Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → Spain → Tancament de Caixes, 1898–1900

The little robots I’ve recruited to read the news for me have been hopping up and down and shouting in their little robot voices about something going on in Catalonia. Much of the shouting is in Spanish and Catalan, though, so it’s taken me some time to figure out what it’s all about.

Òmnium Cultural is a group that promotes Catalan nationalism. In a speech on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the founding of the group last Monday, Muriel Casals, its president, announced a four-year plan to make Catalonia fiscally independent from Spain, and said:

We cannot continue to be plundered. We will manage our resources, with the freedom this implies and the high responsibility that it entails. To do this we need political and social unity. … If Spain refuses to advance along these lines, Òmnium Cultural has taken the decision to develop a deliberate and viable plan to initiate a campaign of tax resistance. Our approach is to redirect taxes to be administered in an account opened for this purpose. This account will not be closed until the resolution of the tax grievance suffered by Catalonia.

La Vanguardia, in its report on the speech, claimed at this point “the applause of the crowd was deafening.”

The next day, Casals expanded on this call, saying that city governments should lead the resistance because it would be harder for the Spanish government to take legal action against them than against individuals. “A threat is not made effective until there is a clear mass of willing people and entities in order that the consequences are very dramatic.”

This made waves in Spain. Josep Gisbert, at La Vanguardia, wrote: “Tax resistance? Why not. But why wait four years?”

The scenario has parallels with the famous tancament de caixes at the end of the 19^th century. Take a look at what is recorded about that event in the encyclopedias: The call for tancament de caixes [shutting the cashboxes] was a protest of traders and industrialists in Barcelona in 1899 against the law of the cabinet of Francisco Silvela and the finance minister Raimundo Fernández Villaverde. It consisted of a strike by the traders and industralists so as to stop paying the tax without being illegal. The protest was led by doctor Bartomeu Robert i Yarzábal, mayor of the city of Barcelona, and was begun on 20 October 1899. The action was the result of the colonial crisis of 1898, which led the Spanish government to impose some restrictive budgets, accompanied by a rise in taxes, to offset the deficit. The protest was against the earnings tax on capital and labor and that of personal documents, with some types higher in Barcelona than in Madrid. The board of the Industrial and Commercial Defense League announced the protest. It created a standing committee, selected by the representatives of more than fifty unions in Barcelona. The protest extended through Sabadell, Mataró, Manresa, Vilafranca, and some traders were imprisoned for not paying taxes.
Changing names and dates, only with some variations, the description could apply to present reality, two centuries later, at the dawn of the 21^st. Why, however, is tax resistance posed in this case by Òmnium Cultural not yet possible? It is clear that motives are not lacking, but perhaps the difference is that Catalonia is not politically prepared to face the shocks that follow — which would be internal — its ruling class seems to prefer beating around the bush with statements in order to escape criticism rather than take the bull by the horns with a decisive and committed roadmap. The first serves simply as a throw-away and the second, without a doubt, involves risks, but one day or another you have to take them if you really want to overcome the current suffocating situation.
Why bother now with a new tancament de caixes? Society is more prepared than the political class wants to admit.

One such member of the political class is Joaquim Nadal i Farreras, head of the Catalan Socialist Party and minority leader in the Catalan parliament. He rejected the idea of a tax resistance campaign, saying, “the popular, attractive, demagogic thing would be to say that I am siding with the proposal of Òmnium Cultural, but — beware! — because this nation has many times encountered great explosions of protest or separatism when finally, at the point of waving your hand, you find that the water seeps between your toes.” I’m not quite sure what to make of that metaphor, but I think I get the gist of it.

Joan Laporta, on the other hand, a member of parliament from the small Catalan Solidarity for Independence party, called on the president of Catalonia to immediately launch a tax resistance campaign.

I have always applauded the social movements, but we know that these initiatives have sometimes had to go over the heads of the political parties in the defense of the rights and liberties of Catalan citizens. Without political power, social initiatives can accomplish nothing. I understand tax resistance as a more positive step. It is the only way to overcome the economic crisis that the people are suffering.

A spokesperson for the government brushed this off, calling the Òmnium Cultural proposal “an interesting contribution and consideration” but refusing to endorse it in the midst of its economic negotiations with the Spanish government.

The Justice Minister was skeptical of the tactic: “It comes down to a lack of solidarity. Although you don’t want to pay, you will end up paying. The machinery of the law will empty your bank account. For this reason, I say you have to carefully consider this.”

