Some historical and global examples of tax resistance → India → Gandhi’s campaigns → Mahadev Desai

Some bits and pieces from here and there:

• The 200-person town of Gallifa in Catalonia, Spain, has begun tax resistance as a municipality — by refusing to pay €1,662.62 income tax due on the salaries of the employees at the tax office. The town government is controlled by the small separatist coalition party “Catalan Solidarity for Independence.” There have been other rumblings of tax resistance lately in Catalan independence circles, and some people have made a symbolic gesture of trying to pay their federal taxes directly to the Catalan regional government. A not particularly favorable Spanish-language news article about the Gallifa action gives a good overview of Catalan nationalist tax resistance in recent years (translation mine):

  The group from local Barcelona-area government is considering conducting the same action with other taxes, such as the contributions for Social Security.

  This action is in line with eight Catalan entrepreneurs and freelancers, grouped under the platform “Diem Prou” (“We Say Enough”), who in April of this year staged a tax evasion that came after months of protest against what they consider an unjust regional financing model that they believe qualifies as “looting.”

  In December of 2008, the then-secretary of General Policy of the ERC, Josep Ginesta, demanded “that not one new euro raised be sent beyond Fraga [the Westernmost town in Catalonia, which is the Easternmost province in Spain]” In October of 2009, former regional president Pasqual Maragall (PSC) proposed a “cierre de cajas [shutting of the cashboxes],” and eight months later he threatened “tax resistance.” A measure that was supported by the secretary-general of the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC), Oriol Pujol, in August of 2010. In April of 2011, the then-leader of ERC, Joan Puigcercós, and the Member of European Parliament from CiU, Ramon Tremosa, also called for refusal to honor the demands of the Treasury.

  Also those media that survive thanks to public funds have taken sides in favor of these campaigns. In March of 2011, the chief political editor of La Vanguardia, Jordi Barbeta, hinted from the pages of the newspaper group Godó of the need to launch “collective tax resistance.” A month later, Vincent Partal, director and owner of Vilaweb, one of the most heavily subsidized journals in Catalonia, encouraged from its on-line edition the launch of a campaign of “planned and widespread civil disobedience” against the Spanish government finances. In fact, in this journal are given all sorts of details on how to carry out such evasion.

  In the Summer of 2011, Òmnium Cultural, a radical separatist group that tops the list in terms of subsidies received, launched a new challenge against the present law — more than those it is accustomed to raise — that the federal government grant the Catalan regional government an economic treaty [like the ones that make the Basque region and Navarre more fiscally independent] in the next four years, or it will promote “tax resistance” against the Tax Agency. This proposal was dismissed by the Catalan government — which considered it “interesting” — and by CiU, while the PSC called it “appealing” but “unrealistic.”

  Gallifa is not the only municipality that has initiated an action of this sort. The Consistory of San Vicente dels Horts (Barcelona) — chaired by the ERC leader Oriol Junqueras — or of Gerona — with Carles Puigdemont (CiU) in charge — also attempted to cheat the national Treasury, but eventually backed down.

• I’ve had less luck trying to parse this article (in Italian), but the gist of it seems to be that Italy’s “Northern League” is threatening tax resistance (though it seems I’ve heard similar bluster from them in the past, without much to show for it). The gist of the grievance is similar to that of Catalonia — that taxes paid by people that live in the region don’t go to provide services there but to prop up economically poorer regions of the country. Northern League-allied mayors are threatening to kick out the agency that collects federal taxes, and to instead collect and spend these taxes themselves at the local level.
• Household Tax resisters disrupted a Cork City Council meeting last week, where nearly 40% of households were still refusing to register for and pay the new charge.

  Laura McGonigle said: “I’ve always enjoyed being a public representative and taken the rough with the smooth but tonight was horrendous.

  “While everyone is entitled to protest, I felt extremely intimidated and unsafe in our democratically-elected chamber.”

• Bill Evans, a pensioner living near Hartlepool, England, is refusing to pay his council tax because the government services it pays for have become so shoddy. “It has reached the stage where I feel the only thing I can do now is stop paying my council tax,” he says. “The council is not fulfilling its commitment and I will have my day in court.”
• Mahadev Desai’s 1929 book The Story of Bardoli: Being a History of the Bardoli Satyagraha of 1928 and its Sequel is available on-line.
• The U.S. government recently seized $269 from war tax resister Cindy Sheehan’s bank account, leading her to reflect on “Stealing Rent Money from a Gold Star Mother.”
• The New York Times profiles American alternative currency martyr Bernard von NotHaus, who is facing serious prison time for minting a set of coins for people who were losing faith in the government’s official legal tender.
• IRS employees “are closing delinquent taxpayer accounts [categorizing them as ‘currently not collectible’] without following the proper procedures and without managerial approval” according to a new TIGTA report.

