Paper Short Abstract:

This paper engages calls for "a return to politics" in anthropology vis-a-vis a new wealth tax in Bolivia. It thus proposes the notion of a "fiscal grievance politics" animating elite opposition to the tax in terms of race, education, and democracy salient in the wake of a 2019 coup.

Paper Abstract:

Drawing on fieldwork in Bolivia on a new wealth tax in place since 2021, this paper responds to recent calls for “a return to politics” in anthropology (Postero and Elinoff 2019) by proposing the notion of a “fiscal grievance politics” that, I argue, animates elite opposition to the tax in lowland Santa Cruz department. A key issue around wealth taxes in general and Bolivia’s specifically (the Impuesto a las grandes fortunas, “tax on large fortunes,” or IGF) is how they render wealth legible to the state and thereby taxable. In formulating their opposition to the IGF, Santa Cruz elites often seize on such an apparent ambiguity in how it applies to individuals versus business. In doing so, they act as a type of liberal, vigilant taxpayer (Willmott 2017), folding the wealth tax into a wider set of grievances over race, education, and democracy that have taken center stage with the 2019 coup against the Evo Morales government and its ongoing fallout. Interrogating why taxation is so available to this more expansive grievance politics, I suggest that this involves assertions of white ownership of tax (Willmott 2022) that are foundational to what political theorist Domenico Losurdo (2011) called the liberal project of “planetary master-race democracy.”