The International Year Book for 1900 included this summary of events in Catalonia:

The National Union Movement

The refusal of Catalonia to pay imposts, late in 1899, led to the formation of a committee of National Union, which assumed the direction of the widespread movement for reform. The greatest activity was displayed by the merchants of the northeastern part of the country, but the economic feature was not the only one. To some degree all the liberal elements in Spain sympathized with the National Union party, for its demands included the entire reorganization of the vital forces of the nation: fiscal and administrative reform, the amelioration of the judicial system, the introduction of an effective system of compulsory education, the improvement of the provincial governments. In view of the excessive burden of taxation and the government’s policy of expenditure the National Committee advised property holders to refuse to pay taxes. On January 14, 1900, 400 delegates, representing 50 chambers of commerce. 39 agricultural societies, and 37 mercantile and industrial associations, met at Valladolid and adopted the programme outlined above. The fiercest opposition to the Nationalists came from the upper classes and the clergy, who would wish to see the army aggrandized and secular education neglected. The government vigorously prosecuted the leaders of the National Union party and all who refused to pay taxes. In May riots broke out in Seville, Valencia, Polencia, and Barcelona. Martial law was declared in the provinces of Valencia and Barcelona, and on June 21 in Madrid. The constitutional guarantees were suspended in many other provinces, and at the end of the year had not been restored.

I think this was part of the same agitation that led to the “tancament de caixes” — an event that has the same sort of rhetorical value in Catalonia today as the Boston Tea Party does in the U.S.

A tax resistance note from yesteryear in Spain:

Taxes Are Disliked

Spaniards Refuse to Pay Government Assessments.

Rioting Occurs in Various Parts of Spain and Several Citizens and Soldiers Are Wounded — Streets Barricaded.

Madrid, May 11 [1900]. — Yesterday passed off peacefully practically everywhere throughout Spain, despite the universal character of the anti-taxation measure. The only noteworthy disturbance took place at Valencia, where barricades were erected in streets and a mob stoned the gendarmes and received them with rifle shots. Two policemen were injured. The gendarmes replied with a fusillade, before which the mob fled.
Madrid, May 11. — Despatches just received here show that disorders due to anti-taxation agitation similar to those which took place in Valencia yesterday occurred last night at Barcelona, where a crowd threw up a barricade in the streets and exchanged musketry fire with a body of gendarmes. Shots were also fired from verandas and balconies of a number of houses. Several gendarmes were hit. A number of rioters were arrested. At Seville a mob threw stones at the building of the military club, shattering windows and gas lamps. The gendarmes only succeeded in dispersing the rioters after a hard fight, during which several citizens, two gendarmes, a police inspector, and two members of the municipal guard were wounded. Infantry and cavalry finally cleared the streets.

This anti-tax agitation concerned, I believe, the introduction of the income tax in Spain, partially in order to pay of debts from the Spanish-American War in which Spain was trying to hold on to its distant Western Hemisphere colonies (the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam) that the U.S. preferred to wrest for itself.

Some day the bill for the wars that the U.S. has been putting on credit is going to come due. Today’s Occupiers and TEA Partiers are just tuning up their paving-stone aim for when the real battles come.

Tax resistance campaigns have found it useful to identify resonances with popular myths, esteemed tax rebellions of yore, and semi-fictional heroes. Here are some examples:

Just about every tax revolt in the United States (and many elsewhere as well) appropriates the example of the Boston Tea Party as an evocative reminder of a grassroots uprising, the recent “Taxed Enough Already” TEA Party movement being just the latest of many, many examples.

In Spain, the tancament de caixes plays a similar role to the Tea Party in America, with modern Spanish tax resisters comparing their campaigns with that legendary struggle. In England (and the British empire), John Hampden has long been the exemplar of choice, with his example being used from South Africa to Ireland to India to prove that celebrated patriots can refuse to pay their taxes.
The phrase “no taxation without representation” has such resonance, especially in the descendant nations of the British Empire, that it gets trotted out even to support tax resistance campaigns in which representation isn’t really an issue at all. It was especially potent in the American revolution and in the women’s suffrage movements.
The Rebecca Rioters in Wales, painting their faces and dressing in drag to destroy tollgates and mete out justice in the middle of the nineteenth century, were tapping into a folkloric form of grassroots justice that was centuries old. “Jack a Lents” painted their faces and dressed in women’s clothing to tear down turnpikes in England a century before, and I’ve found references to protesters led by men in women’s clothing and using the shared pseudonym of “Lady Skimmington” in the Western Rising in England a century before that.
Resistance to the “Foreign Miners Tax” in California in 1850 gave birth to the myth of Joaquin Murieta, a sort of Robin Hood-like outlaw who became a desperado when he was forced off his claim by the tax.
The Robin Hood myth itself has taken on a tax resistance theme in recent years. The popular Disney animated version of the Robin Hood story makes the wicked Sheriff of Nottingham a tax collector, and Robin Hood’s robbery of him a case of redistributing the taxes back to the people they’d been seized from:

While he taxes us to pieces
  And he robs us of our bread
King Richard’s crown keeps slippin’ down
  Around that pointed head
Ah! But while there is a merry man
  in Robin’s wily pack
We’ll find a way to make him pay
  And steal our money back
Urban legends helped to fuel tax resistance during the French Revolution. Rumors that the King had abolished taxes led people to refuse payment or to destroy the obsolete offices and apparatus of taxation. Here is a similar example from Russia (as found in James C. Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance):

After the emancipation [of the serfs] in 1861, the peasants in Biezdne (Kazan Province) were demoralized to discover that with redemption payments, labor dues, and taxes their burdens were, if anything, heavier than before. When one of their number claimed that the emancipation decree granted them complete freedom from such dues — the term volia (freedom) appeared in many contexts in the decree — but that the squires and officials had kept it from being implemented, they leapt at the opportunity, now sanctioned from on high, to refuse payment.

The myth of the czar’s benevolence, which was of course promoted by the czarist government, could backfire in this way when peasants refused to pay onerous taxes or obey other commands of the czar’s subordinates, under the theory that because the czar was so good he could not possibly have ordered such terrible things:

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the myth was its plasticity in the hands of its peasant adherents. First and foremost, it was an invitation to resist any or all of the czar’s supposed agents, who could not have been carrying out the good czar’s wishes if they imposed heavy taxes, conscription, rents, military corvée, and so forth. If the czar only knew of the crimes his faithless agents were committing in his name, he would punish them and rectify matters. When petitions failed and oppression continued, it may simply have indicated that an impostor — a false czar — was on the throne. In such cases, the peasants who joined the banners of a rebel claiming to be the true czar would be demonstrating their loyalty to the monarchy. … In a form of symbolic jujitsu, an apparently conservative myth counseling passivity becomes a basis for defiance and rebellion…
Scott also talks (e.g. in his paper Everyday Forms of Resistance) about how “much of the folk culture of the peasant ‘little tradition’ amounts to a legitimation, or even a celebration, of [resistance]…”

In this and other ways (e.g. tales of bandits, tricksters, peasant heroes, religious myths, carnivalesque parodies of authorities) the peasant subculture helps to underwrite dissimulation, poaching, theft, tax evasion, evasion of conscription, and so on. While folk culture is not coordinational in any formal sense, it often achieves a “climate of opinion” which, in other more institutionalized societies, might require a public relations campaign.
The very name “Poll Tax,” which came to be the most widely-accepted name for what Thatcher’s government hoped would go down as the “community charge,” was a potent propaganda coup for the resistance movement. Danny Burns, a chronicler of that successful tax rebellion, says that “the story of [Wat Tyler’s] peasants revolt against the Poll Tax in 1381 was told in virtually every meeting. Calling on these traditions was an important part of explaining why non-cooperation was needed…” Signs that people would hang in their windows reading “No Poll Tax Here” also hearkened back to the tax resistance accompanying the Reform Act agitation in the 1830s.
Today, tax resistance actions like the ongoing Household Tax resistance in Ireland compare themselves in turn to the successful Poll Tax revolt.
The Lady Godiva myth concerns a “noblewoman who, according to legend, rode naked through the streets of Coventry in order to gain a remission of the oppressive taxation imposed by her husband on his tenants.”
A motley variety of myths about “common law,” about the True Constitution, about the significance of fringed edges to flags, and other what-not, fuel the often bizarre Constitutionalist tax protester movement in the United States.

Sometimes the decisive turn in a tax resistance campaign has come when the resisters have coalesced into a formal group with the authority to organize and coordinate resistance actions. Today I’ll give some examples of this.