A tax resistance campaign can benefit its recruiting efforts, engage public sympathy, and constrain the response of the government, by getting a good spin out in the media. Here are some examples:

• The Bardoli tax strike was media savvy, both in terms of national establishment media, and in terms of local, down-to-earth outreach methods:
  • “A campaign like this could not be carried out without a publicity department,” wrote Mahadev Desai. “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. … 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 agriculturalists all over the taluka. … 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.”
  • In the course of describing the organizational structure of the nonviolent resistance army, Mahadev Desai noted: “[U]nder these officers were privates ready to march anywhere and everywhere, at any hour of the night and day, and ready to do the lowliest of duties, from carrying a message to drawing water from the well. … The round of duties of most of them began often as early as 3 A.M., when they started with their orders for the day to the various villages where they would distribute the daily news bulletins issued by the Publicity Bureau. … All were to go amongst the peasants, acquaint themselves with their needs and difficulties, cheer them up, and explain to them the instructions of the Chief.”
  • Mahadev Desai continues: “And at the head of them all the Sardar, ever on the move, without haste and without rest, ever vigilant, his iron discipline ever unrelaxed, paying the penalty of his exclusive prerogative — speech-making — often at midnight, and often at three or four places in a day.” … “The Bardoli victory was not won by a miracle. It was the inevitable fruit of patient and incessant toil, the inevitable result of the teaching that the Sardar wore himself out to impart day in and day out. During the first two months he gave three days in the week to Bardoli, but as soon as the Ahmedabad Municipality released him, all his waking hours were given to the people of Bardoli, the day usually beginning at 5 P.M. and ending at 2 A.M., with four or five speeches a day on average.”
• The case of Valentine Byler, an Amish man who refused to participate in the American Social Security system for conscientious reasons, was notable for how it played out in the media. Part of this was due to the clumsy heavy-handedness of the IRS, which seized Byler’s horses out from under him literally as he was working his field. Asked about this, the IRS Chief of Collections said: “Plowing never occurred to me. I live in an apartment.” The frame of thoughtless-urban-bureaucrats vs. godly-heartland-people attached itself to the story, and editorialists across the country who were already skeptical of welfare state policies jumped on it. “What kind of ‘welfare’ is it,” wrote the New York Herald Tribune, “that takes a farmer’s horses away at spring plowing time in order to dragoon a whole community into a ‘benefit’ scheme it neither needs nor wants, and which offends its deeply held religious scruples?” Byler got letters of support from around the country. And Congress eventually felt enough of the pressure that it carved out an exception for the Amish exempting them from the Social Security law.
• Abby and Julia Smith, who were taxed excessively by an unscrupulous local government for which they, as women, had no voice in electing, knew how to make their struggle attractive to the news media. Julia prepared a speech for the town council, which fell on deaf ears — but she then released it to the editor of a nearby newspaper, which reprinted it and compared the sisters’ actions to those American Revolutionaries who fought for the principle of “no taxation without representation.” An accompanying editorial concluded: “It will not be creditable if Abby Smith and her sister are left to stand alone… to fight the battle of principle unaided.” Sure enough, they found support — rhetorical and practical — from many quarters. “[M]uch of the nation’s interest in the Glastonbury case was the work of Abby,” wrote Elizabeth George Speare in recapping the case, “who willingly took pen in hand to keep her public informed. Though she once reminded a Toledo editor that she could not give quite so much time to answering such distant requests, she seems to have welcomed every opportunity to recount, in her pungent style, a tale which lost nothing in constant retelling.”
• The Women’s Tax Resistance League in Britain made sure to have speeches and propaganda ready to deliver at any events — such as tax auctions — that the media might cover. Such speeches might form the core of an overtaxed reporter’s coverage of such an event. When Dora Montefiore barricaded her home against the tax collector in 1906, she recalled:

  In 1904 and 1905 a bailiff had been put in my house, a levy of my goods had been made, and they had been sold at public auction in Hammersmith. The result as far as publicity was concerned was half a dozen lines in the corner of some daily newspapers, stating the fact that Mrs. Montefiore’s goods had been distrained and sold for payment of income tax; and there the matter ended.

