Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

This introductory chapter presents the puzzle of the variation in agrarian elites’ capacity to organize electoral representation across Latin America after the third wave of democratization and discusses the consequences of this variation for redistributive politics. It summarizes the book’s central argument that agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence are explained by two factors: the perception of an existential threat and the level of intragroup fragmentation. Then, it discusses the relevance of that argument for the comparative politics literature, in particular regarding the relationship among economic elites’ representation, democratic consolidation, and redistribution. The chapter also offers background about a series of structural and political transformations that have changed agrarian elites’ sources of power in Latin America over the last six decades and describes my research methods, case selection strategy, and data sources.

This chapter explores how the book’s arguments travel beyond the analyzed cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and discusses their broader implications for the field of comparative politics, in particular for the relationship among economic elites’ political representation, democracy, and inequality. It deals with questions such as: under what conditions will landowners respond to existential threats with electoral organization instead of by trying to destabilize democracy? When are candidate-centered strategies a viable substitute for party-building? Do the same factors that shape agrarian elites’ strategic choices explain how other interest groups organize to influence policymaking? First, the chapter tests the scope conditions of the argument by analyzing agrarian elites’ strategies of political influence in a country where democracy is less consolidated: Paraguay during the Lugo administration (2008–2012). Next, it looks at party-building by agrarian elites beyond South America, in a different historical context marked by civil war: post-1979 El Salvador. Finally, the chapter extends the argument beyond agrarian elites, focusing on nonpartisan electoral representation by other interest groups in two contemporary cases: for-profit universities in Peru and conservative religious groups in Colombia.

Regional competition in African countries finds expression in tensions, debates, and competition over policy. Regional economic tensions in African countries tend to find expression in four persistently salient issue areas: (a) demand for redistributive policies and social policy, (b) region- and sector-specific development and regulatory policies, (c) land policy, where redistributive tensions and conflicts arise in the building of national land markets, and (d) issues around state structure and design (the territorial division of powers and prerogatives, as under federalism or decentralization). In most countries, regional cleavages trump class-like or interpersonal income inequalities as a driver of national contestation over issues of policy and collective choice. A 2x2 matrix predicts “regional preferences for decentralization and redistribution” based on a region’s relative economic standing and its political alignment with the center. South Africa, where regional inequality is lower and nationalizing institutions are stronger, is an outlier: Redistributive social policy is more developed than it is anywhere else in Africa, and the issue of national land market integration is less salient than it is in many African countries.

This Introduction has three objectives. The first is to situate this volume within the current phase of South Africa’s difficult engagement with land reform in particular and transformative constitutionalism in general. For this purpose, we characterise the recent debate on ‘Expropriation Without Compensation’ (EWC) and the political developments leading to the tabling, and failure, of the Constitution Eighteenth Amendment Bill. In section two, we begin with an account of the research project and conference that led to this volume and then review the book’s three-part structure and its individual chapters in relation to each other. While there are important points of convergence with regard to the contested assemblage of law, land reform and redistributive justice, there are also divergent views for probing further. In the third section, we respond to this challenge by addressing three interlinked issues that emerge from a transversal reading of the chapters, which we regard as central for the future of redistributive justice in South Africa. These are, first, the respective roles of the state, popular politics and the private sector in driving this project; second, the relative importance to be attached to productive and redistributive measures as building blocks of change; and third, the scale of the structural changes that are needed.

‘Expropriation without compensation’ has crystallised in South African discourse into a symbolic rejection of inherited privilege, with calls for a constitutional amendment that presupposes a legal constraint on the property regime. The intentions of the lawmakers in the ‘property clause’ debates of the 1990s were to craft what I term a ‘mandate for transformation’. Yet the state has failed to override property owner interests in favour of the landless. Second, the battle over ‘expropriation without compensation’ since 2018 has not been about what is written in the Constitution. Third, the counterpoint to the fixation on state power to acquire property is the right of citizens to gain access to land on an equitable basis. This under-developed idea languishing within the property clause offers the basis for constitutional claims for a right to land. Inverting attention from state powers to enact reform to citizens’ powers to claim rights, it could serve as a focal point for emancipatory politics grounded in real struggles.

Three decades after South Africa’s first democratic election, the country remains the most unequal society on earth. This reflects in part the continuing legacies of apartheid, from access to land, education and employment opportunities to the inability to address the spatial design of apartheid cities and towns. While most agree that this reality continues to detrimentally shape the life opportunities of the majority of South Africans, there is increasing evidence that it is also undermining the post-apartheid settlement – whether in the form of public protests, corruption or simply increasing disillusionment with the political and constitutional order. Since market-led reform policies have clearly failed to produce the necessary redistributive justice required to address apartheid’s legacies, it is time to explore more interventionist options. This chapter proposes a transformational tax to address the legacies of apartheid and to provide the basis for a new social contract that will further the promise of South Africa’s 1996 constitutional order. In exploring this proposal, it employs a comparative analysis of global wealth taxes to reflect on the forms and purposes of a proposed transformational tax.

