Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with a Catalonian Cooperative that developed an alternative tax regime in crisis-ridden Spain, this paper will examine how formalized tax-evasion strategies can, somewhat paradoxically, result in state effects or the sensation of reproducing the state.

Paper long abstract:

Contesting the legitimacy of the Spanish state in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, several activist groups are promoting civil disobedience and so called desobedienca económica (economic disobedience) which involves, among other things, tax evasion. This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork with an anti-capitalist Catalonian cooperative that, using a legal loophole in the Catalonian law, set up an employment system that allowed people to use the cooperative's fiscal structure to make invoices in exchange for a trimestral fee, instead of paying the steep self-employment taxes required by the state. These trimestral fees were subsequently used for commonly defined purposes. In this sense, we therefore see a formalized way of tax-evasion through the strategic use of state devices and even the creation of an alternative tax regime.

Previous studies have theorized the relation between state and civil society through taxes, showing how tax evasion can be a widespread socially embedded practice that questions the legitimacy of the state. Yet less attention has been paid to how tax-evasion can itself produce state-effects. Indeed, by promoting fiscal disobedience, the Cooperative ended up engaging in state-like activities such as the collection of trimestral fees (tax collection if you will) and the imposition of fiscal discipline. The members of the Cooperative, on their part, felt like they were indeed unwillingly reproducing the state. By analyzing these imaginations and identifications of the boundary of the state, this paper will shed light on the shifting relation between state, society, and economy in contemporary Southern-Europe.