  When talking this over in 1906 with Theresa Billington and Annie Kenney, I told them that now we had the organisation of the W.S.P.U. to back me up I would, if it were thought advisable, not only refuse to pay income tax, but would shut and bar my doors and keep out the bailiff, so as to give the demonstration more publicity and thus help to educate public opinion about the fight for the political emancipation of women which was going on. They agreed that if I would do my share of passive resistance they would hold daily demonstrations outside the house as long as the bailiff was excluded and do all in their power outside to make the sacrifice I was making of value to the cause.…

  …From the day of this simple act of closing my door against the bailiff, an extraordinary change came over the publicity department of daily and weekly journalism towards this demonstration of passive resistance on my part…

  On the morning following the inauguration of the siege, Annie Kenney and Theresa Billington, with other members of the W.S.P.U., came round to see how we were getting on and to encourage our resistance. They were still chatting from the pavement outside, while I stood on the steps of No. 32 Upper Mall, when there crept round from all sides men with notebooks and men with cameras, and the publicity stunt began. These men had been watching furtively the coming and going of postmen and tradesmen. Now they posted themselves in front, questioning the suffragists outside and asking for news of us inside. They had come to make a “story” and they did not intend to leave until they had got their “story.” One of them returned soon with a loaf of bread and asked Annie Kenney to hand it up over the wall to my housekeeper, whilst the army of men with cameras “snapped” the incident. Some of them wanted to climb over the wall so as to be able to boast in their descriptions that they had been inside what they pleased to call “The Fort”; but the policeman outside (there was a policeman on duty outside during all the six weeks of a siege) warned them that they must not do this so we were relieved, in this respect, from the too close attention of eager pressmen. But all through the morning notebooks and cameras came and went, and at one time my housekeeper and I counted no less than twenty-two pressmen outside the house. A woman sympathiser in the neighbourhood brought during the course of the morning, a pot of home-made marmalade, as the story had got abroad that we had no provisions and had difficulty in obtaining food. This was never the case as I am a good housekeeper and have always kept a store cupboard, but we accepted with thanks the pot of marmalade because the intentions of the giver were so excellent; but this incident was also watched and reported by the Press.

• When I read stories from newspaper archives about the tax strike in Beit Sahour during the first intifada, I’m struck with how much more sympathetic the English-language press was toward the Palestinian people at that time. They are depicted as human beings, with families and aspirations, and their grievances are taken seriously and explored and analyzed and given credence. The contrast with the coverage in today’s media is stark. Beit Sahour was a high water mark of sorts. This can partially be explained by the fact that most of the resisters were Palestinian Christians, and so did not trigger the anti-Muslim bias that shapes much of the English-language reporting from the area — one news account made much of the fact that the Israeli military had seized “Christian crosses carved of olivewood and the statuettes of the Good Shepherd and the Madonna” from one resister. But the resisters were also very deliberately media savvy: they stuck to nonviolent tactics, which, besides being tactically sensible under the circumstances, also made the draconian Israeli crackdown seem particularly bullying; and they used slogans, like “no taxation without representation” that could not help but fall on sympathetic ears in the English-speaking world. Another article noted that when the Israeli military lifted its siege of Beit Sahour, “hundreds of residents gathered at a central intersection to celebrate and to escort journalists to homes and shops from which troops had seized goods.”
• During the campaign against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax, the very name “poll tax” was a propaganda coup. Thatcher had launched the tax under the benign name “community charge,” but the opposition movement used “poll tax” right off the bat, and the name stuck. That name had resonance with anti-poll tax campaigns of the past, dating back as far as the 14^th century rebellion of Wat Tyler. The movement also pitted the government against pensioners, the disabled, student nurses, families with live-in elderly relatives, and other such victims that made for a sympathetic media narrative. “Stories like this flooded both the national and local media,” writes movement historian Danny Burns. “One minute the focus was on the nurses, next on the disabled, then on the pensioners.”
• The IRS includes a publicity strategy with their enforcement actions, and grades itself with how much publicity it gets when it cracks down on a tax evader, thus “sending the message to taxpayers that violations of the Internal Revenue Code and related financial crimes are being investigated and prosecuted.” Since the IRS is already doing the work to make sure the press is aware of the action, and of course giving out their own spin, it makes sense for tax resisters to be prepared with their own message. “Never let a lien, levy, seizure, auction, summons, Order to Show Cause, or indictment pass without taking the opportunity to publicize opposition,” advise the authors of the book War Tax Resistance: A Guide to Withholding Your Support from the Military. “The IRS is very sensitive to adverse public opinion. It is probably the most disliked agency of the government. You may be surprised at the amount of support and sympathy you will get from the general public and media when struggling against the IRS — if you take care to organize properly.”
  • NWTRCC has some ideas on how to make a bigger media splash, including propaganda leaflets, props & costumes, theatrical protest ideas, penny polls, tax form burnings, bake sales, banners, vigils, and so forth.

