Oil, Labor, and Authoritarian Neoliberalism in Kazakhstan

Oil scholarship in Kazakhstan has primarily focused on the circulation and accumulation of oil money, the distribution of revenues, and the institutions and fiscal regimes that mediate them. In different degrees, these studies have espoused the theory—known as “resource curse”—linking authoritarian forms of government to state ownership of natural resources, or to governments’ failure to apply free-market reforms to their respective oil and gas industries.Footnote ¹⁶ More recently, however, anthropological studies have shifted the object of analysis toward the industry itself, focusing on the infrastructures, labor regimes, and forms of expertise that constitute oil operations, and how these provide insights on the “how” of capitalism.Footnote ¹⁷ This section overviews how privatization in the oil sector has co-produced and consolidated authoritarian neoliberalism, incentivizing the state to police its population against actions that might threaten companies’ profits.

After the fall of the USSR, Kazakhstan's government readily endorsed economic policies such as privatization, social spending cuts, and a tax regime favorable to foreign direct investment in order to capitalize on its oil and gas resources,Footnote ¹⁸ starting with the signing of a production sharing agreement (PSA) with Chevron for the Tengiz oilfield in 1993.Footnote ¹⁹ As shown by anthropologist Saulesh Yessenova in her work, the US-based transnational corporation pushed the government to speed up the signing of the PSA, avoiding public debate by framing the issue as “a private (corporate) matter to be negotiated directly with the executive branch” behind closed doors.Footnote ²⁰ If, as Ian Bruff argues, “authoritarianism can also be observed in the reconfiguring of state and institutional power in an attempt to insulate certain policies and institutional practices from social and political dissent,”Footnote ²¹ then Kazakhstan's PSAs can be understood as technologies through which transnational oil capital ensured the conditions for access to resources by means of closure and insulation, producing authoritarian forms of government in the process.Footnote ²²

Kazakhstan's oil privatizations in fact led to a consolidation of power and concentration of wealth around the figure of then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev. The former was achieved through the adoption of a new “super presidential” constitution in 1995, in order to shield the signing of contracts from dissent in the Parliament and civil society. The latter, through the establishment of a state investment committee with Nazarbayev at its head, acting as a gateway for channelling inflowing capital and distributing licenses. The urgency of the deals was highlighted by international financial institutions who stressed how, encumbered by foreign debt and skyrocketing hyperinflation, the government was under the threat of insolvency and social unrest, unless it started to cash-in from the privatization of its oil endowment. However, while TNCs signed deals for the country's largest oilfields such as Tengiz and Kashagan, privatization of Mangystau's oil followed a different direction. OzenMunayGaz (OMG), operating the large yet declining Ozen oilfield, remained under state control and became the kernel of KMG, after the latter was established in 2004. MangystauMunayGaz (MMG)—also operating smaller yet mature fields—was privatized but known to be connected to the then-president's circle, before being re-nationalized in 2009.

Through the years, these NOCs have come to constitute a distinctive “technological zone” of shared practices, procedures, and forms of dealing with labor and oil extraction.Footnote ²³ These companies share a number of characteristics: they are heirs of the Soviet regional oil association (Mangyshlakneft’) and its production divisions (NGDUs), and are tied to oil service companies that were once an integral part of them, with which they have an exclusive relationship, making the latter “quasi-internal to the main company, their sole client.”Footnote ²⁴ Secondly, a national company is often associated with a particularly strong influence of political interests rather than being merely profit-driven; meaning that, on the one hand, differently from transnational consortia, national companies allegedly have a stronger relationship with politicians and “entrepratchiki” (half entrepreneurs and half apparatchiks)Footnote ²⁵ and are considered opaque in their accountability, with both hiring and career advancement depending on kin and patronage networks. However, workplace organizations can be articulated more easily in trade unions rather than in TNCs’ management-led industrial relations departments; workers enjoy a singular index for the calculation of salaries (ESOT: edinnaya sistema oplata truda), as well as substantial social packages; and their employment is deemed more stable—that is, less dependent on the contract-based, precarious, and “modular”Footnote ²⁶ modes of functioning of large transnational consortiums and their subcontracting companies.

