How you can resist funding the government → other forms our opposition can take → peace movement: marches, protests, and so forth → my frustration with

A while back I decided to try to get involved with the anti-war, “progressive” movement. I’m a veteran of this political wing, having done my share of peace marches, protest rallies, and civil disobedience sit-ins back in the day. But I drifted away some time ago and I’m finding it hard to drift back.

My motives for returning include the desire to join forces with people who are working for similar goals, and the hope that I can encourage people who already consider themselves to be in the opposition to try tax resistance as a technique.

What’s making it difficult for me to return is that, in San Francisco, to be part of the anti-war, progressive movement means to be sharing the stage with a whole bunch of unapologetic Stalinists, paranoid schizophrenics, ersatz intifadists, tin-eared rhetorical broken-records, insatiable identity-politics police, new-age gurus of every variety, publicity hounds, careerist Democrats, and the like. Even our right-wing counter-protesters aren’t very witty.

It’s not as though you can even really say of all of these freaks, “well, their hearts are in the right place,” because, more often than not, they aren’t.

And demonstrations in San Francisco — what are they demonstrating exactly? That a bunch of San Fransiscans are upset about Dubya’s policies? Big surprise. The march was more like a parade — everyone marching behind their flags, with their costumes and props, mostly there to impress each other and to feel important and right.

In conversation with another tax resister I compared it to the “cargo cult” phenomenon. The most photogenic parts of a successful protest movement like the civil rights movement in the United States — and therefore the most-often-seen in documentary footage — were big rallies and marches like the March on Washington, civil disobedience like the lunch counter sit-ins, and confrontations with baton- and hose-wielding cops. So today’s protester thinks that if those elements can be resummoned somehow, success can’t be far behind.

They might as well expect to gain independence for California by throwing crates of tea into San Francisco Bay. A superficial fetishization of the theatrical residue of history gets you a renaissance faire, not a successful political movement.

But I went through the effort of getting that rant out of my system so I could move on to better things. I started attending the Designs on Democracy conference in Berkeley today. It’s a set of panels and workshops and such about how “progressives” can craft their messages more effectively.

And it was really good. People were thinking practically, and facing things honestly and realistically. I hadn’t seen anything like it from the left in too long. I can’t say I agreed with all of the shared political assumptions (it’s probably a bit of a stretch to call me a “progressive” these days), but I was delighted to see a group of dedicated, rational, pragmatic, good-humored people working for positive change.

I heard a lot of good advice about “framing your message” that I can start putting into practice right away. And I got a good dose of relief and encouragement from hearing ideas for powerful and revolutionary social change being articulated by people who have their heads screwed on straight.

Yesterday evening, I sent this email to a list devoted to war tax resistance:

Partners—

It’s sure been hard to drum up much interest for tax resistance over these last several months. Everybody’s been so wound up about the election and how important it is that it’s made everything else seem like a distraction.

Now that’s over, and the people who last week were telling us to please, please, please vote for the fellow who voted for the Patriot Act and the war resolution (and to please save our funny ideas for the annual April 15^th war tax resistance fifteen-minutes-of-fame show), are now shuffling around like war refugees themselves, feeling angry and repentant and wondering what to do next.

Meanwhile, the people who covered up Guernica at the U.N. Security Council are planning to paint a new one in Falluja.

We have an opportunity now to reach out and say “you tried voting for the lesser of two evils, and you put your heart into it, but there’s a stronger vote you can cast every day and we can help show you how.”

On November 2^nd, the Republicans extended their control of Congress, Dubya retained his control of the White House, and the majority of voters condoned and even vindicated the belligerence and disregard for life and liberty that has been on display for the last four years. But as awful is that millions of people who should know better woke up on November 3^rd and cast another vote — to continue sending their money to be spent by that terrible bunch.

I feel like we need to challenge these people. I’m in no mood to join another Bay Area protest march with the same old “People! United!” marching under the banner of “Our Opinions Sure Are Right!”