Some tax resistance campaigns have had their own anthems or fight songs.

• Mahadev Desai, in The Story of Bardoli, mentions such songs on a few occasions:

  I paid a visit along with Sjt. Vallabhbhai to one of these [Raniparaj] villages. … The young women, who had taken the Khadi pledge three years ago in the presence of Gandhiji and shed their trinkets and heavy brass ornaments, were all there in spotlessly white Khadi, brimming over with joy and lustily singing Satyagraha songs.

  The mention of the Satyagraha songs reminds me of one or two things that happened during the month. … Phulchandbhai had already some songs ready, and the atmosphere in the taluka gave him the inspiration for many more. These friends were posted at Valod, and thanks to their bhajans they were in great demand everywhere. The plain and homely songs spread the message of Satyagraha in a most effective manner, and men, women, and children had them on their lips. One cannot speak too highly of the part played in the movement by Phulchandbhai and his songs.

  I shall describe one of the scenes. We visited Nani Phalod, a small village, at about 9 p.m. There was a huge procession of men and women, the former singing Satyagraha songs, and the latter singing a song from an old saint of which the refrain was: “All our sorrows have ended, now that the Master has come.”

  There were huge meetings everywhere, attended by hundreds of women, laying heaps of [homespun] yarn before Sjt. Vallabhbhai, as in 1921, and lustily singing bhajans. The invincible spirit of the people evidenced everywhere was bound to exasperate the officials even more.

  The women of Varad… had their own songs, some of them being old songs of the saints and some composed by themselves to suit the fight in which they were engaged, and tacked on to the originals. One of these songs sung soulfully by them ran:

  With full knowledge take up your arms even like a Gnani (seer). Let Purity and Contentment be your armour and Courage your shield. The valiant shall rush to the forefront, the laggards will be beaten and will take to their heels. With full knowledge, therefore, take up the fight like the Gnani.

  The path of fight is not strewn with roses. It is sharp as the edge of the sword, for it is the fight for Truth. Let us therefore be wide awake like the Gnani. With full knowledge etc.

  The tyrant has run amok and crushed the ryot under his heels. We slumbered so long, we have now found our Guru and are blessed with knowledge. With full knowledge etc.

  He has taught us to pit righteousness and truth against oppression and injustice. God is sure to run to the rescue of right and vanquish the wrong. With full knowledge etc.

  Vallabhbhai our leader assures us that ultimately victory is ours. Let us therefore keep our pledge. With full knowledge etc.

• The boycotts and tax strikes of the American Revolution also had their songs. When patriots gathered to spin home-spun yarn, the work would be accompanied by “many stirring tunes, anthems, and liberty songs,” such as the following:

  Young ladies in town, and those that live round,
    Let a friend at this season advise you;
  Since money’s so scarce, and times growing worse,
    Strange things may soon hap and surprise you.

  First, then, throw aside your topknots of pride;
    Wear none but your own country linen;
  Of economy boast, let your pride be the most
    To show clothes of your own make and spinning.

  What if homespun they say is not quite so gay
    As brocades, yet be not in a passion,
  For when once it is known this is much worn in town,
    One and all will cry out— ’Tis the fashion!

  And, as one, all agree, that you’ll not married be
    To such as will wear London factory,
  But at first sight refuse, tell ’em such you will choose
    As encourage our own manufactory.

  No more ribbons wear, nor in rich silks appear;
    Love your country much better than fine things;
  Begin without passion, ’twill soon be the fashion
    To grace your smooth locks with a twine string.

  Throw aside your Bohea, and your Green Hyson tea,
    And all things with a new-fashion duty;
  Procure a good store of the choice Labrador,
    For there’ll soon be enough here to suit you.

  These do without fear, and to all you’ll appear,
    Fair, charming, true, lovely and clever;
  Though the times remain darkish, young men may be sparkish,
    And love you much stronger than ever.

  Then make yourselves easy, for no one will teaze ye,
    Nor tax you, if chancing to sneer
  At the sense-ridden tools, who think us all fools;
    But they’ll find the reverse far and near.

