Some historical and global examples of tax resistance →
Germany →
in 1848
The more I uncover about historical examples of tax resistance campaigns and campaigners, the more there seems to be to uncover.
By accident, while reading a book unrelated to my tax resistance research a few days ago, I found a reference to Karl Marx promoting a tax resistance campaign in Germany.
Germany was a chaos of uprisings in , and its rulers and taxers had only the most dubious legitimacy, as the first popularly elected parliament had been shut down by the royal and military aristocracy before they could enact something resembling a Constitution.
That parliament responded by ruling, unanimously, that the government was officially out of business:
So long as the National Assembly is not at liberty to continue its sessions in Berlin, the Brandenburg cabinet has no right to dispose of government revenues and to collect taxes.
, the paper issued a further appeal (signed by Marx and two others):
The Rhenish District Committee of Democrats calls upon all democratic associations in the Rhine Province to have the following measures decided upon and carried through:
Since the Prussian National Assembly itself has ruled that taxes are not to be paid, their forcible collection must be resisted everywhere and in every way.
In order to repulse the enemy the local militia must be organized everywhere.
The cost of weapons and ammunition for impecunious citizens is to be defrayed by the community or by voluntary contributions.
The authorities are to be asked everywhere to state publicly whether they recognize the decisions of the National Assembly and intend to carry them out.
In case of refusal committees of public safety are to be set up, and where possible this should be done with the consent of the local councils.
Local councils opposed to the Legislative Assembly should be re-elected by a universal vote.
This was pretty straightforwardly a declaration of revolutionary (or counterrevolutionary, depending on your perspective) war via an outpouring of passive verbs.
The aristocrats & generals, who got the jump on Marx and his militias and seized political power, took Marx to court, but were unable to convince a jury to convict.
(Edmund Wilson, in whose book To The Finland Station I first learned about this case, writes that “the effect [of Marx’s defense] on the jury was so great that Marx was thanked on their behalf by the foreman for his ‘extremely informative speech.’ ”)
Quite apart from the question whether the decision on the refusal to pay taxes is legally valid or not the document [the appeal] obviously presented an example of incitement to revolt and to civil war.
The accused also did not conceal that the word “enemy” (see Paragraph 2) should be understood as the internal enemy, the armed might of the Government.
Nevertheless the state authorities, despairing of a conviction under this article of the Code, have selected a milder indictment: the call for rebellion and resistance to the agents of state power…
Hence the case turned only on the political question: whether the accused were authorised by the decision of the National Assembly on the refusal to pay taxes to call in this way for resistance to the state power, to organise an armed force against that of the state, and to have government authorities removed and appointed at their discretion.
After a very brief consultation, the jury answered this question in the affirmative.
You may wonder why Karl Marx was so concerned with the legitimacy of governments and democratically-elected parliaments and Constitutional reforms and such.
It’s not what one typically thinks of as Marxist concerns.
From the looks of things, this was just a sort of strategic camouflage: Marx had picked up the bullhorn of a bourgeois democratic reform movement because he saw it as the necessary next step toward his real goal, which had nothing to do with bourgeois democracy.
Some tax resistance campaigns have tried to partially or completely secede from the government that is taxing them, or to set up alternative parallel governmental or quasi-governmental institutions to compete with or crowd out those of the established government.
When white supremacists in Louisiana lost the gubernatorial election to a reconstructionist candidate in 1872, they formed their own parallel government led by the losing candidate, with their own separate legislature and their own separate militia (with which they briefly occupied the statehouse).
They insisted that they were the legitimate government of Louisiana and recommended that people pay taxes to them and not to the usurpers in the statehouse.
They asserted:
Public opinion throughout the Union is against the usurpation, and our only danger, if there be any, will come from ourselves.
If the people of Louisiana will sanction, by obedience and acquiescence, this Government, they will give it the only validity it can ever acquire.
It is only by our own submission that our cause can be defeated.