While authoritarianism has developed in relation to both TNCs and NOCs, organized labor has developed differently in the two “zones.” Similarly to other “extraction enclaves”Footnote ²⁷ around the world, the Tengiz case is exemplary of how labor in oil extraction has become gradually disciplined and precarized. On the one hand, crew rotation and securitization of the secluded “industrial colony” have obstructed the labor movement and its organization from the onset, gradually leading to the trade union being dissolved under corporate pressure in 2003, substituted by an employer-sponsored association. On the other hand, while the company's workforce shrunk by more than half between 1998 and 2005, the number of workers in subcontracting companies increased threefold, with short-term and low-paying contracts becoming the norm, while a smaller portion of (largely foreign) workers enjoyed relative privileges.Footnote ²⁸

Conversely, Mangystau's oil workers have become nationally renowned for their activism, most famously when riot police opened fire on OMG workers and Zhanaozen residents in 2011, putting an end to a six-month strike in the oil town,Footnote ²⁹ one hundred fifty kilometers east of Aqtau. As Kuspan explained to me during one of our conversations: “In order to achieve something, there needs to be a sacrifice, or else they will not hear you. That is what happened in Zhanaozen. People stood there for seven months demanding what they must get. And after [its tragic ending] we started to be treated like human beings.” Kuspan's remark hints to the betterment of working conditions in state-owned enterprises following workers’ mobilizations: salaries had been raised, those who had been fired during the strike were rehired en masse, and trade unions felt, for a short time, emboldened to negotiate au pair in their relations with management.

These conditions were problematized as a threat to companies’ profitability following the price crisis, in particular the weight that supposedly entitled workers and their high wages had on budgets. The price crisis was then an opportunity to rebalance labor-capital relations in favor of the latter with a series of restrictive moves. First, in 2014, a new law on trade unions substantially restricted the activity of independent labor organizations, encumbering them with Kafkaesque registration procedures. The following year, amendments to the Labor Code further restricted the instances for declaring legitimate strikes, while favoring individual over collective bargaining in order to make the workforce more flexible and responsive to oil capital's fluctuating operations.Footnote ³⁰ In both cases, the effect of these neoliberal reforms has been to reduce spaces for contestation and dissent. What remained to be done was disjoining the entrenched relation that NOCs had with their service companies.

The (Im)Possible Return of Feudalism

The service company where Kuspan worked—Oil Construction Company (OCC)—was established in 2003, by adjoining three service divisions carved out in the mid-1990s from MMG, heir to the Soviet regional production association Mangyshlakneft’. Nevertheless, the relation between MMG and its previous service divisions remained entwined throughout the years, with the latter continuing to be quasi-internal to MMG. A visual manifestation of such a relationship is displayed inside the MMG museum at the Zhetybay oilfield, opened for the fifty-fifth anniversary of Mangystau oil in 2016. There, beside dioramas of the oilfield, ampules with oil samples, a reconstruction of a 1960s workers’ barrack, and the miniature of a pump-jack, one can observe a whole wall dedicated to the three companies (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Showcase of ANS's companies at the MMG museum in Zhetybay, July 2017

Until they were re-nationalized in 2009 (MMG) and 2011 (OCC) respectively, both companies were considered “closed” ones with a “vague and mysterious ownership.”Footnote ³¹ As early as 1998—two years after its privatization—reports began circulating that members of the Nazarbayev family had acquired interests in MMG. Then, in 2002, the government's residual 30 percent interest was sold to a group identified as Ansell Development, registered in the Virgin Islands and also suspected to be connected to Nazarbayev's circle.Footnote ³² The following year, OCC was privatized in its turn, retaining control of a range of important activities such as construction, transport, and maintenance services, which it offered to its sole “new” client, MMG. OCC was rumored to be controlled by Timur Kulibayev—Nazarbayev's son-in-law—through the umbrella company AktauNefteServis until this too was renationalized in 2011,Footnote ³³ two years after the ownership of MMG had passed to a joint-venture between KMG and China's CNPC. The nationalization was going to create a “synergetic effect” between the operating company and the service ones, the press reported at the time.Footnote ³⁴

The period between 2003 and 2011 was remembered by workers as a chaotic era. Maksot—a now dismissed fifty-six-year-old welder and trade union activist—underscored how he did not even know where the company's offices were located during that period, and how local bosses did not treat them as “human beings” (Kaz.: adamdar), but as “slaves” who could not dare to demand anything. Several of the workers emphasized the sheer coercion and arbitrariness involved in extracting labor power, the absence of workers’ entitlements and rights, and the carelessness showed by management in regard to their health and safety. Zhambyl, who started working for the company in 2003, remembered it as a time when order (Kaz.: tartip) had disappeared, workers did not receive kefir nor protective work clothing as remedies against health hazards, and did not even know “what a collective agreement was.”

