Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
India →
Gandhi’s campaigns →
homespun cloth (khādī) / swadeshi
It’s possible that if enough affluent Americans stopped participating in the economy, the politicians would sit up and notice.
It probably would not have worked much if at all in a Gandhian context; the British Raj’s sleep would have stayed quite blissfully untroubled if a few million poor Bengalis had decided to quit, and hence to starve.
Actually a big hunk of Gandhi’s program was in fact “economic secession” of this sort.
The salt march was all about encouraging people to (illegally) replace their taxed consumption of imported salt with untaxed domestic salt.
Similar was the Gandhian insistence that everyone in the independence movement should wear (and should personally take time every day to help create) homespun cloth rather than wear imported fabric (imported from Britain and taxed).
The boycotts and pickets of liquor stores and opium dens were only partially aimed at the intoxicating effects of the drugs, but were also directed at the British monopoly on alcohol and opium.
The raj was worried enough that the viceroy sent troops out who beat people senseless just for harvesting salt.
I’ve said elsewhere why I’m not a Gandhian pacifist, but I was very much influenced by his insistence that the way to throw off the chains of the tyrant is by withdrawing the everyday economic support it thrives on.
I gave my opinion that violent struggle for political change in the United States was unwise and likely to be counterproductive.
But I also expressed frustration at the ingrained ineffectiveness of today’s nonviolent protests, and tried to imagine what an effective nonviolent resistance might look like.
I’m not a doctrinaire pacifist the way Gandhi was.
I can imagine causes I would kill for as well as those I would die for.
And yet it seems to me that we’re more likely to reach the goal worth aiming for — and I’m speaking here practically and not just idealistically — through nonviolent means.
I recommended yesterday that “[p]eople who are committed to (or who prefer) nonviolence and who regret the rise of the ‘black bloc’ and other violent protesters should ask how Gandhi prevented the Indian National Congress from choosing the tactics of those in India who were advocating armed insurrection.”
“The answer,” I suggested, was that Gandhi “was more hard-core than they were, and he demonstrated results.”
But I decided to take my own advice and take a closer look, since I’m not a scholar of the Indian independence movement.
I picked up some facts of interest, both about the practical appeal of Gandhi’s program to an Indian National Congress with lofty and concrete goals, and about the importance of, yes, tax resistance in that program.
If we step into the Wayback Machine, we’ll see an India that was fighting for its independence against a hypocritically blind and openly imperalist British empire.
Jawaharlal Nehru remembered:
I have always wondered at and admired the astonishing knack of the British people for making their moral standards correspond with their material interests and for seeing virtue in everything that advances their imperial designs.
[SNC 160]
The violent struggle for independence in India, which Nehru initially supported, predates Gandhi’s nonviolent satyagraha techniques.
In fact Gandhi’s first use of these new tactics in India were in response to the British administration’s draconian anti-terrorist laws which had in turn been designed to fend off the violent independence movement (and which sound awfully familiar):
In the Rowlatt Bills were promulgated.
Their intent was to control a few wartime manifestations of terrorism and to prevent their recurrence during the postwar period… They incensed Indians and provided a focal point for resistance.
The bills made trial without jury permissible for political offenses and extended to the provincial authorities the right to intern suspected terrorists without trial.
On the day they were to become law, Gandhi, fresh from a victorious campaign in Champaran… proposed a nationwide hartal.
[SNC 163]
The hartal was something akin to a general strike.
The “victorious campaign in Champaran” was Gandhi’s first Indian satyagraha campaign, conducted when he was a newcomer on the political scene without a lot of “cred.”
He had been acting independently of existing resistance organizations as the founder of his own group called the “Satyagraha Sabha” because, in his words, “all hope of any of the existing institutions adopting a novel weapon like Satyagraha seemed to me to be in vain” [GAA 456]
The Raj responded to Gandhi’s new national campaign and the outrage over the Rowlatt Bills with violent reprisals, which included perpetrating the vicious Amritsar massacre and imprisoning Gandhi for .
Gandhi’s first national campaign of non-cooperation went nowhere.
Yet the Indian National Congress decided against a violent revolutionary movement and chose Gandhi as its commander-in-chief for the coming independence struggle.
One of Gandhi’s first acts in this capacity was to lead “what amounted to both a training exercise and a preliminary skirmish” [SNC 166] in Bardoli:
The farmers and peasants of Bardoli were being asked to pay a 22 percent land tax increase after a particularly bad agricultural year.
[Vallabhbhai] Patel led them in withholding all taxes until the increase was rescinded.
Solidarity was enforced in part through a social boycott of nonresisters.
The movement lasted , and ended with the resisters paying the tax into a government escrow account, pending an investigation of the fairness of the tax.
The investigation found that the tax was not justified, and it was withdrawn.
