Roma Workers and the Disciplining of Labor Under Czech Racial Capitalism

This article theorizes the racialization of Roma within the first three decades of capitalism in East Central Europe. Its findings echo the studies of racial capitalism in other geographies where racialization operates as a vector of labor precarity and surplussing. But while racialized labor precarity in the post-imperial and settler colonial contexts remains linked to the legacies of slavery, apartheid, segregation, and border control, in Czechia its evolution accelerated within a short time span after the transition to capitalism in the 1990s. During that time, the precarity of Roma workers became entangled with the imperatives of capital accumulation, which animate the state policies of workfare and debtfare. The author argues that these policies turned Roma into a labor disciplined subject, which became functional for the high industrial employment in Czechia.