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- [00:02]
A
Welcome to the LSE Events Podcast by the London School of Economics and Political Science. Get ready to hear from some of the most influential international figures in the social sciences.
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B
Welcome to everybody. I'm Mukulika Banerjee. I'm at the Department of Anthropology, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you here. If you're students, welcome. If you're alumni, welcome back to colleagues, friends, members of the public who are here. It is a public event and as you all know, LSE public events are one of the best and most special aspects of life on campus today. We are here really, as you know, to launch and celebrate two very important books that have just been published. We put up copies for you to get a good view of them. Deborah's book Clawing Back is on sale outside at the end when the drinks reception is on. And the Anthropology of Tax volume has a QR code that you can scan and order, but it is open access, so anyone can read it. Please do engage with the contents. It's fantastic you guys pull that off. It's so helpful. And you can download large parts of it and read it, and I hope you will. And I hope that the discussion we've curated and planned for this evening will give you a sense of both the books and the way we thought we would do. This is I'm going to invite Deborah and Miranda to talk about the two books in succession, quick succession. We may. We are academics, so we'll have questions to each other, which we will keep as brief and long, depending on the quality of the questions being asked. We are very aware that this is not a seminar and we want questions from the floor. So I will open it up for questions and then we can have a broader discussion. That's the way the evening's going to proceed. Now, I should say that these books on tax and redistribution would have sounded suitably niche in ordinary times. But as we all know as of last week, focusing on working underclasses, redistribution of wealth and affordability have become really cool. Mamdani has put it from front and center and made it cool. More importantly, not only has he raised it, so our book launch is perfectly timed to actually think about the complexity of this phenomenon. Now, when anthropologists discuss tax, they can turn, as you will see, a dry word such as tax into something that is morally salient, that is complex. It's an enticing phenomenon. And we've done this as anthropologists with dry concepts like bureaucracy or infrastructure or elections and made them really interesting concepts. In these two books, you will find that tax and redistribution are discussed in terms of historical, colonial, religion, community colonialism, religion, community, reciprocity, creating a dialogue really with various disciplines, history, economics, political economy and religion and so on. It is entirely appropriate that we are doing this at lse, which, as some of you will know, used to be called the London School of Political Economy in the distant past, before economics became the discipline. It is. And this is where one of its directors, William Beveridge, produced a report in 1942 called the Social Insurance and Allied Services Report and then was touted and advertised by his. By the school secretary and future wife, Janet Phillips. And this report became the basis of the welfare state in Britain. So LSE's relationship with these themes of welfare distribution, taxation is a very old and institutional one. And in the Department of Anthropology we have an even closer connection, which I discovered this morning, that Janet Phillips, who I just mentioned, who was a school secretary at the time and then married William Beveridge, who was her late husband's cousin, was also Lucy Mayer's mother. So Lucy Mayer, for those of you who don't know, is a stalwart of our department at LSE and was there on and off for nearly 40 years until 1968. But Beveridge was in the interwar period. It was adopted after the Second World War. This is 2025. The terms of debate, the nature of capitalism, all of these have changed and we need new conversations, new strategies to respond to these very same universal and long standing themes. So these two books really help us think about a very broad range of those attendant issues. And I'm going to invite Deborah first to give us a sense of the book. Deborah's been invited to speak for five to 10 minutes, no more than that. I'm going to stop you if you do and then Miranda will follow straight after that. So over to you, Deborah.
- [06:05]
C
Hi everyone and thank you for coming. The title of the book is Clawing Back and the session is called Spreading It Around. These are a few acknowledgments in case I forget to come to them later on. So how does my book, or how does my account challenge what we might take for granted about redistribution? This is a photograph of the Gazette's blood. It's like the sort of government Gazette which was put out by Kaiser Wilhelm of Prussia, the King of Prussia at the time. He said to have invented social welfare back in 18 something or other. Anyway, that's just a sort of piece of memorabilia. But to simplify things dramatically, people are seen as earning an income through wage work when Unemployment threatens. The lack of such earnings means relying on other arrangements, often in the form of welfare benefits. Redistribution is usually seen as set in motion by the state gathering together resources centrally and then dispersing them to counteract the lack of work or to mitigate the effects of, of exploitative labor relations. And there's a quote from Thurborne there talking about that. But it nowadays increasingly involves market actors on the one hand and also informal arrangements, including various kinds of advisors on the other. So in the book I show how payments are often and increasingly in the age of austerity, inadequate. And this means that people need to seek new ways to supplement what they get from work and welfare. So there's work and wages. If that's not enough, you have to rely on welfare redistribution, but you often find yourself then having to borrow. And so it's the interaction between these three income sources and the way they are cobbled together or patchworked, a term in my book that the book explores. These things work out rather differently in the two cases explored in the book. In South Africa, like other places in the global south, where my examples come from research on an important court case and from collaborative work with a major human rights NGO in South Africa, those are the two pamphlet style books that we produced. Welfare systems were rolled out widely after democratisation, but they largely took the form of paying out cash transfers. And this makes each individual recipient responsible for the use of these transfers and in providing for her own needs. Whereas in the uk, where I did some of the work for the book, welfare arrangements were initially quite comprehensive. As Mukalika points out, the beverage plan kind of rolled them out initially, but of course less so in the age, the new age of austerity, where the state has in fact been clawing back and sort of failing to give as much as it previously did. So the clawing back refers to two things. Firstly, to large organizations, financial institutions that lend money, small money lenders, even the state that distributes welfare benefits. Those organizations include people at the bottom of the pyramid, but in the process they try to make sure that borrowers pay them back again. Or some people would say extort profit from them. It depends on your point of view. Or in the case of welfare payments, attempt to reclaim payments deemed to be incorrect. So in all these cases you've got these big kind of more powerful organizations and then you've got these small people who are in the end going to try themselves to claw back what they feel has been unduly taken away from them. So people in the low wage sector. In response, often with the aid of advisors, human rights lawyers, NGOs do this kind of clawing back. So the state claws things back, the financial lenders claw things back, but then people claw things back in turn. And my book is in many ways a hymn of praise to the efforts of these advisors, NGOs, human rights lawyers, and so on. Now, one reason why this kind of clawing back is necessary is because all of this happens in a setting where economic arrangements have been increasingly enabled by high tech forms of financialization. In the case of banks, but also registration and data capture. In the case of states, it's often a bit of both. One of the effects of this has been to create smooth flows of funds that are very difficult to interrupt. And so, for example, this is just one example which occupies an entire chapter of the book. But don't worry too much about it right here. What we can see here is that these elements are connected. Lenders can dip straight into the wages of workers to get their money back. And this was the case with garnishee emoluments attachment orders in South Africa, which became a huge court case and eventually was a certain modest kind of success was won there. Or in another case also from South Africa, lenders can find ways to secure