Performing financialized subjectivities in household economy manuals under state socialism and neoliberal capitalism

Abstract

This article explores how financialized subjectivities have been performed in household economy manuals under two successive socioeconomic regimes in the former Czechoslovakia and the current Czech Republic: state socialism and neoliberal capitalism. Drawing on a layered performativity framework, we studied how rhetoric, devices and instructions used in manuals construct households into self-reliant actors who embrace financial products. We found that subjects were already being financialized by the manuals of the socialist era, particularly those from the 1980s. The main change concerned the treatment of temporality and the occurrence of calculative devices. Our findings challenge the idea that financialization has emerged under the regime of neoliberal capitalism and implies that financialization is part of a longer trend in modern economic governance.

Politics of the Debtfare State: Repoliticizing the Czech Debt Enforcement Order and Its Limits

“…Legitimizing bailiffs as rule-oflaw enforcers, it equates the creditor interests and the debt enforcement industry's power with a departure from the socialist past and 1990s unregulated neoliberalization to the desirable EU-style legal frameworks. Concerning the overindebted households, self-reliance or self-responsibility (Gřundělová, 2021;Hoření Samec, 2021;Samec and Hájek, 2019) is another foundational rhetoric that neutralizes the resulting exploitation as a social problem. Along with the austerity and workfarist rhetorics, I document how it rationalizes the debt enforcement proceedings as a re-educative process toward the debtor's financial literacy and reintegration into the labor market.…”