Next time there’s a march, I want to see us marching upstream, with signs saying “And When You’re Serious About It, Get Back To Us!”

Meanwhile, the time to turn up our volume is right now — the gut-felt anguish of these voters hasn’t gone away yet and we’ve got what they’re looking for.

I appended an excerpt from Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government that seemed to speak extremely well to today’s election aftermath from a perspective about a hundred and fifty years back (I’ve taken the liberty of chopping paragraphs more finely than in the original, for ease of on-line reading):

I quarrel not with far-off foes, but with those who, near at home, co-operate with, and do the bidding of, those far away, and without whom the latter would be harmless.

We are accustomed to say, that the mass of men are unprepared; but improvement is slow, because the few are not materially wiser or better than the many. It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.

There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know not what to do, and do nothing; who even postpone the question of freedom to the question of free trade, and quietly read the prices-current along with the latest advices from Mexico, after dinner, and, it may be, fall asleep over them both. What is the price-current of an honest man and patriot today? They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret.

At most, they give up only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and Godspeed, to the right, as it goes by them…

All voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions; and betting naturally accompanies it. The character of the voters is not staked. I cast my vote, perchance, as I think right; but I am not vitally concerned that that right should prevail. I am willing to leave it to the majority. Its obligation, therefore, never exceeds that of expediency.

Even voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority.

There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men. When the majority shall at length vote for the abolition of slavery, it will be because they are indifferent to slavery, or because there is but little slavery left to be abolished by their vote. They will then be the only slaves. Only his vote can hasten the abolition of slavery who asserts his own freedom by his vote.

I hear of a convention to be held at Baltimore, or elsewhere, for the selection of a candidate for the Presidency, made up chiefly of editors, and men who are politicians by profession; but I think, what is it to any independent, intelligent, and respectable man what decision they may come to? Shall we not have the advantage of his wisdom and honesty, nevertheless? Can we not count upon some independent votes? Are there not many individuals in the country who do not attend conventions?

But no: I find that the respectable man, so called, has immediately drifted from his position, and despairs of his country, when his country has more reasons to despair of him.

He forthwith adopts one of the candidates thus selected as the only available one, thus proving that he is himself available for any purposes of the demagogue. His vote is of no more worth than that of any unprincipled foreigner or hireling native, who may have been bought.

O for a man who is a man, and, and my neighbor says, has a bone is his back which you cannot pass your hand through!

Our statistics are at fault: the population has been returned too large. How many men are there to a square thousand miles in the country? Hardly one.…

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even to most enormous, wrong; he may still properly have other concerns to engage him; but it is his duty, at least, to wash his hands of it, and, if he gives it no thought longer, not to give it practically his support.

If I devote myself to other pursuits and contemplations, I must first see, at least, that I do not pursue them sitting upon another man’s shoulders. I must get off him first, that he may pursue his contemplations too.

See what gross inconsistency is tolerated. I have heard some of my townsmen say, “I should like to have them order me out to help put down an insurrection of the slaves, or to march to Mexico — see if I would go”; and yet these very men have each, directly by their allegiance, and so indirectly, at least, by their money, furnished a substitute.

The soldier is applauded who refuses to serve in an unjust war by those who do not refuse to sustain the unjust government which makes the war; is applauded by those whose own act and authority he disregards and sets at naught; as if the state were penitent to that degree that it hired one to scourge it while it sinned, but not to that degree that it left off sinning for a moment.…

Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform. Some are petitioning the State to dissolve the Union, to disregard the requisitions of the President. Why do they not dissolve it themselves — the union between themselves and the State — and refuse to pay their quota into its treasury?

What does the way forward look like? I’m watching the Kerry voters digest their loss — and what belches their sour stomachs produce! There’s a lot of talk of “values,” such as that from George Lakoff which preceded the campaign, or the more panicky talk since, which seems to boil down to something like this: “The swing voters swung Republican because of something called ‘values’ — is there any way we can fake some of those convincingly ourselves?”