repayment of debts funneled straight from welfare payments. So people get their welfare payments, those then get turned into the collateral for loans. And ultimately, once again, some sort of extractive process seems to be going on. And in the case referred to here, the government outsourced the job of paying the grants, the welfare grants, to people, to a company, and that company doubled up as a lender and used the grants as collateral and ultimately then redistributed funds to its rather than redistributing them to other people. So given how much automation is involved in all of this, human intervention is required to ameliorate or mitigate or set things straight. And sometimes this is not available, as in parts of rural South Africa. And you get people saying, I advise myself, I don't have an advisor, so I've got to do this all by myself. Now, let's just take one example. This is a woman who comes from far up north in the very northern part of South Africa, right near the Zimbabwe border. Her income is, like I was saying before, a cobbled together patchwork of some child support grants, that's welfare, some paid work for an ngo, that's wages and some loans. And she pays back those loans from this sort of formal provider called Moneyline, which is the sort of subsidiary of the other that actually distributes the grants and that's what she uses the loans for. It's very easy to get a loan. All you've got to do is fill in a form that looks like this, put your thumbprint on if you can't sign, and the next minute you find that repayments of your loan are going back straight out of your grant. Okay, now this sounds like a very sort of egregious example of a case where financialization has come down upon people like a kind of great big ogre from above and embroiled people in a set of very unacceptable arrangements. So many anthropologists have referred to this process as the financialization of everyday life. The idea is that where finance comes and decides things, people's lives are then kind of almost automatically hardbound by those kinds of processes. But it's not always like that. And that's part of what my book is trying to show. There is this clawing back process. So in the case that I've just described, a whole lot of people got together in a big social movement called Hands Off Our Grants. It was partly coordinated by this NGO that I mentioned, the Black Sash. And their whole idea was to try and take away these unauthorized, immoral, as they put it, deductions from the SASSA bank accounts that that was the South African Social Security Agency. So some claims about the financialization of life do ring true. But here's where the anthropological sort of jargon comes out. Very important though they do miss a crucial anthropological and sociological point, and that is that in their view of economy, finance stands above and apart from the spirit fear of the household and is inimical to its interests. This is what Zelizer, Viviana Zelizer, calls the hostile world approach. And it's the idea is that you've got short term marketplace exchanges measured in dollars, rands, etc. And on the other hand you've got ongoing relations. But Jane Gaia, the late lamenter Jane Gaia, explored how in fact this disjunction has almost been created by the world of finance and how somehow sometimes it's created, but sometimes it's breached and there are conversions that occur between the two. The point that she makes is that householders like Mpua, the woman I spoke about earlier, is not just a person in a little domestic group. She is part of a group constituted according to all kinds of rights and obligations. And she is inherently linked to an external field of extra familial ties, whether that be the finance giants that are kind of giving her the Grant and then taking away, but also in other kinds of ways as well. So we need to think of households not as being imposed upon, but somehow interacting with these bigger processes and bigger procedures that go on outside. So if we get back to her again and we go back to what the loans that she took out, she also took out informal loans from a person called a mashonisa, that is a loan shark. And the reason she borrowed these second set of loans, much more expensive ones, repaying basically at 50% per month, was because she needed to pay her savings club membership. This is a TV sort of excerpt from a TV series about the rise of the Mashaanisa. There's many, many loan sharks around South Africa these days, and they're often very demonized. But in the case of tribalschut, she was doing this because she needed to pay her savings club, which is. It's also known as a stockfell in South Africa. And this was a way in which she was somehow creating a sort of reciprocal relationship between herself and other people in a way that really speaks to this idea that households are not simply separate units, but rather have an interaction with a whole set of different relationships around in society. So the story of Mpho, just one example from my book, is one in which grant payments and borrowing have caught her up in wider structures, but also one of being enmeshed in family and neighborhood obligations. Now, of course, the role of these savings clubs, I will tell you more if I had time, is a very complex one because they do in fact give people some sort of reciprocal implantedness in a way wider social sphere. But they often lend you money as well, and often at interest. So they also are money lenders. So there's a very complicated interaction here between what you can borrow and who you can borrow from, and whether it's seen as an extractive process or simply one which involves some sort of reciprocal mutuality. So without further ado, I'll get on quickly to my final example. And that is a case from the UK because. Because I do talk about the two different settings in a sort of comparative way. And as I said before, in the global north, places like the uk, you had a relatively sort of generous offer of welfare in the first instance, but it's gradually itself being clawed back under conditions of austerity. So this is a case that I came across and followed of a woman who had been given certain kinds of payments and suddenly she found that she was being required to pay them back. She had overpayment letters. Now, this is something which Sam Cohen, who's there in the audience somewhere, has written a lot about as well. Thank you, Sam. But the interesting point to really draw home here also has something to do with the household because the British state, in trying to claw back some of its money from this woman, was trying to somehow impose a type of arrangement upon the household. What goes on in these cases is it's a system that has been dubbed pay now, establish entitlement later. So you pay relatively generously, but then you claw back the money. As the Department of Welfare and Pensions. This is either because people were simultaneously earning wages and failed to accurately report their income, or because of a change in the composition of the household. In this case, the woman was not in fact living with her rather abusive boyfriend, but he came and slept on the couch once in a while to help look after the children. And the state decided she was in fact living together in a partnered household and therefore had to pay back all of this money because she didn't really earn, she didn't really deserve what a single mother should have. So you've got this situation where changes in employment and family structure are rarely permanent, but judgment is based on this kind of thing. Once again, you find the household playing a major sort of role here. And what happened once again, there was a clawing back, a counter clawing back going on because she went to an advisor, which is where I met her. And that advisor said this could have been fought. In other words, there could have been a clawing back on the grounds that the ex himself was abusive, was definitely not living there. There was various kinds of proof that could have been provided. And she was kind of going through another process of applying for other kinds of benefits. But in the meantime, the advisor helped her by splitting up the repayments into smaller manageable amounts, thus making the idea of this clawing back far more palatable and somehow able to be done. So what I will do then, having given you a very brief outline of what's going on, is just tell you that, that I think the conclusion, tentative conclusion, is partly that we need to think more carefully about the household. Think about it as something that is not this bounded, self sufficient unit, but rather has a kind of interaction with wider processes, roundabout and is processual rather than a unit. And other ways in which this clawing back process could be further, somehow enhanced by funding these advisors who operate on the ground.
- [20:22]
B
So I'll leave it there, Deborah, as you can. I should have given you a health warning that the examples are not cheering. So this is grim stuff, but at least we get into the weeds of the discussion. But I know that Robin, Miranda and Johanna have written an introduction to the Anthropology of Tax Reader, which is. Which ends on hope. So we are going to rely on you to provide some of that. So over to you, Miranda.
- [20:57]
C
Thank you so much.
