FinancialLives · Finance and Risk in the Lives of Working People in Market Socialist Asia

The rise of household financial activities such as mortgages, consumer credits and private insur-ance among working people in China, Vietnam and Laos signals new patterns of accumulation alongside the commodification of labour that has been central to their national development. In these market socialist countries, where marketization is deepening under the rule Communist par-ty states, governments are turning to financialization to ensure growth and fill the gaps of social provisioning. Via financial products and services, debt and private risk management are being promoted to working people as the means to wealth accumulation and social protection, drawing household reproduction into the financial system. Meanwhile, working households actively deploy risk management tools marketed by financial institutions for their own purposes, thereby playing a constitutive role in how financialization unfolds. Hypothetically, the ensuing normalisation of risk exposes working households to increasing systemic risk that characterises global finance, with far-reaching implications for the reproduction of working lives and the sustenance of the market socialist economy. Enquiring into household and institutional processes that bind labour and finance through the production, governance and management of risk, FinancialLives uses the concept politics of risk to comparatively unpack these implications across the three countries. As an anthropological project, it includes five ethnographic studies examining the household pro-cesses and negotiations referred to as financial householding as well as the practices of risk commodification by commercial banks in their interactions with working people. The project is timely and ground-breaking in illuminating the differing ways in which risk has become both a governing tool and a social practice under market socialism, with uneven possibilities and dangers for working people and the state.