Now, the dismissal of workers and their transfer to emerging private companies raised suspects over the possible privatization of the state-owned service companies, bringing to mind the effects of the privatization of the oil sector in the mid-1990s. As Kuspan put it during one of our conversations: “When all countries are going forward, it is not possible for Kazakhstan to regress. Going back to the old feudalism (Kaz.: burnghy feodalizmge) is not something which suits this era.” The idea that the remaking of social and property relations through privatization would constitute a return to feudalism is not new in former Soviet countries. Anthropologists Caroline Humphrey and Katherine Verdery have both used it to understand the constitution of emerging state forms and power relations during and soon after the demise of socialism. For Humphrey, writing during the fragmentation of the planned economy in the wake of the USSR's undoing, enterprises were being “run in a personal way almost as ‘suzerainties’ by local bosses,”Footnote ³⁵ resulting in uncertainties as to where law and government resided. Similarly, for Verdery, privatization was comparable to the “parcellization of sovereignty,” which Perry Anderson had previously identified as one of the characteristic features of the late “feudal mode of production.”Footnote ³⁶ In this light, in the early postsocialist years, privatization involved, besides the redistribution of property from the state to new private owners, also what Verdery calls “the privatization of power, meaning the arrogation of formerly central instruments of rule—especially coercion—by lower-level actors.”Footnote ³⁷

Kuspan's evocation of a link between privatization and feudalism did not refer to the early postsocialist years though, when oil functioned as a “bargaining chip” (Rus.: razmennaya moneta) for meat and dairy products, and workers received rationing tickets in place of salaries.Footnote ³⁸ Instead, the timeframe for the “parcellization of sovereignty” was placed between his company's establishment as a private entity in 2003 and its later nationalization in 2011, concomitantly with the strikes ending with the already mentioned shootings in Zhanaozen. Moreover, differently from the 1990s, privatization was not a weird-sounding word subject to jokes, nor was it considered an alien policy bringing a “systemic derangement” and a crisis of recognition to hitherto established relations and assimilated value standardsFootnote ³⁹; neither was it readily associated to, or experienced as, a “chaotic mode of dispossession.”Footnote ⁴⁰ On the contrary, it was a well-known project, whose effects were part of workers’ recent memory.

Precarity-as-slavery

As in the mid-1990s, the return of feudalism via privatization was linked to the transformation of persons,Footnote ⁴¹ specifically the (re)making of “slaves” (Kaz.: quldar; Rus.: raby): no more citizen-workers but mere laboring bodies. Exiting the state oil industry was understood as a negative “graduation of citizenship,” to say it with Aihwa Ong,Footnote ⁴² anticipating a future of short-term, low-pay jobs in private companies taking up contracts that had been previously awarded to state-owned ones. Precarity-as-slavery, then, entails a sense of lost recognition and social integration in labor's relation to the state,Footnote ⁴³ as well as the arbitrariness held by bosses to have workers’ labor power and time at one's disposal. Rather than referring to unfree work conditions in a regime of parcelized sovereignty, as it was in the early postsocialist years, in this connotation “slavery” came close to the Latin meaning of the word precarius, as in “obtained by entreaty,” with workers having “to beg” in order to receive—as alms—jobs and better working and living conditions, in exchange for their availability to be at the bosses’ complete disposal.

