Paper long abstract:

In early January 2017, after a court ruled in favour of the dissolution of the Kazakhstani Federation of Independent Trade Unions, workers at Oil Construction Company (a state-owned service company) in Aqtau entered a hunger strike. After two weeks the strike came to an end, with its leaders arrested, the participants fined, and those identified as "instigators" fired. By narrating the trajectories of four of the latter in the following sixteen months, in this paper I want to interrogate the effects that the strike and its consequences had for the (re)production of these laid-off workers' subjectivities in relation to the state, to their social environment, and to themselves. In its ambivalent meaning of "citizen" and "breadwinner", azamat will serve me as a concept expressing the tensions and contradictions between, on the one hand, the abstract legal-juridical subject with its rights and duties and, on the other, an embodied masculinity and a moral positioning needing constant reproduction amidst conjunctural and processual relations of forces.

During the months following the strike, as the oil service sector went through a restructuring involving the downsizing and precarization of its workforce in order to restore profitability, the tensions in the meaning of azamat came to the fore. If agencies for the re-training of former workers into entrepreneurs stressed how this was an occasion to take "one's life in its own hands", leaving behind the subjection of salaried labor for the freedom of the citizen, for many workers the loss of their job induced a crisis that was simultaneously one of the citizen and of the (male) subject,​ reshaping perceptions of the state and of the self. This reshaping developed along different trajectories: withdrawing from work due to a sense of "dignity" as well as to the black mark the strike had left on one's "employment record" (trudovaya knizhka); returning to the village and starting a volatile husbandry business; continuing with labor activism, even taking stage at international conferences; or following the dream of "liberated work" in a pyramidal scheme, purifying oneself from the moral and physical intoxication of the oil industry through the curative products one would sell by means of its embodied labour​.