We recommend the people of the several parishes, for the purpose of most effectual resistance to this usurpation, and of mutual aid and defense, to join the People’s League of Louisiana by the formation of Parish councils in correspondence with the Central Council at New-Orleans.
We must remember that there can be no de facto government as against a de jure government in a State, and that the only way by which the [governor] Kellogg usurpation can become established as a government is by acquiescence of the people… The people of New-Orleans are not to pay taxes, can not, in fact, pay them, nor are they giving any recognition to the usurpers.
The existence of this shadow government was not only a direct threat to the Kellogg government, but also indirectly made it difficult for it to raise funds because of the uncertainty.
One editorialist explained:
[Kellogg] can borrow no money, for his government is so notoriously illegal that no lender would expect payment.
If he should undertake to sell property for taxes, there would be no buyers, because an illegal Government could not give a valid title.
Hence he is reduced to the necessity of resorting to bluster and threats.
The Rebecca Rioters, confident from their success in destroying tollbooths, started to step in and adjudicate disputes in a quasi-governmental fashion.
For instance, they would visit the homes of fathers of illegitimate children and exact promises from them that they would provide support for the mothers.
During the tax strike that erupted in the French wine-growing region, local government officials resigned en masse and “local Separatist committees professed to take the Government’s place and set up a sort of provincial government.”
The decentralist Liberal Democratic Movement of Carabobo, Venezuela hinted at a tax resistance campaign in .
Upset at deteriorating public safety and infrastructure, and alleging that local taxes were being siphoned off to wasteful federal spending and a bloated local bureaucracy, Enio Daza, autonomism director of the Carabobo branch of the party, suggested that locals organize their own, independent tax office, and pay their taxes there where they could exercise local control over the spending.
The Zapatista movement in Mexico established municipios autónomos (autonomous towns) in regions where they were active:
The Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Tojolabal, and Chol Indians (among others) who lived in the autonomous townships called their political philosophy resistencia: civil resistance to government authority.
In the late 1990s there were thirty-eight Zapatista townships in Chiapas, including less than 10 percent of the 700,000 Indians in the state, but with a political impact in the indigenous communities that far outweighed their size.
The Zapatistas sought not to found a new Indian nation but to make a place for Indian self-determination within the Mexican state.
In their townships they kept their own birth and death records, discouraging followers from registering with official bureaucracies.
They stopped paying taxes to any government and refused to allow social workers from government health and welfare agencies to set foot inside what they considered their boundaries.
They opened their own health clinics staffed by volunteer Mexican and foreign doctors and local herbal healers and organized agricultural and crafts cooperatives that operated mainly through regional barter.
In some townships they held trials and set up jails.
Some people in the present-day Catalan independence movement have started paying their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government rather than to Spain.
An ongoing Spanish tax resistance movement is urging people to create a new, bottom-up, autonomous government of their own, and encourages them to redirect their taxes from the existing government into these new government-like projects:
[T]he construction of autonomy will require a lot of resources.
This process should be based on the ability to work and the generosity of many people, but needs to rely on these resources to make it possible.
By fiscal autonomy we mean all the pathways of redistribution that will make the tax system support initiatives that will really benefit people.
That is to say that the portion that each person is responsible of providing for the common good must be destined for new public services that really place the basic needs of people higher on the scale of priorities.
Therefore it becomes a priority, and all but essential, to generate dynamics of ever more massive civil disobedience against the pilfering of our resources on the part of the state, and to reclaim them for popular self-government.
In the Māori government in New Zealand instructed its subjects there to begin paying a dog tax directly to it, rather than to the New Zealand government-approved County Council.
When the Czar dissolved the Russian Duma in , the Duma refused to dissolve, meeting in Finland and declaring that they were the only government body with the authority to collect and spend taxes, and that therefore so long as they were abolished — so were taxes.
Something similar happened in Germany in , when the military and executive tried to break up the parliament.
The parliament then called on the people to refuse to pay any more taxes to the government.
