This article challenges the seemingly inseparable conceptual link between tax and the state by drawing on fieldwork carried out with an anti-capitalist cooperative in Barcelona, where tax evasion went hand in hand with the pooling of common monetary resources used for the creation of semi-public goods managed by non-state actors. Drawing on theoretical insights from the commons, I will put forward the concept of the ‘fiscal commons’ in order to decenter tax as an analytic for making sense of the relation between the state and civil society. In so doing, I will argue that taxes are part of a broader repertoire of financial contributions that people draw on to actively create different fiscal commons that operate alongside and in relation to the state’s tax regime.
Rather than theorizing trust and mistrust in the abstract, recent anthropological scholarship has shown how trust and mistrust emerge in particular social settings. In this article, I build on this scholarship by drawing on fieldwork with the members of an anti-capitalist Catalonian cooperative who looked to create alternative economic systems that were said to be based on trust. The central aim of this article is to redirect analytical attention from the emergence of the experience of (mis-)trust in particular contexts, toward an analysis of how trust and mistrust are mobilized to make particular iterations of an ‘alternative economy’ emerge out of competing grassroots economic conceptualizations. By analysing how trust and mistrust are constituted within a relational field involving the state and a broader landscape of cooperative movements, this article shows that socio-economic formations are continually formed through embodied, affectively charged practices instead of being solely ‘based’ on trust or mistrust.
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