• The modern American war tax resistance movement has in recent years managed to collect its own funk anthem (“What If We All Stopped Paying Taxes?” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings):

  I was talking to a friend of mine
  Said he don’t want no wars no more
  They’re building bombs while our schools are falling
  Tell me what in the hell we’re paying taxes for

  What if we all stopped paying taxes?
  Now, what if we all stopped paying taxes?
  Stop paying taxes y’all

  Now tell me who’s gonna buy their bombs
  Their tanks, their planes and all their guns
  Well, tell me who’s gonna pay for their wars
  If we all get together and cut their funds

  Hey, listen people, listen to what I’ve got to say
  What if we all stopped paying taxes?

  folk song (“Don’t Be Afraid of the Neo-Cons” by Norman Blake):

  Don’t send your money to Washington
  To fight a war that’s never done
  Don’t play their games don’t be their pawns
  And don’t be afraid of the neo-cons

  and rap (“Uncle Sam Goddamn” by Brother Ali):

  You don’t give money to the bums
  On the corner with a sign, bleeding from their gums.
  Talking about you don’t support a crackhead —
  What you think happens to the money from yo taxes?

  Shit, the government’s an addict
  With a billion dollar a week kill-brown-people habit
  And even if you ain’t on the front line
  When the master yell crunch time you right back at it

  You ain’t look at how you hustling backwards
  And the end of the year add up what they subtracted:
  3 outta twelve months your salary
  Paid for that madness… man that’s sadness

• War tax resister Joan Baez was fond of including the Whiskey Rebellion celebration tune “Copper Kettle” in her concerts.

  Get you a copper kettle
  Get you a copper coil
  Cover with new made corn mash
  And never more you’ll toil

  You just lay there by the juniper
  While the moon is bright
  Watch them jugs a-fillin’
  In the pale moonlight

  Build your fires of hickory
  Hickory or ash or oak
  Don’t use no green or rotten wood
  They’ll catch you by the smoke

  My daddy he made whiskey
  My granddaddy did to
  We ain’t paid no whiskey tax
  Since seventeen ninety-two!

• When a youth activist group joined war tax resisters at a recent Tax Day demonstration at the Oakland federal building, they brought their lyrical skills along:

  People, People, People, can’t you see?
  They kill around the world with tax money.
  Stealing from workers how there money’s made,
  I guess that’s why we’re broke and they’re so paid!

  People, People, People, can’t you see?
  They tax the poor more, the rich stay greedy.
  No money for health or to educate,
  I guess that’s why we’re broke and they’re so paid!

  On-line, you can see some of the rehearsal video showing how they combined the lyrics with pantomime to drive the point home.
• At another American “Tax Day” protest, this one in St. Louis in 2003, war tax resisters at the federal building sang a protest song with lyrics like these:

  For the cost of cluster bombs
  that maim and leave to bleed
  our kids could have more teachers
  helping them to read

• Tax resisters against the British colonial government in Ghana had a fight song for the occasion:

  Cannon they have loaded, but couldn’t fire,
  Cannon they have loaded, but couldn’t fire.
  Whitemen dishonestly imposed poll-tax on the blacks.
  The poll-tax we will never pay, the grandees never deliver up,
  Go tell the white man to come out!

• Luzerne County, Pennsylvania is home to an unusually corrupt government culture (or maybe it’s just that they got caught). Federal authorities charged 23 county residents with various corruption charges, including three judges and a county commissioner. But then the county government decided to hike taxes by 10%. Fred Heller said no. Why fund a nest of crooks? He recorded a protest song titled “Take This Tax and Shove It” and started a campaign to get county residents to refuse to pay their taxes, at least until the government stables have had all their manure shoveled out. Excerpts:

  Take this tax and shove it
  We ain’t paying you crooks no more
  The good ol’ boys stole all our cash
  And ran out the courthouse door

• Residents in Castine, Maine, upset at their local taxes being siphoned off by state politicians, started a tax resistance campaign and accompanied it by protest songs:

  Write me a song of the Revolution,
  ’cause that’s what it’s gonna be.
  Write me a song of the Revolution,
  ’cause that’s what’s in store for me!
  I can’t sit by and watch this country
  go right down the drain.
  I gotta stand firm on the Constitution
  and stay aboard the freedom train.

  “In I Just Found Out (Who the ‘They’ Is), [songwriter] Linscott derides the notion of some anonymous outside government force, commonly called ‘They.’ ‘I’ve heard so many people talk about what “they” are doing. This is my attempt to show that the “they” are those who let government operate by default.’ ”
• When Meo farmers killed a tax collector during a tax strike aimed at the British-backed Maharaja in the 1930s, they commemorated the occasion with a song:

  Rebels in the open the Meos did then rejoice
  They conferred among themselves and spoke in a single voice
  Your názim’s dead and ever since
    we aren’t ruled by any prince
  To London by now you should’ve fled,
    and do take along your dead.