When the government responded by trying to cut off funds for parliament, “the people insisted on making the payment, in spite of this prohibition.”
One way a tax resistance campaign can claim victory is by convincing the government to either formally rescind the tax, or to recognize the legal validity of tax resistance.
Charles Ⅰ went around Parliament to create a new property tax, and John Hampden famously said “no” in .
He lost his court case, but the next Parliament legalized his resistance by voiding the “ship-writs” tax and declaring the court judgment against him invalid.
American Amish, after a long campaign of lobbying, lawsuits, civil disobedience, and public relations, successfully won an exemption to the U.S. social security system, including its tax, and also canceled the outstanding social security tax bills of 15,000 Amish resisters.
A number of pacifist groups, frequently including war tax resisters, have been trying to get their governments to recognize or legally formalize a right to conscientious objection to military spending that would permit conscientious objectors to pay their taxes in a way that would not pay for the military portion of the government’s budget: a “Peace Tax” as it were.
So far, none of these long-standing efforts — which have included legal challenges using a variety of arguments, lobbying, and appeals to international legal bodies — have borne much fruit.
Governments seem universally hostile to the idea, and those international legal bodies with any clout have been unwilling to push the point.
Besides this, it is difficult to separate a government’s military budget from the rest of its budget in a way that would make a separate “Peace Tax” plausible.
The American version of the “Peace Tax” legislation, for instance, would ironically result in more taxpayer money going to military projects.
Italy has an otto per mille tax, which people can designate either for their church or for “humanitarian and cultural projects” of the government’s choosing — this resembles the sort of plan the “Peace Tax” promoters have in mind, but Italy’s government cunningly declared its participation in the Iraq War a “humanitarian and cultural” project and siphoned the funds off that way.
A tax resister who was opposed to the death penalty came to an agreement with the state of Delaware in which the state permitted him to pay his state taxes into a fund designated for paying state tax refunds of other taxpayers, rather than into the general fund that funded the prison system and executions.
American Quaker war tax resister Joshua Evans was so persistent that eventually the tax collector gave up.
“I was told it was concluded that as I gave myself up very much to the service of Truth, it was not proper I should be troubled on account of military demands; and I understood my name was erased, or taken from their list.”
Occasionally something similar happens today, when because a war tax resister has so few assets, or those assets would take too much trouble to discover, the IRS formally lists the resister’s file as “uncollectible” and gives up the attempt to force payment.
After ten years, a delinquent income tax payment hits a statute of limitations and the U.S. government is generally forbidden to pursue the matter further.
American suffragist activist Sarah E. Wall resisted her taxes for 25 years, when finally, according to Susan B. Anthony, “I do not know exactly how it is now, but the assessor has left her name off the tax-list, and passed her by rather than have a lawsuit with her.”
Something similar happened to English suffragist tax resister Charlotte Despard and some others: “[T]he Government rather than go to the trouble of selling up the recalcitrant ‘debtor,’ and attracting attention to the principle involved, had quietly dropped the matter in several instances.
Mrs. Despard had had no application for taxes since she had been sold up last year.”
Ellen C. Sargent patiently pursued legal challenges in California to try to promote women’s suffrage with a “no taxation without representation” argument.
She began by petitioning the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for a refund of her property taxes, and then filed a lawsuit when this petition was denied (the lawsuit also failed).
When farmers in drought-ravaged regions of Argentina threatened a tax strike in , the government responded with a clever bit of ju-jitsu — it declared an agricultural emergency in the area which exempted those farmers from paying taxes.
Utah governor J. Bracken Lee stopped paying his federal income taxes in the hopes of prompting a Supreme Court test case that would invalidate what he considered to be extraconstitutional federal spending.
(The court declined to take his case.)
