Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Spain → comprehensive disobedience movement

While stimulus-critics on this side of the Atlantic are content to throw tea parties and hint at drastic action on television talk shows, in Spain they’re putting their money where their mouths are (translation mine, caveat emptor):

ATTAC, Ecologists in Action, the “Who Owes Whom?” campaign, and InspirAction deliver tax returns in which they have withheld 84 euros in protest against the government’s anti-crisis measures which they describe as socially and environmentally regressive.

Activists promote tax resistance against the anti-crisis measures

Madrid, 17 June — The NGOs Ecologists in Action, InspirAction, and ATTAC will deliver tomorrow in a Madrid tax office symbolic tax returns as a protest against the government’s anti-crisis measures, which they describe as “socially and environmentally regressive.”

In a statement, these organizations explain that these tax returns include a third box, to go with those aimed at the Catholic Church and “other social purposes,” which will allow spending 84 euros on social organizations that are engaged in “positive action to end the social and environmental crisis.”

In Spain, taxpayers can choose to allocate a percentage of their tax dollars to the Catholic Church, to some other denomination, or to “other social purposes,” much in the same way that in the United States, taxpayers can choose to allocate $3 of their tax money to the “presidential election campaign fund.”

The 84 euros symbolize the 84 most impoverished countries on the planet, “they who are suffering this crisis most harshly.”

The activists complain that “all the money is being sent to save the banks” by means of an “immoral” extension of assistance of up to 150,000 million euros, because “the bank never stopped taking profits while this crisis erupted.”

This “tax resistance” also protests that the government subsidizes the auto industry, “the poster child for unsustainability for its contribution to climate change,” and devotes more than 5,600 [million?] euros for new highway construction, while Spain is “the country with the most kilometers per person in the world.”

Furthermore, they criticize the budget for expanding the high-speed rail network and for aid to the construction sector, “one of the principal destroyers of the environment in the past years.”

To promote employment, they bet on an an economy that distributes work and covers human needs “in peace with the planet.”

According to the organizers of the initiative, the 84 euros will support social movements that advocate the elimination of tax havens and hedge funds and that encourage non-motorized transportation, renewable energy, or the creation of ecological networks of producers and consumers.

This is the first tax resistance campaign anywhere that I know about that has an explicitly environmentalist focus. There was some talk at the last NWTRCC national gathering about reaching out to the environmentalist movement. This campaign might be a good conversation-starter.

Here’s a more in-depth article on the same campaign.

There has been a lot of talk of tax resistance in Spain lately, both from an energetic war tax resistance movement and from a new environmental / social justice tax resistance campaign focusing on the skulduggery of the Spanish government’s responding to the economic crisis with corporate bailouts.

Now the backlash begins. Ricardo Rodríguez of Rebelión pens the following left-wing critique of tax resistance (translation mine):

Critique of Tax Resistance

1.

Everyone knows that Spring customarily brings the flowering of the gardens, the heat of love, and the obligation to submit your tax returns — all equally arousing things, though in different erogenous zones. For some years at this time there have also tended to be some social organizations spreading their campaigns for so-called tax resistance, simultaneously with the tenacious clerical propaganda for good Catholics to mark the box on their tax returns next to the Catholic Church. The comparison is not an idle one, for we see that this and the other campaign agree on the same economic formula, a formula that is in my opinion alarmingly reactionary, even in the view that it is with the best, most altruistic and noble intentions in the world.

The way in which it tries to encourage citizens to object via taxes, and the method that it proposes for doing so, may vary in some details, depending on the organization or the social platform in question, but always they repeat some elemental features. The manifest and indisputable injustice is alleged in which the state always dedicates fewer resources to sustaining basic public health and education services, or to the aid of the most disadvantaged social classes, directing instead exorbitant amounts to armaments, heavily polluting industries, or to various other ends damaging to the community. Most common is tax resistance that is justified in protest against military spending, but this is not the only possibility. This year, for example, in particular: the opposition to the transfer of billions in public money to banks and the real estate sector, among other principle causes of the crisis, which without a doubt constitutes an obscenity.

The concrete objection is to refuse to pay, when submitting the income tax return, a particular amount of money that beforehand will be redirected to some social organization that struggles for peace, for social justice, or for conservation of nature. The amount usually is small, fixed, calculated as a percentage of the tax or freely determined by the “objector.” As a fixed amount, 84 euros has been proposed, which is meant to symbolize the 84 most impoverished countries on the planet. And the choice of a percentage of the tax is singularly comical, because it supposes that in general those who owe more taxes are freed from paying more to the Treasury, or, seen another way, that the right to resist grows in proportion to the wealth of the taxpayer — a strange notion of economic justice to be promoted by leftist groups.

The most common formula for reflecting this reduction we withhold from our taxes consists in simply recording it in the blank box of miscellaneous deductions or subtracting it from the tax owed. In one way or another, if what is intended is to express a protest, it must be sufficiently visible, not camouflaged in some concept that could be easily overlooked. It is recommended for this reason that the Tax Administration Agency be contacted with a written statement, claiming that we deduct the money from our return in order to reduce military spending (or from nuclear plants, or public bank bailouts, or all at the same time), and that a receipt is attached showing our redirection to a social organization or project that we have chosen.

Let it be clear that I am in heartfelt agreement with the idea of fighting for public funds to be allocated to guarantee quality social services for all citizens and to reduce inequality and fight injustice. The question is whether tax resistance helps these objectives, as such, and if not, on the other hand, what other harmful side effects might follow.

After submitting our tax return with the corresponding act of civil disobedience, two things may happen. It is to be expected that the Tax Agency will issue its own return and charge us for what we failed to pay. For this eventuality, the promoters of resistance ask us to comfort ourselves until the end with the idea of converting each such letter into a new opportunity to protest (a protest, indeed, that will stop in the hands of some bureaucrat who typically ignores our pleas for social justice, and who will simply dismiss our claims according to the stipulated procedure). It will be useful to clarify to the potential resisters of good faith how much more influence they can have with their protest letters the more money they owe. Above all, one should note that the social advocacy organizations for tax resistance usually include themselves among the beneficiaries of the redirected money and that it is obligatory to observe a minimum of honesty with our purveyors. In any case, in the best scenario, we will be charged the debt plus interest. Although one thing to know, having announced our unequivocal will to not submit part of the tax, knowing that legally we have to, the General Tax Law does without a doubt cover such a case with sanctions for non-compliance. On the other hand this usually does not come to pass.

It happens in no few occasions, however, that the Tax Agency makes no complaint. In an article published recently in favor of resistance, I read the pious explanation that the motive for such indulgence might be that small amounts are not detected, or because of bureaucratic negligence or even “complicity.” In reality, things don’t work like this. In practically all tax returns, missing income is detected by computer (except for sneaky tax shelters that show no evidence of irregularity, a practice that would contradict the intention to use the tax resistance as a public protest). And if once discovered but not charged, this is likely because the debt is so low that the administrative procedures to force payment would cost more, or because, given the growing scarcity of personnel, the Tax Agency offices are concentrating on larger debts. I feel, indeed, this betrays a trust in the existence of bureaucrats sympathetic to our cause, but I can perhaps dream that there are many willing to risk their jobs overlooking procedures that are strictly regulated, concerning things in which each decision remains recorded and personally keyed in databases, and that are accounted with a multitude of controls, as well as being audited with relative frequency.

From one motive or another, often we settle with ourselves and pay less than we owe to the Treasury. What have we achieved with this? Only to reduce, by much or little, the amount of State revenue. After which, the government will allocate a sum of what is collected to such expenses as it decides, and not to those which objectors have demanded, and, as for having to reduce some part, it will be in that which seems good. A government that realizes a conservative economic policy — and, frankly, I do not hope for another type of government, at least in the coming years — will tend just to sacrifice social spending, and, in each case, will always meet their obligations to the army, to NATO, to the large corporations, and to the banks. If to do so one has to sacrifice spending on health or education, so be it. To be successful, our good-intentioned tax resisters might take note of the segments of society least protected by underfunded public services. We have given our money to committed social organizations, it is true. But these, as diligent as they are, will always constitute a private safety net. That is to say that we may be provoking a transfer of resources from universal, free, public services to private entities. This is a form of privatization, or, in other words, transforming the exercise of rights that we have demanded from the powers that be, into charity dependent on good samaritans. James Petras has given us some excellent texts on this, not much to the taste, of course, of certain NGOs.

2.

One might think, however, that although tax resistance lacks any effect on revenue and public spending or even has somewhat undesirable effects, it might, to compensate, set off a social echo of rebellion against the patent injustices of the capitalist state. But an examination of the results of all the tax resistance campaigns of the past years would have to have disillusioned the proponents on this point by now. Nobody would have learned that such campaigns are carried out if not for the publicity that the same promoting social organizations give. And, of course, the letters sent to the Tax Agency have absolutely no effect. In general, bureaucrats pass over such arguments of a political nature when resolving appeals; at most, they remember it as an anecdote of their work. The mythical vision of dozens of senior Administration officials terrorized by the exemplary valor of tax rebellion is a puerility that has nothing to do with the real world.

However, if the mere exercise of tax resistance is not significant or symbolic, the spread of the campaigns may serve up to the people a vision of taxes that has a surprising neoliberal resonance.

To begin, we have to question if it is very leftist, or even progressive, to claim the right of every citizen to decide individually what the state must do with the revenue from their taxes. For to go even further: if we imagine a society that has superseded capitalism — socialist, communist, or libertarian — do we proclaim as a right for every person to dictate to the community the particular destination of their contribution? Is this what the hell they mean when they allude to the objective of making every citizen “master of his income tax?” Of what character of economic democracy are we thinking — the same as Milton Friedman and Hayek? Doesn’t it address the collective management of the wealth of society? Or am I old-fashioned? To what point has the destruction of economic thinking reached that the left approaches these matters without a hint of doubt remaining?

Basically, fundamentally, what the partisans of resistance claim is the same as what serves the Catholic Church when it claims a slice of the income tax, as I said at the start. The Episcopal Conference and the denominational Spanish state offer fervent citizens the opportunity to, in conscience, direct a percentage of their tax contribution to the unpaid pastoral work of don Rouco Varela. And the partisans of resistance claim that the same possibility exists for antimilitarists or for those who hate the looting of the country at the hands of the bankers. In those last two groups, I include myself. The problem is that, when someone asserts a political right with universal character, it must take into account that not all of the citizens are going to make the same use of it, and admit, nevertheless, that any use will be legitimate. Many of us will object to military spending and will redirect our portion of savings to progressive organizations, but others will want to subtract what is invested in the public health to practice abortions with dignity and security for women, or from unemployment payments, or will even desire for that military expenses increase, as showing patriotism can also be a subject of conscience. Who will decide, and with what criteria, how far the conscience of each one can reach? And since Emilio Botín is just as much a citizen as us, he will be granted the corresponding right to object, and not only that — if he decides to use the formula of a percentage of his tax, his right will be infinitely larger than that of his gardener.

Consistent with individualism as the model of society that underlies the acceptance of tax resistance, is the individualism of resistance as a civil rights issue in which the right to object is recognized as the Law. The means are adjusted faithfully to the end proposed in this case, as what happened with the first Jesuits. I mean to say that, in the current configuration of the income tax in our country, tax resistance as protest can only be an act eminently individual and moreover elite, or at least not equal for everyone.

It is a fiction that we pay our income tax at the moment of presenting our tax return; this is not so. In reality, in the months of May and June the only thing that we do is submit to the Treasury a final accounting of what we have been paying over the past year for all of our income. Salaried workers have paid their tax every month via the tax withholding that has been taken from their pay. And small business owners and contractors make quarterly payments to account for what they have self-assessed in each period. It is very difficult to practice tax resistance if one’s tax return comes back with a refund; but that it comes back with a refund doesn’t mean that one hasn’t paid ones income tax, but that in the final balance more was contributed to the Treasury and one asks that it refund the surplus. Even if one is self-employed and files and has no right to a refund — a situation in which we find each year thousands of citizens, incidentally those with the lowest incomes — still objection is entirely impossible, despite, as with the previous case, that one has paid ones taxes religiously. Not to mention the poorest citizens, unemployed, retired, or social outcasts, whose taxes, or absolute lack of them, they do not give or have withheld, who do not pay income tax but many other sales taxes far more unjust than the income tax, each time they buy bread, board the bus, or eat soup, from which they are not given benefits.

All these thousands of people remain excluded from the possibility of tax resistance. Which is to say, we speak of a “right” that business, individual or corporate, can exercise with the greatest of ease, but that salaried employees, retirees, and the unemployed will find very difficult if not impossible. In olden times, a right of this nature was called privilege. We are to believe in the sincerity of the social organizations that assert the right to object, but the truth is that what they ask for is an economic option that can be enjoyed principally by the upper classes, in which I don’t find many enthusiasts for world peace, or proponents of reduction in military spending, or those furious about public money used for bank bailouts.

In certain educational pamphlets from the promoters of tax resistance are proposed resolutions to this problem in the form of the curious suggestion that those who don’t submit a tax return instead send letters asking for the recognition of the right to object. Very elegant: that the poor may be in solidarity with our responsible economic action as peaceful middle-class citizens. Also propose that, along with everything else, they come together with us in defraying the interest on the tax debt if the Tax Agency reclaims it from us. This, in order that they may feel they too have accomplished something, you see.

It’s very significant, for that matter, that the objection proposed happens to concern the income tax, one of the few taxes in our country — and almost the only one — that preserves some trace of progressivity, although increasingly more limited with each successive reactionary tax reform approved in these two decades by the People’s Party governments along with those of the Socialist Party. At least since Marx and Engels included the requirement of “strong progressive taxation” in one of the ten major proposals for social transformation in the Communist Manifesto, the labor movement has attached great importance to the existence of high and very progressive income taxes in order to achieve social justice.