- [21:01]
D
Thank you as well, everyone, for coming here today to listen to us talk about our books, which we've done endlessly in many places. So our volume is a very different beast from Deborah's book, which is an ethnography written by her, whereas ours is a collection of ethnographies. And more than that, I think is actually kind of the. It's the work that's gone into this has really been the work of building a community of people working on tax. Like Mukhalika mentioned, it has been seen as quite niche, or there haven't really been any anthropologists working on tax. When I first started looking at tax, I felt quite lonely. And little by little, through various conferences and workshops, I found other people working on tax. And this book has been in the workings for a few years. And really it was about connecting with other scholars working on tax, working across different ethnographic field sites, but also at different institutions in different countries. So it's been a really fantastic way of kind of building community of scholars. And this is a QR code because we can't sell the book because it's too expensive in hardcover, but it is open access, so feel free to like, take the phones off and you can find it on Cambridge University Press and there's websites on the poster outside as well. So, as I said, there are 14 chapters in this book. So it's very kind of diverse ethnographically. One of the things we wanted to do with the book when we started looking at tax was not to have one question. So the book isn't directly about redistribution, it is about tax. And we wanted to be very open about what the object of study was. And so these chapters reflect very different scales and different actors. We're talking about like, tax collectors and tax institutions in Scandinavia. We're talking about taxpayers in Bolivia or Ghana. We're talking about international tax norm negotiators. So the book, as you started with kind of more intimate stories and then it scales up to finally, Johannes chapter. Oh, sorry, the mic yet Johannes chapter, which looks at tax norm negotiation within the oecd. So you can kind of zoom in and out at different moments. And our idea is to really open up tax as an object of study and think about it not just as, you know, what is Tax, but all these different experiences within fiscal cultures and all the different actors involved. So when we wrote the introduction, we wrote it three times and started off with a kind of classic genealogy of what is tax of anthropology? Where has it come from? What are we inspired by? What are the aims of this subfield, maybe? And then realized that resulted in quite a boring introduction. And we tried to think about what is it we really want to do? And decided that what made sense was to settle on some quite simple but broad questions. So these questions didn't come from the questions of or the contributors in the volume. Instead, we wanted to kind of create these broad questions that all the different chapters could speak to in different ways. So our first question was, why talk about tax now? And Mukunika mentioned some of this. I mean, tax is kind of is a hot topic now. There's been over the years, you know, the scandals around, kind of the dirty paperworks of high tax evasion and all of that. But we thought that now is a good time to talk about tax, partly because we were all talking about tax and anthropology hadn't been talking much about tax. Our next big question was, what is tax? How is tax defined and by whom and with what distributory effects and consequences? So one of the things that comes up in a lot of the chapters in the books is that the way our interlocutors relate to tax is very much through other kinds of payments as. As well, well, how taxes relate to the other outgoings they have, the other fees they pay, payments they make. And for many, they didn't define tax in a way that, you know, maybe the British state would define tax. So we were kind of circling around, how do we, as scholars work with tax if our interlocutors have multiple definitions of what tax is? So we have a section in the introduction that talks about tax as kind of in a more fiscal essentialist way, kind of taxes as set by states. But we also talk about tax beyond the state payments that people make. That may feel more similar to how we think about taxes. They are about creating public goods, but this might not be happening through the state. The third question we asked is, what is taxable and who is taxable and how are they rendered? So, so what are moments when, what moments become taxable? Is it when resources move hands? Is it, you know, when people pass away? Is it when we work like, what moments become taxable? When do they become acceptable as taxable? And I think these questions, what they do by being so broad is they help us open up quite a Philosophical, philosophical conversation about what taxes are. Where do we actually extract value from? And how does that decision to extract value from that moment come to define something as valuable? Our fourth question is what do taxes do? How are they implicated in the histories and presence of global and local equities and inequities, racism and colonialisms? And again, by having this very broad question, we can look to both the positive side and the harms of different fiscal systems and really pay attention to the fact that taxes do very different things in different places, but also link these questions to things like identity and personage. How do they actually shape intimate spheres, not just these broad questions of societal questions of redistribution. And so even though the book isn't directly about redistribution, obviously tax is always about redistribution on some level. And while Deborah has this focus on the kind of householding of different flows of resources, it might seem obvious that our book is about redistribution from the state, these big kind of movements of redistribution through taxes. But actually what a lot of our chapters do is look at how taxes are also implicated in these other smaller flows that are also redistributory. So how paying tax allows you to make other payments, how paying tax might allow you to make claims on the local municipality, how paying tax reframes the labor of that day, how it enables certain livelihoods over other livelihoods. So we think, I mean Deborah, one of the big points she makes in her book is that we can't look at debt separately. We need to look at debt in relation to wages and benefits as well. And our contention is that we need to add to that, that we also need to look at debt and wages and benefits in relation to tax as well. And look and think not just about tax as a macroeconomic phenomena, but look at how tax shapes social relationships and how it's another one of the things that people manage in a day to day way. And yes, that is everything from me.
- [28:46]
B
So I'm going to, as you can tell already from the comments, that we've actually read each other's books here. So they, unlike many of you, have any of you in the audience read any of the books being discussed? Well, I know members of Deborah's family may have had to under duress. I should also say that Deborah's work is really because she's a colleague, one knows more. This is also the comparison between the UK and South Africa is many years in the making, isn't it? And an earlier grant on which a number of researchers worked on advice in the UK are present today in the audience as our Colleagues at LSE who write about taxation as social scientists who have been cited by all of you are in the audience. So this is. And there are students, our wonderful students we've produced over the years who are teaching elsewhere are also here. So I'm hoping that there will be a rich discussion and challenge from the floor in a few minutes when we open up. But Johanna, you have read Deborah's book and can I start by inviting you? Do you want to ask a provocative question, a polite question, a searching question, anything. Try to be provocative and polite.
- [30:02]
E
I thought maybe an interesting way to start our conversation is about, you know, your take on definitions of what redistribution is. And you focus on in Floral back on many small scale instances of the redistributive encounter in the UK and in South Africa. And if we think of the tax avoidance practices of multinational companies and high net individuals, we also talk about in our volume, and if we think of the open and public talk of state capture in South Africa, which was probably already going on when you were doing the research, then a very distributive, then a distributed distributive agenda of a very different nature comes to one mind. So an agenda which is immersed in powerful layers of lobbyism, of patronage and of clientelism. So, and my question is twofold. Is that also redistribution but at the other end of the income and wealth spectrum, or how does it link to the redistributed encounters you describing? And then the second one is, does the public attention we are seeing, you know, over the last decade or two decades, maybe on tax privileges and now specifically in South Africa, on the open talk about state capture, did it affect how people feel entitled to clawing back, or is it, do they say, okay, now I've got this enhances their right to a specific grant or to specific benefit, or is it just simply perceived as there is now less funds to be raided? Astroages.
- [31:47]
C
Yeah, thank you. That's a very interesting question. So the state capture that Johanna's talking about here is this process whereby the previous president was kind of almost captured really by a certain kind of businessman who effectively pretty much just dictated who was going to do what. He literally captured the state. And yeah, two brothers, they were two businessmen and they were actually making appointments in the government and so on. And the question is whether this kind of moral, I guess, ambivalence somehow filtered its way down to the bottom so that people might feel, well, we have the right to whatever, and now our right to these things has been taken away because of these processes and to be truthful, I think that really there wasn't a huge amount of knowledge about that or even awareness about it. It was more. Many of the people that I met, and I met them in the process of sort of doing this work with this ngo, the Black sas. So we were directing our questions quite specifically to this, what was perceived as a different kind of state capture, I suppose. And that was the capture of these funds from the government that was sort of going off onto the side to be used by these basically cashed in by these money lenders of different kinds. So there was a sort of equivalence. And yet I think the people in question were much more focused on the specifics of their pragmatic everyday life and felt that ultimately the only way forward was really to kind of optimize their position in relation to all these different flows of money without thinking too much about the big picture.
- [33:19]
B
Yeah, okay.
- [33:22]
C
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- [33:28]
D
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- [33:47]
C
Now back to the event.
- [33:49]
B
Did you want a less polite question?