The Bardoli experiment demonstrated the power of disciplined collective action.
Nonpayment of taxes was an extremely aggressive act and subject to harsh penalties.
[SNC 166–7]
Gandhi and the Indian National Congress took heart at this victory.
Gandhi wrote about the British: “You have great military resources.
Your naval power is matchless.
If we wanted to fight with you on your own ground, we should be unable to do so, but… we cease to play the part of the ruled.
You may, if you like, cut us to pieces.
You may shatter us at the cannon’s mouth.
If you act contrary to our will, we shall not help you; and without our help, we know that you cannot move one step forward.”
[PNVA 84]
The key, according to Gandhi, was in withdrawal of cooperation.
“We recognize… that the most effective way of gaining our freedom is not through violence.
We will therefore prepare ourselves by withdrawing, so far as we can, all voluntary association from the British Government, and will prepare for civil disobedience, including nonpayment of taxes.
We are convinced that if we can but withdraw our voluntary help and stop payment of taxes without doing violence, even under provocation, the end of inhuman rule is assured.”
[PNVA 84]
The goals of the Indian National Congress were lofty.
“This was the first campaign in which immediate and unconditional independence for India emerged as the explicit objective and it mobilized more Indians for direct action in the service of that objective than any other single campaign” [SNC 157].
And the rhetoric was correspondingly confrontational.
Gandhi wrote: “sedition has become the creed of the Congress… Noncooperation, though a religious and strictly moral movement, deliberately aims at the overthrow of the Government, and is therefore legally seditious in terms of the Indian Penal Code” [PNVA 85].
Gandhi felt that “civil disobedience, once begun this time, cannot be stopped and must not be stopped as long as there is a single resister left free or alive.”
This was not a pastime for hobbyists or cowards.
Tens of thousands were arrested.
Hundreds killed.
Protesters had to be willing to be beaten with steel-tipped canes without even raising a hand to ward off the blows.
The first concentrated target of these protests was the Salt Act:
The existence of a government monopoly on salt, resulting from the Salt Act, perfectly exemplified the perceived evils of colonial rule.
Paying the tax on salt (and thereby providing much of the revenue to run the colonial regime) was more a mild irritant than a desperate hardship for most.
But why pay the bill for their own subjugation?
[SNC 172]
Gandhi also tried to extend this campaign to a boycott of foreign liquor and fabric.
Wearing homespun clothing (and thereby damaging the economy of occupation while at the same time encouraging self-reliance) became a symbol of resistance.
The Salt March, the Dharasana salt factory confrontation (one of the climactic scenes you may remember from Gandhi the movie), and “also the entire Salt Satyagraha campaign, were, technically, utter failures” when seen from the point-of-view of the lofty goals — that is, complete independence.
“Yet now we know that this bloody climax made India’s freedom inevitable, because it showed what the Satyagraha volunteers were made of, and what the oppressive system of government that the British had imposed on India was made of” [ITNOW 113]
Perhaps this is an example of the tendency of losers to use clever fantasy redefinitions to turn their losses into victories, a tendency I complained about on The Picket Line .
But it’s true that India did gain its independence, though , and it’s hard to look at the historical record and not conclude that Gandhi’s campaigns made Indian independence inevitable.
And it’s also true that Indians like Jawaharlal Nehru, who was not initially a proponent of nonviolent resistance, came to have respect for the effectiveness of the technique:
We had accepted that method, the Congress had made that method its own, because of a belief in its effectiveness.
Gandhiji had placed it before the country not only as the right method but as the most effective one for our purpose… In spite of its negative name it was a dynamic method, the very opposite of a meek submission to a tyrant’s will.
It was not a coward’s refuge from action, but a brave man’s defiance of evil and national subjection.
[PVNA 87]
Would that we could say the same for the nonviolent resistance movement in the United States today.
A few weeks ago a friend of mine loaned me his home-brewing kit and showed me how to use it.
We cooked up my first batch of Homespun Brew — a pale ale that, remarkably enough, tastes just like beer.
The federal excise tax on beer comes to about a nickle per bottle (that doesn’t count state excise taxes, sales taxes and state-mandated bottle deposit fees).
If you were to drink a six pack every day, you’d contribute a little more than a hundred dollars to the feds over the course of the year.
So this is small change compared to the income tax or the payroll tax.
Still, I like the symbolism of home brewing tax-free beer.
It reminds me a bit of the American colonists’ switch from tea to coffee in order to foil the British tax on tea, or of Gandhi’s campaign to encourage people to spin their own cloth and harvest their own salt rather than pay the British monopoly.
Gandhi’s campaign had a value that went beyond its bottom-line pounds-and-pence figure.