Why not, for example, a social mobilization against paying VAT on the purchase of food and other articles of crucial necessity? Why not search for solidarity with small businesses in performing symbolic actions of sale without VAT? It’s been about a century since Rosa Luxemburg wrote, in her work The Accumulation of Capital, a concise but visionary chapter showing the social and economic relation of the revenue from indirect and sales taxes with militarism. The artificial increase of prices that provoke consumption taxes will cause a diversion of productive resources to one sector, the military, in which big business can solve its problems of insufficient markets by guaranteeing demand via political decisions of the state and transforming war itself into a specific region for accumulation. Rosa Luxemburg offered data that give suspicion that this was what happened in the years immediately before the outbreak of the first world war. Maybe it would be better to reflect on the reactionary tax reforms and today’s wars and to see if we can do something about it, if we want to, as antimilitarists, if we are to be taken seriously.

3.

I will acknowledge, in conclusion, that temperamentally I am very skeptical about proposals for what is called conscientious objection. I have never proposed as my principal goal for my social action to bring peace to my conscience but to change reality to make it less odious. I don’t want that I should be aloof from injustice, but that injustice not be committed. While I remain alive, I can’t stand aside. I don’t aspire that what I pay as my income tax does not go to military spending or to aid for bankers and speculators, but that military spending not increase and that aid not be given to bankers and speculators. And neither do I seek after a society in which I have the right to decide the destiny of my contributions to the community. My ideal is a society in which everyone and all who create the common wealth decide collectively how to manage it, in order to make true the principle of “from each according to his ability and to each according to his need.” That would only be viable if it destroys capitalism, clearly, and if the capitalist state is transformed into a network of people’s councils that allow for every public decision to be adopted in a democratic and free manner by all citizens.

Those who share a similar ideal, though it be far off, have to agree at least that the actions that we take to achieve it have to be essentially collective and to move towards it and not in the opposite direction.

In the daily struggle, the forms of intervention can be many. With a simple act of joining some fifty people at the Tax Agency in Madrid on the first day of tax season to protest against the wars and the complicity of the state with the looters of the country, it is possible to appear on all of the televisions and to make an impact on public opinion much greater than all the tax resistance campaigns. On occasion it has been done. The most profound and stable way — not detracting from the organization for a citizen’s movement to demand a just and progressive tax system, that which includes a recognized principle in Article 31 of the Constitution of 1978, stubbornly flouted with all the others that don’t suit the masters of the nation. It is not very hard to explain to the citizenry the intolerable injustice of a dual-track income tax, in which one pays much more on earned income then on income from capital, or how the progressivity of taxation has been forcibly reduced in the past decades. We must denounce those who benefit from the suppression of taxes on capital and the constant rebates of corporate taxes, and unmask the land-owners who again requested raising the VAT rates. We tend to think that taxes are too dry a subject to organize social movements around, even though they constitute the backbone that sustains the set of social services before which privatization revolts us with reason.

With the actions of the struggle can coexist on occasion, of course, the civic refusal to pay certain taxes, either because they are unjust or because in extreme situations we decide to break with any variety of collaboration with the state and face the risk of receiving the corresponding punishment. In this last consists the true civil disobedience, that we ought never to trivialize because it is something too serious. I recall from the novelist Norman Mailer in his book The Armies of the Night, that the movement against the Vietnam War in the United States included, as a gesture of disobedience in solidarity with the burning of draft cards, a refusal of taxes. The idea was to challenge the state and declare oneself in complete rebellion before it until the withdrawal from Vietnam and the end of the murder of innocents. In the United States tax system, an action like this could be very visible because, unlike in our own in which the public administration concentrates its measures on collecting tax debts and the amount of tax crime is very high, there the consequences of not paying usually means winding up in jail. In such a way, authentic acts of tax rebellion are always treated, and not merely objection that aspires to be recognized by the system as a peaceful variety. It has nothing to do with some ridiculous poseur in the style of the bandit Fendetestas in El Bosque Animado. Nobody can protest against imperialism and the massive crimes of the system and then merely be satisfied with pilfering small change from the purse.

When certain citizens have committed radical acts of civil disobedience, of deep ethical and political significance, they have been able to run grave personal risks if there existed an energetic, organized movement that supported them and even had sufficient strength to challenge power. It is evident that today is not the point at which such western societies can be found, although with the indecency and the extent of the robbery, in a country with more than four million unemployed, one would think that we would live over a social volcano. However, this does not have to paralyze us.

How have we not put into place a broad-based campaign to propose to people that they pull their savings from the banks? Something that would be entirely legal, but that would truly shake the pillars of the system and that would probably stun more than one, even should we not bring many people on board right away. If we’re talking about civic opposition, with effective measures, to the delivering of billions of public money to Botín, let’s let him clear from the government the money that they have given, we are going to withdraw. How have occupation actions not spread to bank branches? In a meeting of social movements in 2006 at Complutense University in Madrid, economist Fernando Urruticoechea proposed encouraging property owners to sell, in order to stimulate the replacement of home ownership for renting, but also to cause a collapse in the housing market in order to unblock the infernal and corrupt economic platform that churned our national capitalism. If memory serves, among the social organizations that today make audacious apostleship for tax resistance are those that did not look kindly on this initiative.

There are many ways to oppose the iniquities of the world, many, save that of making a virtue of necessity and hiding our failures under the versatility of private conscience.

All of this has mostly confirmed for me that liberals are annoying the whole world over. That’s probably too hasty. Rodríguez and I just don’t start with the same assumptions is all.

If I believed, as he does, that people have a duty to contribute to the public good (as defined by whoever happens to be making decisions for the public), he would be right that I would be hypocritical to complain about my tax dollars not being spent on things I approve of, and he would be correct to warn me of the terrible implications of letting non-politically-correct people have the same rights of conscientious tax objection that I claimed for myself.

If I believed, as he does, that individualism and assertions of conscience are the tools of an evil neoliberal agenda, then I might heed his warning about the anti-collectivist assumptions behind conscientious objection.

As I don’t share these points of view with Rodríguez and the left/progressive audience he’s writing for, most of his arguments are lost on me. What remains is some critique of tax resistance as being largely ineffective and based on exaggerated assumptions about its influence on those in authority (which I suppose I can grant on some level), being more likely to result in reduced government spending on “the good stuff” than “the bad stuff” (which distinction impresses me less than he might think in any case), and being elitist to boot.

The elitism charge is because income tax resistance is an option mostly available to people who have enough income to owe income tax and who are in the relatively privileged position of not having income tax automatically deducted from their paychecks. Rodríguez bristles at the idea that those who owe more taxes can resist more taxes, which makes tax resistance a sort of “regressive” activism, I guess, that the rich can buy more of than the poor.

This strikes me as ludicrous. Of course, from the point of view of the resisters, a rich person isn’t getting away with more resistance by having more to resist so much as he is more badly complicit in the government’s misdeeds if he doesn’t resist and redirect, and so he has a stronger obligation to do so than most. Quite the opposite from what Rodríguez infers. And the idea that tax resistance is bad because it isn’t a universally-available option is just as silly. It’s like telling people they shouldn’t burn their draft cards because women and the elderly would be unable to fully participate in such a protest. (Notably, the protests Rodríguez himself champions — withdrawing your savings from banks and selling off your real estate — seem if anything even more susceptible to his “elitism” critique.)

Most challenging to me was Rodríguez’s attitude towards conscientious objection in general. He sees conscientious objection as a narcissistic substitute for effective political action:

I have never proposed as my principal goal for my social action to bring peace to my conscience but to change reality to make it less odious. I don’t want that I should be aloof from injustice, but that injustice not be committed. While I remain alive, I can’t stand aside. I don’t aspire that what I pay as my income tax does not go to military spending or to aid for bankers and speculators, but that military spending not increase and that aid not be given to bankers and speculators.

In this, Rodríguez is a sort of utilitarian anti-Thoreau. Thoreau was the great champion of conscientious objection — it’s not my duty, he said, to end injustice, but I must not myself behave unjustly:

It is not a man’s duty, as a matter of course, to devote himself to the eradication of any, even the 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.

But although I’m about as Thoreauvian as they come, I admit that Rodríguez’s position also has its attraction. I do sometimes feel the narcissistic pleasure of polishing up my conscience in the privacy of my own soul and then taking it down from the shelf from time to time to admire it some more, and at the same time I recognize that my opinion of my own conscience is of no value to anybody but myself, and nothing good can come of such a pastime but only reckless pride and stupid self-satisfaction.

It is good to have clean hands, but there are better things to do with them than to admire them.

But it’s not as though Rodríguez, with his more utilitarian approach, were thereby immune from self-satisfaction. It’s not as though he can think, “I am willing to debase myself, to take on horrible moral burdens, if this is what it takes to make a better world.” I’m sure he sleeps well with his approach too, and has just as many opportunities to pat himself on the back. Truth is, I’m much more suspicious of the kind of self-congratulation I might engage in if I thought I was doing whatever-it-takes in pursuit of noble utilitarian ends, than I am about the dangers of an ascetic and aloof self-regarding virtue in the Thoreauvian mold.

The debate continues! These translations take me hours, as my Spanish is so rudimentary, so I don’t know how much longer I can keep up. Especially as the argument seems to be descending into hot, dark, flame war territory at this point (in this latest dispatch Rodríguez seems to mostly be restating the points in his first one, but in a heightened tone of indignation).

But anyway, here Ricardo Rodríguez responds to Pablo San José’s rejoinder to Rodríguez’s critique of tax resistance (translation mine):

Clarifications concerning tax resistance

Pablo San José has had the courtesy to respond to my critique of the tax resistance campaigns in an article that appeared, like mine, in Rebelión.

I would like to make some clarifications, with the promise that I will not bore readers with a new essay on this same subject:

1. The finding that I have poorly chosen the time for my writing, given that we find ourselves in the midst of tax season, depends, naturally, on what is your opinion about tax resistance. Mr. Pablo San José would have to admit the possibility that there are those who are not in accord with it, and that, for those who think thusly, tax season is the most opportune moment to express what they think.
2. It would be healthy some time for us to begin to respond without referring to prejudices of individual taste. As Don Pablo San José is not pleased by what I think, he pigeonholes me without reservation in the group that advocates “democratic centralism in the Leninist style” or, alternatively, in the camp of “eurocommunism” and those who have a blind faith in the State. Thereby I am grouped in the company of evil, making it much easier to continue your article drawing on the categories of “us” (the things we do, the risks we take, the antimilitarists) and “them” (the sectarian communists who do nothing and are limited to censuring the actions of others). Polemicizing in this way is very simple, but is not honest.
3. In no place in my writing do I equate the organizations that develop projects of social aid with private for-profit enterprises. I said it constitutes a “private safety net.” Depending on the case, not only do I admire such but have personally collaborated in it with my work, but I do argue that what we must aspire to is that the management of social services be public, because this is the only way to provide them with a guarantee of full justice and universality. It is commendable that there are groups of people disposed to mitigate the suffering of other human beings, but the ideal is that the community be collectively addressing the needs of everyone. My goal is that the State comes to vanish and be substituted by assemblies of citizens who take the fundamental decisions with the free and considered participation of all. To the extent that we are fighting for this utopia, the privatization of public services does not appear to me as the best road to take.
4. Concerning the question of elitism, I must have explained myself poorly and I will try to correct myself now:
   
   In a number of writings favorable to tax resistance that I have read, I have encountered two aspects related logically to each other. On the one hand is proposed an act of symbolic struggle against the militarism and other injustices of the system. On the other hand, is demanded that the right to object be recognized by Law as a civil right. But, clearly, when one requests to be able to exercise a right it is assumed that one is disposed to admit that others can exercise it with purposes different from yours, and when someone suggests a form of protest, it should give provision for what serves for other objectives when others see that it is a valid form of protest.
   
   Probably, Pablo San José is ignorant that there are other tax resistance campaigns, in particular one that promotes an important policy of the Catholic Church in opposition to abortion. You can find information about it at http://www.arbil.org/100fiscal.htm. I, as Pablo San José imagines, am a die-hard enemy of militarism and a partisan, on the other hand, of the right of women to make free decisions about motherhood; under no opinion are the ends of the two campaigns comparable. But the means is the same and the right that is claimed is to be able to carry out both. And truly in a democratic society that allows tax resistance, why can a citizen not claim that with “his” income tax payment public health practice of abortion is not to be funded? In fact, it is sufficiently improbable that the State will go so far as to admit that one may resist military spending, but it is not outrageous to imagine that, within their regulatory capacity, regional governments such as that of Madrid introduce at one time or other an option such as for abortion. In such a case, your movement has put forward an essential part of this argument’s arsenal.
   
   And here is where we touch on the core that Pablo San José mentions but on which he did not want to elaborate: individual liberty. In no place do I oppose it. That which I question is whether one can have the option to decide individually what the whole community can do with that which he contributes. I said, and I repeat, that such a claim is reactionary. If tax resistance became a recognized right, it would be economic capability that would determine the ability to have influence over collective decisions, and then we would not be facing a society of free and equal individuals. The absence of real democracy in the modern capitalist states must be overcome with the collective force of socially organized citizens, as much for a Leninist as for a follower of the beautiful ideas of Kropotkin. And if that is the goal, the methods are to point towards it, and not in the opposite direction. This is what I said.
   
   In regard to the concrete practice of resistance as a form of protest I also ought to explain something. I did not write that those who receive a refund are unable to resist, but that for them it is more difficult. Neither did I say that it is impossible for those who are not obligated to file, but that for such people the result of filing will not be a refund. It would be absurd for a person not obligated to file to file a return to pay (something that Pablo San José will know is not infrequent), put forward the income tax to pay that which he is not obligated to pay, and subtract the quantity for the resistance. Come on now, I say. And then I mentioned people so poor that they don’t pay income tax, independently from their obligation to file, but who pay a multitude of consumption taxes every day. That about “the more purchasing power, the more money can be redirected” (I did not use those words, so I don’t understand the quotation marks), was referring only to when the percentage-of-the-tax formula is used. I imagine that this latter will not be denied: whether or not the quantity is more important, it is mathematics that if you resist a percentage, in general the people with higher taxes will fail to pay more to the Treasury.
   
