work on this volume started from an offi ce conversation in 2016, the editors sharing their outrage about another public controversy sparked by the Austrian conservative right-wing government. Once again, members of the government suggested that asylum allowances were somewhat unjust to 'the population' or 'us taxpayers', or 'hard-working Austrians' and 'Austrian pensioners'. The elements of such messages seemed all too clear: an imagined 'us' threatened by 'undeserving' yet still '(over)assisted' 'Others'. This combination of differentiation and moralized assessment of distribution sparked ever more associations in our ongoing conversations. Over decades, it was claimed that 'lazy immigrants' receive too much welfare or recognition, 'scroungers' abuse welfare systems, and many other similar and contrasting examples. They prompted us to bring together disparate scholarly discussions and analyses of processes of moralized assessments of distribution that seemed to coalesce in specifi c conjunctures and registers of power.(Un)deservingness is our attempt at creating a dialogue among these several fi elds of thematic scholarship and theoretical orientations. In recent years, anthropology in/of Europe has been a thriving scholarly environment for research on those questions. We are very pleased to have in this volume some of the scholars who drive the research that inspired us to think about (un)deservingness as a crucial category of contemporary politics. They come from various ethnographic and theoretical fi elds. As a comparative discipline, anthropology allows
The article analyzes struggles about distributive justice in Austria, one of the wealthiest countries globally, and proposes a reinforced focus on how metaphors of redistribution and reciprocity create fiscal imaginaries. It analyzes how politicians, lobbyists, and activists strategically mobilize these metaphors in corporate and wealth taxation debates. Campaigns against wealth taxation portray wealth taxation as negative reciprocity and a threat to an imagined middle class. Those arguing in favor of them create images of unjustly appropriated value that needs to be redistributed. The article analyzes those shifts between notions of redistribution and reciprocity and the fiscal imaginaries created through these debates. Notably, the article argues for the necessity to embed discursive analysis within an understanding of contemporary capitalisms. It contrasts the fiscal imaginaries with challenges of fiscal relations, most importantly the distributed character of capital accumulation and the dilemma of the tax state, as governments orchestrate accumulation to capture parts of its value generated via taxation.
This article analyzes business owners' complaints about fiscal relations in a specific conjuncture. After decades of radicalizing productivism in Germany, the entrepreneurs' narratives are infused with ideas of an endangered fiscal community. Threats are perceived as coming from the undeserving poor and wealthy people who presumably both trick the system. The pivot of fairness and justice centers on imaginaries of productivist deservingness. The business owners' reactions to those they portray as unproductive or undeserving range from cynical resignation to fantasies of coercion. Critical to understanding why the complaints play out in specific ways is, as we argue, the entanglement of imaginaries of reciprocity in processes of redistribution that accompanied neoliberal welfare retrenchment. We analyze two forms of entangled understandings: solidary redistribution as owing others and fair reciprocity as willingness to perform. Productivist deservingness becomes the central element of bargaining about the legitimacy of tax avoidance, the necessity to enforce the productivity of the poor, and the police as the last barrier against class warfare.
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