Paper short abstract:

Conceptualising the growing rates of personal indebtedness as part and parcel of the broader processes of deindustrialization, this paper investigates how conditions of overindebtedness and precarious living affect political agency and action in one of the Czech Republic's deindustrializing regions.

Paper long abstract:

The Czech Republic has since its transition into capitalism undergone a complete socio-economic transformation, characterised by the processes of deindustrialization and privatization. Such large-scale restructuring of the economy and reterritorialization of power has left previously prosperous spaces suddenly disconnected from the global circuits of capital and care of the state. This has been experienced by the inhabitants of those spaces through dwindling public infrastructure, sharply declining living standards and an upsurge of various poverty industries. As a result, various populist movements have been on the rise, using the local sense of abandonment and economic hardship for political gains.

My contribution to this panel is based on my ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among debtors living in one of such de-industrializing regions in the Czech Republic. I conceptualise the growing rates of personal indebtedness as part and parcel of the broader processes of deindustrialization and semi-peripheral financialization, reflected in the boom-and-bust cycles of household debt, much of which took predatory and high-risk forms. I want to focus on the effects that the conditions of indebtedness and precarious living in the region have on political agency and actions of my interlocutors. To what extent are their conditions accepted as an outcome of individual wrongdoing and at what point do they start to be seen as a collective and structural issue? What political alternatives can be found in the region and how do they articulate solutions to the local problems? These are some of the questions that my paper sets out to address.