   But, to sum up, this again does not rebut the fundamental question, which is whether the power to protest or to decide be based on ones economic capacity, such that it would lock out from participation a particular number of citizens, perhaps a thousand or three million. Because of this, I think that it is elitist, it is the end that will come from the right to resist being legalized, and it is the means, because the means have adjusted to the ends. Authoritarianism is not the road to freedom, and economic exclusion is not the road to equality.
5. San José notes two inaccuracies in my article. He says, firstly, that it is not true that in at present it is recommended to appeal to the bitter end if the tax agency demands the unpaid amount. I am happy to be able to correct my error on this point, but I must clarify that an article published this week in Kaos en la Red and taken from the Diagonal speaks of continuing “with the protest, appealing to such demands (those from the tax agency) until exhausting all of the legal avenues”, without advancing prevention of the unfavorable consequences. By coming in one of the publications promoting resistance, I supposed that the information was correct.
   
   Secondly, San José asks for an explanation why in some tax returns with refunds the tax agency refunds the expected amount plus the resisted quantity. Well, the explanation is the same as that for tax returns where money is owed. The large-scale control of the correction of tax returns is computerized. There are a series of filters. Most of them are cross-checked with information provided to the agency by third parties, also filtered by increasing of the amount, or specific filters (for example, statements of death always contain information for claiming accreditation documentation of the endowment of the heirs from whom they charge a refund). If no computer filter catches the mismatch, from the low quantity or because it appears in an entry that does not conflict with any third-party data, the process continues its course: the tax return is validated without parallel output or recourse whether it is for a payment or a refund is requested. Only the returns flagged by the system are reviewed by staff and there isn’t an individual decision from a bureaucrat for each of these returns. But then, if Mr. San José wants to continue thinking of other possibilities, he may do so.
6. I’m not going to add more (and I have had enough already) about the proposals I protest. I get the feeling that I have not been understood very well, that historical allusions have been mixed in with that which I propose today, or the simple act of removing money from a bank account (an legal act that in principle carries no legal risk) is equated with the action of Enric Duran (that in fact I have supported).
   
   That which concerns me more is the small importance that appears to be given to taxes on the left. In this area, the ideological defeat is overwhelming. It may be said that a consumption or indirect tax that all citizens pay is equal with a tax that can have an effect on redistributing the wealth; that we don’t mind that great estates avoid tax, or that it carelessly brings us the incessant rewarding of the corporations with deductions from social security tax. I don’t say anywhere that the income tax is revolutionary; I say it is one of the few taxes that conserve some progressivity, and that if we choose to begin a campaign of protest with reasons legitimate in principle, it would be more careful that we do not give ammunition to our adversary for tightening the screws on the path to economic inequality. Of that there is more than enough, unfortunately.
   
   To me it seemed that this was sufficient reason to waste my insignificant time in offering my opinion. I have under my belt nearly twenty years of political and social militancy, collaborating in diverse campaigns, confident that not in this will I cede to Pablo San José. Always I give my opinion with sincerity and admit that I may be wrong. But never have I tolerated from anyone, nor am I going to tolerate, that I am required to selflessly toe the party line in order to have the right to do so. Neither will I, for my part, require that from anyone else.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• We tend to think of the IRS mainly as the government’s tool for taking money from us, but these days it’s also one of the primary ways the government distributes money to people and corporations. Naturally, freelance crooks would like to get their hands on some of this officially stolen loot, and so I’m seeing more and more reports of organized tax fraud — the numbers after the dollar-sign, the number of people involved, and the brazenness of the schemes all seems to be increasing, as more people think, “the government bailed out the big guys — why not me?” Alas, many of these schemes involve filing fraudulent returns using someone else’s identity, then cashing in the “refund.” In such cases, the IRS tends to react by sending its enforcement branch after the victim of the identity-theft. Elaine Silvestrini of the Tampa Tribune listened well to some of these victims recently and found they were telling “maddening stories of fighting a seemingly malevolent bureaucracy whose employees were unaccountable and either overwhelmed, incompetent or rude.”
• The government of Spain recently amended the country’s constitution for the first time since 1992 in order to mandate deficit-cutting austerity measures and to give the repayment of government debt priority over other spending. There have been widespread protests, and one group has called on Spaniards to “exercise the right of rebellion.” The constitutional amendment, they say, was “dictated by international capital and enacted behind the backs of the people” (translation mine):

  Our commitment is to the common good, and for this reason, following our legitimate duty as citizens, we declare ourselves rebels to the constitution, insurrectionary to the State, and disobedient to all authority that it represents. For this reason we declare ourselves citizens of the popular assemblies and the assemblies of postcapitalist projects in which we participate. It is in this way that we exercise our sovereignty.

  We pledge to do everything that is in our power to construct a new, popular power that enables a new society where the decisions will be actually realized by the people.

  We understand that after the great outpouring of indignation the best way to regain our dignity is by means of rebellion.

  We understand that with our dignity comes our ability to disobey laws that are unjust and/or contrary to the benefit of the people.

  Therefore, we commit ourselves to the call to begin and extend an action of complete tax resistance against the Spanish state and those who control it, with consequent action to demonstrate that we will not pay “their debts,” because we do not recognize this constitution. A tax resistance that serves to fund the popular assemblies, and from these, giving “absolute priority” to participatory funding of the resources that we really consider public.

  Because the situation that we are experiencing in the Spanish state is common to many countries worldwide, and because the ruling economic powers are global, we encourage human beings around the world to assert their right of rebellion by means of manifestos like this.

  Tax resistance was one of the civil disobedience strategies that raised India to independence from the British Empire; now it may be a key strategy for the independence of all from global capitalism.

  We have already passed the stage of indignation, now we are a new insurgent fellowship!

  I like the sound of that a lot more than anything I’m hearing coming out of the Wall Street protests these days.
• Matt Yglesias penned a sobering speculation that one result of the difficulty the United States has had in coming up with a way to deal with its prisoners of war that is not medieval in its barbarity, is that now it prefers just to assassinate — finding a “take no prisoners” policy easier on the reputation.

Half a million copies of a radical tabloid called ¡Rebelaos! (“Revolt!”) have hit the streets across Spain. It advocates resisting the forces that would surrender the governing and looting of Spain to foreign bankers by creating bottom-up, autonomous government outside of the existing establishment structure. The Spanish state has abandoned the Constitution, they say, so why don’t we abandon them?

Prominent among their proposals is mass tax resistance (my translation):

Tax resistance as a strategy of rebellion

As has been explained earlier, civil disobedience is a fundamental tool for raising popular empowerment on the path to autonomy.

While the progressive privatization of everything public continues, while the economic crisis is blamed for the lack of resources, while public money is pilfered in the interests of those in high places, the real public projects on which we are working on the ground often suffer from the lack of those necessary resources. To reverse this situation, it is necessary to derive a significant amount of those resources by direct means and through tax resistance.

Therefore, with this publication, we call for the initiation and expansion of a tax resistance campaign aimed at the Spanish state and its institutions, with follow-up actions to demonstrate that we will not pay their debts because they do not recognize this constitution. Tax resistance serves to nourish our autonomous assemblies, and from these, gives absolute priority to the participatory financing of those resources that we consider truly public.

Tax resistance in your tax return, step by step

This is a proposal for people who are filing a tax return in 2012, and we want to extend this for successive years.

To declare yourself as a tax resister presumes filing a tax return, and it is no use to say you don’t: if you work for someone else, your company still pays your taxes directly to the state. At this point, you have the option of declaring yourself a tax resister because of all of the budget items with which you do not agree, and to reclaim your taxes by means of a tax return.

This is a manageable option for people who want or need to continue participating in the formal economy, and therefore cannot afford fines or anything of that sort. This is a proposal inspired by war tax resistance, which for years has successfully operated in Spain, acting in this way towards the 6% of the tax statement that corresponds to military spending. In this case, we would increase the percentage by adding other items that we also consider unjust.

You can choose these items according to your own criteria, or you can join in the proposed tax resistance campaign launched by Derecho de Rebelión (Right of Rebellion), which will be 25% of your taxes, a total of €363 billion (which was the 2011 budget and is valid for 2012 as long as no others are approved).

Steps to follow:

1. On tax day, it is advisable not to accept the draft tax return that is sent to you by the tax office, because there may be an error in the data, probably in your favor.
2. It is often not desirable to refrain from filing if you have not earned above the tax line. Even if you do not reach the minimum, it is important that you do the calculations, because very likely you will have a refund (they have to return money to you). Only if you are below the minimum and have not paid anything accordingly does it pay off not to file.
3. The tax return must be done by hand or with the PADRE program. [“PADRE” is an acronym that stands for, in English, something like “tax filing assistance software,” but as a word literally means “father” — ♇] Box 752 is where to put whatever tax resistance percentage you will. When you go to pay, that percentage will be deducted; when you get your refund, that percentage is the amount you will be refunded.
4. On completing the return, it is necessary to deposit the amount of tax resisted in the account of the collective or assembly of your choice. This must be through a nonprofit entity (cooperative, association, or foundation).
5. Then you just fill out a tax resistance card directed to the Treasury Department, which you attach to the return along with proof of your deposit to the group you chose. You can download this form from www.derechoderebelion.net or go to the links on tax resistance listed on the site, some of them linked to fiscal disobedience offices.
6. Finally, it is important that the tax resistance action does not remain an individual act between you and the Treasury, so provide the information about your resistance to the fiscal disobedience office nearest you. It is very important to know the number of people that have done it, and that is why we encourage you to fill out the tax resistance census form, which you will find on the same web site.

Ways to avoid the value-added tax

There are a variety of ways open to a person, a company, or a cooperative, to stop paying the value-added tax (VAT) to the state, and to dedicate the payment to an autonomous project. Some of these are:

• If you are tapped to pay the VAT, declare a smaller amount than would apply, and with that finance an assembly or project of your choosing. To justify the lower payment, you must collect various invoices in your name. These invoices can do for you in various ways without compromising the legal cover of your action.
• If you know that your company is going out of business, instead of paying the state, you can begin to redirect these quantities (or part of them that you choose) to the assemblies in your area or to an autonomous project that inspires you.
• If you want to continue in business and you need a way to continue this process perpetually, a solution may be to open and close your business every three or four years. In this way, when the Treasury is after you to collect the VAT, the company would be insolvent and you would have created another.
• If you are a member of a non-profit cooperative or entity that declares VAT, you can ask for an invoice for your personal expenses with the taxpayer identification number of this entity, and give those invoices in order to have them deducted from your taxes and to not have to pay VAT.
• If after joining all the invoices of your autonomous cooperative together you are left owing, you can invoice the cooperative to which you dedicate your volunteer time with your personal taxpayer identification number. Simply after receiving the money, donate it back to the same cooperative.

Total tax resistance in order to declare bankruptcy

This technique consists of stopping all payment on the income tax, the value-added tax, and/or all of those for which you can, as a preliminary step to declaring bankrupcty. Since tax refusal is only a criminal offense starting at €120,000 per year, there is much margin for refusal without criminal liability, and in order to exit the system by supporting a comprehensive and massive process of social autonomy.

In addition, by means of your personal action you can support other companies and cooperatives that are not insolvent, generating invoices for them to add to their accounts. Remembering always that such invoices must be real and deposited in a bank account. Above all, we caution that your sense of responsibility and the destiny of the money are the key on which is based the ethics of any action of this type.

From tax resistance to fiscal autonomy

Some of the methods we provide on this page are similar to the disreputable methods that some people use for self-interested and other dubious reasons. If these methods also form part of our proposals it is because the 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.

To advance this process, you can sign up with the form at http://derechoderebelion.net/adhesiones-de-lasasambleas, which aims to enlist the assemblies that are committed to fiscal autonomy.

In other news, while activists on the American left seem most interested in getting corporations and rich people to pay more taxes, in Europe more such activists are asking “why are any of us still paying taxes to these crooks when we know we can put the money to better use than they can?”

Last month I mentioned the tax resistance & redirection campaign launched under the ¡Rebelaos! banner and organized by Derecho de Rebelión.

I’m happy to report that the Spanish war tax resistance movement is lending support to this new movement. Arcadi Oliveres spoke at a conference on economic resistance over the weekend “concerning military spending and resistance to militarism by means of tax resistance.”

They’re also working on a tax resisters’ handbook. You can read a draft PDF on-line.

Meanwhile, in a separate tax resistance campaign, some Catalan separatists have started paying their federal taxes into the Catalan treasury instead of submitting the money to the central Spanish government.

A bit more about the contemporary Spanish tax resistance movements:

They Encourage Objection on the Tax Return

A campaign promotes tax resistance against the Spanish debt

With fertile soil in the cuts in public services and the long shadow of the economic bailout, a campaign of fiscal rebellion by means of not paying the national debt and other expenses in the tax return is falling like an April shower among the “indignants” — a proposed “mass civil disobedience” that, as its promoters explain, consists of “redirecting taxes to autonomously funded local popular assemblies, such as have emerged in many populations in the wake of 15-M.” But how?

As was explained to the El Confidencial by volunteers and advisors of the office of economic disobedience recently opened in Madrid, which have clones in Barcelona, Castellón, and Zaragoza, it is “a proposal inspired by war tax resistance, which has for years been working with success, taking this action with 6% of the taxes that correspond to military spending. So, in this case, it would increase the percentage by adding other items that we also consider unjust,” principally the payment of the national debt and interest, which exceed 20% of the income tax, according to their calculations. “The interest expense and amortization of debt will be about 25% of the budget, while health, education, and culture together do not reach half of that amount,” they lament from the Madrid office.

The items proposed are the amount for the national debt (14.58% from amortization and 8.48 from interest), defense (2.21%), national police, national guard, payments for the monarchy, senate, prisons, and church. Luis Torres, a 15-M activist, is one of those who have decided to sign on to this new protest. “I do not want a part of my tax to go to a number of items with which I do not agree, such as military spending or the illegitimate Spanish debt and the interest associated with it.” Maite Blasco, also a 15-M activist, intends to become a tax resister because “I do not agree with sending my taxes to pay for the national debt while dismantling health and education. Instead, I prefer to finance with my money relevant projects that can transform this world.”

The destiny of undeclared taxes

The tax resisters will file their tax returns while withholding the percent of such payments, or filing for refunds of money for “all of those things that you do not agree with paying for with your taxes.” Every resister will add this money in the account of a social project or group of his or her choice, specifying it on the tax return and attaching the receipt as “income from tax resistance 2012.” The advisors from the fiscal disobedience office are surprised at the great interest generated.

