Besides direct action, revolutionaries can change what we do with our money,
especially in the realms of taxes, investments, and local economic activities.
Such changes can disrupt, undermine, and create space for further
revolutionary actions. We in the 99 percent persist as the main funders of the
capitalist state, which passes our money on to corporations that exploit
workers, destroy nature, raise the earth’s temperature, and keep us in
permanent war and perpetual inequality. We need to change our habits of giving
up our money, and if enough of us do so, the capitalist state no longer will
be able to prop up the capitalist economy for the benefit of the ultra-rich.
Tax resistance can take several forms. For more than a century, pacifists in
the United States have resisted taxes that pay for war, some eventually going
to prison but the vast majority, like me, suffering no substantial harm as a
result. As a card-carrying conscientious objector, I openly resisted half of
my income taxes for more than a decade during and after the Vietnam War. If
one honestly declares one’s income, there is nothing illegal about claiming a
war deduction of 50 percent, which is the approximate percentage of the
federal budget that pays for past, present, and future wars. Later, with a
young daughter, I was starting to feel inconvenienced and a little bored by
appeal procedures inside and outside the Internal Revenue Service because of
open tax resistance. So I reluctantly made the same decision that Trump and
his ilk make, to avoid taxes through loopholes rather than resistance of
conscience.
The problem with either explicit or implicit tax resistance is that we number
in the thousands rather than millions. “Death and taxes,” the two
inevitabilities, as we are taught, seem hard to resist, but corporations and
rich individuals understand very well that at least taxes actually are not
inevitable. In Latin America, tax resistance usually proceeds according to the
Trump model for corporations and the rich, but ordinary people can succeed in
massive tax resistance through non-reporting or under-reporting of income.
During the dictatorships in the Southern Cone, the autocratic governments had
trouble raising sufficient tax revenues, despite extensive attempts through
bureaucratic and police surveillance, and tax resistance became one of many
tactics to bring down those regimes. Ironically, a major motivation in Cuba
for allowing expansion of private small businesses involves a perception that
private-sector business activities were expanding anyway, along with rampant
tax evasion; if permitted officially, small businesses could generate
substantial taxes for social programs. Even in Cuba, tax resistance has
interacted with political organizing in Poder Popular and community-based
organizations to enhance popular participation. As a revolutionary strategy in
the United States, tax resistance must flourish, so millions of us stop
functioning as the main financiers for the capitalist state.