Kerry’s slogan might as well have been “abandon your values and support the Kerry campaign — I did!”

To recap: Kerry voted to authorize the war in Iraq, and used his apologia to broadcast the familiar lies about weapons of mass destruction and the like. He voted shamelessly for the Patriot Act, knowing all the while who was going to be holding the reins of that horse. He spent his campaign bragging about the weapons systems he’d voted to fund, and most grotesquely of all: he bragged about how proudly he’d defended the United States by killing people in Vietnam. He vowed to fight the war in Iraq more tenaciously and viciously, with more troops and (with any luck) more allies.

Now perhaps those repulsive stands did represent his values, but what of the rest of us? Those Democrats who opposed the war were counselled not to vote for their values in the primary but to vote for the “electable” candidate, and that’s what they did. And then after the primaries, there were the daily pleadings to Nader leaners or disgusted non-voters not to waste their votes on their values but to vote for Anybody But Bush instead.

And now the discovery that people who value “values” abandoned Kerry at the polls. Listen to the wailing and gnashing of teeth. They cry: How can opposing gay marriage be considered a value and opposing the ongoing bombardment of Iraq not be? It’s a bit late for that.

In the values war, the Democrats unilaterally disarmed — worse, they turned traitor. Gay marriage? Oh, we hate it too. The war in Iraq? We’re no wimps.

It’s as though they forgot that people who find such positions valuable already had a candidate to vote for and didn’t need a new one.

Those of us who are against the war are doubly-humbled. Not only did we not come close to bringing the country around to our point of view, but we couldn’t even convince the opposition party, which not only might have been able to make hay from a stand against an increasingly unpopular war, but which could have become a useful bullhorn for promoting anti-war views.

Part of our problem is that we too often express our “values” not in our actions but in our petulant demands, petitions, and opinions. The United for Peace & Justice Position on Ending the Occupation of Iraq, for instance, is all about what “The Iraqi people” and “The United States” and “The United Nations” “should” do. None of those bodies of people, alas, give a flying fuck what United for Peace & Justice thinks they should do. Pardon my French.

What distinguishes a value from an opinion is that for something you value you’re going to put your money where your mouth is. An opinion as to which mouth somebody else “should” put their money at is an opinion cheaply had, and worth about that much.

When people who are anti-war move from having opinions that are fit for bumper-stickers to having values that motivate their actions, this in and of itself will be more persuasive than any number of opinions, whether expressed as ad campaigns, petitions, letters-to-the-editor, or protest marches. And beyond persuasiveness, it will be the first step toward change. People will work for what they find valuable; opinions just make for more blogs.

Madison, Wis. 23 May 2005 (SNF) — The anti-war protest coalition Citizens United for Peace (CUP) today announced that they are launching a large-scale, multi-faceted tax protest in which they will call on people to “divest from the war machine.”

The coalition’s member groups, which include “United for Justice and Peace” and “Not In My Name,” vowed to ask each of their individual members to stop paying at least some portion of their federal taxes, in protest of the war in Iraq and other policies.

“We believe that as people living in the United States it is our responsibility to resist the injustices done by our government, in our names and with our money,” read a press release from CUP. “Tax resistance is the most direct way we can make this resistance felt.”

According to the group, about half of what the federal government collects in taxes is spent on war, arms, and war-related expenses. “We can’t work to stop this war with our voices while we’re funding it with our paychecks.”

CUP has created a list of tax resistance methods and has asked those who join its campaign to select at least one of these to engage in immediately, and at least one other to work toward.

“Some of these methods are simple, some are more difficult,” says Carla Paxworthy, spokesperson for the National League of War Tax Resistance, who helped to draw up the “tax resistance matrix” list of techniques for CUP. “Some can be done by anyone, others aren’t for everyone. Some are entirely legal, and some require civil disobedience.

“We’re aiming for 100% [of coalition members participating],” Paxworthy says. “There’s something on the list that everyone can do today. And everything on the list is something that decreases the amount that we’re paying for war.”