In the tax resistance manual, financed jointly by a crowdfunding platform, it is recommended to send your money to projects close at hand so that citizens can directly monitor their development.

In the web page where it has launched the initiative is recommended a list of related autonomous projects. The option chosen by both Luis Torres and Maite Blasco is to send 25% of their taxes to the Comprehensive Cooperative of Madrid. Both emphasize the capacity of this project to “cover all of the needs of people, economic and social, regardless of what happens in the capitalist State. Also, it is a good initiative that can salvage a portion of the population that is marginalized by the current economic system, parada y precrarizada [I don’t know how to translate that –♇]”

Legal Consequences

The advisors in the Madrid office at Number 8, General Lacy street (next week a second office will open at Embajadores street) do not hide their surprise at “the great interest that has been generated” and the numerous inquiries received during the past weeks, although it “is the first year that the campaign has launched.” The most frequent questions have to do, firstly, “with the legal risks involved and how to avoid them,” and, secondly, “with the process.”

The possibility of facing financial penalties and of repaying the amount “defrauded” is a possibility, but does not appear to intimidate the resisters. These are based on a judicial ruling in which was exempted the payment of interest on resisted military taxes on the grounds that “there was no intention to defraud, but to send this money to other projects,” explains one of the advisors who prefers to remain anonymous.

Maite Blasco, who says he is waiting to receive his income statement in order to begin his protest campaign, is conscious that “there may be penalties that the Treasury will return to claim the amount donated to social projects.” However, should this occur, he believes that it would not be so bad because “it will put the problem on the table and will make clear that the debt is not legitimate.”

Strategy: short, medium, and long term

Luis Torres paints two future scenarios after the end of the campaign. “If it is a minor thing and does not attract many people it will get swept under the rug, the Treasury will not make a big deal about it, and this money will succeed in financing many social causes. If on the other hand, the ball gets rolling and this becomes a bigger deal, not in this fiscal year but the next, public opinion will bring out the reasons why we do not want to cover these illegitimate expenses”

The information offices are conducting a census of tax resisters, but “as far as the first year we have made some mistakes and some people are reluctant to give their personal data,” say those responsible. In any case, they hope that each year the number of tax resisters will grow and that “the locals will be open all year ’round and not only during the campaign, in order to inform people and to continue raising consciousness.”

The stated objective in the medium-term would be that “the State does not pay to satisfy and fatten the business of banks and other financial speculators, more money than that which they have seen themselves ‘forced’ to cut from various budget items.” While with these and other actions they intend to generate, in the long term, a transition to a “social empowerment in the face of the predatory capitalist model in which we live.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Greek being Greek to me, I had to rely on Google Translate to get the gist of this page, but that gist seems to be that the Greek “won’t pay” movement and the Spanish “indignants” movement are starting to coordinate and share tactics.
• One of the ideas I’m toying with for organizing my possibly upcoming book on historical and global examples of tax resistance campaigns is in terms of “gambits” — tactics and counter-tactics commonly used in the course of such campaigns. Here’s an example. In New York, it costs $6 less to cross the George Washington Bridge if you’re a “carpool” than if you’re not. So people started doing informal ride-shares, where people who needed rides would hitchhike near the bridge, and drivers wanting to avoid the excess toll would pick them up. But this cut into the Port Authority of New York’s revenue from the bridge tolls, so they sent the police out to ticket drivers who picked up such hitchhikers — in spite of there being no law against doing so. This extra-legal police harassment helps protect a government revenue stream and discourages resistance.
• Mike Gerber and Jon Schwarz penned a nice “Declaration of Independence” to celebrate the 4^th.
• William D. Hartung comments on our weird collective amnesia about the fact that a handful of nuclear-armed psychopaths are holding millions of lives in the balance.

Some more news about Spain’s tax resistance movement, translated from the Spanish:

“If the solution does not come from government, the people have to rely on themselves and seek alternatives.”

To depend less on “bad government.” This is the proposal that comes from the Office of Economic Disobedience from Legazpi, in Madrid, a center that opened in July to help people self-manage their economic activity and conduct federal income tax resistance.

The Offices of Economic Disobedience emerged from the first economic protest meeting that was held in Zaragoza, organized by the creators of these centers on July 14 and 15. Currently they exist in Zaragoza, Barcelona, Madrid (in Legazpi and Lavapiés), Ávila, Castellón, Sevilla, and Mallorca.

What’s up?

The Office of Economic Disobedience in Legazpi, in Madrid, opened in late July. Its activity has centered up to now on tax season, as assemblies, cooperatives, platforms, and people have come here in search of information and advice on that topic. “People don’t know how to resist taxes for military spending, payments on the national debt, or for the church and monarchy,” says Reme, head of the Madrid office.

The reform of the VAT has generated activity in the center, but, in this case, the questions come from entrepreneurial people interested in self-management. “They don’t only want to complain; they want to know what they can do for themselves,” explains Reme, “since the aim is to depend less and less on bad government.”

The center is very interested in education, that is to say teaching methods that will produce a change in consciousness. To this end, various Offices of Economic Disobedience are going to conduct meetings to raise awareness in interested parties about how self-management and economic disobedience function. For now, they disseminate their activities in 15-M assemblies and on other days, so that their message reaches more people.

Inquiries can be made by email, phone, and in person. People seeking information about how to develop their business via self-management or who want to resolve their tax questions, can come on Tuesdays to the center found in their city. Up to now, the Office in Legazpi has assisted about fifty people.

Lines of action

The activity principally centers on two activities: tax resistance and self-management.

Tax resistance consists of calculating the amount you wish to object to before filling out your tax return. This amount should be the portion of the federal budget that is allocated to the Senate, the debt, military spending, the Church, and the monarchy. “We suggest resisting 25% although it is common for the amount to be around 10%,” says the head of the Madrid Office.

The amount that is resisted should be redirected to a project that is developing a non-profit organization. In order to finish the operation, the person who does it should send a letter that explains the motives for objection and the check corresponding to the resisted taxes to the chosen organization.

Self-management centers on developing a business outside the regulations established by the State. “In times of hardship, if no solution comes from the hands of Government, the people must rely on each other and search for alternatives. The problem is that we have become accustomed to being told what to do, and this must change,” Reme thinks.

Though existing law includes measures that protect self-management, the problem is that nobody is informed of or taught about this option, explained the head of the Office. Cooperatives are the option most suited for self-managing, since this scheme results in less state control and its structure is based on a partnership, where the organization is more cohesive and less hierarchical.

The Office of Economic Disobedience wants to promote the common good, trying different options and experimenting with new proposals. As Reme explains, “economic disobedience needs to be done in order not to follow the commands set out in unjust laws.”

Future actions

The Office of Economic Disobedience prepares various projects for the coming months, like an informative talk that summarizes all of the information for tax season this year, or the creation of a local self-management network.

This self-management network will include urban gardeners, free stores, time-banks or food-banks, etc. Also, this project can develop initiatives related to the use of free [“libres y gratuitas”] energies, among others. The object of the Office is to construct an “bubble” independent of public power in which there is the minimum number of middlemen between the producer and the consumer.

Questions raised by people who come into the Office also can lead to other projects. The Office is studying how one can develop a business or receive any kind of income when one does not want a bank account. They are also learning about actions against bank fraud, as with the complaint that was recently lodged against Bankia by some collectives.

They are developing outreach strategies through different channels. One of these is Mapunto, a web page that contains a map of social movements that are being developed in Spain. Here they set out the Offices of Economic Disobedience that exist in the country and the available ways to get in contact with them.

When you’re trying to expand the ranks of tax resisters in your campaign, you need good educational tools. People are often reluctant to resist either because they aren’t sure how to go about it, or because they only have a vague idea of the likely consequences (and so are likely to exaggerate their frightfulness).

When NWTRCC conducted a survey of non-resisting anti-war activists a few years back, the most popular answer to the question “Which resources would help you decide to participate [in a tax resistance campaign]?” was: “clear idea of likely consequences” and the two top responses to the question about “the most important reason you have not done war tax resistance” were “fear legal consequences” and “need more information.”

People like to stick with the familiar, and if you ask them to take a jump into the unknown, they will imagine the worst as a way to justify their reticence. If you can be clear, thorough, and credible in demonstrating how to resist and what the consequences are likely to be, you can eliminate the biggest obstacle to the growth of your campaign.

This is easier said than done, however. It can be difficult to be clear and thorough if you are going up against a tax agency that is arbitrary or that changes its rules suddenly, and it can take time to establish credibility.

Today I’ll give a few examples of how tax resistance campaigns have dispelled ignorance about tax resistance.

• Ethel Ayers Purdie ran what she called the “Women Taxpayer’s Agency” and counseled British women’s suffrage activists both on how to best resist their taxes on no-taxation-without-representation grounds, and on how they could exploit legal quirks to avoid taxes (for instance, archaic laws that made husbands wholly legally liable for their wives’ taxes). She also published a pamphlet about that particular legal quirk, which concluded:

  Many married women, including leading actresses, doctors, titled women, business women, and various others having property, businesses, investments, &c., or being in receipt of salaries, have succeeded in demonstrating their non-taxability, and thereby involved the Revenue in a total loss of the tax illegally charged on them.

  Members of the Women’s Tax Resistance League regularly gave lectures on their tactic of choice at suffragist meetings, and thereby recruited new resisters.
• The American war tax resistance group NWTRCC publishes a number of specialized how-to pamphlets that cover various techniques of tax resistance (such as refusing to file, filing and refusing to pay, living on a non-taxable income) and strategies for coping with possible consequences (such as government collection efforts). They also have a nationwide network of people who offer one-on-one counseling sessions for potential resisters or for current resisters who are running into snags. Local groups in the network periodically run workshops at which people can come to learn about the variety of war tax resistance methods and ask questions of people who have experience with them.
• The current tax resistance movement in Spain, which has its roots in the war tax resistance movement there but which has expanded to a broader anti-government pro-autonomy critique, recently published half a million copies of a tabloid that included its call to resist alongside some practical instruction on how to go about resisting both the pay-as-you-earn income tax and the value-added tax.
• American constitutionalist, “show-me-the-law”-style tax protest often spreads by means of workshops run by self-styled experts who have discovered or invented new (and increasingly baroque) legal arguments that prove that most people are not legally liable to pay the federal income tax. Although these arguments don’t typically stand up in court, they are sufficiently credible to the lay audience that they can convince many people to begin resisting. For example, in the early 1980s, an epidemic of tax protest swept General Motors plants in Flint, Michigan, as thousands of employees there told GM to stop withholding income tax from their salaries after they attended seminars or listened to lectures on tape from the tax protester group “We The People ACT.”



• Resisters to Thatcher’s Poll Tax gained confidence thanks to the efforts of the Poll Tax Legal Group which, among other things, “produced over 30 accessible legal bulletins on the Poll Tax and a book called To Pay or Not To Pay.” To combat the threat of property seizure — often the threat itself was enough to intimidate people into stopping their resistance — the movement made efforts to educate the public about the seizure process and about ways to frustrate it:

  [T]he first task of Anti-Poll Tax Unions was to inform people about what the bailiffs could and couldn’t do. In Scotland, people were advised not to tell the sheriffs where they worked, not to tell them which banks they used, and not, under any circumstances, to let them into their houses. They were also told to inform the local group as soon as the sheriffs threatened anything. The Anti-Poll Tax Unions advised people to move possessions to local friends’ houses before the date of the poinding and offered to help with the moving. People were told to leave their cars well away from their homes. They were informed that a wrongful poinding could be appealed against and, in many cases, this was done successfully. People were also told how to avoid bailiff action by signing away their possessions to people who lived outside of the area or, preferably, to their children. There are now young children who technically own all of their parents’ possessions.

  Some local law centres went onto the offensive against the bailiffs, providing information to the public, which totally undermined their actions. One morning in May 1991, the bailiffs delivered over 4,000 intimidation notices to people throughout Bristol. By 7:30 a.m. the law centre had heard about this and contacted all local radio stations. By 8:00 p.m. the news bulletins which went out every fifteen minutes, reported:

  Today bailiffs have delivered notices for payment to over 4,000 people in Bristol. A spokesperson from the law centre said that they were illegal and should be ignored.

  So most people ignored them.

• The Bardoli satyagraha depended on regular distribution of news bulletins from campaign headquarters to the scattered villages of the province, to make sure everyone was on the same page about strategy, and to counteract government propaganda and rumor. These also came to be powerful propaganda tools to affect Indian opinion outside of the resisting region:

  A campaign like this could not be carried on without a publicity department. The peasants could not be asked to subscribe to daily papers or even to the weekly Navajivan, and outside papers could at best give an outside view of the campaign. A publicity office was therefore opened with Sjt. Jugatram Dave at its head. With an artist’s pen and with a knowledge of the whole taluka [district] at his fingertips, he took to this work like a duck to water. The arrangement was to issue a daily news bulletin and publish Sjt. Vallabhbhai’s speeches in pamphlet form and to distribute them free to the agriculturists all over the taluka: For four or five days cyclostyled [mimeograph-like] copies were issued, but arrangement was soon made to get them printed daily at Surat, and a start was made with 5,000 copies. The arrangement answered most admirably, the villagers waiting anxiously for the patrikas every morning and devouring the contents with avidity. All the Gujarati and almost all the English dailies of Bombay reproduced them verbatim, and as the movement gathered force, every important town and village in Gujarat began to get copies of the bulletin with the result that over and above ten thousand copies distributed in Bardoli, four thousand copies were subscribed to by places outside.

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 1907 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 2010. 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 1894 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 1906, 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 1848, 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.”