- [33:54]
E
No, I mean, I really am enjoyed the book. And one theme which I also picked up was on freedom and autonomy and interdependence. And you mentioned, I mean, he showed very well how the book, how those loans are important for people to gain freedom, which they didn't have before, during apartheid, and how this is also part of how the financial industry in South Africa also makes a point. This is which is important and it gives people freedom and autonomy and specific loan types more than others. And I was wondering if we, you know, if you also talk about Ferguson work on rightful share. And he makes the point if as researchers who focus on autonomy and freedom, you know, what about the importance of interdependence? And so I was wondering, how did you. Have you got also for the students here, advice how to handle this conundrum that, you know, you want to show the autonomy, freedom. But on the other hand, as Ferguson says, it's important to focus on, to focus on the interdependence that we are not here by ourselves, that we are dependent on each other. And if we focus more on that, this would actually move the debate on rightful share forward, which is.
- [35:10]
C
Yeah, yeah, thanks very much. So one of the big inspirations for me in writing this book was the book by Jim Ferguson called Give a Man a Fish. Very sadly, Jim Ferguson also died about a year ago. So Jane Guy, one of my great inspirations, died, and so did Jim Ferguson. Actually, he died even more recently. So I always felt quite sad. I wouldn't be able to sort of have a debate with him about the ideas that he talks about in that book. If you think of it in the most dark possible way, Ferguson was talking in very positive way about the fact that the South African state was redistributing resources, giving sort of grants to all the poor people who previously had had to cope without them. But what he didn't really see coming down the line was the fact that those people specifically targeted for these grants, as it turned out, it was mainly women with children, but also old people with pensions and so on, would become targeted as well by these money lenders. And this was the sort of side and of kind. Kind of dark elements to what he didn't quite anticipate. So I think that the idea of sort of being interdependent that he both celebrates, but also mentions as something that you have a hold on the state to be, you know, to be able to claim, turns in the end into just an income stream for these lenders, which is really quite a sort of sad thing. But the question of the freedom versus the interdependence comes through a lot in the book, because on the one hand, you had a government agency whose job was to distribute these bits of money to people. And it said, we do not want this money to be used as collateral. This money belongs to the children. It must not be alienated from them. That was the kind of protective regulatory arrangement. On the other hand, you got these people from the Department of Trade and Industry who said no. At the end of apartheid, everyone has the right to spend the money exactly in the way that they want. And if that means that you spend the money by kind of, you know, using it as a loan and then paying back the money lender at the end, so be it. That's freedom. So there's a sort of constant tension going through the book in that way. And I think it's really just one of those things which is very hard to kind of see your way through. But it's a sort of. Yeah, it's a juggling act in some ways.
- [37:25]
B
There's something very specific about South Africa going on, isn't there? That talking to you, I've learned, and your book makes it evident that this business that the people making the loans, that redistribution or Direct cash transfers, which is what the debate that so many economists have been part of and reading Ferguson for this reason and your work, the direct cash transfers are actually going through agencies. So the capacity of the state to redistribute through its own agencies is flawed.
- [38:03]
C
Right.
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B
So it's using private agencies who therefore have absolute knowledge of what money is being given to people and therefore can use them as collaterals or repayments or whatever. Isn't that right in South Africa? And this is, you know, it'll be interesting. I know so many of the people in the audience, least by face, and I know people work in different contexts. It'll be useful to have comments on whether this is, you know, whether you think this is significant to what is going on specifically in the South Africa case. I'm just beginning research in India on these topics and there is. It's a mess on many problems on many fronts. But this is not the issue. There are other issues. So I mean, this is partly what anthropology does is it's throws something like direct cash transfers, which is talked about in generic terms by say, economists, development economists, and shows that actually its refraction through particular agencies or particular infrastructures of the state can have hugely consequential effects. But one question, reading all your work has, has made me think, and all of you underplay it, but you use the language, all of you of you say in your introduction that tax is political. I think at one point you say there is a, you know, tax is intensely political. That certainly that's what interests me as a political anthropologist in taxation, because it is, it sets up a series of relationships between the individual or the household with the state or indeed other age of the state at a very minimal level. But you, Deborah, just now talked about the way the president was scrutinized, the way people thought they had a right to. Now would any of your studies and the complexities look very different if pretty much all the context you are just discussing were not democracies. So is there a particular form of ideas around taxation in democratic context? And of course, I raised this because so much of anthropology has also looked at what my supervisor in Oxford, John Davis, used to call the hydrocarbon state, or what Coronel later with Venezuela and so on, has looked at states that do need to tax their citizens and can turn into authoritarian regimes. So does democratic politics play a role in the modalities of what you're discussing in particular, not just politics and more generally?
- [40:44]
C
Yeah, yeah, well, absolutely.
- [40:45]
F
I mean, taxation is kind of predicated. I mean, at least the legitimacy of taxation is predicated on there's some sort of social consensus that what we're paying into is going to be redistributed to society in some way that vaguely represents our values, our shared values and beliefs. And that's all kind of democratic principles. Of course, that all breaks down if you're talking about an authoritarian state or in a colonial context, for instance, or even in Eastern Europe where there's democratic backsliding, where there was this promise of democracy. So people are paying taxes and into a system and feel that now there's a certain expectation of what they should be getting in return. They're not seeing that there's instances of, you know, state capture in that region of the world. And they're like, well, you know, these people are getting richer, the inequality is increasing, we're paying into the system and we're not getting anything back. So of course, yeah, democracy is hugely important to understanding the structure and the underlying values of the taxation regimes and redistribution.
- [41:54]
C
In the South African case, I think that the combination of the sort of liberalization which arrived at the end of apartheid and the democratization meant that these huge rollout of grants going around the country. So that in a sense really played a major role in what came next, which was these grants became available and then in a sense people were sort of fair game to be kind of then tapped into. So yes, it's definitely intimately connected to that moment. I would say.
- [42:25]
E
Yeah, I mean, maybe I would add that on a general level, taxation always involves political choices. And then it boils down, even in a non democratic state, what democratic choices are being made and what of kind concepts of property of value are being promoted through the tax system. So actually how redistributive it is, we don't know by just looking whether it's democratic or non democratic. Theoretically, I mean, sure, but the politics.
- [42:56]
B
In which it exists and the claims that you can make on the state are possible within democratic politics. And then if we are in agreement on that, then really the critical question again, which all of you have raised in some ways and other. I'm just reading a new book on the American taxpayer. Mytax Dollars, it's called, points out the really critical distinction between direct taxes such as income tax or property tax or road tax versus invisible taxes like vat, which are hidden, people don't see them. And so all of us say in this room, those of us who have a salary are aware of the direct tax that one is paying. But the reason why indirect taxes are so bad is because they're invisible. And in every single context a poor person lands up paying much more tax proportion to their income than those of, you know, those paying direct taxes. And the invisibility and the progressiveness of a progressive taxation where you pay in proportion to your income is frankly missing in large context of the global south and deliberate and has implications for the kind of politics it produces because governments lack a accountability.