Spending the time spinning cloth was a way of consciously participating on a daily basis in the resistance — wearing the homespun cloth was a way of broadcasting your commitment to those around you.
And besides, brewing beer is fun and when you’re done you’ve got beer!
More grab-bag material:
You can now visualize the U.S. war fatality statistics in Iraq in two new ways:
Obleek’s Flash animation moves forward in time at a pace of ten days per second , and peppers a map of Iraq with dots, where each one “indicates the geographic location that a coalition military fatality occurred.”
A Palm Beach Post map turns this around, and shows where in the United States each of the American fatalities from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan came from (at least those who hailed from the contiguous 48 states).
revival of the Twilight Zone series featured an episode entitled “Button, button”, based on a short story by Richard Matheson.
In the story, a gaunt, black-clad gentleman arrives uninvited at the cramped apartment of a financially destitute couple and presents them with a tempting though somewhat ominous offer.
He gives them a simple wooden box with a clear plastic lid overtop a large red button — the type of nondescript contraption teens might build in a high school Woodshop class — and explains their options:
1) Don’t push the button.
Nothing happens; the man will come back tomorrow to claim the box.
2) Push the button and get $200,000 — tax free — and someone will die.
“Who?” the wife asks.
“Someone you don’t know,” the man replies.
He then leaves them to think about it.
The husband decides it’s unconscionable, but the wife wants to go for it.
After all, what is the death of someone they don’t know?
People die all the time, don’t they?
Maybe a bad person will be the one to die.
“And maybe it’ll be someone’s newborn baby,” the husband counters.
In the end of the story, after much deliberation, the wife decides that they’re owed this and pushes the button.
Nothing happens immediately.
Then, later in the day, the gaunt, black-clad gentleman returns with a briefcase full of cash.
He gives the couple their money and takes his box back.
The wife asks what will happen now and the man replies:
“The button box will be reset and the same offer will be made to someone else…
someone who doesn’t know you.”
Those of you who have been intrigued by my mentions of freeganism and its potential for a lifestyle of radical frugality may be interested in the Dumpster World discussion board, where dumpster divers from all over the place share their wisdom.
It’s not all “do you think this meat is still good?” — there is a lot of discussion of restoring and repairing discarded furniture and appliances and other such topics as well.
How’s our great national flashback coming along?
Read the transcript of the President assuring the world “We will not be defeated.
We will not grow tired. We will not withdraw.”
David Morris at Alternet reviews some of the history behind (Economic) Independence Day.
Apparently Gandhi wasn’t the first one to try swadeshi in a campaign to break free from the British Empire:
Before we declared our political independence we declared our economic independence.
All things English were placed on the blacklist.
Frugality came into fashion.
Out of the First Continental Congress in New York came the embryonic nation’s first Chamber of Commerce.
Given the current policies of the Chamber, it might be useful this July 4th to recall its first campaign slogan, “Save your money and you can save your country.”
Bostonian Sam Adams, the fiery leader of the movement, knew that frugality was not enough.
To become truly independent, America had to produce at home what was previously imported from England.
Members of Boston’s Whig Party demonstrated their patriotism by nursing tea leaves and mulberry trees in their gardens.
New England farmers were exhorted to convert their oak plains into sheep pastures and produce enough wool to clothe every American.
Colonists were urged to abstain from eating lamb or mutton in order to encourage American woolen manufactures.
In less than a year the boycott had so disrupted Transatlantic trade that thousands of British workers lost their jobs.
And, going back a bit more into American history, Murray Rothbard makes a very interesting investigation of Pennsylvania’s Anarchist Experiment — when the Pennsylvania colony was “in a de facto condition of individual anarchism, and seemed none the worse for the experience.”
Tax resistance campaigns can increase their visibility by adopting particular
uniforms, badges, ribbons, or other emblems to identify resisters and those
working in concert with the campaign. Today I will summarize some examples of
this.
Gandhi’s satyagraha in India
An important part of the Indian independence struggle led by Mahatma Gandhi
was the wearing of khādī (homespun cloth). This had three
purposes:
To encourage the development of Indian self-reliance and industry as the
economic foundation of Indian independence.
To hurt the British government by boycotting and thereby reducing the
profits from exports of British fabric to India.
To serve as an emblem to identify and express the commitment of Indian
patriots.
Gandhi wrote:
[T]he most effective and visible cooperation which all [Indian National]
Congressmen and the mute millions can show is by not interfering with the
course civil disobedience may take and by themselves spinning and using
khādī to the exclusion of all other cloth. If it is allowed
that there is a meaning in people wearing primroses on
Primrose Day, surely
there is much more in a people using a particular kind of cloth and giving a
particular type of labour to the cause they hold dear. From their compliance
with the khādī test I shall infer that they have shed
untouchability, and that they have nothing but brotherly feeling towards all
without distinction of race, colour, or creed. Those who will do this are as
much Satyagrahis as those who will be singled out for
civil disobedience.