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Here’s some more good stuff about the guerrilla electricians in the Greek Δεν Πληρώνω (“Won’t Pay”) movement who reconnect the power to people who have had their electricity cut off for failure to pay the new taxes. The article claims that the movement has successfully, and quite illegally, relit a thousand Greek homes in this way.
• A Huffington Post columnist covers Americans who are renouncing their citizenships to get out from under the IRS.
• Francisco José Sarrión Torres reports on the activities of the Tax Resistance Group of Ciudad Real [Spain]: “This year we wrapped up the war tax resistance campaign with no refunds redirected to two-thirds of the tax resisters in Ciudad Real. It has been reclaimed as though it were an error, but we have already stated publicly and in writing that it was not, but was an exercise of conscientious objection in the face of the misuse of our taxes by the government. We have redirected €870 to organizations like Ecologists in Action of Ciudad Real, the 0.7% Project of the Rural Christian Movement, the Anselmo Lorenzo Foundation, or Doctors Without Borders, from believing that these are some that actually contribute to progressing toward a peaceful world.”
• Carlos Lopez has an article on tax resistance up at the Euribor blog. Some excerpts, translated from Spanish:

  …there are reasons to protest, most of us understand that the national books have been cooked and since we are shackled with deep debt, the most workable, quick, and “EU-recommended” solution is budget cuts, to be prioritized in terms of their expendability — and it is here that most of us feel betrayed, by seeing how expendable the citizens are and how comparatively vital are the political class, who have barely changed their privileges.

  Lopez has decided to become a “social rat” — reducing his consumption as much as possible so as to avoid paying the value-added tax:

  …I declare a consumer strike, and I will get the most out of every cent I earn; I subscribe to “lonchafinismo” (responsible consumption). I’ll stretch out the time on my monthly contact lenses, I’ll cut my hair less, I’ll give up on going to the movies and watch films at home, I’ll stretch expiration dates, will drive more economically. Certainly the shops are not to blame, and I’m sorry for them, but if the government comes to realize that it [the VAT increase] is a useless measure, perhaps they will rethink it.

  He also recommends a few other methods of tax resistance. There were over a hundred comments on the article last I looked, many of them off-topic in the classic internet fashion, but giving some clue as to the reach of the article.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The emerging Spanish tax resistance movement, which combines the war tax resistance movement with a broader anti-austerity / community-autonomy focus, has put out a video (and has helpfully translated it into English for its overseas fans):

• An article about Catholic women activists included a note about war tax resistance in Italy that was news to me (translation mine):

  War tax resisters and peace activists in war zones

  In the 1980s, in Italy, Beati Costruttori Della Pace [“blessed are the peacemakers”] was born. While it is not an exclusively female organization, it emphasizes the participation of women. At its creation, religious people were involved who were motivated by war tax resistance. Instrumental at its launch was a document defending this practice signed in the Fall of 1985 by Lorenzo Belloni, bishop of Trieste and president of the Peace & Justice Commission, and by ten thousand laypeople and five thousand nuns, monks, and priests. All of them pledged to practice and spread war tax resistance. The founding document says: “peace is central to the Church if it wants to remain faithful to the risen Christ. Peace cannot be delegated but is entrusted to each person in everyday life.” This association, in addition to war tax resistance, has organized nonviolent intervention marches in war zones like Sarajevo, Kivu, or Ramallah. It also promotes campaigns against the manufacture of landmines, nuclear energy, and military bases on Italian soil.

• The Historic Ipswich Massachusetts blog pointed out that the Ipswich post office has a mural representing an assembly of colonial Americans debating how they would resist taxes that had been illegally imposed by Governor Andros:

  This act of resistance has been called “the foundation of American Democracy,” and was the beginning of a series of events which eighty-eight years later culminated in the Revolutionary War. The act of opposition is commemorated in the seal of the town of Ipswich, which bears the motto, “The Birthplace of American Independence 1687.”

  In 1687 John Andrews was chairman of the selectmen, the town clerk was John Appleton and the minister at Chebacco Parish was the popular John Wise. They met with other town leaders to discuss the command of crown-appointed governor Sir Edmond Andros and his council that a new tax be assessed on the king’s subjects. A town meeting was hastily organized the next day which voted that “no taxes should be Levied upon the Subjects without consent of the Assembly chosen by the Freeholders.” For this act Rev. Wise, John Andrews, John Appleton, Samuel Appleton, William Goodhue, Robert Kinsman, and Thomas French were arrested and tried before the court in Boston. They were severely handled, imprisoned for several weeks and fined. Sam Appleton refused to give the bond and was kept a prisoner from November to March under very harsh conditions.

  A group of provincial militia and citizens gathered in Boston on April 18, 1689 and arrested several dominion officials as well as members of the Church of England who were suspected of sympathizing with the administration. Major Samuel Appleton was among the men who helped escort Andros to Castle Island in Boston Harbor as a prisoner. Leaders of the former Massachusetts Bay Colony then reclaimed control of the government, rescinded the tax order, and Andros was shipped back to England. Rhode Island and Connecticut resumed governance under their earlier charters as well.

Say… what’s going on with the tax resisters in Spain these days? There are two active tax resistance campaigns that I know about: one is a sort of expanded war tax resistance campaign that has grown to include a critique of centralization and of austerity budgets that favor international bankers over taxpayers and citizens; the other is part of a Catalan independence movement that is upset that the region is paying far more in taxes to the central government than it receives in government benefits and services.

The first of these groups is updating their “Right of Rebellion” manifesto for the coming tax year and is fine-tuning the way in which they encourage people to redirect their tax money from the central government to local, autonomous social welfare projects. They are also continuing to staff “economic disobedience offices” to give face-to-face advice to resisters.

Something that’s new to me is that they’re promoting something they call “Desobediència Integral” (Comprehensive Disobedience):

Comprehensive disobedience involves breaking the social contract with the state of the territory where you live, in order to make a new social contract with a community in which the individual feels really connected.

This campaign has provoked a backlash from that portion of the left that sees the central government as an important part of its program and is threatened by proposals to weaken it. An organization called the “Grupo de Trabajo Economía Sol” (Sun Economy Working Group) made the following criticisms:

• If people withhold taxes from the government, the government will probably begin cutting the budgets of education, health, and social welfare programs before those of the more objectionable parts of the government.
• The law now requires Spain to make debt payments a priority over social spending, so if you reduce tax revenue, you do nothing to fix the problem of illegitimate debt, but only hurt recipients of social spending.
• Tax revenue should be managed by the people as a whole, and not by small groups on a local scale. The projects proposed as recipients for tax redirection may be nice, but they are lacking in transparency and in democratic control.

Meanwhile, the Tortoise Antimilitarist Group is ramping up its more traditional war tax resistance campaign.

In the second of these campaigns, some 650 municipalities in Catalonia have decided not to forward the taxes they withhold from their employees (and certain other taxes they administer) to the central government in Madrid, but instead to give the money to the Catalan Tax Agency. This is something of a symbolic measure as the Catalonian government itself sends this money along to Madrid, but the rebellious towns see this as an opening gambit in a series of measures it hopes will lead to increased Catalan independence.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The campaign to get people and institutions in Catalonia to redirect their Spanish federal taxes to the Catalan regional government continues to pick up steam. About a dozen companies and a dozen more municipalities are participating in the redirection campaign, and they were recently joined by three members of congress: Alfred Bosch, Joan Tardà, and Teresa Jordà. The campaign seems to be largely symbolic, as the current policy of the Catalan tax office is just to re-redirect such taxes back to the federal treasury. This also means that the federal government has not felt any urgent need to take reprisals against the redirectors. I get the feeling the redirecters hope to change this policy, and hope that when they do, people will already be in the habit of sending their taxes to the regional agency.
• The IRS snafu, in which some agency personnel improperly gave extra scrutiny to TEA Party groups that had filed for recognition as non-electioneering 501(c)4 “social welfare” groups, has turned public opinion strongly against the tax agency.
• If you’d like to catch up on the interesting autonomist tax resistance movement in Spain, and its “Offices of Economic Disobedience”, and you’re up on your español, you might take a listen to Barrio Canino’s Radio Ágora Sol show.

While I was busy going through Friends Journal back issues, I didn’t attend much to tax resistance news in the here-and-now, so I’ll try to give a recap today of some of the news about international tax resisters that caught my notice:

Spanish war tax resisters

The Spanish magazine Números Rojos published an article about tax resisters there. Excerpts (translation mine):

And you, have you been obedient?

Since the fall into hell of the American financial giant Lehman Brothers in September of 2008, international banks have received injections of public money coming from various governments to the tune of $4.6 trillion, an amount sufficient to eradicate world hunger 92 times over. This embarrassing data forms part of an investigation from Arcadi Oliveres, professor of Applied Economics at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and president of the organization Justícia i Pau (“Justice and Peace”). Oliveres was, 30 years ago, one of the originators of the first tax resistance initiative organized in our country. He decided, in defiance of the Law, but favoring his conscience, not to contribute to the government’s military spending. He became a tax resister. Today, for reasons like the data cited above, many citizens have begun processes of resistance that involve new ways to use their money.

Those first war tax resisters of the 80s opened a new path for the honorable citizen. It was not meant to trick the Treasury so as to keep the money. The taxpayer challenged the collector, and questioned the legitimacy of the spending they considered immoral. In the absence of ethical behavior from the state, the good citizen, they argued, did not have to obey it. “The people are afraid to disobey, but if nobody had done so before there would still be slaves on the streets and blacks would be standing in the back of the bus,” Oliveres told Números Rojos. The professor took as model conscientious objectors who refused to do compulsory military service in the 70s and 80s: “For not wanting to do their military year and a half they were sent to prison for three years, even to penal colonies in the Sahara. They had no fear; for this reason they were so important.” That struggle is won — compulsory military service was abolished in Spain on 31 December 2001 — though war tax resistance, which began to be practiced in 1982 continues to be considered illegal evasion.

Calculating the Deduction

The process of becoming a tax resister is very simple, although there is no fixed rule. It amounts to adding to your tax return a new deduction of x euros, corresponding to your personal contribution to government military spending. But the calculation of this option can have a variety of sources: some people estimate military spending in the total federal budget each year and apply this percentage directly as a deduction on their return (between 6–15%, depending on which items are considered military spending). Others take as their reference the data suggested each year by antimilitarist platforms (last year military spending of €666.14 per person was calculated). And others redirect a fixed amount each year from the taxes owed on their return (traditionally €84). Then, depending on how the final result changes, the objector may have to pay less to the Treasury than is owed — if it is positive — or may recover more money from the Treasury than it has to pay — if it is negative.

In either case, before filing, the objector has already redirected the amount he or she does not accept as legitimate government spending to an institution for social good — whichever the objector wants, although there are lists of groups to contribute to. Of course, the reasons for resisting are specified on the return itself, and also communicated to the tax agency at the time of filing. But what happens next? “if it comes out negative, you will claim an amount from the Treasury, which is not returned to you, and generally that’s that. But when it is positive, you neglect to pay a part. In this case, it may be that nothing happens — according to Ecologists in Action, in 90% of cases the incident goes undetected — but the tax agency may come after you and end up levying not only the amount you refused to pay but also an administrative penalty,” Oliveres said.

With exceptions, like in 2006 when the Supreme Court of Catalonia found in favor of the former Catalonia Parliament deputy Joan Surroca, who in 1998 deducted from the amount that he had to pay in taxes a percentage corresponding to military spending and gave the money to an NGO that assists African women. The treasury then fined him 54,896 pesetas (€329), a penalty that Surroca appealed. Finally the court ruled in his favor by understanding that the offender, by sending his resisted taxes to an NGO, did not have the intent to profit from his action. A landmark judgment, but precise.

But how many pacifist tax resisters are there in Spain? It is difficult to calculate — not everyone who does it talks about it — but according to the associations and platforms associated with this movement there may be between 1,000 and 2,000 people each year: “the number is very stable, although there are sharp peaks in times of armed conflict when Spain is involved, as with the Iraq war,” explains Arcadi Oliveres. So in the fiscal 2003 campaign, it is estimated that at least 5,000 people became tax resisters. Today, the economic crisis has not produced a significant increase in antimilitarist objectors, “even allowing for awful data, like the fact that in 2011 the state spent €1,300 million to construct a combat aircraft, the same amount of money that it saved by freezing pensions.”

From pacifism to rebellion

In April 2012, the Right of Rebellion movement (www.derechoderebelion.net), with the help of more than €8,000 raised through a crowdfunding initiative, printed 5,000 copies of the “Manual of Economic Disobedience” (the 2013 edition is available on the web), a document intended, in its own words, “to all of those people who would like to take steps to make their lives exemplars of their thought and feeling.” So the group intended to “initiate and extend a campaign of tax resistance aimed at the Spanish state and at those who control it… to show that we will not pay their debts, because we do not recognize the existing Constitution or the existing puppet government of global financial capitalism…”

As the most important step of disobedience, the manual teaches the option of making a partial income tax resistance, similar to that of the war tax resisters, but including also deductions for such items as the amortization of public debt, the interest on the debt, payments for the monarchy, the Senate, the prisons, the police, or the church, until the total comes to almost 30% of the federal budget. The authors of the manual make it clear that the decision about what parts to deduct must be decided by the taxpayer, but suggest a standard 25% of what is on the return.

Offices of Disobedience

The goal of resistance is to divert money that doesn’t go to the Treasury to “autonomous projects that will be useful to meet the needs of the people.” After publishing its manual, and without much time to prepare, Right of Rebellion began organizing a series of Offices of Economic Disobedience in various cities around the nation, which learned about and advised anyone who was interested in becoming a tax resister in the tax resistance campaign of 2011. Although it is difficult to know the exact number of people who joined this campaign, the figures tossed about by different offices were very modest, not reaching even a hundred or so resisters. In spite of this, the constituents of the Office of Economic Disobedience in Lavapiés (Embajadores, 49; Madrid), considered the accounting “very positive”: “not so much with the economic level of project supported — just over €18,000 in total — but by, above all, the number of people, from all classes, who were interested in this issue.”

Meanwhile, as the tax season numbers are coming in, Right of Rebellion continues to promote other forms of disobedience, such as certain techniques of resistance to the VAT (in the declarations of independent companies or cooperatives), rent for people who have been evicted (preventing or indefinitely delaying the eviction), or bankruptcy (as freedom to carry out different actions). The ultimate goal would be an actual departure from the “official” economic system and the creation of new, alternative forms of living.