- [44:26]
D
And then they're often very hard taxes to collect as well when you've got huge informal labour markets and a lot of markets moving without receipts, without VAT payments. So they're very hard taxes to collect. And often what is easy to collect is income from employed people. But it's very interesting going back to what you're saying about the political as well and the link between democracy, democracy and taxes. So there's a classic kind of understanding of, you know, if people pay taxes, they're paying into something they're committed to something they're paying to the nation, then the nation delivers in some way and they increasingly it's a virtuous cycle of increasing democratic kind of buy in by people who pay taxes. And obviously that's something that you can see in a lot of places here quite function. But actually that idea of the increasing democratic buy in is so powerful that even in countries, for instance many countries in South America, one of the reasons why people in Bolivia, middle class people would like to pay taxes or do pay taxes is because they want to bring about a European kind of welfare state. And imagine that as the cycle that will happen. But then on the other hand you have most of the benefits being paid for through the gas industry and people then claiming their rightful share of their natural resources rather than what is being paid in. So you've got these multiple layers of kind of what this idea of the link between tax and democracy does and what your claim to the nation's resources are. And often they don't necessarily but paying your taxes, but they're the very fact that you live on this land and these resources are available whereas other people are paying the taxes in order to bring about a state that will create this link between democracy and taxation and paying.
- [46:20]
C
So that was one of the things I find fascinating in your book was this discussion of people absolutely clamoring to become taxpayers. It's like, I think in Bolivia in particular it was like they wanted to queue up to become taxpayers. And you always think of tax as something which people wanting to evade, but in this case quite the opposite. And that seems to be because they're Trying to make their rightful claim to sort of a share of everything else that will be delivered. If you pay your taxes, you should be able to get proper government, proper regulation, etc. Etc. So it's a fascinating kind of counterpoint to what we often think of as tax.
- [46:56]
F
That's one of the reasons we put Olivia Vickel's chapter first. Hers is in the context of the UK and Romanian migrants. And they are clamoring to pay taxes because they are hoping that this will bring about certain kinds of benefit, open access to the UK benefits regime. So they are weaving their way through different consultancies and agencies to try and help them. Advisers, advisors, intermediaries. Yeah, exactly. But in order to make their kind of incoherent tax receipts, more income receipts more legible to the state in a way so that they can access benefits. So it also happens here and also.
- [47:39]
D
For their right to remain. And all of this like the image.
- [47:43]
E
Of the, I think she describes it as the laggards of Europe and to become more a contributor to society and not being considered as someone who is a burden on society.
- [47:54]
D
But the other reason, I mean, one of the reasons we find that some of our interlocutors are wanting to pay taxes isn't necessarily because they imagine they can get something in return, but because actually paying taxes gives you rights to other things. So paying your property taxes means you shore up your rights over your property in case of a property dispute. So it's also about, and this comes back a lot, I think, to your work as well, Deborah. Like this quite creative use of these different payments and how using some of them enables other payments. So having, you know, having shown, having paid tax and having a receipt showing that you've paid this tax enables you to join a local union or enables you to shore up your property rights. So I think this kind of creative use with all these payments is a really interesting way of looking at the two books together as well.
- [48:43]
B
Well.
- [48:49]
C
Can I ask a question of the. Of the tax people? Well, it's more like a bit of a comparison to try and draw some themes together. So the anthropology and textbook shows how state revenues are acquired, exploring the varied meanings and local nuances and how this is viewed. Clawing back concerns how there's a divided up and what happens to them after that, especially when given out to those in low income brackets. Redistribution seems to promise justice and levelling out and in theory it's enabled through centralized taxation measures and then allocating them fairly. But tax has come to be seen as a locus for Protests and indignation that such justice is often far from available. And I picked up a strong feeling from your book that matters are being unfairly handled. So there's protests going on and so on. This is obviously not the people who are clamoring to be part of the tax base. It's a different group. But so what I picked out in both studies was the difficulties and challenges imposed by things like mobile money, electronic digital high tech systems, or, you know, collecting data on the population for the purposes of tax, but also for the purposes of governing. So in anthropology and tax, this is seen as enabling data capture and surveillance. Government, but sort of political function with a dark side. Not just getting money so you can do stuff, but also governing the population. In clawing back, it's seen as sort of enabling the smooth flow of money, both distributing it to the beneficiaries, which is a nice effect, but then also automating repayment where they owe money either to the, the private lenders or to the government, a kind of extractivist element. And in both, I just wondered, in my book, it's almost like my point is that human intervention is required to push back against these inequities that automation can produce. I wondered, in the case of the textbook, is there also a scenario where some sort of human side is somehow evident in the taxation system, or is it all just viewed in this very automated, high tech sort of manner?
- [50:57]
F
I think in so many of our cases it is a very personalistic process still. I mean, this is an edited volume, right? So we cover each author tackles a different tax system. So there's no way to really address everyone's. I think the only author who really dealt with digitalization head on was probably Nimosh, context of Itax in Kenya, where people were trying very, very hard to navigate the digitization of the tax system and were really struggling to continue to pay their taxes. It was again another case where people were seeking for avenues. And it still was a very personalistic system of having to go in and troubleshoot in person, one on one with tax agents. But taxation is always about coming up, becoming visible to the state in a new way. And that can in some cases make people feel like more sense of belonging to their state and like may be able to make claims on citizenship. And in other cases it makes them more vulnerable if you're in a more predatory context, where for instance in my own field site in Croatia, where if you are registered as a business, it might be that, you know, that kind of invites a tax inspector undercover. So in that sense, you know, it's digitized to the extent that the state becomes aware of a business or some transaction that was not maybe legible before becomes legible to the state. And that opens up a can of worms for either good things to happen or. Or some more negative things to happen.
- [52:38]
B
I certainly found with research I did last year on this new VAT indirect tax, or gst. It's called goods and services tax. It came on the back of digital India and where digitization is very far advanced in, in the use of electronic money.
- [52:57]
C
Right.
- [52:57]
B
In transactions in India. But there you had, I mean, the original intention was precisely to capture the informal economy, which is 90% in India. So there was an assumption that if the economy is informal, it's somehow not paying tax. But of course, it's paying tax in a number of different ways. But this was a direct way to formalize. And the formalization and automation went in together. And exactly as you're describing for Croatia happens, you became completely transparent to the state, which a lot of people actually didn't have a problem with. What they had problem with was the logic of automation is that tax notices go out without enough nuanced local knowledge, which tax bureaucrats would have, and therefore tax claims would have been monitored according to the performance of a business. Whereas now. So when you get a claim sent out, when a tax notice comes, you pay, and then you can get repayments. But most small businesses don't have the kind of capital flows to wait six months for their repayments to come through. So the informal economy and small and medium businesses in India have been decimated in the last eight years that the GST has been brought in. So this is, you could say it is an unintended consequence. But I'm less favorable to this particular regime because precisely because this is also the regime that has reduced corporate tax steadily over the last 10 years. As India becomes the fourth largest economy, corporate tax is going down, which sends you a message about its relationship to big business as well, the formal big business. Anyway, we've talked. We can talk again amongst ourselves. Should we open this up for discussion and invite questions from the audience? You can ask any of the four speakers your question. And let's start with the lady here in the front and the next question at the back. Do you want to. Okay, Hans, maybe I'll come to this side of the room and then come back, but please go ahead. This question is for anybody that wants to jump at it. Hold it closer, the microphone to your mouth.
- [55:18]
C
Is that better?
- [55:18]
B
Yeah.
- [55:19]
C
Great.
- [55:19]
B
So for Any of you, what are.
- [55:22]
C
Your feelings about taxing the super rich and corporations?
- [55:28]
B
I've tried to avoid the words wealth tax so far because one assumed it would come up. Do you want to take it now?
