Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Venezuela → political opposition in 2003

Reuters carried this report on this date in 2003:

Chavez foes tear up tax forms

Foes of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez tore up income-tax forms on Tuesday as they added a national tax revolt to their five-week-old strike that has throttled the nation’s crucial oil exports.
Waving Venezuelan flags and blowing whistles, thousands of anti-Chavez demonstrators marched to government tax offices in east Caracas on the 37^th day of an opposition strike aimed at forcing the leftist leader to resign and call early elections.
The grueling shutdown has strangled oil output and shipments by the world’s No. 5 petroleum exporter.
“We are not going to pay taxes until this government goes,” 52-year-old housewife Belkis Soto said as she took part in the march. Many protesters waved tax declaration forms, which they then ripped up outside the tax offices.
The disruption to Venezuela’s strategic oil industry has jolted world oil markets and bled the Chavez’s government’s economic lifeline, costing it millions of dollars a day.
The opposition has called on individuals and firms to stop paying taxes, whether income or sales taxes.
But the strike has so far failed to force Chavez to bow to opposition demands for him to quit. The populist president, a former paratrooper who led a coup attempt in 1992 and was elected president six years later, has dug in his heels, vowing to break the strike and survive.
Speaking on Tuesday at a school in west Caracas, Chavez accused his foes of “trying to break the state coffers.”
“With the oil strike, we’re going to start the year with a lot of economic difficulties,” he said, without elaborating.
He warned opponents they would be breaking the law if they refused to pay taxes. Tax authorities say offenders face fines and prison terms ranging from six months to seven years.
Some analysts questioned the impact of a tax rebellion in a nation where tax evasion is widespread.
Tensions high
Tensions have been running high since anti-Chavez demonstrators clashed with supporters of the president in fierce street battles on Friday also involving troops and police. Two Chavez supporters were shot and killed, triggering accusations between the government and its foes, who blame the president for the killings of opposition protesters last year.
Chavez, who survived a short-lived coup in April, has condemned the strike and the tax rebellion as the work of “traitors” and “terrorists.” He accuses his foes of trying to overthrow him in another coup.
His opponents say the left-wing policies of his self-proclaimed “revolution,” which include a nationalistic oil policy and increased state intervention in the economy, are dragging the country toward ruin and Cuban-style communism.
The strike gripping the oil industry has disrupted oil shipments to the United States, which normally obtains more than 13% of its crude imports from Venezuela.
But oil prices, which rose close to two-year highs last week, fell heavily on Tuesday as leading OPEC heavyweight Saudi Arabia pushed the oil exporters’ cartel for a hefty oil output increase to fill a gap left by the Venezuela strike.
London Brent lost 51 cents to $US29.69 a barrel by late afternoon. US crude fell 98 cents to $US30.92 a barrel.
The government insists strike-hit oil operations are being restored to normal. Striking executives in the state oil giant PDVSA, many of whom have been fired, deny that.
Potentially adding to the problems from the oil strike, which has caused shortages of gasoline and cooking gas, Venezuela’s bank workers said they would decide this week on a proposed 48-hour halt to all banking operations.
Many major industries and shops remain closed and many private schools and universities are not starting classes.
The opposition is setting its sights on a Feb. 2 referendum scheduled by electoral authorities to vote on a single question: should Chavez voluntarily resign?
But the poll is nonbinding, and the president, whose term is scheduled to end in early 2007, has said he will ignore the results, even if he loses massively.
Talks between the government and the opposition, brokered by the Organization of American States, have so far failed to agree on the timing of elections.
Chavez tells his foes they must wait until after August, halfway through his current term, when the constitution allows the holding of a binding referendum on his rule.

The anti-Chavez unrest that the article alludes to had been going on since 2002, but this tax strike was more of a “last hurrah” than a real escalation. The strikes and other civil disobedience petered out and the opposition focused on holding a binding referendum to remove Chavez from office. This recall referendum was held in 2004, but it lost, and Chavez continued to cement his hold on political power.