Jeanne Féaux de la Croix notices how slavery is mentioned with anger and contempt in the Kyrgyz village where she conducted fieldwork, referring to work arrangements within systems of patronage framed as fictive kinship, “where more senior or wealthy ‘relatives’ employ poorer ‘brothers and sisters’ for uncertain rewards and some form of protection.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Similarly, the late Maksat Dosmagambetov—one of Zhanaozen's most outspoken activists—recalled in an interview how, before 2011, employers and management involved workers “in doing housework, caring for livestock, cleaning,” “swore at them,” and “treated workers like slaves.”Footnote ⁴⁵ A similar remark was also made by Kuspan, who noticed how casual workers in subcontracting companies were hired back informally in order to build their bosses’ houses while still wearing their previous work uniforms, with the tag numbers of the villas’ junction boxes and electric panels revealing their links to oil corporations. Precarity-as-slavery can be said to consist of a condition of servile availability under the constant threat of disposability. As Kairat—a machinist who resigned with the 5/50 program—described his new job for a subcontracting company:

Rather than being counterposed to an abstract freedom, “slavery” was thus understood as an instantiation of dependent work; a variation of what Moulier Boutang calls “bridled labor,” i.e., wage labor minus “the freedom to create unions and the right of association,” which constitute “the conditions for unforced forms of employment.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Precarity-as-slavery thus describes a politically induced condition resulting from the faltering of social and economic networks of support in the workplace, the extraction of labor power through extra-economic means, and a heightened exposure to injury, violence, illness, and death. The new “suzerains” would be unconcerned with employment stability, decent salaries, and the provision of a set of protections against the toxic materiality of working in oil extraction. Kairat continued:

Exiting the state oil industry was thus considered a debasement of life conditions also physically, bodily. Exposed to paints fumes, daring ecological conditions, and heavy machinery, working in the oil industry was part of the construction of a muscular masculinity that, however, necessitated health check-ups and insurances, as well as vacations to sanatoriums, in order to be sustained.Footnote ⁴⁷ Special clothing too, as well as dairy products—traditionally considered to have detoxing properties—would not be provided anymore; and more importantly, could not be asked for, denoting once again the descent to a condition of one-sided dependency with employers, as well as the exposure to health and safety hazards, which expressed their disposability, their abandonment, their being pushed away from a livable life. Slavery was the product of an asymmetrical bond that made workers into beggars who would go from contingent contract to contingent contract in order to merely survive. Conversely, belonging to a state company formalized labor relations in a framework that afforded appeals to citizenship—rather than kin—during disputes; that is, workers felt that by working for a national company they were entitled to make claims based on the national wealth—i.e., oil—they were contributing to generate, making the relationship with management one of corporativist interdependency and shared participation in the national project.

From Dependency Mindset to Entrepreneurial Precarity

For the adaptation center in charge of retraining workers, ideally the optimization would produce a different kind of subject—one “freed” from the subjection of dependent labor with the help of a parastatal agency. When the implementation of the early retirement scheme started in spring 2017, a series of activities, consulting sessions, and trainings were organized by CAC in Aqtau. Entrusted by the national holding Samruk-Kazyna with supporting workers’ “social adaptation” (sotsialnaya adaptatsiya) to the new reality, the center was heir to a previous institution: the Center of Social Partnership, a research institute created after the Zhanaozen events with the aim of collecting thorough information on social issues in conflict-prone, remote areas with the intent to “better police the population,”Footnote ⁴⁸ as well as monitoring job satisfaction among workers of state enterprises and the connected risks of labor unrest.

The program was presented as a social project helping people going through a “process of transformation,” as Aigul—one of the young members of the team, put it. Coming from the NGO sector, Aigul worked as a self-styled psychologist, strong of her previous experience in working face to face with the population, and of being native to the region. This last quality was important, she said, inasmuch as she understood well what it meant living in an oil region and the reason for workers’ attachment to their jobs: “It is my region and my people. These people worked in one enterprise for many years, with ten or fifteen years’ experience. They cannot imagine anything else except working in the oil industry. They have been freed (Rus.: osvobozhdenniy) and they cannot understand how to live further.” The initial anger and refusal to accept the new condition was justified, said Aigul. Dismissed workers were going through a critical moment, which made them akin to “neurotic citizens,” i.e., subjects whose conduct arises from, and responds to, fears, anxieties, and insecurities, rather than being based on calculating rationalities.Footnote ⁴⁹ The project consisted first in making people understand that “life does not consist only of that work,” while successively retraining them through courses in financial and computer literacy, business skills, English, and CV writing.