- [55:35]
D
I've actually just been trying to this week write a short piece about, about wealth tax. And that comes from recent field work I've been doing in Sweden where they abolished the wealth tax back in 2007 and they also abolished the inheritance tax around the same time. And Sweden now finds itself one of the most unequal countries in Europe. Now, arguably that isn't necessarily because the abolition of the wealth tax directly. I'm not actually sure about the data there, like, but Sweden has now shifted from what people might think of as a kind of socialist haven or a haven of a welfare haven to a haven for the rich. And we have some of the most billionaires in Europe in Sweden and lots of these unicorn companies that make lots of money from Spotify. So I think, you know instinctively, taxing the rich is obviously a very attractive option. But I guess from, I mean, I guess from like what our work has been looking at is not necessarily.
- [56:48]
B
Whether.
- [56:48]
D
Like taking from the rich and giving to the poor is what taxes mainly do, kind of, if that makes sense.
- [56:55]
C
Sense.
- [56:56]
D
And that taxes can be. We can think about redistribution in more interesting ways, about how is wealth production for everyone enabled or how our livelihoods kind of remunerated in a more equal way across the board. So I think in terms of whether there should be a wealth tax or not, that's kind of for every country to work out, whether that makes sense. And a lot of the arguments, arguments against, like, oh, there'd be a flight of capital, you know, can be called bullshit, but might also be true A lot of other arguments against it that often doesn't bring in that much money because they, they're very skillful at evading the tax or that it's very complicated to, to do. So I don't think there's like a yes or no. Like instinctively it appeals obviously, but I, it's. I don't, I think it depends very much on the circumstances of each country. But in Sweden, what it's done does, I think a little bit is giving them an identity crisis, removing the wealth and the inheritance tax.
- [57:56]
B
Are there any questions from this side at all? Okay.
- [58:00]
C
Yeah.
- [58:01]
B
Okay.
- [58:07]
C
Thank you. My question is also for everybody because I'd love to get, get a few different perspectives. What do you see as the roles of tax, especially when it comes to international aid, paying reference to history of Colonialism. And I think I'm. I'm thinking more in terms of like the western countries who are the colonizers. What do we see as a role of tax there?
- [58:36]
B
We should get Keith to answer the question. Kate's in the audience. She's written fantastic papers on precisely this. Did any of you want to take the question?
- [58:48]
C
I think in a sense, what we're all trying to do is sort of analyze existing tax systems on the ground rather than necessarily making massive recommendations. So in a sense, what you seem to be touching on is more like that, although I know that you do touch on some aspects of colonial kind of rule and how that has played out more historically, though, than casting forward to the future. Do you want to say anything about that?
- [59:12]
D
Yeah, we do look very much at how colonial rule was implemented through taxation and the role of taxation in establishing colonies and governing colonies, but also about how the reality is of tax today in post colonial societies is often very different. Their relationship to tax and to state building is very different because of this colonial. This colonial base. So, for instance, one of our authors, Kyle Wilmot, he works in Canada with First nations, and there he argues that, I mean, the whole kind of. That you're basically taxing people in order to. To oppress themselves. Like, you know, you're taxing to pay into a system that's going to. Going to oppress you. And so the relationship between democracy and tax is completely different in a post colonial setting. Now, whether or not art, like Deborah was saying, like the intervention of, you know, it's up to all of us what we think, whether the taxes that we pay in this country, what they should be spent on. Of course, there's like a really important argument that they should be spent in aid. There's a whole other discussion about what does aid do. I don't think we can go into that, but I mean, I think that's all up to all of us. So our aim is not so much to go, this is how we should do our tax systems. It's more like, what do tax systems actually do? Let's think about them deeply so that we can have these conversations in a public arena and make these decisions together in a slightly more thoughtful may make then just go, let's go right or left kind of.
- [60:52]
E
I think maybe now going back to the wealth taxes or estate taxes. I mean, we would probably then say look at corporate tax together with wealth taxes. Sometimes it doesn't matter whether you cut the wealth taxes. If the corporate taxes are going down as mokulike, just Said this has a huge impact on wealth distribution at the very top end of society. And I think what also goes through the book is, you know, you see patterns which have been developed during colonialism and then they carry on or being used as arguments to justify certain tax system nowadays. So that's what we maybe would say, but not if you say go left, go right.
- [61:35]
B
And remember, in lots of historical contexts, in post colonial context, tax is a really bad word because precisely for this reason, because they were taxed on basic commodities and you knew it was a system that was extractive and exploitative. And I think what I remember, Keith's paper, I think the point about the social contract and the state and its citizens and its relationships through the social contract and tax as it's understood in the global north, is the historical sequencing of these ideas is very different in the global South. So in that context, to bring in the talk of aid and development has to be understood with that historical information, otherwise it doesn't make sense.
- [62:21]
D
And to add to that, there's also been great sociological and historical work done by, for instance, Guminda Bambra, who shows that this whole notion of the welfare state being produced through taxation locally is a fantasy. You know, the welfare state was built off.
- [62:38]
C
Yeah.
- [62:39]
D
Off the empire and for all, for most of Europe. So the idea that kind of the wealth, this ideal welfare state can be built just from the resources within and just through redistribution and sharing and good organizing of good politics is also a farce. So, I mean, in that way it could next to colonialism and does make the argument then that obviously there should be money flowing in the opposite direction or in many directions.
- [63:07]
C
Great.
- [63:07]
B
Okay, Hans is next.
- [63:12]
C
And then. Hello.
- [63:14]
G
Yeah, so Deborah spoke about data capture before, and I'm wondering, you know, I've done a tax declaration or two in my life and I struggled a lot with it and I didn't understand what was going on there. It was really kind of magical to me. But at the same time, I understand that tax is a big social issue. It's like the social contract. And I believe it's probably the same for poor people in South Africa and in Bolivia and elsewhere, for many people, that on the one hand, it's a very crucial social and emotional issue, but on the other hand, it's complete bureaucratic magic and technology. And so Deborah asked about data capture before. I mean, I'm. I'm thinking actually the transition from the welfare state to neoliberalism into whatever we have now, that's also essentially a technological change. I mean, in the Past people did paperwork and now they do it on computers. And now in South Africa they even have like online payment systems. And a lot of what's happening with clawing back or with other processes of, of tax and benefits are actually simply kind of consequential or conditional on those technological differences. So my question for you is what can we learn from the anthropologists talking to people? I mean, they might be just like us, you know, like actually not understanding anything about the technological stuff that's happening there.
- [64:44]
C
In my case, the answer is people do feel very confused by probably just like you did when you filled in your tax return form, but they are aware of some sort of process whereby somebody once said, a person who was being interviewed said the money does not stay with us. The money comes in and then off it goes. So we are just a bridge on the way for the money to come in and to go out again. Some very graphic kind of metaphors which seem to suggest that there's this perception of money going into the wrong direction. And as a result of that, the sort of protest movements that I mentioned have been somehow fueled by an awareness of this ultimately unfair procedure. But at the same time quite a pragmatic awareness where, which is that if I understood too much I think I would have a heart attack. So let me rather be a little bit ignorant about everything that's going on. So an interesting sort of contrasting set of perspectives there.
- [65:48]
B
I have a short answer, but I'll come back to it later. Let's take some more questions. This one here.
