Activists Fund the Solidarity Economy by Diverting Taxes from the Government
Spanish war tax resisters and “Occupy”-style activists have joined forces to organize a sharing economy network and nourish it with redirected taxes.
When the financial crisis hit Spain, the finance industry begged for bailouts, just like they did in the U.S. But Spain went further, abruptly amending its Constitution to make payments to these financiers the “absolute priority” — higher than any other budget item — and forcing an austerity budget on everyone else.
Meanwhile, Enric Durán carried out a daring bank robbery. He took out loans from 39 banks and fled with the nearly half a million euros. This he invested into anti-capitalist projects, saying he was fighting back against the banking system’s piracy of the Spanish Treasury.
Among the projects this Robin Hood funded was Derecho de Rebelion (Right of Rebellion). It encourages people to withdraw their allegiance from the Spanish government and instead “declare ourselves citizens of the popular assemblies and the assemblies of post-capitalist projects in which we participate.”
Tax resistance serves to fund the popular assemblies, and from these, gives “absolute priority” to participatory funding of the resources that we really consider public.
They advised people to resist not just military spending (as war tax resisters do) but also payments on the national debt, salaries of legislators, church subsidies, prisons, police, and the monarchy — 25% of the budget.
They asked people to redirect their taxes into their local, Occupy-style popular assemblies or into projects launched by those assemblies: like worker-run cooperatives, grassroots job centers, squats in unused buildings and abandoned villages, and self-managed health-care cooperatives.
With the advice of veteran Spanish war tax resisters, the group wrote a tax resisters’ handbook. They opened “offices of economic disobedience” in Madrid, Barcelona, Castellón, and Zaragoza (the first four of what are now at least a dozen such offices), where they teach how to resist taxes and how to set up self-managed businesses and cooperatives.
They also began to link up sharing economy projects — cooperatives, community gardens, free stores, food banks, alternative currencies, debtors’ unions, credit cooperatives, barter networks, housing co-ops, tool libraries, off-the-grid energy generators, soup kitchens, squats, activist affinity groups, and popular assemblies — hoping that by connecting these projects into local, self-managed networks, they could bypass governmental and financial intermediaries in the economy. They coined the term “Desobediencia Integral” (Comprehensive Disobedience) for this strategy:
Comprehensive Disobedience means breaking the social contract with the State of a territory where one lives, in order to create a new social contract with a community in which the person is really linked.
The movement’s Handbook of Economic Disobedience describes how to take your resources away from big business, big finance, and government, and put those resources at the service of people in your community.
They acknowledge that this is going to be a long process. For some time we have to live in two worlds: the official economy where the rules are set by a privileged few for their own benefit, and the emerging one in which we can participate on an equal basis.
Because big finance and government are tightly linked, the movement augments tax resistance with resistance to foreclosures, defaults on credit card debt, and personal bankruptcy as a way to make such debts uncollectable. They take their money out of banks in favor of credit unions, new “ethical” banks, or microloans that fund alternative economy projects. Some leave money behind entirely and move to barter, alternative currencies, or local exchange trading systems.
And they experiment with ways to use tools of the official economy to subversively build the sharing economy. (Corporate personhood? We can play that game too!)
By experimenting, by building new methods of production and exchange, and by redirecting their resources and loyalty from the government to grassroots community projects, together they are building a new economic system in which people are the highest priority.
How can activists in the U.S. learn from this model? We might reach out to the American war tax resistance movement. They have a long-standing tradition of redirecting taxes from the government to more worthwhile projects — it seems a natural fit for them to partner with people who are building the sharing economy. It could be that all you need to do is extend a hand of friendship in order to find enthusiastic start-up capital for your subversive sharing economy innovation.
If you’re more daring, you might ask them how you and those around you can redirect your own tax dollars away from the Trump administration and into the projects whose benefits you have seen with your own two eyes. Tax resistance may be just as important a part of the new economy in the U.S. as it is in Spain.