The Great Confederated Anti-Dray and Land Tax League of South Australia formed in the Spring of 1850 to fight taxes associated with a recently-enacted Road Act, and, once organized, the League was successful in its fight. Organizer Jonathan Norman remarked to a meeting of the League in September: “They had before them an example of what might be achieved by union. In everything they had been victorious; the dray-tax. which from time to time was threatened to be enforced, was ultimately abandoned altogether. The various memorials from the different hundreds, backed by the memorial of the united delegates, had caused the Government to introduce an amended Act, which promised almost everything they desired.”
When Charles Ⅹ and his ministers threatened to bypass the elected legislature and start taxing and spending on their own initiative in 1829, French liberals declared that since such actions violated the constitution, the people were under no obligation to pay for them with their taxes. Taxed landholders in Brittany formed the “Breton Association” to coordinate their resistance.

This Association had a two-fold object. They proposed, in the first place, to refuse to pay any illegal tax, and in the second place to raise by contribution a common fund for indemnifying any subscriber, whose property or person might suffer by reason of his refusal.

The members subscribed each ten francs. In the event of any tax being imposed without the consent of the Chambers, or with the consent of a Chamber of Deputies created by any illegal alteration of the existing law, payment of the tax was to be refused, and the money subscribed was to be employed in defending and indemnifying the persons who should so refuse, and to prosecute all who might be concerned in the imposing, or the levying of such illegal taxes.

The association enacted a trigger mechanism for an organized tax strike and a process for collecting and distributing a mutual insurance fund. In this way they were able to present a credible threat to the planned royal usurpation — so much so that the newspapers that dared to print the Association’s charter were prosecuted and their editors imprisoned. This only served to fuel the movement: “The associations spread over the greater part of the kingdom; they embraced more than half the Chamber of Deputies, and a very considerable number of peers.”
The Rebeccaites formed Farmers Unions which met in secret to discuss the same sort of grievances that, in disguise, Rebecca and her sisters would address vigilante-style, and which corresponded with each other in a regional network. One farmer said: “This Union among us is a very excellent thing if all join. When they elect members of Parliament they do just as they please, and we have no voice, but here we have. There is no way of putting things to rights till we get up this Union, and then we can do as we please and think best. If we had had this Union many years ago we should be better off than we are now!”
The Women’s Tax Resistance League formed in 1909 when about twenty women from existing suffrage groups came together in London “with the single-minded aim of starting ‘an entirely independent society quite separate from any existing suffrage society with the object of spreading the principles of tax resistance.’ ” League organizer Margaret Kineton Parkes explained that it “included Suffragists from every camp, Conservative, Liberal, Socialist, as well as non-party, and was making every effort to get a large number of influential women to refuse to pay taxes” because “[t]he isolated refusal to pay was ineffective and only caused trouble to the refuser; but a large and unexpected number would cause considerable trouble to the Government and would bring the question at issue home to them.”
Elias Rishmawi was among those who organized tax resistance in Beit Sahour during the first intifada. He remembers how important it was to have formed a network of committees so as to distribute communication and decision-making in anticipation of Israeli military disruption by means of curfews and arrests of the resistance leadership.
Direct action-oriented pacifists in the United States came together in the late 1940s to form Peacemakers. “[T]his is not an attempt to organize another pacifist membership organization, which one joins by signing a statement or paying a membership fee,” they announced. By 1949 the group had about 2,000 members, about 150 of which were resisting taxes. A second group, War Tax Resistance, promoted the tactic within the anti-Vietnam War activist community. In 1982, the National War Tax Resistance Coordinating Committee formed to help a variety of groups that included war tax resistance as part of their work to coordinate and share resources and expertise.
During the Great Depression in the United States, taxpayers’ leagues, some of which organized property tax strikes, proliferated in the thousands. Such groups “spring up like mushrooms,” one critic complained, “every time you go out in the morning, you find more of them.” These leagues attacked the taxes on multiple fronts — not only organizing tax strikes but also coordinating legal suits and pressuring political figures.
A proposed sales tax boycott in Ottawa in 1981 was boosted by the group Human Action to Limit Taxes. “As individuals we are lost,” one resister said. “But as a group we would have some impact.”
In January, 1830 the Birmingham Political Union of the Middle and Lower Classes formed. It would play a strong role — and would advocate tax resistance — in the battle to pass the Reform Act of 1832. But it also began as a war tax resistance group, asking its members to sign the following oath:

That in the event of the present ministers so misconducting the affairs of the country as to make it probable we shall be involved in a Continental war [with Belgium], we will consider the propriety of checking so mischievous an event by withholding the means as far as may lay in our power, and will then consider whether or not refusing to pay direct taxes may not be advisable.
Similarly, the Catalonian “National Union” began life as a committee to direct a tax resistance action in 1899 and grew into the organizing party for an ambitious reform movement: “its demands included the entire reorganization of the vital forces of the nation: fiscal and administrative reform, the amelioration of the judicial system, the introduction of an effective system of compulsory education, the improvement of the provincial governments.”