Gandhi wearing a “Gandhi cap”
Gandhi himself put in many hours at the spinning wheel, and demanded this of
his followers as well.
“Gandhi caps” made from
khādī became almost a uniform of the resistance. One news
dispatch from around the time of the Dharasana salt raid noted:
The correspondent said the growth of the Gandhi movement was shown by the
increased number of persons wearing the Gandhi caps. In the cities, he said,
a majority of the people wear them; they also are beginning to be worn in
villages in Punjab while even in aristocratic Simla one person in six of the
population in the bazaars have donned caps, which is the symbol of the
nationalist campaign.
Homespun cloth in the American revolution
But Gandhi’s campaign wasn’t the first blow against the British Empire that
was struck in part by homespun cloth and conspicuous consumption of
locally-manufactured goods. This was also an important part of the American
Revolution.
Here is an example reported in a
edition of the Massachusetts Gazette:
On Wednesday evening the honorable speaker and gentlemen of the House of
Burgesses gave a ball at the capitol… and it is with the greatest pleasure we
inform our readers… [of] the patriotic spirit… [that] was most agreeably
manifested in the dress of the ladies on that occasion, who, to the number of
near one hundred, appeared in homespun gowns; a lively and striking instance
of their acquiescence and concurrence in whatever may be the true and
essential interest of their country.
“Spinning bees” at which patriotic Americans worked together to card, spin,
weave, and sew, so as to avoid having to import clothing from England, were
ways that everybody could demonstrate their revolutionary spirit and
participate in the resistance. Resisters also made a point of eschewing
imported tea in favor of locally-produced substitutes (such as dried raspberry
leaves).
One patriotic poem of the time advised “young ladies”:
Wear none but your own country linen;
Of economy boast, let your pride be the most
To show clothes of your own make and spinning.
What if homespun they say is not quite so gay
As brocades, yet be not in a passion,
For when once it is known this is much worn in town,
One and all will cry out— ’Tis the fashion!
And, as one, all agree, that you’ll not married be
To such as will wear London factory,
But at first sight refuse, tell ’em such you will choose
As encourage our own manufactory.
No more ribbons wear, nor in rich silks appear;
Love your country much better than fine things;
Begin without passion, ’twill soon be the fashion
To grace your smooth locks with a twine string.
Massachusetts patriots vowed in :
…that we will not, at funerals, use any gloves except those made here, or
purchase any article of mourning on such occasion, but what shall be
absolutely necessary; and we consent to abandon the use, so far as may be,
not only of all the articles mentioned in the Boston resolves, but of all
foreign teas, which are clearly superfluous, our own fields abounding in
herbs more healthful, and which we doubt not, may, by use, be found agreeable…
Rebecca Riots
The Rebecca Riots in Wales in
were notorious for the distinctive garb donned by the
resistance groups who would gather to tear down tollgates.
The leader of the party was usually a man dressed up in women’s clothing and
a large bonnet, sometimes wearing a long horse-hair wig or carrying a parasol,
who was given the name “Rebecca.” Rebecca’s followers also were men wearing
women’s clothes, or at least white blouses over their clothes, and sometimes
bonnets or other high-crowned hats, occasionally with fern fronds, feathers,
or other decorations on them. They would paint their faces black or yellow,
and sometimes drape their horses in white sheets.
In this case, the reasoning behind the costuming was not so much to express
public pride than for other purposes. For instance:
To disguise the participants so that the government would be less able to
take reprisals against them.
To resonate with ancient folk forms of grassroots vigilantism and protest
that had a similar character (cross-dressing, face painting, a carnival
atmosphere).
To intimidate toll gate keepers with their strangeness and reputation.
To create a figurehead for the movement that could be adopted and then
set aside by multiple people, so as to make the movement’s leadership
harder to target for reprisals.
To make the resistance more festive and carnivalesque and thereby
encourage participation.
To make it easier to identify fellow-resisters in the confusion of
late-night raids on dark country roads.
Badges awarded by the Women’s Tax Resistance League
The badge representing Holloway Prison that was awarded to women’s suffrage
activists who had been imprisoned.
Women’s suffrage activists in the United Kingdom awarded badges to resisters
who had been imprisoned for their resistance. Here is a description of one
such badge given to Kate Harvey:
The badge is cast in the form of a shield on which is depicted the entrance
to Holloway Prison. On the reverse is a card inscribed in a faint hand:
“Given to Mrs K Harvey By Women’s Suffrage After She Had Been In Prison For
Tax Resistance.”
