3 - Resisting Agricultural Taxes

Summary

This chapter examines the peasants’ everyday resistance to heavy taxes, particularly the land tax, the livestock tax, the road tax and the wheat protection tax under the single-party regime. It shows that under the authoritarian single-party system, peasants coped with the increasingly burdensome economic demands of the new state and resulting social injustice through everyday and informal means. In contrast to the existing accounts that mostly regard the peasants as atomized under the absolute control of the state, this chapter portrays them as a relatively active social dynamic, which annulled the great part of the taxes in practice and compelled the government to soften its heavy taxes.