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Paper short abstract

This paper tells a story of indebted Roma in Czechia and develops the argument that racialization operates as a vector of labour devaluation (Wynter) in the service of capital accumulation. It is drawing on a decade-long research in Ostrava, an industrial city embedded in the global supply chains.

Paper long abstract

This paper tells a story of indebted Roma in Czechia and develops the argument that racialization operates as a vector of labour devaluation in the service of capital accumulation. It is drawing on a decade-long research among working-class Roma in Ostrava, a city long shaped by heavy industry that transformed into a hub for electronics and automotive production in the post-socialist period. Inspired by the writing of Sylvia Wynter on racism being the material base, the economic infrastructure of the capitalist system rather than merely an ideology (unpublished, p. 33), I propose that the predatory debt in Czechia amounts to a form of racial captivity that locks Roma in a position of subordinate labour. This captivity is documented by segregation in housing, which turns neighbourhoods where Roma live into a target of various forms of predatory capital as door-to-door salespeople continue push high interest loans, gas and electricity ‘deals’, mobile phone and internet ‘deals’, health insurance, along with various consumer items, on the residents. Predatory credit is functionally connected to state-sanctioned predatory debt enforcement, that locks people in an endless cycle of repayments. The paper provides ethnographic details on how debt enters these processes through social reproduction where it changes the material conditions in which people live, and shapes their employment options. This way the dispossessive power of debt, underlined by a racial logic, becomes entangled with the model of capital accumulation based on cheap industrial labour that characterizes the Czech context.