Integrated Cooperatives

The “Manual of Economic Disobedience” relies on a call for comprehensive cooperatives, “a legal form that allows construction of an arena of autonomous economic relations among the participants that is protected from public or private liability, and quite legally minimizes tax and social insurance liability, shielding as much as possible from the acts of the banks or government.” Furthermore, this new way of life permits “bankrupt or unemployed beings as people, according to the system and the existing legal framework, but at the same time to be able to live completely normally, working and consuming in an autonomous manner, without worrying about seizures of prior debts.” In short, a permanent economic disobedience, a collective evasion of the system clinging to a self-sufficient, multisectorial structure, where the members, involved to a lesser or greater extent, coexist and cooperate at the margin of the system. Indeed, the cooperatives possess a system of communal services, using alternative currencies and relying on self-financing social cooperatives to obtain credit without interest.

The Solidarity Scam

One of the major promoters of the Catalan Comprehensive Cooperative is Enric Durán. This activist burst into the limelight in September 2008 when he announced himself, in an article in the self-published Crisi, which had “stolen” €492,000 from the banks. Step by step, he described how he had taken out 68 different loans from 39 banks on various pretenses: to buy a car, renovate his house, etc. And how he had created a shell company and falsified documents to justify nonexistent income, in order that the credit control system would not detect its growing debt.

While the mainstream media were trumpeting his “exploit,” Enric fled to South America with €8,000 in his wallet. The rest had been given, as was explained in the manifesto, to autonomous social project. This action, whether described as financial disobedience or a solidarity con, sounded around the world and the press named its actor the “Robin Hood of banks.” Enric returned to take credit for the legitimacy of his action, and was imprisoned March to September 2009. He was finally released, though with a pending criminal trial that was to have been held last February. Enric failed to attend “because he doesn’t believe that the judicial system has standing to judge,” so the Provincial Court put out a bench warrant for him on 13 March. The prosecutor asked for an eight-year sentence, six for an ongoing offense of falsifying a commercial document, and two for criminal bankruptcy.

While eluding justice, Durán continues to vindicate resistance: “any act of insubordination is a welcome step, and although at first it may seem like an isolated action, it is from such small actions that we build a strategy with a long-term goal,” although clearly these processes are initially marginal, “historically risky actions, if they involve individual responsibility, are taken only by the minorities involved. The key is that these minorities are able to organize to better influence the majorities.”

Disobedience of the system

Other citizens who dissent from the economic relations imposed by the system, like the lawyer, writer, and expert on disobedience José Luis Carretero, do not understand the processes of economic disobedience as an “exit”: “you have to take a step toward disobedience, but not as an alternative to confrontation. You can’t get anything without an effective, mass confrontation.” Carratero has reservations about measures like tax resistance, “it has a very limited and token run. I get these dynamics if they are done with other actions, like the occupation of vacant housing for instance. In the short run, I think we should try to find an alliance with various sectors that are confronting austerity. In the long run, turn back the social segmentation processes that have taken place in recent decades. But from the grassroots, not from outside of the system.” For Carretero, since the 15-M outbreak, as the topic of disobedience is no longer taboo, “those who talk about these things were once marginal — I felt like a Martian. Most saw capitalism as a good thing that allowed you to have a house or a car. That has changed somewhat, but the problem remains that they see no alternative.”

With less theory and more concrete actions, the campaigns of economic disobedience of the “I won’t pay” movement have taken root in many sectors through social networking, where they already have some 30,000 followers. They called a rebellion against toll roads in Catalonia and managed to get some 60,000 people, according to Abertis, the collecting company, to refuse to pay to use the road. They managed to mobilize, last Spring, hundreds of people in several demonstrations in Madrid against the so-called “rate hikes” for public transit, which upped the price of tickets for members of the community some 11%. Another action called “I won’t repay” inspired citizens not to pay the euro-per-prescription in the communities where it was imposed — Catalonia and Madrid — before it was suspended by the Constitutional Court. According to the founder of “I won’t pay,” Álex Corrones: “Not only do we believe that it is right to disobey laws that are unjust, but that it is our obligation as responsible citizens.” For Corrones, it is not enough to demonstrate: “demonstrations have been controlled. And if they get out of hand, there are 200 cops to fire on command.”

A report on the war tax resistance campaign in Asturias this year said that it had “led workshops in all parts of Asturias, conducted five street actions, and has delivered thousands of information packets, which have been supplemented by the educational conference with Tica Font and Pere Ortega of the Centro Delás research center, and the contributions of Arcadi Oliveres in another conference.”

In Gijón, the resisters tried a new twist on the tactic of paying taxes with goods instead of money: “trying to deposit a missile and several grenades with the tax authorities.” You will probably not be surprised to learn that the tax agency frowned on this variety of payment.

Catalonia

The National Conference of the Catalan Republic, a nationalist group, met last month to try to plan a path forward to Catalan independence. The Secretary General of the Republican Left of Catalonia opened the conference and, for the first time I’m aware of, made a link of sorts between the tax resistance of Catalan nationalists and that of Spanish war tax resisters. He complained: “We live in a state that allocates a good part of our taxes in having an army that invests thousands and thousands of euros in military upgrades.”

The group is pushing for a referendum on Catalan independence, and is meanwhile trying to create a new state within the shell of the old, by creating new Catalan institutions and trying to vest in them the authority currently held by federal ones. One of these is a Catalan tax agency, and some resisters have adopted the tactic of paying their federal taxes there instead of to the federal agency.

Madagascar

Businesses in Madagascar have begun refusing to submit taxes to the government, depositing the money in an escrow account instead. The businesses, which represent a large percentage of the country’s tax base, are reacting to a crisis of stability and perceived legitimacy in the government, to the extent that, according to the chair of the Madagascar’s Enterprises Union, “We no longer know with what kind of authorities we should deal at this stage.”

Zimbabwe

The recent elections in Zimbabwe went off without a hitch, at least from the perspective of incumbent lunatic Robert Mugabe, who made sure that the vote would come out his way. The Movement for Democratic Change, whose party was defeated in the “election,” is not accepting these results. A Movement leader, Roy Bennett, called on people to stop paying taxes. “The people of Zimbabwe have to demonstrate what the polls said: that they are the majority and that they are completely dissatisfied with [the ruling party], and for this reason are resorting to passive resistance.”

Ghana

Responding to a new 20% import tax on cell phones and accessories, merchants have formed a union — the Concerned Phone and Accessories Dealers of Ghana — and shut down their operations in a business strike to press their demands.

Italy

Italy’s is the latest government to try to slip new taxes into utility bills as a way of trying to sneak tax hikes past its subjects — the latest is something called “tares” which is ostensibly part of the garbage bill. A “No Tares Steering Committee” is preparing a tax strike in protest.

Greece

Russia Today did a good English-language news report on the guerrilla electricians of the Greek “won’t pay” movement, who reconnect the power to homes where it has been shut off because the occupants have been unable (or unwilling) to pay the tax hikes on their electric bills, and on the toll-resistance actions of the movement.

“Resistir por Um Resistir por Todos”

A Portuguese group is pressing a legal claim that people unemployed in the ongoing economic crisis should be exempt from taxation, on the grounds that the tax agency must leave them the money they need to live on. A judge ruled against them, but on what appears to be a technicality (saying that they could not challenge the taxation policy itself, but must challenge a particular lien against a particular tax refuser).

Peggy Thomas

The HebdenBridgeWeb blog introduced its readers to war tax resister Peggy Thomas. Excerpts:

Peggy Thomas, a retired teacher who lives in Hebden Bridge, is refusing to pay the Inland Revenue some of her income tax. She is a conscientious objector and against taxes being used for warfare.

Peggy told the HebWeb that the nature of conscientious objection had completely changed. Today, it is not about young people refusing to fight; it is about money. Today’s wars can be fought with just a few men but the weapons are much far more expensive and deadly. That’s why she’s withholding a proportion of her tax, a proportion which would otherwise be spent on war and weapons.

Peggy told the HebWeb, “At the beginning of the invasion of Iraq, the then Chancellor Gordon Brown, told the House of Commons not to worry about how our participation in the ‘coalition of the willing’ would be financed. He assured MPs and the country that all the money needed would be available. Of course it was; 10% of the Government budget is set aside for warfare.”

Peggy is not alone in withholding taxes. An organisation called “Conscience” is campaigning to end compulsory contributions to warfare. Conscience believes that those who object in principle to warfare should be able to divert 10% of their taxes to peaceful pursuits. For example, some people donate their 10% withheld tax to charities such as Oxfam.

When Peggy first started withholding her tax, the Inland Revenue ignored her, and just took the tax she owed out of any refund she was due. If she sent a letter explaining, they’d reply that they couldn’t enter into correspondence about the matter.

But this year the Inland Revenue started to get a little more serious with Peggy and started to talk about debt collection agencies. Conscience were able to reassure Peggy that in the first instance the debt collection agency would not be allowed to take anything from her. And that what she should do is write to the debt collection agency explaining the situation.

In her letter, Peggy wrote, “The right of conscientious objection, which was won, not without a struggle, during the First World war, protected people who did not want to kill other people from having to take part in warfare. Once conscription was abolished, this right was taken from us. Now our money is conscripted and used to finance killing.”

Council tax resistance

June Farrow is still resisting her council tax (see ♇ 26 August 2011 for an earlier mention of her resistance). She recently lost a court case and was ordered to pay over £1,000 in taxes and court fees.

“The poorest are footing the bill for those in multiple occupancy. The burden is put on the very poor,” she said.

“I am doing this for many of us, not just myself. Everyone I speak to says ‘we support you, our mother or our father is like you, they are struggling too.’

“The only weapon we have got is not to pay council tax.”

She said she has been paying some of her council tax but she could not afford to pay all of it.

“I have been paying £25 a month and that is all I can afford,” she said.

There’s a pretty good English-language documentary film that covers some of the innovative counter-economic projects emerging in Spain that the folks in the “Comprehensive Disobedience” project are trying to coordinate and redirect their taxes to. It’s called Beyond the Crisis/Another Life Is Possible (Homage to Catalonia Ⅱ) and it’s available on YouTube:

Also: The economist Gay de Liébana covered tax resistance on his video blog E-konomía (in Spanish).

Some international tax resistance news:

• Yesterday, a group of business owners in Lviv announced that they would stop paying value-added and income taxes to the Ukraine central government of Viktor Yanukovych — those taxes that go to maintain the military and internal security forces. The businesses plan to continue paying social security and local taxes. They also called on other businesses across Ukraine to join them.
• The “pos me salto” movement of Mexico seems to be spreading to other countries where governments have hiked transit fares as a “stealth tax.” I’ve seen examples popping up in recent weeks from Rio de Janiero to Barcelona.

  

• River Att, of Hulme, England, has legally changed his name to River Axe The Tax. Mr. Axe The Tax is fighting increased fees the government is charging to people who live in subsidised housing if the government deems them to have more rooms than strictly necessary: something foes of the policy call the “bedroom tax.”
• Activists in Spain have been promoting something they call “economic disobedience” — a program of disengagement from the official economy and construction of a grassroots economy that includes tax resistance and redirection. A new report from Spain’s Ministry of Finance reveals that the underground economy in Spain has been surging, and now represents about a quarter of Spain’s gross domestic product.
• France’s tax agency misses out on about €10 billion each year thanks to “zappers” — computer programs that businesses can use to override the software on their cash registers to as to hide transactions and avoid reporting receipts.

I’ve been slacking a bit in my reporting, but a lot has been coming across my screen in recent weeks:

War Tax Resistance News

• Erica Weiland penned a thoughtful piece on War Tax Resistance as Self-Care at NWTRCC’s blog. Excerpt:

  Some resisters describe war tax resistance as something they do so they can live with themselves, or something they do to assuage their conscience about where tax money goes. Being able to live in alignment with your beliefs is a profound form of self-care — think about the dis-ease you experience when you do something against your beliefs. War tax resistance not only brings you into alignment with your beliefs about war, it can also help you integrate your beliefs on other issues.

• The Global Day of Action on Military Spending is right around tax day (April 15) again this year, and the coalition is making plans for a variety of protest actions.

U.S. Tax Law News

• If you’re self-employed as a sole proprietorship in the U.S., you’re supposed to pay self-employment tax on all of your profits, just as though you were employed and it was your salary. But if you’ve organized yourself as an “S Corporation” — you can instead pay yourself a specific salary out of your profits and you’ll only owe self-employment tax on that. Seems an arbitrary and even sketchy loophole? Tax expert Peter J. Reilly says it’s “a valid self-employment tax avoidance strategy… organizing as an S Corporation and avoiding self-employment tax seems like a no-brainer for a sole proprietor” though he also warns that “you really should not use the strategy to avoid SE/payroll taxes entirely.”
• NPR looked into Why More Americans Are Renouncing U.S. Citizenship and concluded that there isn’t one single cause, but instead it is the result of “dominoes falling, one after another, leading to an unexpected outcome.” But all of the dominoes have to do with taxes, and how the U.S. tax system makes life difficult for citizens living overseas.

Tax Resistance in Spain

• Professor Roberto Centeno, writing at El Confidencial, made a bit of a stir by arguing that since much of the Spanish government debt is not legitimate, the people of Spain do not owe it and ought not to pay for it through their taxes. Excerpts:

  Following the marvelous example of civil dignity that Henry David Thoreau gave us with the practice of disobedience against unjust taxes, created and used against the interest of the citizens, now more than ever it has become indispensable to put an end to the particracy of lies and corruption. And to do this by means of an exemplary action of tax withholding against the enrichment without reason of the political and financial oligarchs, by means of those taxes created and a debt assumed to defend their interests, and so it will be them who reassume this debt or answer for the consequences of its nonpayment.

  It is a debt of the regime, a personal debt of the government that contracted it, because it does not comply with the essential requirements of a legitimate debt, which would be that it was contracted for the exclusive benefit of the people.

• Meanwhile the number of towns in Catalonia that have stopped paying their taxes to the federal government, sending them to the regional government instead has risen to 54. This is currently only a sort of quasi-tax-resistance, as the regional government dutifully forwards these taxes to the central government, but it is part of a strategy of strengthening the regional tax agency in anticipation of eventually making the buck stop there in “the transition to statehood.”

Tax Resistance in France

• Yes, they’re still burning “ecotax” portals in Brittany. The latest one was partially burned on the night of the 5^th, which damaged it enough that the authorities ordered it to be removed.

