Paper short abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork with self-employed migrants,this paper theorises taxation as an intersection of agency and coercive structure, where the ability to fashion oneself morally, as a contributing subject, is informed by the ability to navigate an increasingly digitised bureaucracy.

Paper long abstract:

In states built on a narrative of freedom, where good government is small government, and self-reliance reigns supreme, self-employment is the quintessential configuration of liberal citizenship. Premised on self-management, on control over one's labour rather than work rights, and on personal accountancy rather than payslips, it constitutes the fiscal counterpart of the enterprising self.

This paper proposes a critical theory of self-accountancy. Drawing on fieldwork with Romanian migrants to London, I argue that the fabled entrepreneurship of migrant subjectivity was fashioned, to a large extent, by coercive immigration controls. For many of my informants, becoming self-employed was not a pursuit of independent business, but a means of engineering the legality of their stay in the UK, and of gaining access to the protections granted only to tax contributing citizens. To be a tax payer, in other words, was to secure oneself. This securitisation was, in turn, a highly mediated performance.

The paper concludes by drawing attention to the complex infrastructures which mediated, and at times confounded, the practice of self-accountancy: the invoices and receipts, the digital platforms and phone robots, which interceded with my informants' ability to pay tax, and pushed many into the hands of paid-for consultants. In drawing attention to the political economic constitution and everyday enactment of self-accountancy then, this paper theorises taxation as an intersection of agency and coercive structure, where the ability to fashion oneself morally, as a contributing subject, is informed by the ability to navigate a particular bureaucracy.