- [65:53]
H
Yeah, thank you. This has been absolutely fascinating and it's given me a new perspective on the way I think about taxation. I apologize, my question is a bit rambly. I'm slightly sleep deprived with twin for two day old babies. The recent COP event, there's a discussion about a lack of transfer from the global north to the global South. And listening to you has also made me start to consider and then some of the questions about wealth taxation. I'm not too concerned about the wealthy but the middle classes and the future wealth generators. The they are moving around and moving away from countries where they're highly sought after. Spotify and recently in the UK Revolut, he came from Estonia and he's now moved to the Middle East. If you're going to have a welfare distribution system, you need to have a tax base. But with no longer economies based on manufacturing or offices and sort of globally mobile middle classes, the UK has lost a significant number of its middle classes as they've well first got pushed out because of mortgage interest payments forcing them out. But secondly, opportunities seem to be more considerably available. How is the welfare distribution system going to redesign global society as you no longer need to be in a factory or need to be down the road. But if you're going to claim entitlements or redistribution, how are you going to collect it when the state authority can't get the wealth across borders?
- [67:32]
B
We've got it.
- [67:33]
C
Yeah.
- [67:35]
B
Do you want to. Who wants to talk?
- [67:38]
D
I mean, it is a challenge like with. I mean, there's always been mobility in labour, but this is a different kind of mobility of labor who have been been traditionally maybe the more reliable taxpayers. I mean, it's the same as with all kind of mobility of labour. People will be taxed in different places. There's loads of. Some people, places will lose out and some places won't lose out. There will be legal restrictions on residency and all of this stuff. And there are, you know, Johanna works on international taxonom negotiations. There's loads of different deals between different countries to avoid double taxation. There's all. I mean, countries have been dealing with this for a while, like how do you tax mobile labor? And there will always be new challenges to it. I don't have a. I don't have an answer, but I think this is one of the things that, you know, people in government think about when they think about taxes all the time. How do we capture this labor? How do we keep this kind of labor here or these taxpayers? And how do we make deals with other nations to ensure they are taxed in the correct place and people will be making their decisions about their own mobility and where they work based on. So it's kind of an evolving picture. Yeah.
- [68:56]
B
Thank you. Okay, let's. I think you were next. The dark jumper, third row.
- [69:07]
C
Thank you. Thank you for the presentation.
- [69:08]
H
My question is to Deborah and the cases she was looking at in the uk I'm curious if the experience of the state receding in these areas, how that affects people's political socialization and how do they perceive the fact that they still have to pay tax when the state is sort of going away and. And what kind of transformations in political associations are linked to that?
- [69:38]
C
Yeah, so the research I did in the UK was mainly done in advice offices, listening to people asking for advice, often coming up with very kind of feeling of powerlessness and just general, like, what do I do next? Pretty much like Hans was describing, like how. How does this whole system work? And ultimately in a sense being kind of given some kind of, I guess Comfort by being told how to kind of wangle your way through the system and ultimately how to challenge it where it was going wrong, and in other ways, perhaps accept where it was correctly done, but maybe making the repayment system a little bit more acceptable. So the issues of sort of very overt politicization weren't really readily visible to me there. They were slightly more so in South African case because there, what was interesting, I found that a lot of people who have read my work have said, well, why don't these people start a revolution? And basically they already had one. It didn't really bring them a huge amount of good. But as I showed in my slide, there are some cases where there are kind of social movements saying hands off our grants, leave our grants without continually being robbed of us. But for me, there's also something sort of a cumulative effect in these small events of clawing back. So even though they may not be joining some union or some vast social movement which is going to kind of club together and demand their rights from people, the fact that they are able to kind of engage with other people, especially these NGOs and activists, in a small set of sort of activities which perhaps accumulate into something a bit more like a politics. But it's a politics that is quite a device, a divided one, rather than a kind of the obvious kind of, you know, labor union type of arrangement. So it's an interesting and slightly counterintuitive way, but I feel like there is something definitely going on there which you could call political, but in a slightly different way, perhaps a neoliberal form of politics, in fact.
- [71:52]
B
Thanks.
- [71:53]
A
Yeah, thank you for the discourse so far. I have a slightly different question and I'm curious on putting in some of the threads already discussed, how much of a person or a household's relationship with the state, with society as a whole, is defined by taxation, but more so defined by the fact you sort of have to pay tax in order to engage in the social contract. So I wonder what would change or how would people redefine their relationship with the state and society if tax almost became an optional thing like an opt in type system? And again, welcome. Any thoughts on that? It's an open question.
- [72:34]
D
Maybe.
- [72:35]
E
I think one of the strengths of the book or of the contributions of the book is that in many there are options or people don't always pay taxes and some have more options than others and different kind of options. I mean, indirect taxation is different, but I think that's also one. I mean, one strength of their anthropology of taxation is Actually to argue against the idea of a social contract.
- [73:02]
B
So that's. You have that brilliant example, don't you, of in Finland where people start to pay for services.
- [73:12]
C
Exactly right.
- [73:13]
F
I was going to bring this up actually, where even in a high tax society, say Finland, people come up with yet more ways to pay taxes by creating. What were they? What did he call them? The tax banks.
- [73:27]
D
Time banks.
- [73:27]
F
Time banks, for instance, where people in a community can basically trade services with each other based on the number of hours that they take to do the service rather than actually paying in cash. And it becomes this sort of community bank of services that people lend to each other. And there are other examples where people pay into, say, tithes or other. There's other institutions that communities create in order to pay into a system, in order to create a redistribution that makes sense to them. So I think it is optional in some contexts. And we, for whatever reasons.
- [74:19]
B
Example was so interesting because the state comes in and says, no, no, this is you're selling your service, so we're going to tax it. But if you're an accountant and you do somebody's books, that's taxable. But if the accountant does somebody's garden, then that's not taxed. So work and taxation are defined in particular ways. So, you know, the attempt to move away from that social contract or have other kinds of relations is always within the purview of the state, depending on where you are. In large parts of India, for instance, people carry on and do their, you know, have their economic lives completely outside the gaze of the state as. But this is Finland we were talking about.
- [74:59]
D
Okay, it comes back, Sorry, a little bit to question as well, like how complicated is this? Because what happens in this specific case is that the tax authorities don't know how to deal with it. And in the end it all closes to down. But the tax authorities go, hang on a minute, these people are evading tax somehow. But we can't quite work out how they're evading tax. And what they land on is that an accountant who's providing an accountancy skill from someone is taking out taxable labor from the, from the wider market, whereas an accountant walking someone's dog isn't taking out labor from the market. And therefore. So you're allowed to provide work if that's not work you would otherwise have been paid for and taxed on. But it comes back to this conundrum where actually these are very fundamental questions about where do you extract value from? And then we have several contributors who work with tax collectors who also struggle with this. And things don't add up because actually they are quite complicated questions like where, where does this become taxable in Sweden, in theory, you are taxable when you provide any service to someone else that isn't close family. Even babysitting could arguably be considered tax fraud if you are not. Like if you, even if you're not being paid for it because you're providing a service that should have been paid for and therefore, so you're increasing the kind of tax gap. And this is another philosophical, philosophical question, kind of what a country expects to be able to collect in tax based on calculations about what should be taxable and what they can collect, what they do collect in tax. So these come down to quite philosophical questions.
- [76:42]
C
Sorry.