A Look Back at the Poll Tax Resistance Campaign

• Chris Robinson has published a series of reminiscences of the campaign against the poll tax that brought down Thatcher’s reign in Great Britain:
  1. The Anti-Poll Tax Campaign
  2. A Paler Shade of Red
  3. Get Militant
  4. Revolution Down Below
  5. The Wall Comes Tumbling Down
  6. The Art of Self-Defence
  7. Demo
  8. Victory
• I also found some archives about the poll tax resistance effort at an Anarchist Communist Federation website.

Tax Resistance in Greece

• The Greek “Won’t Pay” movement won’t quit either. Thousands of Greeks marched at Afidnes and raised the toll gates there last month.

Tax Resistance in the Dominican Republic

• I feel like I have way too little context to make sense of all of this, but various industrial and commercial unions are squabbling over whether to support a business strike in the Dominican Republic over the expansion of a value-added tax there.

Tax Resistance in Argentina

• Last month, twenty “productores, industriales forestales, empresas de servicios, y colonos” (roughly: “manufacturers, foresters, service businesses, and farmers,” I think) in Colonia Delicia decided to stop paying taxes in protest at the poor state of the government-maintained roads. The businesses say that the poor condition of the roads is making their businesses impossible to operate.

Tax Resistance in Great Britain

• “A mother of three is so incensed by the Isle of Man’s new sewerage charge she has pledged to go to prison rather than pay it.”

Erica Weiland has summarized her keynote speech on Economic Disobedience and War Tax Resistance, which she delivered at a conference in Eugene, Oregon, on Wednesday. Excerpt:

When we heard about this work in Spain, it was clear to us that war tax resistance is economic disobedience, the refusal to cooperate in an economic system that is built on war, militarism, and the perpetuation of human suffering. It was also clear to us that a variety of movements that also practice economic disobedience are allied with us in this struggle. When people refuse to pay debts to ruthless debt collectors, resist foreclosure, set up bartering networks that don’t report bartering as income, set up gift economies that avoid the IRS bartering regulations, organize lending circles for low-income borrowers, counsel high school students on alternatives to military service, squat abandoned houses, organize tent cities for the homeless regardless of bureaucratic and inhumane regulations, and struggle against corrupt landlords and employers, we are engaging in economic disobedience. The economic system we live under is not set up to support us, so we should withdraw our support from the system whenever feasible.

And here’s some more information about the Spanish movement that is the inspiration for this work: an interview with Enric Duran on the Shareable site and the video Come Back: A Story We Wrote Together (subtitled in English) which tells the story of Duran’s bank heists and how a coalition of pioneers used the funds to build a parallel solidarity economy.

I’ve got an article about the Spanish desobediencia integral movement up at Shareable. Here’s how it starts:

Spanish war tax resisters and activists from the 15-M, or indignados, movement (the Spanish version of “Occupy”) have joined forces to organize a sharing economy network and to nourish it with redirected taxes.

How this came about is an interesting story, and though their project is decidedly edgier and more confrontational than most of what goes on under the sharing economy umbrella, we can learn a lot from what they have accomplished.

Shareable also conducted an interesting interview with Enric Duran which they published a couple of weeks ago.

It’s time for another international tax resistance news update:

Austria

The Hypo Alpe Adria bank bailout scandal has proven to be the last straw for some Austrian taxpayers. I’ve mentioned before the case of tobacconist Gerhard Höller, who recently started to refuse to pay his taxes and who started a website to encourage others to join his strike.

This article introduced me to Wolfgang Reichl, who is paying his taxes into an escrow account to protest the Hypo bailout.

France

The bonnets rouges are still torching tax portals along the highways of Brittany. Two went up in flames last week and the authorities then dismantled and removed the damaged structures.

Italy

Small business owners in Italy are also rebelling against the taxes and fees that are pushing their businesses into bankruptcy. Bed and breakfast owner Alessandra Marazzi laid off staff and started doing everything herself — working from six in the morning to eleven at night — and she still couldn’t keep above water. Then she sat down with her books and discovered that fully 84% of what she was bringing in was going to pay taxes and state-monopolized utility fees. She decided to stop paying taxes just so her business (and her family) could survive.

Her “protesta fiscale ad oltranza” (tax protest to the bitter end) movement is also gaining adherents. Caterer Andrea Polese, for instance, stopped paying and put a sign on her door reading “I am a tax resister.” Bar owner Mariano Pavanello posted a selfie with a sign saying “I decided to stop paying protection money to a state thief.”

Meanwhile, the planned tax strike of the Venetian secessionists continues to progress, despite the recent arrests of two dozen separatists.

Jordan

Well, I can’t make heads or tails of the dialog in this video, but apparently it shows residents of Bani Obeid explaining why they have decided to stop paying taxes to protest against governmental incompetence.

Spain

The “comprehensive disobedience” movement that began in Catalonia has a new website, that includes material in several languages (including English). Its purpose: “to construct an international political and ideological space on the basis of the Integral Revolution.”

Meanwhile the Spanish war tax resistance movement is kicking into high gear (more details here) — and is increasingly targeting not just military spending but government spending on internal security forces, the Catholic Church, bank bailouts, the Spanish monarchy, and so forth.

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• Ruth Benn of NWTRCC casts a critical eye on Obamacare, and explains some of its complications for war tax resisters.
• Three major corporations have announced that they are pulling their investments from “private” prison companies in the United States under pressure from activists.
• Robert W. McGee continues his series of investigations into attitudes on the ethics of tax evasion, this time surveying philosophy professors about which circumstances, if any, they think may justify tax evasion. He’s also done a meta-study of some of his earlier work to try to determine if there are gender differences in evaluating the ethics of tax evasion.
• At Hit & Run, Jesse Walker takes note of the rise of the underground economy in Zimbabwe.
• Breton “bonnets rouges” are holding rallies outside the prison where some of their comrades are being held awaiting trial on charges of destroying highway tax portals.
• The fight against new water charges in Ireland is escalating, with protesters blockading contractors for Irish Water who had been sent to install meters in Cork.
• The folks behind the Spanish “comprehensive disobedience” project have launched a multi-lingual, international website: IntegraRevolucio to coordinate the work of people around the world who are working on similar lines. They also plan to launch a new media project — RADI.MS — soon.

An international tax resistance news round-up:

• A pos me salto-style movement in Sweden has gone a step further by initiating a mutual insurance plan. For a €12 monthly fee, the plan will insure contributors against any tickets they are given for being caught without a ticket — compare this to €100 for a monthly transit pass, or €150 for a fare evasion citation. So far, the plan is running at a healthy profit; taking in about twice as much from grateful subscribers as it has had to pay out in fine reimbursements.
• A recent poll of Austrian citizens found that a third of them were in favor of a tax strike.
• Iago Alvarez of the Economista Cabreado blog, writing at Público.es, voices the usual uneasiness of establishment liberals with tax resistance (“tax revenue is the lifeblood of our welfare state, the funding of our schools, hospitals, roads, etc.…”) but then decides things have finally gone too far:

  We must take the reins of our future, and I insist that it is us who must wrestle for them, and that the current drivers are comfortable the way they are and will not give them up. Only the daily struggle for democracy, either through your vote, your taxes, in the streets, or through self-managed projects, will lead to the regaining or the taking of power and will make us masters of our future.

  He then links approvingly to sites like the Economic Disobedience and Utopia Contagiosa.
• The Venetian separatists have started opening their own versions of “Offices of Economic Disobedience” — Uffici Pubblici sull’Obiezione Fiscale — to counsel people and businesses on how best to refuse to pay taxes to Italy in anticipation of eventually being able to pay taxes instead to an independent Venice.

The “Comprehensive Disobedience” movement in Spain has developed international ambitions, and as part of this project it has launched a new media platform — RADI.MS — that aims to spread news about allied projects around the world. The site content is currently translated into English, Castillian (Spanish), and Catalan.

I contributed an article on the American war tax resistance movement for the inauguration of the project:

In mid-April, people across the United States struggle to fill out their federal income tax returns. This shared calamity has created something of an inverted holiday season — with grumbling about paperwork and frustration towards government bureaucracy replacing the “peace on earth, goodwill to men” of the Yuletide.

But at a church in Berkeley, California, this past April, people were handing over their taxes with a smile. They were members of the group Northern California War Tax Resistance, and they were smiling because their checks — averaging more than $1,000 (more than €800) apiece — were not made out to the federal government, but to twenty-seven local groups including the Bay Area Community Land Trust, the Berkeley Food Pantry, the Biketopia Community Workshop, Oakland Sustaining Ourselves Locally, People’s Community Medics, and the Sustainable Economies Law Center.

The money came from a war tax resisters’ “alternative fund” called the “People’s Life Fund” — one of more than a dozen such funds in the United States. The Fund’s annual mid-April “granting ceremony” brought together representatives from each of the recipient groups, who accepted their checks and briefly summarized their work for the benefit of the other attendees.

The People’s Life Fund (like most other such funds) accepts deposits from war tax resisters of the money they are refusing to pay to the government. The fund holds the money in alternative financial institutions like credit unions and socially-responsible investments. If the government manages to seize the resisted taxes from the resister, he or she can reclaim the money from the Fund. Meanwhile, any investment returns from the deposits are distributed to local groups in these annual granting ceremonies.

“Redirection” has a long history in American war tax resistance. American war tax resister Bill Ramsey says it reminds him of Gandhi’s “constructive programme” with which the commander of the Indian resistance movement worked to strengthen grassroots Indian institutions at the same time he was trying to weaken British imperialist ones:

The spinning wheel was the center of Gandhi’s constructive program. Redirection is the war tax resistance movement’s spinning wheel. The “constructive program” is positive action that builds structures, systems, and processes alongside the obstructive program of direct confrontation to or noncooperation with oppression. When we redirect our war taxes, we invest in imaginative and positive projects in our communities and around the world.

At first, redirection was largely practiced by individuals, and in an ad hoc manner. For example, in 1968, war tax resister Irving Hogan stood outside the Federal Building in San Francisco and redirected his federal income tax dollars one at a time by handing them out to passers by. “I want this money to be used for the delight, not the destruction, of men,” he said. “Here: go buy yourself a beer.” But today redirection is frequently coordinated by local or national war tax resistance groups.

Some have used redirection to strengthen the anti-war movement. One group used its alternative fund to create a scholarship for college students who had been barred from government financial aid because they refused to register for the military draft. Another made an interest-free loan to a legal defense group that was supporting a group of military draft resisters who were on trial.

Traditional charity and relief organizations have also been recipients of redirected taxes. In 2008, a national effort called the “War Tax Boycott” redirected $325,000 (approximately €235,000) in federal taxes from the U.S. Treasury to two organizations: a health clinic in New Orleans struggling with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Direct Aid Iraq, which provided medical care to refugees from the American war.

War tax resisters aren’t just redirecting their money. Many American war tax resisters resist by deliberately lowering their income below the level where the federal income tax applies.  They do this by working fewer hours of paid employment and by simplifying their lives so that they can live on less money. Such resisters no longer have an amount of income tax to redirect, but they can redirect their time instead. One low-income resister, Clare Hanrahan, wrote: “I believe that redirection of time and presence provides a personal and potent contribution to the common good, a gift of self that has more dimensions than money alone. I redirect each time I give my time and energy in support of good work within my community.”

In recent years more ties have developed between American war tax resisters and the grassroots or “solidarity economy” — a model that is currently being spearheaded by Spain’s “comprehensive disobedience” (desobediencia integral) movement. National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee (NWTRCC) made “economic disobedience” the theme of its last national gathering, and had fruitful exchanges there with the debt resistance group Strike Debt! which has since incorporated a chapter on resisting “tax debt” into its Debt Resisters’ Operations Manual.

When Erica Weiland of NWTRCC delivered the keynote address at a recent “economic disobedience” conference in Eugene, Oregon, she said:

When we heard about this work in Spain, it was clear to us that war tax resistance is economic disobedience, the refusal to cooperate in an economic system that is built on war, militarism, and the perpetuation of human suffering. It was also clear to us that a variety of movements that also practice economic disobedience are allied with us in this struggle. When people refuse to pay debts to ruthless debt collectors, resist foreclosure, set up bartering networks that don’t report bartering as income, set up gift economies that avoid the IRS bartering regulations, organize lending circles for low-income borrowers, counsel high school students on alternatives to military service, squat abandoned houses, organize tent cities for the homeless regardless of bureaucratic and inhumane regulations, and struggle against corrupt landlords and employers, we are engaging in economic disobedience. The economic system we live under is not set up to support us, so we should withdraw our support from the system whenever feasible.

American war tax resisters are withdrawing from the warfare state and the economic model it enforces and are committing themselves with all of their strength and all of their resources to the creation of a more just system in which we can live with dignity. In doing so, they are blazing the trail that leads to this better world we all yearn for.

---

David M. Gross, an American tax resister, is the author of 99 Tactics of Successful Tax Resistance Campaigns (2014).

Some tax resistance news from here and there:

• The Friends Journal has started, in its latest issue, to publish the prison journals of convicted American Quaker war tax resister Joseph Olejak.
• NWTRCC has begun to assemble its list of Tax Day actions for 2015. Find out if anything is going on in your area, or let them know if you have anything planned.
• A couple of artists — Núria Güell and Levi Orta — decided to form a shell company in an off-shore tax haven as an experiment. They then turned the company, along with its tax advantages and ease of evading government regulations, over to a group of activists who are trying to create counter-capitalist autonomous projects. Here’s a video of a panel on which they are joined by some other speakers to discuss whether there’s any “implicit contradiction in replicating capitalist strategies to build anti-capitalist social dynamics” (in Spanish).
• There’s been a lot of buzz around the interwebs about a celebrity news report that actors Greg Wise and Emma Thompson have pledged to stop paying taxes until the U.K. government cracks down on big-business tax evaders and enablers like HSBC. I saw the original report this story came from, and to me it just sounded like Wise was blowing off steam in a “why I oughta!” sort of way and the reporter, perhaps for effect, took it more seriously than that. I haven’t seen anything from the couple since the story broke and got legs either confirming or denying the supposed pledge. But it is getting people talking about the circumstances under which it is appropriate to cut the government off.

