Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the entanglement of corporate, governmental, and activist modes of political efficacy as agency in Austria. The case are attempts to re-introduce wealth taxation in an era of “split and settle” strategies, which limit agency and pose new challenges of redistributive privilege.

Paper long abstract:

The paper centres efforts to tax value generation processes spanning several countries. Value generation is a highly distributed process in contemporary capitalisms. Large corporations or networks of associated corporate forms, e.g. holdings, strategically “cut and settle” value generation processes into legally distinct corporate entities and their emplacement in jurisdictions that promise low costs and little capture via taxation. The paper’s first part introduces practices that distribute corporate liability and tax responsibilities from corporations headquartered in Austria. The second part expands the question of agency to governmental action of redistribution. Governments frequently understand themselves as torn between attempts to foster the settling of such split corporate activities on their territory and trying to capture parts of its value to finance government and redistribution.

In the third part, I will discuss how corporate and governmental agency meets with activist attempts to re-introduce wealth taxation in the run-up to the 2024 general election in Austria. Among the activists, instructive discussions emerged about redistributive privileges, specifically about countering austerity in a wealthy country by taxing distributed processes, hence redistributing in Austria what was extracted elsewhere.

It is these processes and negotiations of political agency in contemporary tax states in capitalism that the paper focuses on, and their relational and power-laden conditions for efficacious action/ agency.