Paxworthy says her organization will help counsel individual resisters and will serve as a clearinghouse for information on the experiences of tax resisters nationwide.

Ignis Brünnlig, of the IRS press office, said “the United States has a proud tradition of dissent, but we also have a system in which we all must contribute to the benefits we share as part of this nation. It’s important that people realize that the law is very clear that we all have to pay our fair share.”

But according to Mai Paga, who has been a tax resister for 14 years, the IRS bark is much worse than its bite. “First off, there are ways to resist taxes that aren’t illegal at all,” she says. “But in the history of war tax resistance in the United States, there haven’t been a dozen people who’ve done time for it.”

Still, some campaign coordinators say that the IRS may respond to a large-scale campaign with some high-profile prosecutions to try to discourage people from signing on. Paxworthy warns, “nobody should go into this without being aware of the risks and being ready to face the consequences.”

Thus reads a news article from an alternate future! (Cue theramin.)

I’m trying to bring a little more solidity to this vision I have of the U.S. opposition becoming more organized, energized, and relevant. The slice of America that prefers peace to war and justice to injustice is, I suspect, thanks to the combination of inexorable taxation and hopeless passivity, actually working harder for war and injustice than for their own values.

We’ve got to turn that around. It seems to me that the time for being inoffensive and ineffective is over. The people on the side of war and domination don’t make a hobby or fashion statement of it. They don’t limit themselves to bumper stickers and blogs. They’ve made careers of their passion, they’ve requisitioned tax money, they command armies.

Give me a reality check here, will ya, team? Am I making sense? Can we ask a little bit more of ourselves as activists? Today I’m going to reach a little more than yesterday, and tomorrow a little more still, until I’m putting all my weight behind my beliefs and not letting myself be used as fuel shoveled into the engine of the war machine. That sort of pledge ought to have the strength of a vow for us. Don’t say you’re for peace and justice if all you’re willing to do is wave a sign for it, or go to a movie about it, or vote for someone who’s possibly less against it than the other guy.

Damn. Listen to me rant and rave today.

There’s a new anti-war protest action being planned under the name The World Can’t Wait. It talks a big game:

There is not going to be some magical “pendulum swing.” People who steal elections and believe they’re on a “mission from God” will not go without a fight.

There is not going to be some savior from the Democratic Party. This whole idea of putting our hopes and energies into “leaders” who tell us to seek common ground with fascists and religious fanatics is proving every day to be a disaster, and actually serves to demobilize people.

But silence and paralysis are not acceptable. That which you will not resist and mobilize to stop, you will learn — or be forced — to accept. There is no escaping it: the whole disastrous course of this Bush regime must be stopped. And we must take the responsibility to do it.

And there is a way. We are talking about something on a scale that can really make a huge change in this country and in the world. We need more than fighting Bush’s outrages one at a time, constantly losing ground to the whole onslaught. We must, and can, aim to create a political situation where the Bush regime’s program is repudiated, where Bush himself is driven from office, and where the whole direction he has been taking society is reversed. We, in our millions, must and can take responsibility to change the course of history.

To that end, on November 2, the first anniversary of Bush’s “re-election”, we will take the first major step in this by organizing a truly massive day of resistance all over this country. People everywhere will walk out of school, they will take off work, they will come to the downtowns and town squares and set out from there, going through the streets and calling on many more to join us. They will repudiate this criminal regime, making a powerful statement: “No! This regime does not represent us! And we will drive it out!”

November 2 must be a massive and public proclamation that we refuse to be ruled in this way. November 2 must call out to the tens of millions more who are now agonizing and disgusted. November 2 will be the beginning — a giant first step in forcing the Bush regime to step down, and a powerful announcement that we will not stop until he does so — and it will join with and give support and heart to people all over the globe who so urgently need and want this regime to be stopped.

This will not be easy. If we speak the truth, they will try to silence us. If we act, they will try to stop us. But we speak for the majority, here and around the world, and as we get this going we are going to reach out to the people who have been so badly fooled by Bush and we are not going to stop.

