This thesis contributes to research and theory of racial capitalism by focusing on its operation in the post-socialist context. Drawing on eleven months of ethnographic research among racialised Roma workers in the city of Ostrava in the Czech Republic, I present an empirical exploration of a racialised âsurplus populationâ. Engaging with recent research on the applicability of Marxâs category of the surplus population to society today, I make the case that, though Roma workers are integrated among wage labourers, they are contained in low-paid, stigmatised and precarious jobs, in a racialised condition of âunder-employmentâ. This way I provide an alternative to the dominant trope in the media and political discourse, supported by some academics, that presents unemployment as a universal fact of Roma lives. Analysing the surplus population empirically, I look both at the operation of capital and also at interventions of the Czech state that facilitate and maintain it. The main method of the thesis is participant observation, which I carried out while living in a racially segregated neighbourhood of Ãdol, and while working as a street cleaner and as a recycling operative, handpicking items on a conveyor belt, with a majority-Roma workforce. Through this work and daily interactions with my neighbours and colleagues, I collected data that show the interconnected features of racialised lives of working-class Roma, who find themselves contained in low-paid and insecure jobs; in segregated neighbourhoods marked by stigma; and needing to support their monthly budgets by various forms of credit. The thesis analyses the ethnographic data using these three key sociological categories: urban space; waged labour; and household debt. The overarching approach for my analysis is racialisation of class conditions, a process through which capital and state create and reproduce marginality at work, in housing and in access to finances. â I situate my analysis in the context of debates about post-socialism, paying particular attention to the changes in class formations. To date, class-based analysis is still largely missing in scholarship on the Eastern European âtransition to capitalismâ, partially as a result of the suppression of the notion of class conflict as something illegitimate in the post-socialist period. As a result, the language of class was replaced with notions of nation, ethnicity, family or church (Ost, 2005). This meant a departure from class-based interpretations of poverty, and also an analytical preference for conceptions of a racialised âculture of povertyâ (Lewis, 1966). My thesis refocuses analytical attention on the racialisation of class formations in a context marked by three decades of complex changes that included the privatisation of national industries, which fundamentally reshaped the class structure and hierarchies and solidified the dominance of employers in the labour-capital relationship. Using class as a category of exploitation and dispossession, rather than stratification, I argue that Roma constitute an under-employed, racialised surplus population in the Czech Republic.
Date of Award | 1 Aug 2022 |
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Original language | English |
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Awarding Institution | - The University of Manchester
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Supervisor | Meghan Tinsley (Supervisor), Nicholas Thoburn (Supervisor) & Jan Grill (Supervisor) |
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- race and class
- ethnography
- Roma
- post-socialism
- racialised labour
- Marxism
- surplus population
- racial capitalism
- urban marginality
The âOtherâ Proletariat: An Ethnography of a Racialised Surplus Population among Roma in the Czech Republic
Cernusakova, B. (Author). 1 Aug 2022
Student thesis: Phd