These badges were the equivalent of medals for meritorious service. An
American woman who visited her counterparts across the waters observed:
It was a queer sensation in those days to look upon sweet and ladylike young
women… and to know that they had actually been prisoners. It was not long
before they were looked upon as something sacred, as those who had made
special sacrifices for the cause, and they wore badges to show that they had
been prisoners and in every place were given the post of honor until their
numbers mounted up to the hundreds.
Relics of the Glastonbury cows
Abby & Julia Smith refused to pay taxes to a local government that denied
women the vote and that took advantage of this by excessively taxing women’s
property in order to ease the tax burden on male voters and to redistribute
the money to male patronage recipients. In response, the government
periodically seized and auctioned off the Smith sisters’ cows (“Votey” and
“Taxey”).
Emblems made from hairs of the cows’ tails, woven into the shape of flowers,
and tied with ribbons emblazoned with the slogan “Taxation Without
Representation,” became popular adornments for supporters of the Smiths’ tax
resistance.
“I refuse to fund this war” stickers
In , an American anti-war group held a
“Stop Funding the War in Iraq” rally near the offices of a Congressional
leader.
A war tax resistance group was there to hand out stickers for people to wear
that read “I refuse to fund this war!” I was there and noted:
I figured a few people would take them and wear them without thinking much
about it, a few people would refuse to take them without thinking much about
it, and the remainder would have to think about whether they should start
refusing if they hadn’t already.
As it turned out, just about everyone we offered the stickers to was eager to
wear one, though it’s hard to tell which of these will put their money where
their mouths are. Hopefully a few, anyway, had that light bulb go on, and
then looked around and wondered “have all these other people wearing these
stickers started resisting their taxes?”
French cockades and militia uniforms in the Fries Rebellion
The Fries Rebellion in the United States took place about a decade after the
enacting of the United States Constitution, and shortly after the successful
French Revolution.
The United States government was under the presidency of John Adams, who
represented the more authoritarian, aristocratic, pro-English faction; the
faction out of power was more populist, democratic, and pro-French.
Tax resisters who participated in the Fries Rebellion sometimes signaled
their loyalty (and frightened the Adams government) by wearing French
tricolor cockades in their hats to demonstrate their affinity with the
democratic revolutionaries across the pond, and/or by wearing their old
American revolutionary militia uniforms to show their belief that their
current rebellion was more in harmony with the spirit of the American
Revolution than were the policies of the federal government.
Masks at the Carnival of Viareggio
The Carnival of Viareggio is today a parade and bacchanal, but it began with
a tax protest in which “a number of local citizens, as a sign of protest…
decided to put on masks in order to show their refusal of high taxes they were
forced to pay.”
Australian miners wear a red ribbon
Australian miners, who in were resisting
a license tax, held a “monster meeting” at which they passed a number of
resolutions, including these:
[A]s it is necessary that the diggers should know their friends, every miner
agrees to wear as a pledge of good faith, and in support of the cause, a
piece of red ribbon on his hat, not to be removed until the license tax is
abolished.
That this meeting… desire to publicly express their esteem for the memory of
the brave men who have fallen in battle [during “the late out-break”], and
that to shew their respect every digger and their friends do wear tomorrow
(Sunday) a band of black crape on his hat…
Taking pride in resistance
Many of these are examples of resisters showing pride in their
resistance. This can be a way of short-circuiting a traditional government
gambit used against tax evaders: to publish their names as a way of calling
them out as bankrupts or deadbeats. If the government tries to shame tax
resisters as irresponsible tax evaders, but the resisters have already
willingly made their resistance public, this government tactic loses its
force.
When local council governments in the United Kingdom tried to use this tactic
against Poll Tax resisters in the Thatcher years, the newspapers who published
the lists of “shame” found themselves on the receiving end of letters to the
editor from resisters who were outraged that they had not made the
list — insisting that their names be included too!
Here are some similar examples of people taking pride in their resistance or
in things incident to resistance:
When the Women’s Freedom League (a British suffrage group which refused to
pay taxes on the salaries of its employees), was threatened with a legal
writ by the government, it decided to auction the writ as a
fundraiser.
Greek tax resisters in Penteli (near Athens), who have been refusing to
pay the new taxes attached to their utility bills during the recent “won’t
pay” movement, hung their urgent “past due” notices from a Christmas tree
in the town square as ornaments.
When somebody asked Quaker Nathaniel Morgan whether he and his father had
“got anything” in the course of their war tax resistance (by which he
meant, did his Quaker meeting reimburse them for their losses when their
goods were distrained and sold), Morgan replied: “Yes, peace of mind,
which was worth all.”
I mentioned boycotts of government-produced or -taxed goods and services as a variety of tax resistance or a tactic that has accompanied tax resistance campaigns.
Today I’m going to cover a related tactic: the manufacture and sale of untaxed alternatives to taxed goods.