The point is this: history is full of examples where people who had right on their side fought against tremendous odds and were victorious. And it is also full of examples of people passively hoping to wait it out, only to get swallowed up by a horror beyond what they ever imagined. The future is unwritten. Which one we get is up to us.

At first I was attracted by all the talk about taking responsibility to act rather than waiting for politicians to solve the problems. A call for people to walk off their jobs and take to the streets — whoopie! the seeds of a general strike! (It’s free to dream.)

But I don’t see much substance here. It seems to come down to nothing more than a smaller and more strident version of last month’s anti-war protests. “Making a powerful statement” — a “public proclamation” — “a powerful announcement.”

I’ll predict that on November 2^nd, there’ll be a few hundred earnest people, more-or-less embarrassed or horrified at the Revolutionary Communist Party banners in their midst, marching around downtown San Francisco, while “the majority” look out of their office windows and think “didn’t we just have one of these peace parades last month?”

Myself, I’m with Phil Ochs on this one: “I ain’t a-marchin’ anymore!”

From the “The Revolution Will Not Be Authorized” department:

Remember that “World Can’t Wait” protest march I wrote about on Thursday? You know, the “truly massive day of resistance all over this country” in which “[p]eople everywhere will walk out of school, they will take off work, they will come to the downtowns and town squares and set out from there, going through the streets and calling on many more to join us.”

“This will not be easy,” the organizers warned us: “If we speak the truth, they will try to silence us. If we act, they will try to stop us.”

If we apply for a permit, the police might say “no.”

I’ve volunteered in the VITA program on a couple of Saturday mornings this tax season. So far, I have helped nine families take $15,253 back from the U.S. Treasury. It’s a feather in my cap, Robin Hood style.

If you’d like to get involved, it’s not too late. You can take an on-line training course from the IRS at http://www.irs.gov/app/vita/index.jsp. The real trick may be trying to find a VITA site in your area — I don’t know of any central list of nationwide sites. You’ll just have to Google around, or call your local United Way chapter or maybe your local IRS office.

My next VITA day is this coming Saturday, the 18^th. So I’ll miss the annual Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair and the protest-themed parade that is being held to mark the one-year anniversary of the protest-themed parade which was thrown on the one-year anniversary of the protest-themed parade that also failed to stop the Iraq War.

I recently went to a planning meeting of a local coalition that was hoping to bring the floundering local anti-war movement together to do something. The “steering committee” itself was over a hundred members large, and still its members (scarred by previous encounters with the hammer-and-sickle crowd) nervously begged for the maximum of democratic inclusiveness.

All of these people, representing almost as many groups — labor unions, leftish and greenish third-parties, liberal peace advocates, would-be Mumia freers, and so forth — testing the limits of compromise and patience to try to come to agreement on the wording of a “Statement of Purpose” and to organize a “Mass Antiwar Conference/Rally” featuring:

• Opening keynote speeches
• A large assortment of workshops designed to include the broad range of groups and constituencies working against the war
• A plenary opportunity to hear reports from the constituent workshops
• A plenary session(s) where major decisions about the future of the coalition-in-formation and proposals for future activities would be democratically presented, debated and decided. These would include a proposed mass mobilization against the war.
• A mass concluding rally with major speakers and popular antiwar political entertainment and music

Maybe I’m too impatient. Maybe this is the sort of slow, deliberate, democratic decision-making that effective mass movements require. To me it seems more like a bunch of well-meaning people putting in a bunch of time and effort to finally decide to all meet up and talk at each other some more in the shadow of “major speakers” and such at yet another failure rally.

The Dubya Squad went from recovering from the shock of 9/11 to capitalizing on it by bringing the government and the media and the people on-board with their Iraq War agenda in a year and a half flat. Three years after that, the anti-war movement is still holding massive meetings to draft statements of purpose and plan more meetings to consider proposals for some sort of “mass mobilization against the war”.