- [76:44]
B
Absolutely. I find them fascinating too. So if you can. I think we've got to start wrapping up. Yeah, I've seen them. If you all keep your questions slightly brief, I'm going to take maybe three questions together now so that we can fit everyone in.
- [77:03]
C
Yeah, thank you. This is primarily to Professor James, but also the rest of you. It seems like the management of capital through tax is somewhat clearer than the management of conflict or labor through redistribution is in many ways welfare transfers or direct transfers, direct cash transfers create favorable vote banks on which the state can continue or particular parties can continue to rely on despite not explicitly promising and also in many practical cases, not delivering on economic benefits or long term causes of prosperity. So, so is this somehow a puzzle which fits together where one side of the taxation manages capital, but also redistribution manages potential conflicts in labor?
- [77:59]
B
I don't know whether Deborah has anything to say on this, but we have a workshop tomorrow. And actually one of the LSE professors, she was in the audience, Shohini, has this paper, Shahini Kaur, on the regulatory state versus the political state, precisely on this issue. So maybe you should look up her work. Okay, let's go to the back. Yeah.
- [78:19]
A
I wanted to get you to engage on some of the assumptions that have come out of some of the things that have been said this evening. It's absolutely fascinating and I know it's only the beginning of the conversation, but wishing that Michael Hudson and David Graber were here to talk about the history of taxation as control, because their concept of it is very much that taxation isn't about raising money, it's about ensuring that you have service from military forces within your state and that that's where taxation comes from. And all of the stuff that we've talked about tonight about social contract comes millennia later. So I wanted to take up the point that was made earlier about is there such a thing as a social contract? I mean, all the examples that you've given sound much more like a social imposition, not a social contract. So questions about what do you do if you don't consent? What if all your neighbors don't consent? What if the vast majority of people in your country don't consent? Doesn't matter, right? Taking South Africa, I was really interested in Deborah's example. So, first of all, obviously, colonial taxation resistance doesn't mean that when you get your homegrown elite that you get a better taxation system. I give you the American Revolution as just one example. But South Africa's obviously particularly egregious because it's well understood that the democratization of South Africa didn't lead to the democratization of the South African economy. And that's very well understood. So how does tax play a role there?
- [79:47]
B
Can we stop there so we can.
- [79:48]
A
Lend one more quickly? If taxation isn't about raising money, which would be, I think, a modern economic view, heterodox, but modern. If states print money into existence and tax isn't anything to do with raising money for any purpose, it's about redistribution, only control and redistribution, what does that then? What light would that shed on the work that you've done? If that is the view, if that is the reality of what tax is for.
- [80:19]
B
I'm going to let you all reflect on that question. Let's take one more and then you can all have your final thoughts. So right here in the front. Oh, sorry, they're online questions. Okay, Kai, I'm so sorry, I completely forgot. Please, do you want to read out maybe one online question? Are there many?
- [80:43]
A
There are six in total.
- [80:44]
B
And I've my sincere apologies to the online audience. This is absolutely dreadful.
- [80:51]
A
I only accepted two.
- [80:52]
B
Two?
- [80:53]
A
Yes. But anyway, I'll give one of them. I hope the person who proposed this will grant me the liberty to elaborate a little on this. But there's been a lot of talk about UBI and negative income taxation as one form of that to circumvent government ineptitude in service delivery. So how would such proposals change the dynamic of the relationship between people in the state?
- [81:15]
B
Okay, do you all want to share your final thoughts reflecting on this and that question? Sure.
- [81:25]
D
I can start on the social contract. I mean, one of the things we do talk about in the volume is very much that taxes isn't just about collecting money and that tax systems do many other things and they stimulate economy, they manage populations, they Try and organize behavior. And that is some of our key points in the volume bringing up Graeber as well. And the argument about what the point of taxation is there and its role in the economy. So absolutely there, even though we're not saying that it's not. I mean, I do think that in certain circumstances it is also about collecting money. But I think also we talk as well against the social contract as this natural link with taxation. And we do argue that the social contract is also, you know, a very specific philosophical idea that does not apply to how many people live within fiscal systems or think about them or think about their relationship with the state. We aren't in a contract with the state. We, most of us can't opt out. We haven't signed anything like, I mean, the social contract is an idea to play through how society could be the world. We don't live in a contractarian society in that way. And the idea that that should underpin kind of people's relationship with the state doesn't really hold up. And that is something we talk about in the volume.
- [82:45]
B
Great, thank you. Robin, did you want to comment with anything?
- [82:49]
F
Come back to me?
- [82:50]
B
Yeah, okay.
- [82:51]
E
Yeah, I just want to have one sentence. I think it's just adding on what you said. It's important to not touch quickly say it's not about money, because in context where you then suddenly see tax rates going down or tax revenue going down and there is no money, then it has a huge impact.
- [83:08]
D
And it does impact how much you borrow. It does impact bond markets, all of this, even if it's in a performative.
- [83:13]
E
Way, it does matter how you're seen by other countries, how you're seen by other taxpayers.
- [83:19]
F
It is just about what we owe to each other. And if we want to, to be a society that takes care of one another, how do we facilitate that, if not through taxation, how would we otherwise organize millions of people into some sort of redistribution system if not through taxation, albeit it being flawed?
- [83:41]
D
I mean, the printing of money is flawed.
- [83:45]
C
So I'll just finish with one point, and that is around the issue of control, because I, I think anthropologists are very keen on spotting sort of governmentality, Foucaultian style, kind of intent to oppress populations in many, many kinds of places. And I kind of read what you're saying, Michael, through some of that, but I think part of what I'm trying to say in my book is that despite these rather hegemonic looking forms of control, whether it be through the financial system or through the state There are these kind of glimmerings of people being able to sort of operate at a small scale level. And when you look at them cumulatively, they do have a certain kind of power in their own right, despite maybe what people might think otherwise.
- [84:27]
B
Have we answered the online question?
- [84:30]
C
Not quite, but it's about ubi.
- [84:33]
B
Do you mind repeating the online. Yeah. Please repeat it.
- [84:37]
A
Thank you. Yes. So how do proposals like universal basic income or the negative income tax change the relationship between citizen and state or do they change it?
- [84:49]
C
Well, I think the example that I come up with, it comes from Jim Ferguson's book on Give a Mind of Fish. It's largely premised on debates that were going on in South Africa about having a universal basic income, which never in fact transpired. Instead, they had particular targeted kinds of grants that, that were often targeted at women who had children. And then it turned those women into vulnerable targets for paying higher interest rates. So I feel as though in some respects the whole thing was a kind of a storm in a teacup that didn't quite occur. But there may be other settings in which it has been more successful. Thank you.
- [85:25]
B
This is where the political state comes in, I think in India, certainly direct cash transfers as opposed to universal basic income have been extensively used rather cynically by political actors. But it's also introduced a new language of being recipients of beneficiaries as opposed to citizenship, citizens with rights. And that's been the problematic political problem with cash transfers because somehow it is seen seem to be not the right of a citizen to have cash transfer in order to have a dignified life, but somehow an act of charity by the state that the middle class are paid for. Which is completely empirically incorrect, but that is the language in which it is couched. And at least from the Indian example, that's been the problem. Thank you all so much. This has been a terrific discussion. Thank you to the terrific family.
- [86:29]
D
Thank you for listening.
- [86:30]
A
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