A group referred to as “the Texas housewives” resisted paying the social security tax on the salaries of their household help, and pursued a two-year parallel legal challenge to have the tax invalidated, before finally being turned down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Property tax resisters in Depression-era Chicago won a court case that found property assessments in the city to have been performed incorrectly — with $15 billion in property held by wealthy, well-connected Chicagoans somehow left off the rolls — thus effectively legalizing the resistance.
“As the matter stands,” a newspaper account put it, “citizens howled about their taxes, refused to pay them and a court upheld them.
They are in revolt with legal sanction.”
During the Land League’s rent strike in Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell reported that “a large majority of landlords” reduced the rents on their properties, “[which] shows that they did finally recognize the situation, and that they determined to make the best of it.”
When the Prussian quasi-autocracy tried to ignore the legislature and govern on its own, the legislature formally declared tax resistance to be legal, and said that the autocrats had no authority to raise or spend money.
Something similar happened in Russia half a century later, when the Czar dissolved the legislature, which then reconvened in Vyborg and called on the citizens to refuse to pay any more taxes to the Czar.
According to a book on war tax resistance: “In Russia became the first country to establish legislation exempting pacifists from paying war taxes.
Thirty British citizens were invited by Czar Alexander Ⅰ to establish a cotton mill.
Because some of the employees were Quakers, a petition was submitted to the Czar from the employees asking for freedom of conscience and an exemption from military service, church taxes for war, etc. The Czar issued a certificate which read ‘His Imperial Majesty has given his gracious assent to this petition … all … shall be exempted from all civil and military taxes … the sect of Quakers may now and in future be freed from war taxes for the support of the Military…’ Two English Quakers visiting Russia in found these provisions still in effect.”
The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia began as a tax resistance and mutual insurance group, but was soon successful in convincing the government to rescind the offensive tax.
But history is also full of lessons about the foolishness of trusting the government when it responds to your tax resistance campaign by insisting that it’s on your side and wants to help.
For example:
When tax resistance leader Wat Tyler was assassinated while negotiating with the King in , the king boldly went out to the enraged crowd and told it that he would be their leader and would press for their demands.
Instead, he waited for the fuss to die down, then executed some of the other leaders of the rebellion.
When the Whigs were whisked into power in the wake of the Reform Act agitation around , the tax resistance movement celebrated its victory… only to find that the Whigs could be just as tyrannical about prosecuting those who promoted tax resistance as their Tory cousins.
The recent American TEA Party was quickly coöpted by the Republican Party, which learned how to lead it by the nose with witless rhetoric, but conceded nothing on the tax-and-spend big government front.
During the Annuity Tax strike in Edinburgh, the government passed something called the “Edinburgh Annuity Tax Abolition Act.”
Despite its name, that act did not abolish the annuity tax, but merely concealed it with an aim to making it more difficult to resist.
In there was a tax resistance crisis in Germany, when the executive attempted to govern independently from the legislature and the National Assembly declared that citizens had no obligation to pay for it.
Karl Marx was among those members of the press who spread the news of the authorized tax strike and who were prosecuted for this.
He was acquitted, but others were not so lucky.
Here are some notes from the aftermath that made it into the British press.
First, from the Caledonian Mercury:
The trial of M. [Benedikt] Waldeck has commen[ced?] that of M. Zeigler, burgomaster of Brandenburgh, charged with treason, for having, in his official capacity, published the tax refusing resolution of the late National Assembly, has ended with a verdict of guilty, and a sentence of six months’ imprisonment in a fortress, and deprivation of his order.
From the London Daily News:
During the last week we have had a signal instance of the capricious mutability of the public taste in relation to the political topics of the day, and of the fluctuating value of the wares of the news market.
No event has exercised a more critical influence over the fate of Prussia than the decree of the Rump of the National Assembly, on , to refuse to the Brandenburg ministry, then just a week in office, the means of carrying on the government.
This hoisting of the revolutionary standard isolated the democratic party in one instant completely from the mass of the nation, whose sympathies had until that moment seriously inclined to their cause, or at least wavered.