This tactic was put to good use in the American Revolution.
Boycotts of British products like tea, paint, cloth, were supplemented by expansion of local industry to make alternative products:
Members of Boston’s Whig Party demonstrated their patriotism by nursing tea leaves and mulberry trees in their gardens.
New England farmers were exhorted to convert their oak plains into sheep pastures and produce enough wool to clothe every American.
Colonists were urged to abstain from eating lamb or mutton in order to encourage American woolen manufactures.
In less than a year the boycott had so disrupted Transatlantic trade that thousands of British workers lost their jobs.
Gatherings at which dozens of people would card and spin yarn, weave fabric, or sew clothing, were simultaneously acts of resistance and patriotic rallies.
Towns competed with each other over how many yards of cloth they could produce, with results breathlessly reported in the newspapers.
At society balls, a woman who turned up in anything but a homespun cloth dress would be shunned.
…at the first commencement exercises of Rhode Island College (later Brown University), the president proud-spiritedly wore wholly homespun clothing.
At Harvard, the faculty and students had all taken to homespun in support of their women spinners, of whom the Boston Chronicle had bragged “[T]hey exhibited a fine example of industry, by spinning from sunrise until dark, and displayed a spirit for saving their sinking country, rarely to be found among persons of more age and experience.”
American tea drinkers switched to “balsamic hyperion” — dried raspberry leaves — which could be produced domestically.
Homespun cloth, or khādī, was a signature part of the Indian independence movement (which also, famously, promoted the domestic production of salt to break Britain’s taxed monopoly).
Gandhi insisted that everyone in the resistance movement should participate in producing, and of course should exclusively wear, domestic cloth.
I’ve tried to promote home-brewing beer and cider as a way of avoiding the federal excise tax on those products.
Home distilling is another option, though it’s not legal in the United States.
When Britain increased the excise tax on distilled spirits in Ireland in , “the only effect was to increase illicit distillation.
The decrease in the duty was £7,361 4s. The number of persons in confinement for breach of the revenue laws had increased from 84 to 368.” A few people have started growing their own tobacco as a way of combating the increasingly prohibitive tobacco excise taxes.
Audrey Silk grew and cured enough tobacco at her Brooklyn home in to roll nine cartons worth of cigarettes, which would have cost more than $1,000 at taxed rates at the time.
The “Addiopizzo” movement in Italy founded a supermarket, the shelves of which were stocked exclusively with goods from producers who had vowed not to pay any more protection money to the mafia.
They also maintain a buycott list of such companies to help consumers make pizzo-free shopping choices.
When Greece tacked new taxes onto electric bills as a way of combating tax evasion, the sales of gas-powered electric generators shot up.
Some tax resistance campaigns have had their own anthems or fight songs.
Mahadev Desai, in The Story of Bardoli, mentions such songs on a few occasions:
I paid a visit along with Sjt. Vallabhbhai to one of these [Raniparaj] villages.
… The young women, who had taken the Khadi pledge three years ago in the presence of Gandhiji and shed their trinkets and heavy brass ornaments, were all there in spotlessly white Khadi, brimming over with joy and lustily singing Satyagraha songs.
The mention of the Satyagraha songs reminds me of one or two things that happened during the month.
… Phulchandbhai had already some songs ready, and the atmosphere in the taluka gave him the inspiration for many more.
These friends were posted at Valod, and thanks to their bhajans they were in great demand everywhere.
The plain and homely songs spread the message of Satyagraha in a most effective manner, and men, women, and children had them on their lips.
One cannot speak too highly of the part played in the movement by Phulchandbhai and his songs.
I shall describe one of the scenes.
We visited Nani Phalod, a small village, at about 9 p.m. There was a huge procession of men and women, the former singing Satyagraha songs, and the latter singing a song from an old saint of which the refrain was: “All our sorrows have ended, now that the Master has come.”
There were huge meetings everywhere, attended by hundreds of women, laying heaps of [homespun] yarn before Sjt. Vallabhbhai, as in , and lustily singing bhajans.
The invincible spirit of the people evidenced everywhere was bound to exasperate the officials even more.
The women of Varad… had their own songs, some of them being old songs of the saints and some composed by themselves to suit the fight in which they were engaged, and tacked on to the originals.
One of these songs sung soulfully by them ran:
With full knowledge take up your arms even like a Gnani (seer).
Let Purity and Contentment be your armour and Courage your shield.
The valiant shall rush to the forefront, the laggards will be beaten and will take to their heels.
With full knowledge, therefore, take up the fight like the Gnani.
The path of fight is not strewn with roses.
It is sharp as the edge of the sword, for it is the fight for Truth.
Let us therefore be wide awake like the Gnani.
With full knowledge etc.