All individual dignity and power
Engulfed in Courts, Committees, Institutions,
Associations and Societies,
A vain, speach-mouthing, speech-reporting Guild,
One Benefit-Club for mutual flattery…

I’m for unengulfing that “individual dignity and power” myself. More of these righteous rallies will not stop the war, no matter what sort of “popular antiwar political entertainment and music” is on the playbill.

The other day I imagined how much worse things would be here (and quite possibly in Iraq as well) if Kerry had won the election. Half of the people now despairing over the war in Iraq and the U.S. torture policy would instead be making excuses to ignore it, while Kerry, true to his campaign promises, would keep blundering right along, nervously looking for opportunities to demonstrate the testicular fortitude-by-proxy of Democrats in power ties.

Even now, a sad percentage of the alleged opposition are wasting their energies on trying to depose Dubya via impeachment, as though it were in the least likely, as though it would be in the least useful.

For never can true courage dwell with them,
Who, playing tricks with conscience, dare not look
At their own vices. We have been too long
Dupes of a deep delusion! Some, belike,
Groaning with restless enmity, expect
All change from change of constituted power;
As if a Government had been a robe,
On which our vice and wretchedness were tagged
Like fancy-points and fringes, with the robe
Pulled off at pleasure. Fondly these attach
A radical causation to a few
Poor drudges of chastising Providence,
Who borrow all their hues and qualities
From our own folly and rank wickedness,
Which gave them birth and nursed them.

Thanks to wood s lot for pointing me in the direction of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Fears in Solitude.

Yesterday I got an email from “Peace Action West” announcing a “historic call” that will “mobilize the majority of Americans who are opposed to this war.”

It’s something called the Iraq Moratorium and it’s the most depressing thing I’ve seen in a long time.

The theory of the Iraq Moratorium is that you will “[j]oin with actors, celebrities, writers, trade union leaders, Iraq veterans, Gold Star Families, and hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans” who want U.S. troops out of Iraq — “on September 21^st, and every third Friday thereafter” to do “something to stop the war.”

What something, exactly? “What you do is up to you or to the group of people you are working with. Labor unions in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere have called on their members to wear armbands and hold lunch hour rallies.” The Iraq Moratorium web site recommends the following actions:

• Wear and distribute black ribbons and armbands
• Buy no gas on Moratorium days
• Pressure politicians and the media
• Hold vigils, pickets, rallies, and teach-ins
• Hold special religious services
• Coordinate events in music, art, and culture
• Host film showings, talks, and educational events
• Organize student actions: Teach-ins, school closings, etc.

(This isn’t radical enough for some of the participants, who have advocated something they call “Non-Violent Action,” — “proposed in the spirit of Ghandi [sic]” — to wit: “On the third Friday of each month, designated as Moratorium Day, organize all Peace supporters across the country to drive exactly 10 miles below the posted speed limit on whatever road they are driving, whenever they drive, for the entire day.”)

In this way, because “the political process is moving glacially at best,” we can finally “force the media and the politicians to recognize just how angry and how massive anti-war sentiment in this country has grown.”

The Iraq Moratorium crowd is the political activism equivalent of the people who recommend prayer and crystals to patients with malignant tumors. Shun them, run from them, do not turn around until they are far from sight.

Haven’t I promised myself before that I would never go to another fucking ANSWER parade again?

It’s not that it was a complete waste of time. Intelligent, well-meaning people do sometimes bravely come forth to these things, and they’re apt to find with relief people like us (I was there helping to staff Northern California War Tax Resistance’s information booth) who aren’t chanting communist mumbo-jumbo into a megaphone.

But damn. You rarely see so much stupid in one place. The end of these marches is a sort of communist fringe group trade show in the Civic Center plaza in San Francisco. I think capitalist trade shows can be pretty hilarious, but communist ones just make me feel kind of dirty, like being invited to a party and then having your host tell racist jokes all through dinner.