Tax resistance movements have often coordinated with labor strikes or business shut-downs as a way of further restricting government resources, demonstrating solidarity, and freeing up the time of resisters to engage in more campaign-oriented activities. In some cases, these strikes are themselves a form of tax resistance — reducing the income or sales tax base by simply reducing the amount of income earned or sales made. Here are several examples:

Labor strikes

In Germany, in 1920, “A movement for a general refusal to pay taxes, originating in Württemberg, spread rapidly to other towns, principally Stuttgart, which was without gas, electricity and water for several days. The strike began in the Daimler motor works in Württemberg, where the workers refused to allow the deduction of the legal tax of ten per cent from their weekly wages…”
A tax strike in 2003 aimed at the Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela was accompanied by a multi-week labor strike that “bled the Chavez’s government’s economic lifeline, costing it millions of dollars a day.”
Prisoner slave laborers in the American state of Georgia went on strike in 2010, refusing to work for the profit of the prison system.
In Savannah, Georgia, in 1867, the city tried to impose a $10 tax on “stevedores and other laborers on the wharves,” which they refused to pay. The city then locked them out of the wharves.

This, of course, seriously interfered with the shipping interests of the city, and the Council, finding that the laborers were not at all disposed to yield, and that meanwhile the “strike” was damaging the business community to the amount of thousands of dollars, and was driving all the vessels from this to other ports, met and reduced the tax to $3. This, however, only tended to increase the feelings of the laborers, who had resolved not to pay any tax whatever, deeming it unjust, unconstitutional and oppressive to tax unskilled labor, and they determined that none of their number should work, whether they paid the tax or not.
During the recent Household Tax agitation in Ireland, the Civil and Public Service Union threatened to strike if the government tried to deduct the tax from the paychecks of resisting union members.
Ship stokers in France went on strike when the government tried to tax their incidental benefits like meals as income in 1923. The standoff kept the largest French trans-Atlantic ship stranded in port until the stokers’ employer agreed to pay the extra tax on their behalf.
In Birmingham, Alabama, in 1901:

The plant of… [a] Paint company at North Birmingham, employing 200 men, closed down because a deputy tax collector served garnishment on five employees for the non-payment of poll tax. Many of the men quit work causing the plant to shut down. … The men persist in their refusal because they claim the tax is an unjust one and not constitutional. The citizens all side with the strikers.

Hartals and business strikes

When Argentina tried to increase taxes in the midst of a drought in 2009, farmers there went on strike for a week and set up highway roadblocks.
American farmer Bob Williams, disgusted at the U.S. military budget, decided in 2008 to henceforth donate all of his produce to charity rather than sell it for taxable income.
For a week in 2008, a strike spread amongst the vendors in Tehran’s bazaar until hardly any were open for business. They were protesting a new VAT that would have applied to them. Apparently this was a nonviolent resistance tactic that bazaar merchants used successfully before the 1979 Iranian revolution, but this was the first time they’d done it since.
20,000 lawyers in Delhi went on strike in 2009, “paralyzing the lower courts,” when India tried to extend its sales tax to cover legal services.
In 1810 in Benares, the British imperial government tried to impose a house tax. The residents responded with a hartal, or general strike: “the shops were closed, every kind of occupation was abandoned… a solemn engagement was taken by all the inhabitants to carry on no manner of work or business until the tax was repealed. Everything was at a stand: the dead bodies were cast unceremoniously into the river, because there were none to perform the obsequial rites; and the very thieves refrained from the exercise of their vocation…”
Hartals and strikes, sometimes of specific industries and other times general strikes, were also frequently used in the later Indian independence movement led by Gandhi, sometimes in coordination with tax resistance campaigns such as the salt raids. During the Bardoli satyagraha, for example, shopkeepers frequently shut down their operations whenever officials came to town, and hartals sometimes broke out spontaneously on other occasions. Gandhi also led a strike of Indian miners in South Africa in 1913 that was directed against a poll tax on Indian immigrants, a strike in which hundreds were arrested, and which eventually drew in strikers from “harbour, corporation, and railway employees, as well as the drivers, cooks, waiters, and messengers.” That campaign was successful at forcing the government to rescind the tax.