The tyrant has run amok and crushed the ryot under his heels.
We slumbered so long, we have now found our Guru and are blessed with knowledge.
With full knowledge etc.
He has taught us to pit righteousness and truth against oppression and injustice.
God is sure to run to the rescue of right and vanquish the wrong.
With full knowledge etc.
Vallabhbhai our leader assures us that ultimately victory is ours.
Let us therefore keep our pledge.
With full knowledge etc.
The boycotts and tax strikes of the American Revolution also had their songs.
When patriots gathered to spin home-spun yarn, the work would be accompanied by “many stirring tunes, anthems, and liberty songs,” such as the following:
Young ladies in town, and those that live round, Let a friend at this season advise you; Since money’s so scarce, and times growing worse, Strange things may soon hap and surprise you.
First, then, throw aside your topknots of pride; Wear none but your own country linen; Of economy boast, let your pride be the most To show clothes of your own make and spinning.
What if homespun they say is not quite so gay As brocades, yet be not in a passion, For when once it is known this is much worn in town, One and all will cry out— ’Tis the fashion!
And, as one, all agree, that you’ll not married be To such as will wear London factory, But at first sight refuse, tell ’em such you will choose As encourage our own manufactory.
No more ribbons wear, nor in rich silks appear; Love your country much better than fine things; Begin without passion, ’twill soon be the fashion To grace your smooth locks with a twine string.
Throw aside your Bohea, and your Green Hyson tea, And all things with a new-fashion duty; Procure a good store of the choice Labrador, For there’ll soon be enough here to suit you.
These do without fear, and to all you’ll appear, Fair, charming, true, lovely and clever; Though the times remain darkish, young men may be sparkish, And love you much stronger than ever.
Then make yourselves easy, for no one will teaze ye, Nor tax you, if chancing to sneer At the sense-ridden tools, who think us all fools; But they’ll find the reverse far and near.
The modern American war tax resistance movement has in recent years managed to collect its own funk anthem (“What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings):
I was talking to a friend of mine Said he don’t want no wars no more They’re building bombs while our schools are falling Tell me what in the hell we’re paying taxes for
What if we all stopped paying taxes? Now, what if we all stopped paying taxes? Stop paying taxes y’all
Now tell me who’s gonna buy their bombs Their tanks, their planes and all their guns Well, tell me who’s gonna pay for their wars If we all get together and cut their funds
Hey, listen people, listen to what I’ve got to say What if we all stopped paying taxes?
folk song (“Don’t Be Afraid of the Neo-Cons” by Norman Blake):
Don’t send your money to Washington To fight a war that’s never done Don’t play their games don’t be their pawns And don’t be afraid of the neo-cons
and rap (“Uncle Sam Goddamn” by Brother Ali):
You don’t give money to the bums On the corner with a sign, bleeding from their gums. Talking about you don’t support a crackhead — What you think happens to the money from yo taxes?
Shit, the government’s an addict With a billion dollar a week kill-brown-people habit And even if you ain’t on the front line When the master yell crunch time you right back at it
You ain’t look at how you hustling backwards And the end of the year add up what they subtracted: 3 outta twelve months your salary Paid for that madness… man that’s sadness
War tax resister Joan Baez was fond of including the Whiskey Rebellion celebration tune “Copper Kettle” in her concerts.
Get you a copper kettle Get you a copper coil Cover with new made corn mash And never more you’ll toil
You just lay there by the juniper While the moon is bright Watch them jugs a-fillin’ In the pale moonlight
Build your fires of hickory Hickory or ash or oak Don’t use no green or rotten wood They’ll catch you by the smoke
My daddy he made whiskey My granddaddy did to We ain’t paid no whiskey tax Since !
When a youth activist group joined war tax resisters at a recent Tax Day demonstration at the Oakland federal building, they brought their lyrical skills along:
People, People, People, can’t you see? They kill around the world with tax money. Stealing from workers how there money’s made, I guess that’s why we’re broke and they’re so paid!
People, People, People, can’t you see? They tax the poor more, the rich stay greedy. No money for health or to educate, I guess that’s why we’re broke and they’re so paid!
On-line, you can see some of the rehearsal video showing how they combined the lyrics with pantomime to drive the point home.
At another American “Tax Day” protest, this one in St. Louis in , war tax resisters at the federal building sang a protest song with lyrics like these:
For the cost of cluster bombs that maim and leave to bleed our kids could have more teachers helping them to read
Tax resisters against the British colonial government in Ghana had a fight song for the occasion:
Cannon they have loaded, but couldn’t fire, Cannon they have loaded, but couldn’t fire. Whitemen dishonestly imposed poll-tax on the blacks. The poll-tax we will never pay, the grandees never deliver up, Go tell the white man to come out!