In Danny Burns’s book on the Poll Tax Rebellion, he stresses how important it was for the success of the campaign that people formed and ran their own small-scale, neighborhood resistance groups, rather than ceding control of the movement to the various established left-wing partisan and labor-union groups who wanted to use the movement to their own ends but were also afraid to identify themselves too closely with the law-breaking resisters.

Prior to the Anti-Poll Tax campaign, many people’s only experience of politics was a traditional Labour Party or trade union meeting — the sort of meeting where the top table takes up 90% of the discussion; where the only items discussed are those decided by the executive committee; where half the meeting time is spent discussing procedural motions or the order of words in a resolution; where political factions throw rhetoric across the room in angry and unproductive exchanges. Essentially, boring meetings which stretch long into the night. Hundreds of thousands of people have been to these meetings just once and never returned. To engage people in a mass campaign, the Anti-Poll Tax Unions had to challenge this culture of organisation. They had to make people feel wanted and included and give everyone a sense that they had a role.… This immediate form of organisation also meant that people weren’t patronised by those who had political experience. In the local groups, people didn’t need permission to act, they just had to get on the phone to their neighbours and get something going. People stay involved in political campaigns if they can contribute in the way that they feel is most effective. Very often this is not by sitting in boring meetings.
…most of the successful Anti-Poll Tax Unions operated on a principle of parallel development. Rather than trying to assert majority control or spend hours reaching consensus, people were allowed to get on with what they thought was most important. Everything could be done in the name of the Anti-Poll Tax Union, which existed to coordinate activity against the Poll Tax, not to specify its exact nature.

However, he also notes:

…it was sometimes in the places where the Anti-Poll Tax Unions were weakest that resistance was strongest. For example, St. Pauls was almost the only area in Bristol which couldn’t sustain an Anti-Poll Tax group. Local people didn’t feel the need to set up new groups because, as in many inner city areas, they already had strong networks of solidarity, and there was already a high level of general hostility to officials of any sort. … By the end of 1990, three times as many people had turned up to court to contest their cases from St. Pauls than any other area.
White supremacists in Louisiana met in 1872 to form “The People’s Association to Resist Unconstitutional Taxation” to coordinate their resistance to state and city taxes enacted by the reconstruction government there, and to provide legal support for resisters.
Property owners of Silver Lake Assembly met in 1908 to decide how to respond to a property tax they felt was being illegally put over on them by a government with no authority to do so. They decided to respond as a group, “and perfected an organization for the purpose,” issuing a resolution saying that they “individually and collectively will resist the payment of the so-called taxes.”

From the 22 November 1899 Derby Mercury:

The Troubles in Spain

Madrid, November 15. — The General League of Producers, in which most of the local leagues of a similar character throughout Spain are represented, has issued a manifesto to the country, addressed especially to taxpayers. It declares that passive resistance to the payment of taxes is lawful, and the managing committee of the league, while recommending the payment of the taxes for the second quarter of the current year, advises the taxpayers to reserve their decision regarding the third quarter for a later date. The proclamation further exhorts the taxpayers to control their impatience, and to put their confidence in the General League. “If,” the document continues, “it is true, as is declared by those watching us from the other side of the Pyrenees, that we are on the eve of a 5^th of May, 1789, let us be sparing of our blood, so that we may reach the 4^th of August calm and strong, and even that more distant epoch of the liberation of our country in such a way that we shall not lay ourselves open to the charge of precipitation or of having been lacking in prudence.”
Contrary to official information received this morning from Barcelona, anticipating an early settlement of the dispute, the latest information shows that the situation there has become more serious. Merchants and shopkeepers refuse emphatically to pay their taxes, and they assert their attitude will contribute to the fall of the Ministry. Shops have again been closed.

This was the celebrated tancament de caixes in Barcelona, which continues to inspire tax revolts in Spain and Catalonia today.