The country rallied at once to the throne; and when the landwehr was called out, not a man disobeyed the royal summons.
The tax-refusers (Stener verweigerer) were from that hour doomed, and the democratic cause was lost.
Still the public eye followed with a singular interest those bold citizens who had bidden defiance to the crown.
Nearly all of them were returned as members to the Second Chamber of , mostly by the populations of the large cities.
The nine deputies elected on that occasion by Berlin were all Stener-verweigerer, and nearly the entire Left of the new assembly was composed of the same compromised category.
Still there was drawn an important line of distinction between such as had voted for the decree of the National Assembly purely and simply without joining the agitation to carry the decree into practical effect throughout the country; and such as had by the distribution of proclamations, by inflammatory speeches, and other such means, attempted to organise a resistance on the part of the people to the payment of taxes.
It furnishes a valuable testimony to the constitutional disposition of the most democratic assembly which could be returned in Prussia under a system of universal suffrage, that only 42 out of the large majority which voted the refusal of taxes were found rash enough to attempt to bring that vote to a practical result.
Those 42 are now arraigned at the bar of the criminal jury court.
The most eminent among them are [Hermann] Schulz, [Ludwig] Hildenhagen, [Philipp] Von Berg, and [Lothar] Bucher.
The trial of these offenders, which a year ago would have roused the keenest political excitement throughout Germany, has gone on during the last week without moving the faintest curiosity.
The National Zeitung, chief democratic organ, apologizes to its readers for confining its extracts to the speech of Schulz.
The printer, who cleared several thousand thalers by giving separately the earliest edition of the short-hand report of Waldeck’s trial, has sunk a considerable part of his gains in the new enterprise of issuing a corresponding account of the Stener-verweigerungs process.
Without going into immaterial details and tedious formalities, I shall state briefly the line of argument adopted by the prosecution and the defence.
The offence charged in the indictment is incitement of his majesty’s subjects to rebellion.
Rebellion (says the Staats-Anwalt) is resistance to the king’s government.
Never had the king at any lawful time divested himself of the prerogative of choosing his own ministers.
Therefore the Brandenburg government was lawful.
But there can be no more serious act of resistance to a government than to deny it the means of carrying on the administration.
Not only did the 42 accused incite by writing, word of mouth, and manifold means of agitation, to such resistance, but they actually encouraged the people to seize and sequester the cash-boxes of the state.
Proclamations would be exhibited, signed with the names of many, encouraging the peaceable citizens to such acts of violence.
Letters and a vast volume of testimony would be produced, in order fully to establish the charges contained in the indictment.
The line of argument adopted by the defence is by no means so simple, and goes into some of the most thorny questions of political jurisprudence.
In the first place, the defendants admitted all the evidence of importance brought against them.
But the offence with which they were charged, attempted rebellion, must, according to the statute, be accompanied by some acts of violence.
Now, they had been guilty of no such act themselves, nor had they instigated others to use force.
They employed a legal passive resistance against an illegal government.
The Brandenburgh government was illegal, because it not only had no majority in the national parliament, but dissolved an assembly called together for the purpose of framing a constitution in consent with the sovereign, which could not be legally dissolved before it had completed that mission.
By the King’s promises of , the constitutional principle of self-government had been introduced into Prussia; and the very heart of constitutionalism was that no ministers were entitled to the confidence of the king, without also possessing the confidence of the people shown by a parliamentary majority in favour of those ministers.
Therefore, the ministry of Count Brandenburgh was illegal in its composition, and illegal in its acts.
Now, the National Assembly had, undoubtedly, the right of withholding supplies from such a government; for the king in the patent prefixed to the electoral law, by which the National Assembly was chosen, had expressly declared that the same privileges, which had been promised on , to the Reichs-Stände, or estates of the realm, should be also competent to the National Assembly.
But one of the chief of those privileges was the right of voting the taxes (Stener-bewilligungs-Recht.)