When the tax inspector called at St. Cere during the Poujadist tax strikes: “The tax inspector rapped on steel curtain after steel curtain, demanding to be let in to see the books. Nowhere did he get an answer. When they found that even the bistros were locked, the hapless inspector and his guards gave up their mission and beat a humble retreat…”
During the first intifada in Palestine, the Unified National Command responded to a crackdown on the tax strikers of Beit Sahour by calling “an unprecedented five day in six general strike,” while “[s]torekeepers in the town launched a commercial strike that lasted three months…” The Israeli practice of seizing equipment, supplies, and goods from businesses that refused to remit taxes also had the effect of putting those businesses into a state of strike whether or not that was their intention.
In 1981, in support of Palestinian doctors who were refusing to pay an Israeli income tax, shopkeepers in Gaza City launched multiple two-day strikes.
In 2010, Greek kiosk owners held a one-day strike to protest an increase in tobacco taxes.
In the Dutch West Indies in 1921, “[m]erchants, as a token of their approval of [a] doctor’s refusal to pay the tax,” (the government was attempting to auction off his goods that day) “closed their places of business during the afternoon.”
In the waning days of the rule of the Gyanendra monarchy in Nepal in 2006, people stopped paying taxes and utility bills, and accompanied this with a general strike.
In 2011, cashew traders in Guinea Bissau went on strike: “We cashew exporters have decided to boycott the current marketing season to protest the payment of a 50 CFA franc ($0.11) per kilogram export tax,” said the head of the exporter’s association.
In sympathy with the tax protests in Turkey in 1906, there were often business strikes:

…all shops and businesses [in Kastamonu] remained closed during the day…

…merchants [in Erzurum] closed their shops in solidarity… shops were closed again…

Erzurum’s example of closing shops… [was followed] at Hasankale…
In the Ruhr, during the French/Belgian occupation of 1923, businesses shut down rather than pay reparation taxes:

The owners of the German coal mines and foundries in the Ruhr are determined not to pay the 10 per cent. export tax imposed on coal by the French… The owners will refuse to export an ounce of coal or coke. They will dump the supplies in the yards, and are prepared for a long seige.

This was accompanied by a large-scale labor strike, which the German government supported by directly financially supporting the individual strikers.

Consumer strikes

In Cairo in 1947, a boatload of cruise ship passengers refused to disembark because of a landing tax they would be forced to pay. This so upset the tourist-dependent shopkeepers that they rioted and forced the tax officials to waive the tax.
In Melbourne, Australia, in 1917 “[b]etween 500 and 600 young men refused to pay the amusement tax at the Stadium last night to witness a boxing match between Edwards and Palmer. They were patrons of the lower-priced seats. The manager of the Stadium argued with the spokesmen for the crowd for some time, but neither side would yield, and the result was that the attendance was much smaller than usual.”
In the U.S., school districts often get government funding based on how many students are attending on certain “count days.” One parent decided to use this as leverage, saying she would keep her children home from school on count days, and thereby deprive the district of money, to protest against poor district policies.

(I’ll cover consumer strikes of government-monopoly products in another episode of this series.)

Pickets and other such public demonstrations commonly accompany tax resistance campaigns. Here are some examples that caught my eye:

During the Tithe War in Ireland, one parliamentarian noted with some panic a news account of a mock funeral held in Ireland, attended by 100,000 people “who assembled to carry in a procession to the grave two coffins, on which were inscribed ‘Tithes’ and ‘Rent’.”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League used signs, banners, handbills, chalked-slogans, and sandwich boards to help get their “No Vote — No Tax” message across at their public demonstrations.
The Benares hartal of 1810–11 was in part a strike, but in part a huge demonstration, the duration and peaceful discipline of which pointed out the determination of the demonstrators.
When the Rebecca Rioters came to Carmarthen, they came en masse and during the daytime, almost as a parade. They were “preceded by a band of musicians playing popular airs, and men bearing placards with the following enscriptions in large printed letters:” “Justice and lovers of Justice are we all.” “Freedom and better food.” “Free tolls and Freedom.”
The tax strike in the French wine-growing region in 1907 was preceded by huge demonstrations and parades. Wrote one observer:

All observers were struck by the extraordinary perfection of the organization. It was not necessary once for the troops or police to interfere with the multitude which was variously estimated was made up of from 400,000 to 600,000 persons. A feature of the parade was the large proportion of women participating. Groups from various cities bore banners with various inscriptions and carried coffins, guillotines, &c.