The idea that the central issue for South Africa’s redistribution is ‘the land’ is a familiar one, but it becomes harder to sustain with each passing year, as agriculture is a small and shrinking proportion of the country’s economic output, and historic land loss just one of a great many ways that black South Africans are disadvantaged in distributive terms. Under the circumstances, it might be best to de-emphasise the focus on land and concentrate limited resources on direct measures of income support such as a basic income grant. This chapter uses a consideration of the campaign for a basic income grant in Namibia to show that there may be an alternative to the binary choice that this way of putting the problem suggests. By understanding the maldistribution of ‘the nation’s wealth’ as the product of colonialism and historical dispossession while identifying concrete and universalistic remedies via programmes of income distribution and monthly cash payments, the Namibian activists have shown a possible way to combine the righteous demand for ownership of one’s own country with a politically pragmatic and economically well-conceived campaign targeting income rather than land.

This chapter takes as its point of departure the observation that the growing acceptance of the market in state-socialist Hungary after 1956 and the evolution of a language of social justice are intertwined. It argues that in the case of socialist countries, notions of social justice, the second economy, and the black market developed in parallel. As references to the second economy and the black market became increasingly frequent in official public discourses, so did references to social justice and to its socialist-era synonyms (e.g., ‘socialist justice’), especially during late socialism. Thus, by the end of the socialist era, the market and social justice had lost their mutually exclusive and contradictory meanings. Conversely, references to the second economy and the market as a tool better suited to address social inequalities than redistribution became synonymous with the assertion of social justice.

Three decades after the collapse of state socialism in Eastern Europe, where should a history of post-socialist social justice start from? This chapter explores how questions of social justice in Eastern Europe after 1989 emerged against the background of policies of privatization – the transfer of state assets to private hands – in public rhetoric and expert commentary. Taking a longer historical perspective, the chapter shows how the notion of a ‘popular’ or ‘people’s capitalism’ came to be instrumental in framing debates about wealth redistribution and mass entrepreneurship after decades of dictatorship in virtually all countries of the former Communist Bloc. The chapter concludes with some remarks on the wider implications of this regional experience for a history of social justice in the European twentieth century and beyond.

Women have been perceived as a ‘problem’ for visions of social justice since the emergence of the ‘social question’ in the nineteenth century, prompting feminist debates about whether social justice for women is best pursued on the basis of their equality with, or difference from, men. This chapter reconstructs those debates with a focus on Central Europe, the heartland of the late nineteenth-century European socialist and sexual-reform movements and, throughout the twentieth century, the site of conflicts between fascist, state-socialist, and liberal-democratic regimes of social justice. But these conflicts also have a strongly contemporary character, given the deeply gendered experiences of transition to a capitalist economy in the former socialist states of Central Europe since 1989. The absence of an agreed definition of how social justice for women might be achieved (and in which political contexts) was reinforced throughout the twentieth century by the weight of embedded inequalities of gender, which have remained a defining element of Europe’s modern experience. Bringing women into the story of social justice in twentieth-century Europe highlights the perceived deficit of social justice that the editors of this volume identify as the hallmark of contemporary understandings of social justice in Europe today.

Since the 1990s, economic inequality has risen in just about every affluent democracy in North America and Western Europe. But the last three decades have also been characterized by falling or stagnating levels of state-led economic redistribution. These two contemporaneous trends pose a puzzle for students of political economy. Why have democratically accountable governments not done more to compensate the large majority of citizens with low and middle income for rising top-income shares? Our introductory chapter begins by describing this puzzle of rising inequality and noting some nuances that most accounts regularly miss. We then examine two groups of explanations for the puzzle of rising inequality: one set that focuses on voters and their demands for redistribution, and another that focuses on elites and unequal representation that is biased against less-affluent citizens. This volume seeks to contribute to explaining the puzzle of rising inequality by bringing these two groups of explanations into dialogue with each other. We describe the contributions of the individual chapters to these efforts and suggest directions for future research.

A new literature on advanced democracies questions the capacity of majorities to influence fiscal policies to advance their distributive interests, either because the modern state is undercut by increasingly footloose capital, or because the wealthy subvert the majority will through the power of money. This paper critically assesses the evidence using an amended dataset from the Luxembourg Income Study and new data from the World Inequality Database (WID). We use a three-class setup and axiomatically derive the distributive interests of each class and then assess these predictions against data on transfers, public services, and insurance for eighteen OECD countries since the 1970s. For the middle class, the transfer ratio (transfers and services as a percent of the net income of the rich) is remarkably stable, and with the notable exception of the United States, so is the relative position of the middle class in the overall income distribution. Top-end inequality and measures of globalization play no role, but both the poor and the middle class do better under center-left governments.