The crown prosecutor had attempted to draw a distinction between the right of voting and the right of refusing taxes, the Stener-bewilligungs-Recht and the Stener-verweigerungs-Recht, but the fact was that they were the same thing; else the first mentioned privilege was no privilege at all.
The decree of the National Assembly was therefore perfectly legal and constitutional; and the attempt to realise it was equally so, because the assembly was not affected in its existence by the arbitrary dissolution by the government.
The taxes withheld were not to be used for the purpose of levying war upon the King, God forbid, but they were simply to be reserved for other ministers who enjoyed the confidence both of his Majesty and the parliament.
There was no violence in such a proceeding at all; it was merely a sort of constitutional blockade of an unconstitutional cabinet, and was the only peaceful remedy let to the people against absolute and arbitrary rule.
Another circumstance was, that not only was inviolability guaranteed to the persons of the National Assembly, but it was expressly stipulated before they were convoked that they should not be called to account for their acts before the legal tribunals.
The state prosecutor said that they had not been called to account for their acts in the house, but for their acts out of it.
This, it was said on the part of the defence, was a proof that the government was conscious of illegality of the dissolution of the National Assembly; else, why were not all those members prosecuted, who had voted for the decree.
The Staats-Anwalt replied to this that the two offences were distinct, and it could not be concluded from the prosecution of the more flagrant that the other was regarded as no offence at all.
It is expected that a verdict of not guilty will be returned in the case of the tax-refusers.
Schulze’s speech, of which I gave yesterday the substance, produced a great effect on the court.
A follow-up from the London Daily News:
The trial of the tax-refusers is at last over.
The jury, after consulting for several hours, at gave their verdict.
They pronounced 36 out of the 37 accused who appeared “not guilty;” but the eminent talent of the man whom they selected for a victim more than compensated this equitable decision.
Bucher, the best, coolest, and most closely logical head and speaker in the Prussian parliament, was declared guilty.
He was condemned for being the last to quit the field in a hopeless cause; and the doom, if heavy, is not dishonourable.
This morning the public prosecutor moved that, in consideration of his exertions having produced no result, the sentence should be limited to two years’ imprisonment in a fortress, loss of national cockade, and offices.
The court modified this sentence in one particular, reducing the imprisonment to 15 months.
His offices as assessor and common councilman were taken away.
Of the four who did not appear to plead, three were declared guilty: two of an attempt to excite rebellion, and the third of insulting the King’s majesty.
The last was condemned to 3 months’ common imprisonment, and the others to 15 months’ confinement in a fortress.
Hessian leader Hans Daniel Hassenpflug’s anti-Constitutionalist moves, which included dissolving the state legislature in , led to another tax resistance campaign.
Bavarian (and Austrian) troops marched in to Hesse to protect its autocracy against an anticipated Prussian invasion (and against the rage of the Hessian democrats).
Here’s a report from that incident, from the Reynolds’s Newspaper:
Since the Bavarian troops have been within the walls of Rothenberg the proceedings against the tax-refusers and opposers of the September ordinances began.
These proceedings are carried out in the most shameless way.
The judge, who, with his mother, 80 years of age, inhabits a small apartment, has been forced to give up his parlour and his bedrooms to soldiers who are quartered upon him; and it is not permitted to such “rebels” to find another lodging out of their own houses.
No; there must be personal punishment, as well as the cost of entertaining soldiers.
The judge, Von Urff, had eight men quartered on him, but being dangerously ill, they were, on the urgent representations of physicians, withdrawn; the next day a letter was sent him from Count von Rechberg; the doctors would not suffer it to be delivered, lest the excitement should prove fatal to their patient.
On the following day however, an adjutant forced his way into the sick man’s bedchamber and delivered the letter, the purport of which was that he should, within the space of twelve hours, acknowledge the validity of the September ordinances, or suffer the consequences.
He immediately sent in his resignation.
And such things are done in the 19th century, and in the face of civilised Europe.