Another wrote:

…all night long trains entered the station every quarter of an hour with crowds, many of whom had been travelling fifteen and twenty hours. Looking worn and dishevelled, they formed in serried battalions, and, headed by bands and trumpets and drums, young and old, men, women, and children, marched to their quarters…

This morning five huge columns, approaching from various quarters, welded at the Arch Peyrou into one procession nine miles long, and the march through the streets began at 11. Placards threatened, “The day of reckoning is at hand,” “We will take up arms,” “Down with the deputies.” Here were 200 handsome Norbannese women in mourning, there 500 young girls robed in white muslin, with tricolor robes.
In 1906 in Turkey, mass tax refusal was backed up by mass demonstrations of as many as 20,000 people, demanding the repeal of the taxes.
In 2003, anti-Chavez protesters launched a tax strike by tearing up their income tax forms in a demonstration in which thousands of demonstrators marched on the tax offices in Caracas.
Farmers in New Zealand threatened to drive their farm equipment onto the highways to jam the roads in protest against a new greenhouse-gas-targeting “flatulence tax” on livestock in 2003.
When the authorities tried to impose a tax on dogs in Breslau, Germany, in 1925 5,000 dogs (and their owners) descended on city hall to protest.
One of Gandhi’s first experiments with satyagraha was a strike in South Africa to protest against a tax on Indian immigrants there. The culmination of that campaign was a massive protest march of striking workers that deliberately violated laws restricting the right of travel of Indians.
Ammon Hennacy was fond of accompanying his solitary tax resistance with periodic fasts and picketings at IRS headquarters, typically around the time of the anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing. He would hand out to passers-by copies of the Catholic Worker as well as leaflets that described his own particular protest — while also carrying a sign and wearing a sandwich-board that put things more concisely.
The previously-untaxed caste of Bhats in India responded to being subjected to the income tax in dramatic fashion: “Two thousand men turned out to remonstrate with the Superintendent of Police who appeared on the scene. He remained firm, whereupon they cut themselves with knives, cursed the Assessors, bespattering them with their blood, and declared they would rather die than surrender their birthright. When several were apprehended, their wives began to hack their persons, and so severely that several have since died. Up to the last intelligence the Bhats still gloried in their refusal.”
American war tax resisters frequently hold rallies, pickets, street theater, and other such actions around “Tax Day” (the date when federal income tax returns are due). This among other things helps make sure that their message is one of those represented in the obligatory tax day news stories. Here is an example:

The group then left for the federal building, in which the IRS and a number of other offices are located, at which 75 people burned tax forms and blockaded the street for a bit. There were no arrests. In conjunction with the tax form burning, they used a banner with the quote: “Pardon us, friends, for the fracture of good order, for burning paper instead of babies,” sent from prison during the Vietnam War by Daniel Berrigan… They offered their apologies for burning tax forms instead of Colombian villages, Palestinian schools, Iraqi hospitals, Filipinos’ mosques and Afghan homes.

In another case:

After a mock President Clinton bragged to onlookers about the many areas in which the U.S. was #1 - military spending, arms sales, violent gun deaths, etc. — he drove home the point with an 8-foot Patriot missile tossed into a group of students, parents, nurses and other ordinary people.
Mass dying ensued, followed by an appearance by the grim reaper himself. Ostensibly there to collect bodies, he assented to an interview with M.C. Daniel Woodham. Death was the only one at the rally willing to even attempt an explanation of the maniacal logic of a still-bloated U.S. military budget.

Here are some street theater tips from war tax resister Steve Gulick.
Some war tax resisters in Wales brought their tax payment to the tax office in a bucket of blood. When the payment was refused, they poured the blood over the steps of the building.
In 1997 members of the Magdalene House Catholic Worker held a demonstration at the IRS office in which they “laid out a cloth altar with candles, flowers, and health care items to represent life, and tax forms with their blood poured on them to represent death. They held a worship service and talked about why they were there.” This was enough for several of them to get arrested.
During the rebellion against Thatcher’s poll tax, there were several demonstrations.
- The Scottish Trade Union Conference organized a number of rallies, including a 30,000-person march in Edinburgh, but then it put its weight behind a strange 11-minute-long general strike at which people all over Scotland were supposed to briefly stop working to engage in some short anti-poll-tax activism. That protest didn’t go anywhere and the Union Conference lost some credibility as a movement organizer.
- Hundreds of thousands of people turned out to demonstrations in England, with some of these rallies and marches turning into riots (or being attacked by police, depending on whose stories you believe). On such occasions, the riots became the message of the demonstrations, whatever the intentions of the organizers were. This had mixed consequences for the movement.