DON’T PAY: Politics of mass refusal
By Al Mikey. Illustration: Bella Harter
Exploitative systems rely on our compliance: our willingness to work and pay our bills. This has become an almost naturalised obligation to pay for goods and services whilst working for an income to cover the cost of them. But we don’t have a stable and fair system. In recent years prices have risen while inflation depressed our wages. What has been termed the ‘cost of living crisis’ means that things we could afford, including necessities, are increasingly out of reach.
We have been assaulted by those with power, capital and influence to pay more so their profits increase and continue to keep their shareholding overlords happy. It’s no surprise, then, that when the costs of our goods and services keep increasing, people will stop paying and start stealing.
According to the Association of Convenience Stores’ Crime Report, there were 5.6 million incidents of shop theft in the UK last year. People are also bunking public transport to save a few quid here and there. Others stopped paying their bills or at least delayed them until the dreaded red letter or bailiff visit. These are rational reactions when we have little or no money. They are individualised survival mechanisms, often with no wider political motivations. But there are also moments, bigger than the individual, where the act (and art) of not paying has a collective and political dimension. Throughout our recent history, the power of collective action through mass refusal is clear.
FROM EVERYDAY SURVIVAL TO MASS RESISTANCE
In Turin,1974, faced with a growing economic crisis, the Italian government, along with business associations, created a plan to reinvigorate the economy. This led to a reduction in public expenditure and reforms which placed the burden of economic reform on the working class by reducing internal demand, like household consumption. This entailed massive price hikes exceeding 50% for costs of transportation, electricity, telephone, healthcare and housing.
Over the summer/autumn of 1974, two private bus companies’ fares increased by 20% - 50%, causing an immediate reaction. Refusing all payment would have caused them to stop running the buses so, in each bus, delegates of passengers would gather fares at the old price. Money collected was handed over to the bus companies. This became known as the practice of ‘autoreduction’, collectively refusing to pay the increases and demanding that prices remain at the old price. It wasn’t long before the workers won their demands, and the increases stopped.
As price increases started hitting rents and electricity prices, the social turmoil inspired many others. In Turin’s working-class neighbourhoods, committees were formed to stop paying rent and electricity bills. Rent strikes spread, protests continued, and the ‘autonomy of the political’ emerged: a form of social struggle that affirms itself by building power from below, able to refuse to pay and argue for price reduction.
FROM THE WORKPLACE TO THE HOME
These experiences of working-class self-organisation further inspired others. From students refusing to pay for the cinema to housewives, along with leftist militants expropriating supermarkets.
These mass experiences of social disobedience weren’t detached from what was happening in other areas, like mass factories. Workers who struggled for more pay and better conditions saw that when those demands were won, their gains were often swallowed up by rent and price increases. It was this understanding - that bosses in the workplace and the ‘bosses at home’ (landlords and the owners of supermarkets and utility companies) both must be confronted to fight the exploitation of labour and improve general material conditions. This new focus on the home as a site of struggle, falling on the shoulders of women whose work was undervalued and unwaged, produced new political theory and an understanding of how capital relies on their labour to produce workers ready to sell their labour.
MASS REFUSAL AND THE ‘ROLLBACK’
The explosive worker’s movements of the 1970s, across much of the world, especially in the most advanced economies in the West, posed a direct crisis for the elites in accumulating capital.
The response was a massive rollback and attacks on workers and their communities. For example, the fascist coup against the socialist Allende government in Chile in 1973 became a testing ground for what became called ‘Neoliberalism’: a once-fringe economic idea started to take hold. Its ‘shock doctrine’ aimed at dismantling the social state and workers’ rights, moved in its ‘democratic’ incarnation to Britain and the US in the 1980s, with privatisation and the marketisation of social goods such as transport, social care, education, housing, utilities etc. Its political objective was to smash organised labour.
DON’T PAY UK - THE RETURN OF ‘AUTOREDUCTION’
In the summer of 2022, we faced an energy price hike. Our bills rose while oil and gas producers’ profits hit record highs. Millions were faced with the choice of heating or eating. In response, an anonymous movement, Don’t Pay UK, burst onto the scene. Some said that this movement took inspiration from the Poll Tax Rebellion of the 1980s/90s, where an estimated 14 million people refused to pay the tax, and the biggest working-class riots against the government occurred, ultimately ending the Thatcher regime of the time. Don’t Pay UK’s call was simple - to gather 1 million pledges to trigger mass non-payment of energy bills if the government refused to scrap the 300% hike that energy companies wanted, from Oct 1st 2022. The movement reached its peak over the 100 days it ran, gaining 300,000 pledges. Polls indicated that 3+ million households would refuse to pay. It was reported that 12,000+ people ordered 4 million leaflets to use in their areas of the UK, while energy companies lobbied the government to shut down the movement, and the Bank of England was forced to consider mass refusal collapsing the energy sector.
Fundamentally, mass pressure forced the short-lived Liz Truss government to introduce the energy price cap guarantee - an uncosted cap on energy price increases. Ultimately, the movement didn’t realise its threat but won significant concessions.
Similar to the experiences of the past, Don’t Pay UK showed the potential of mass refusal as a means to defend ourselves collectively and win material benefits for all. It also highlighted the growth of financialization and the extent it dominates our lives - from rents, student debt, mortgages, and consumer credit to private water and energy companies. The home, therefore, becomes the site of these financialised instruments that are deep within the entire financial system. It also opens up a possibility for resistance. If their power relies on our compliance, our non-compliance forms the substance of our power to fight back.
One new campaign seeks to do just that - after years of polluting our rivers and seas, with shareholders helping themselves to £70 billion in dividends, Take Back Water aims to build a movement in response, using mass ‘autoreduction’ as power from below to win back public ownership.
Check them out: takebackwater.uk
Al Mikey has for many years been involved in anti-authoritarian autonomist and anarchist based movements in London.
