasion. For example, in Mexico City, you can visit a taco stand and walk away not only with lunch, but — for a small price — with fake receipts from a variety of restaurants, hotels, and stores, that you can then use to declare business expenses on your tax returns.