The rally at the end of the parade was like a communist fringe group trade show.

The march and rally were pretty small by San Francisco standards — probably a combination of bad weather, the lower news profile of the wars these days, and the obama­stupi­fi­ca­tion of local liberals. Still, it was enough to merit a group of counter-protesters: Zionists waving Israeli flags behind a couple of police barricades. I only saw one of their signs: in an ocean of blue-and-white flags it read “The Iraq War Is Not About Israel.” Nice to have that cleared up.

A fracas broke out between protesters and the police who were lined up between the Zionists and their Palestinian-sympathetic flag-waving counterparts. This led to a good fifteen minutes of heavily amplified, monotonous, and predictably ignored demands for the police to leave the area. Sixteen minutes probably would have done it. Myself, I was ready to leave after considerably less. I’ve never claimed to be cut out for the force.

The fascist pigs try to keep the people from saving Mumia from the imperialists.

I swear to god that if those morons from ANSWER ever threaten to have any meaningful political power, I’ll be ready to put on a badge myself and join the counterrevolution. Meanwhile, I’m through. People with stronger stomachs than mine can do outreach at these things; I’m moving on to less-revolting revolutionary activity.

Ed Agro sent an email to the wtr-s list a couple of days back about how to revitalize the war tax resistance movement and expand its influence in American activism in these days of the obama­stupification of anti-war liberals.

It seems to me that our trouble is largely the same two problems the anti-war movement has had all along:

1. there aren’t enough people who understand that the government’s aggressive militarism is a problem, and
2. the people who do understand this typically don’t see it as something urgent that they personally ought to do something about — they’re content to have the correct opinion on the matter, and express that opinion at greater or lesser volume, and hope that posterity records their righteousness

The anti-war movement, such as it is, has helped to perpetuate U.S. militarism by largely restricting its activities to encouraging problem #2 people to complain and protest and propagandize and raise a fuss in the hopes of getting more problem #1 people to become problem #2 people.

Thing is, a lot of potentially sympathetic problem #1 people look at the problem #2 people and think: if these folks really believed their own propaganda, they wouldn’t just be holding parades and putting bumper stickers on their cars. Looks to me like they’re just opinionated self-righteous loudmouths trying to recruit people into their no-fun club.

The problem #2 folks ought to address problem #2 head on, as each one of them is immediately empowered to do. Problem #1 will solve itself as people notice anti-militarists starting to take themselves seriously.

The war tax resistance movement offers one way for problem #2 folks to do this — to “put their money where their mouths are” and to treat their own concerns with the urgent seriousness they deserve.

Agro makes a second point, which I’ve alluded to here in the past as well:

A problem: The way things are going, many of the target audiences, which would otherwise be sympathetic to WTR, will probably have little or no tax liability. In fact people will be relying on the government to help them through tough times. Will someone soon have to write a how-to article on “WTR in a time of no taxes”?

The last several years have seen large percentages of the U.S. population made essentially immune from the personal federal income tax. Last I checked, only about three in five Americans paid any personal federal income tax, and nothing about the Obama administration’s current tax plans gives any indication of reversing this trend.

Most of the focus of the American war tax resistance movement has been on the personal federal income tax and on the telephone excise tax. The phone tax is also hitting fewer people now, as now it only applies to local service on land-lines.

It’s something we’re going to have to give some thought to: how we can retool our movement for today’s tax environment.

You can read some more of my other musings about protest tactics at The Picket Line:

21 March 2003

Reflections on the big anti-war march in downtown San Francisco at the start of the Iraq war.

26 March 2004

On cargo-cult protest tactics: “A superficial fetishization of the theatrical residue of history gets you a renaissance faire, not a successful political movement.”

8 November 2004

Anti-war values didn’t play a part in the “values voter” election. Part of our problem is that we too often express our “values” not in our actions but in our demands, petitions, and opinions.

8 August, 9 August, and 11 August 2006

A critical look at a civil disobedience action directed at the Bechtel company headquarters.

