Fiscal grievance politics: wealth taxation and master‐race democracy in post‐coup Bolivia

This article analyses a new wealth tax (the IGF) in Bolivia against the backdrop of the 2019 ousting of former president Evo Morales. In doing so, it engages calls for ‘a return to politics’ in anthropology by proposing the notion of a ‘fiscal grievance politics’ as animating elite opposition to the tax in lowland Santa Cruz department. I show that the effects of the tax exceed its narrow scope, the revenue it generates, or the allocation of that revenue by activating lowland elites as liberal, vigilant taxpayers. As such, these elites fold the wealth tax into a wider set of racialized grievances, including over public education and the wider production of history, that have taken centre stage with the coup against the Morales government and its fallout. Interrogating why the IGF is so available to this more expansive grievance politics, I argue that this involves assertions of white ownership of tax that are foundational to the peculiar, racially circumscribed form of democracy which liberalism aspires to elaborate at a planetary scale. As taxation becomes a key material and symbolic axis of white grievance, I conclude that it offers critical vantage points for a revamped political anthropology.