Today, a roundup of links from here and there:

American War Tax Resisters

• Ruth Benn reports on war tax resister presence at the protests surrounding the United Nations review of the Nuclear Weapons Non-Proliferation Treaty.
• Here are some photos from NWTRCC’s national gathering in Milwaukee earlier this month. Erica Weiland wrote up a recap of the gathering.
• On the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, host Garrison Keillor gave a nod to war tax resistance in the course of a segment telling the story of the history of the Mennonites and another comic dramatization of a whimsical tax resister. Check out the “Garrison Keillor talks about the history of Mennonites” and “Catchup” segments in the archives.

IRS Woes

• The Treasury Department’s inspector-general issued a report stating that over a recent ten-year period, 1580 IRS employees “were found to have willfully evaded taxes.” Most (75%) were not fired, and some later received promotions, raises, and bonuses.
• The number of people who renounced their U.S. citizenship is aiming toward another record high this year. The first quarter of the year saw 1,335 people tell Sam “you’re not my uncle” — a new record.

Tax Resistance Campaigns Around the World

• Spanish war tax resisters have produced a stylish video to promote their cause: No Pagamos (We Aren’t Paying):

• Police brutality, discrimination, and mistreatment towards Israel’s Ethopian Jewish minority has led to protests, clashes, and to Shlomo Molla, one of the few Ethiopian-Israelis to have been in the Israeli parliament, calling for tax resistance, refusal to serve in the army, and other forms of civil disobedience.
• Paul Nicolson, a retired Anglican vicar, took his local council government to court, saying the £125 in fees it had added to the council tax that he had refused to pay in protest were excessive. He won his case.
• Payroll tax arrears are up 19% over the last fiscal year in Hong Kong and some are blaming the conscientious tax resistance movement (良心抗稅運動) that was launched as part of the pro-democracy “umbrella movement” there.
• Forty villages in Guragon, India have decided not to pay a new “house tax” the (Haryana) state government is trying to impose on them.
• The Chamber of Commerce and Industry in the northern Indian state of Jammu announced a policy of “total non-cooperation” including tax resistance in order to pressure the state government to meet its demands.

Some tax resistance news out of Spain:

• The Nueva Tribuna of Spain reminds its readers that “war is funded with your taxes,” and describes the latest war tax resistance campaign launched by pacifist and antimilitarist groups like Ecologists in Action.
• Economic Disobedience: Ethical Integrity and Consistency in Tax Resistance is the title of an announcement by the Integral Catalan Cooperative of their tax redirection campaign.

I’ve written before about the ideas being developed in Spain under the desobediencia integral (comprehensive disobedience) and desobediencia económica (economic disobedience) banners. Among these are the idea that grassroots, radically democratic assemblies and projects can better become sustainable if they are funded by what the activists are currently misdirecting to the government as taxes. They recommend redirecting your taxes into such projects.

I found a possible ancestor of this idea in an old issue of Liberation (August/September 1969). It comes from an otherwise unremarkable article by Arthur Waskow about ideas for strengthening what he calls “the movement,” one of which is:

Arrangements should be made for a movement “investment bank” — that is, a way of channeling new investment money into important new business areas. “Important,” of course, not by profit standards but by political ones — and the “bank” board should be chosen by the major movement groupings and by the businesses extending their credit. (The proposed Peace Tax Commission, intended to decide where war tax refusers who want to contribute their money to useful purposes can best do so, might be a prototype of such a movement “bank”.)

Waskow was one of the signers of the “Writers & Editors War Tax Protest” the year before, so he had some familiarity with the war tax resistance movement of that period.

Gabriel Colominas Bigorra, an economist from Barcelona, has written a libertarian defense of tax resistance. My translation:

Deconstructing Myths:
Liberalism, Taxes, and Tax Resistance

It’s strange to see how often tax evasion is identified as a purely selfish and heartless thing, as something immoral, when in my opinion it is very much the opposite. Those responsible for criminalizing tax evasion or tax fraud are the state and all of its functionaries (politicians and high officials). The context and institutions that surround us are mainly statist and it is for this reason that almost all public opinion is convinced that the evasion of taxes is something bad because “the treasury is all of us.” But when push comes to shove, we discover many people taking part of their salary in cash or our mechanic, no dummy, not writing out a receipt for the repairs and in that way avoiding the value-added tax. This scenario clearly contrasts with the typical Spanish attitude of “que me lo den todo echo, pero que pague otro” [an idiom I could not find a good translation for; maybe something like “I’d like to order everything on the menu except the prices” — ♇] that was reflected in the election held last week. We want a soviet state economy, but not to pony up its cost.

The tax burden in Spain is especially high, with some taxes that rise and rise without end to strip from people the fruits of their labor. Fortunately there are those who say that although we must contribute, the tax reform carried out by Hollande (in which those who earn more than a million euros must pay 75% of their income) is a monumental atrocity. I do not agree with the idea that everyone is obligated to contribute, but this is better than the people who say that “the rich” are to be expropriated for the purpose of guaranteeing a basic income to everyone, the typical fantasy land proposal.

Libertarians are thought of as misers who are incapable of helping others or giving them some of the money that they have, a picture totally removed from reality. People often spout off words like generosity when to pay taxes has nothing generous about it. To pay a tax to me signifies accepting our wasteful and extravagant authorities as our legitimate masters and complying irresponsibly with respect to the part of our money that we are forced to give. It’s true that we do so under the coercion of the monopoly of violence possessed by the state, but I believe that we have the obligation to search for better managers of our money, for example ourselves, and to do this begins with tax resistance.

Is tax resistance a purely libertarian tool? Well, no, in fact it is the act we all should perform when the state spends a part of our taxes on something that we do not want to invest in. Is there anyone who agrees with all of the spending and investments made by the state? Absolutely not. There is not even one taxpayer who sees their taxes spent as they would like. To give some examples: Catholics do not want abortions performed with public funds (they would be morally responsible for this), pacifists do not want to finance the army and much less to undertake a war, there is a significant number of people who do not want money used to bail out the banks and banking conglomerates in the way that has been done, others would like to use funds to protect the forests more or to strengthen public services, there is a large group of scientists who want to see boosts to funding for R&D, not to research them, but because they believe that research itself is a pillar of human development. There are many examples and I’m not going to bore my readers with many others.

But aside from not devoting our money to what we we want, there are other problems that we must keep in mind if we really want the apparatus of the state bureaucracy to manage our money. If we imagine someone who obtains a government that uses the taxes exactly as he wishes, even in this case the management costs that the government generates must be considered losses from our taxes, as we have seen over and over how the costs of certain parts of the budget increase without this translating into better service for citizens. A part of this sequence of problems we have the embarrassment of corruption and embezzlement of funds as well as the abuse of the budgets on the part of a sizable group of public managers, especially those most connected to the party system. If we observe the entire process we see that financing by means of taxes means that for every euro that we pay, a really significant part is diverted to invest in projects we don’t want, to pay for the bloated costs of administration, and to maintain a rogues gallery from whom we get too many cases of corruption.

Having reached this point, we see that really the enormous state bureaucratic system is not the best option for managing our money. What is the argument in defense of choosing to continue to pay taxes? In my opinion there is none that justifies the loss of money, especially taking into account that, as has been shown: From donations to voluntary, non-government organizations, we can develop a social structure apart from the state that better manages our money. And if you are one of those who thinks that with a different government, one that is truly “good and responsible,” things would be different as has been said, I want you to look at the structures and synergies of power that govern themselves by their own nature, the important state apparatus has developed a way of doing things just so that only a politician who disassembles it would be capable of getting rid of these dynamics turned sadly into vices.

Tax resistance is not only a tool for individualist libertarians; it is an action that any taxpayer must consider whenever any government, whatever flavor it has, employs money in a way that he does not like.

In a proposal similar to the “comprehensive disobedience” movement that was pioneered by Spanish activists, a group in the United Kingdom has inaugurated a “Golden Rule Tax Disobedience” campaign. In their words:

The latest tax scandal is bringing the erosion of our democracy into ever sharper focus. Britain suffers under an enormous democratic deficit due to state capture by “free”-market neoliberal fundamentalism and its associated corporate and financial interests, in aggressive ascendancy since the 1970s. Notwithstanding the 2008 financial crisis, this capture of the state has remained unaddressed, with successive governments shamefully complicit in it. Despite copious corroborative research and endless petitioning and protesting, all we’ve seen is disingenuous hand-wringing and political evasion.

Our collusion with this apology for a “democracy” must stop. We, the citizenry, are therefore taking matters into our own hands — with a “Golden Rule Tax Disobedience” whose intention is grassroots mobilisation against systemic injustice, favouring far greater equality, shared and stable prosperity, enhanced quality of life and, most importantly, an environmentally sustainable future.

The evidential rationale for this action is overwhelming. Not least, £93bn of “corporate welfare” is given as handouts annually to businesses operating in our allegedly “free” market; and the government spends £26bn subsidising harmful fossil fuels, yet a mere £3.5bn subsidising renewables. “Free”-market fundamentalism has been an astonishing failure for the vast majority.

Our Golden Rule Tax Disobedience initiative asks citizens to withhold a small amount of tax (through VAT or their tax return — everyone can join in), and then donate it to conducive campaigning groups. This principled modelling of a redistributive ethos intends to shame our politicians into taking effective action.

Principled tax activism has a long and distinguished history in circumstances where the state has shown itself incapable of defending the public interest. With no serious attempt by government to correct Britain’s massive democratic deficit, our initiative is an idea whose time has come. We ask you to join with us in taking back power in order to create a fairer and more sustainable society.

• Dr Gail Bradbrook — Director, Compassionate Revolution
• Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett — Co-authors of The Spirit Level
• George Barda — Social justice and Occupy campaigner, Compassionate Revolution
• Leon Rosselson — Writer/musician
• David Drew — Former Labour MP for Stroud
• Polly Higgins — Lawyer advocating for Ecocide Law
• Joel Benjamin — Debt Resistance UK and People vs PFI
• Professor Andrew Samuels — Analytical psychology, University of Essex
• Professor Karín Lesnik-Oberstein — Critical theorist
• Rev Paul Nicolson — Taxpayers Against Poverty
• Dr Richard House — Chartered psychologist, education campaigner, Stroud
• Liam Barrington-Bush — Co-founder, More Like People
• Max Graef — Broadcast engineer, company director
• Andrea Halewood — Chartered psychologist
• Ben Jarlett — Digital media consultant
• Martin Large — Publisher and author
• Jojo Mehta — Environmental campaigner
• Beatrice Millar — Steering group, Psychotherapists and Counsellors for Social Responsibility (PCSR)
• Gabriel Millar — Teacher, Stroud
• Alice Murray — Political activist and campaigner, Stroud
• Aliyah Norrish — Digital content associate
• Mark Nurse — NHS paramedic, Stroud
• Councillor Brian Oosthuysen — Gloucestershire
• Maja Passchier — Cellist and cello teacher
• Hazel Raee — Mobile digital champion, Isle of Skye
• Skeena Rathor — Movement therapist and teacher
• Dr Ilana Mira Sluckin — Paediatric doctor
• Richard Wilson — Director, OSCA
• Matt Wimpress — Company director

Here’s a video explanation of the campaign, its methods, and its goals. It plans to begin when 5,000 citizens of the United Kingdom have signed on to a “collective tax disobedience” pledge:

Some other tabs that have slid across my browser in times not long past:

• Here’s a short video promoting this year’s Spanish war tax resistance campaign:
• Aline Sitoe Diatta was, says Wikipedia, “a Senegalese heroine of the opposition to French colonialism, often called the Joan of Arc or the Marianne of Senegal.” When the French colonial administrators of the region where the Diola people lived began conscripting locals to fight in European wars and to engage in confiscatory taxation of rice and cattle, the Diola resisted. Aline Sitoe Diatta was one of the leaders of this resistance, and also a martyr: she was arrested and tortured, and died while imprisoned in exile. Emitai is a film about these uprisings from the Senegalese point of view.
• Glasgow Living looks back at the role of the people of Glasgow in the battle against Thatcher’s poll tax.
• Some mining companies in Romania are refusing to pay increased royalties on the grounds that the government raised the rates illegally after granting the initial mining concessions.
• A farmer from Lot-et-Garonne brought his farm animals along with him when paying his taxes and then got charged €230 for the manure clean-up afterwards — a fine the farmer plans to pay with 23,000 pennies.
• In the middle of tax filing season this year, the IRS headquarters in Washington, D.C. caught fire and had to shut down for repairs for a week.
• Truckers & farmers in Belgium have parked their vehicles on the highways, bringing traffic to a standstill to protest new trucking tolls.
• Sieglinde Baumert has spent two months in prison for her refusal to pay a €17½ monthly television tax to support the government-run station. The tax, which formerly was based on the number of televisions in a household, is now assessed on everyone in Germany whether or not they have a television.
• The attempt by Catalan nationalists to convince people there to pay their federal taxes to the regional government instead of to the Spanish central government is proceeding: this year more local governments will symbolically resist in this way, but fewer individuals are expected to do so.
• Taxi drivers in Quebec, upset at being outcompeted by upstarts like Uber, are threatening to stop paying taxes if the government doesn’t act to protect their industry against competition.
• Similarly, French hotels have threatened a tourist tax boycott in reaction to competition from Airbnb-like vacation rental facilitator Abritel-HomeAway.
• Have you caught the tax evasion bug? The recent leaks of the “Panama Papers,” with their details of how the 1% stash their money in shell companies in tax havens, have increased perceptions that the tax system is gamed by the rich and powerful — and have decreased the willingness of the average joe to continue getting fleeced.

  [IRS chief] Koskinen says the main factor that drives ordinary Americans to stop paying their taxes, or to try to cheat on their taxes, is the perception that others are doing the same. If you think that your neighbors are not paying their fair share, you’re just a little less likely to pay your own tax bill in full or in part.

  In other words, tax evasion is contagious.

• Lateef Mangum, a resident of Washington, D.C., stopped filing federal tax returns thirty years ago because residents of that district do not have voting congressional representatives and Mangum takes the “no taxation without representation” slogan seriously.