27 May 2009

When people get arrested at protests just as a sort of exclamation-mark, without much regard for what law they’re breaking or why, does it confuse people about the value of real civil disobedience?

I went to the “Families Belong Together” protest rally and march in San Luis Obispo today. I’ve been to a few of these things now. It’s pretty much the same drill. A few people speak to the crowd, then we walk in a circuit through the downtown. Some people hold signs, some people chant things. It doesn’t do much for me, but other people who participate seem to get something out of it.

I wondered what people thought they were doing. The speakers gave the attendees opinions they approved of about current events and well-known newsmakers, but only rarely (and mostly vaguely) gave them suggestions for actions to take… and more often than not these actions amounted to urgently waiting for another opportunity to vote.

The local “Women’s March” listed this rally among others in its list of what it called “direct action” events, none of which, as far as I could tell, included any actual direct action.

That said, there is another “direct action” planned at the ICE facility nearby in Santa Maria this evening, where some actual direct action would do some good, so maybe there’ll be more meat on the bones there.

I was at the rally, wearing my “Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is” / “War Tax Resisters Aren’t Buying It” sandwich board. It felt a little bit off, specifying war tax resistance at a rally that wasn’t protesting war. But I actually had more conversations from interested people, and handed out many more “tax resistance counselor” business cards than is usual at rallies of this sort.

My sandwich board and the rest of me have aged a bit since the rally where this picture was taken a decade or so ago.

My sign was directed at the people who were reading it: other protesters. Most of the other signs seemed to be either expressions of desires and values (“Humans are not bargaining chips!”) maybe as attempts to model those desires and values for other protesters, strange attempts to make demands of power when power’s not even in the same zip code (“Trump & Pence step down!”), and degrading depictions of or descriptions of Donald Trump (“Super callous fragile racist sexist Nazi POTUS”).

The only other examples of signs urging fellow-protesters to action that I saw were variations on “Vote!” alas. There was also a voter-registration table set up at the rally starting point — the only table, and the only real “and here’s an action you can take right now” opportunity on hand.

I say this with some disappointment, but also as a confession. There was nothing stopping me from setting up a table somewhere, or leading a charge, or what have you, but I only offered a little more than a sign and my presence myself.

And I should note that this was a hastily-organized rally and that it probably took a lot of work from a few dedicated people just to make it happen in the first place.

But I wonder if it was worth it. We walked in a circuit down one street, up another, then back to the courthouse, and that was that. We waved signs, chanted if that was our thing, had some cars honk at us, got one “getta job!” from a guy on a loud motorcycle, and… people by and large seemed to feel they had accomplished something. It was hard to tell what.

Maybe it counts for something just to stand up and say “we don’t agree” when the government persecutes some group. Maybe people in our town who worry that ICE may come for them next saw our march and felt heartened, believing they might find sanctuary with their neighbors if they were targeted.

Another thing: I really don’t get this trend of putting “Women’s” in front of all the protest actions these days. Women’s Marches, #WomenDisobey, and so forth. The only speakers at the rally today were women, and the organizer said this was because only women had volunteered to speak, what could she do about it? But of course men are being overtly told that the actions aren’t for them, or that they’re supposed to be at most a sort of quiet, passively-supportive auxiliary. It disappoints me that this is what feminism has wrought, a sort of parody version of what anti-feminists taunted them about wanting: an inversion of the old sexist order instead of liberation from it.

But that aside, it divides the opposition and disempowers half of its membership, which is a pathetic own-goal. It’s not like men can decide to throw their energy into creating a “Men’s March” with all-male speakers and a #MenDisobey hashtag. Or is that the future: Are activists to now compete in their own sex-segregated events like athletes? Or are men supposed to shuffle off to the other side of the argument where troglodytes like them belong, and instead of everyone talking about the red/blue divide we can make it a Mars/Venus thing?

In short, if this is the sort of “direct action” those opposed to Trumpery can muster, I expect we’ll have a lot more #MAGA to look forward to.