Luzerne County, Pennsylvania is home to an unusually corrupt government culture (or maybe it’s just that they got caught).
Federal authorities charged 23 county residents with various corruption charges, including three judges and a county commissioner.
But then the county government decided to hike taxes by 10%.
Fred Heller said no.
Why fund a nest of crooks?
He recorded a protest song titled “Take This Tax and Shove It” and started a campaign to get county residents to refuse to pay their taxes, at least until the government stables have had all their manure shoveled out.
Excerpts:
Take this tax and shove it We ain’t paying you crooks no more The good ol’ boys stole all our cash And ran out the courthouse door
Residents in Castine, Maine, upset at their local taxes being siphoned off by state politicians, started a tax resistance campaign and accompanied it by protest songs:
Write me a song of the Revolution, ’cause that’s what it’s gonna be. Write me a song of the Revolution, ’cause that’s what’s in store for me! I can’t sit by and watch this country go right down the drain. I gotta stand firm on the Constitution and stay aboard the freedom train.
When Meo farmers killed a tax collector during a tax strike aimed at the British-backed Maharaja in , they commemorated the occasion with a song:
Rebels in the open the Meos did then rejoice They conferred among themselves and spoke in a single voice Your názim’s dead and ever since we aren’t ruled by any prince To London by now you should’ve fled, and do take along your dead.
Thousands of old newsreels from the British Pathé archives have been posted to YouTube.
Here are a handful that show some rare motion picture footage of tax resistance actions of the past:
The nicest way of being Arrested
“Tired of waiting — women councillors arrange by telephone with Sheriffs Officer to be taken to prison altogether at 3 o’clock!”
This was part of the Poplar Rates Rebellion of (silent):
Les obsèques des ouvriers de l’usine Krupp…
Footage of the funerals of (and commemorative parade for) of Krupp factory workers killed during the strikes of the Ruhrkampf in (silent):
Footage of Gandhi
Here’s some footage released in soon after his imprisonment for sedition.
It shows him addressing an outdoor Indian National Congress meeting (silent):
This comes from , at the time of the Salt March, and shows Gandhi addressing a crowd and large groups of people in “Gandhi caps” walking along with him (silent):
Rideaux Baissés et Portes Closes
Parisian shopkeepers and businesses shut down one afternoon in in a hartal to protest against new taxes (silent):
Footage of Irish Blue Shirts
This comes from a point in when the quasi-fascist Blue Shirt party had launched a tax strike.
One person was killed by police during an attempt to stop a tax auction of seized cattle, and this newsreel shows footage of the funeral (silent):
Tax & Taxis!
Parisian taxi drivers blockade the streets outside the Chamber of Deputies in a tax protest:
Farmers Protest
Belgian farmers drive their tractors into the provincial capital in to protest a new tax, and a pitchfork-waving, paving-stone-throwing, tire-burning riot ensues:
Footage of a large meeting with Pierre Poujade speaking
From , by which time Poujade was trying to transform his regional tax protest into a national political party (silent):
The question of whether something is a tax-exempt, charitable enterprise or is one with a half-concealed political motive and therefore is undeserving of a tax exemption has been causing a lot of headaches for the IRS in recent years.
But the issue is not a new one, as the following interesting example shows.
It’s an interesting footnote to the tax angle behind Gandhi’s khādī campaign, as found in an aside from a Spectator article:
In these days of alert journalism it is not often that a story that anyone could have had for the asking is missed by everybody — except one enterprising paper.
The Daily Express deserves congratulation on its sense of values, or its estimate of intrinsic interest, in sending someone on to report a Privy Council case in which the Judicial Committee sat “in a quiet room over London’s grey river” to consider whether the All India Spinners’ Association of Mirzapur, formed by Mr. Gandhi in to provide work for the agricultural population in periods when work on the land was slack, existed for charitable purposes, and was therefore exempt from income tax, or for political purposes and was therefore subject to tax.
The High Court of Bombay decided in favour of the Commissioner of Income-Tax, and it was this decision that was being appealed against.
Two facts gave extraneous interest to the appeal: the first being that Mr. Gandhi is very much in the news at the moment in another context [he had just been released from prison where he had been held by British authorities ]; the second that Mr. Roland Burrows, K.C., of whom we have just been hearing a good deal in connexion with the Newcastle-on-Tyne enquiry, was appearing for “the anonymous multitude of Indian villagers.”
Arguments were heard; the familiar terms “khadi” and “khaddar” were bandied to and fro; their lordships listened — and reserved their judgments.
The Privy Council ended up ruling in the Association’s favor, saying, in part, that “If an association is set on foot by a political organization and is connected with it but still has for its real object the relief of poverty, its connection with the political organisation does not make its real object any the less charitable.”