For Bolat, CAC's director and founder, the role of the center was directed at dismantling the pairing of state paternalism and workers’ “dependency mindset,” both considered legacies of the Soviet system. Indeed, similarly to public discourses during the Zhanaozen strike six years earlier, workers were stigmatized for their “culture of parasitism, reckless reliance on outside subsidies, greed, large appetite for easy money, and inability for hard work and self-development”Footnote ⁵⁰; a discourse that has widely accompanied practices of neoliberal restructuring in the former Soviet Union, where the worker-hero has been substituted for the entrepreneur as the new model citizen.Footnote ⁵¹ As Bolat put it:

Beside prevention, CAC's staff tried to actively shape a sufficient, calculating, responsible, autonomous, and unencumbered subject, as part of the independence-era “practice of governing ‘through freedom,’ i.e., through teaching people how to independently achieve their ‘interests’ […] in the framework of the market economy.”Footnote ⁵² Yet transforming workers into entrepreneurs was no easy task. Of the approximately three thousand who had “voluntarily” retired, only around one hundred were following courses at CAC's. The rest had largely spent their compensation to repay accumulated debts and mortgages, buy or renovate their houses, address health problems, and fund their children's education.

Workers’ reluctance to engage in business was, however, considered a legacy of Soviet paternalism. “We do not have [doing business] in our blood (Rus.: v krovi etogo u nas netu),” as Aigul put it. Working in the oil sector had allegedly spoiled them with relatively high salaries compared to their job qualifications. After all, they were not proper oil-workers (Rus.: neftyaniki) —such as geologists, petroleum engineers, and drillers—but nefteservisniki: locksmiths, drivers, mechanics, and construction workers serving the oil industry yet undeserving of salaries that would reach four hundred thousand tenge (around seven hundred dollars) compared to a national average of half the amount. As Bolat put it: “We do not say it directly, but we try to deliver the message that they are overvalued (pereotseneny).” Yet, workers were reluctant to accept the job positions that CAC found them as an alternative, since the latter would pay less than a fourth of what they previously earned for the same work, this time for the private outsourcing companies stipulating cheaper service contracts with the oil corporations.

The devaluing of workers’ labor and the stripping of their supposed entitlements was justified by reference to global practices on which national companies had to model their own. Malik, human resources manager in one of the service companies, said:

The unified salary index (ESOT) enjoyed by all workers in state-owned enterprises was also considered an outdated legacy of Soviet paternalism, although it was introduced following the Zhanaozen tragedy in 2011 in order to minimize workers’ grievances on wage disparities by homogenizing salary calculations. For the supporters of the optimization, this move had been a step back from the adoption of a profit-driven capitalist logic, where workers who worked harder and showed the intention of improving were rewarded monetarily and could uphold career advancement, while the lazy majority would be hired contingently according to company workloads. The role of the state was not to guarantee job security, but to create the conditions for self-improvement so that unsatisfied workers could attain better conditions by acquiring new skills. Failing to do so was a confirmation of their laziness and incapacity for self-development, a confirmation of their previous overvaluation and their infantile stubbornness. The intention of eradicating paternalism notwithstanding, a state paternalist logic was driving the very conception and implementation of the project. As Bolat stated: “these people cannot be expected to look for better jobs by themselves,” but had to be guided, stirred, and pointed towards them; in order to build trust with these “ citizens and clients,” CAC's staff had to keep up with them “as with our own children.”

As the optimization went further during 2018, the local press published a series of articles showcasing ready and willing, virtuous workers making adequate provision for the reconstruction of their human capital in order to transition successfully from dependent labor—and a dependent mindset—to forward-looking entrepreneurship:

Workers such as Taubaev were upheld as models of responsibility, not only in regards to their families but also toward their former company and the state. The project of turning workers into entrepreneurs aimed at creating similar subjectivities who, by becoming financially independent and responsible, could participate in “helping the state” rather than being a burden for it. The attainment of a new stability in the future passed necessarily through a process of responsibilization and the acquisition of skills that would turn former oil workers in “patriotic entrepreneurs,”Footnote ⁵⁴ linking neoliberal ethics to the social obligation of building the nation.Footnote ⁵⁵ The other side of the coin, however, was the marginalization of “irresponsible” labor activists.

Cleansing from a Toxic Industry

Kuspan, Maksot, and Zhambyl had been among the most active and visible workers during the last strike before the implementation of the 5/50 program. Already in October 2016, organized by their independent trade union, they participated in a hunger strike at the MMG fields of Kalamkas and Zhetybay. Both the regional akim Aidarbayev and KMG director Mynbayev visited the Kalamkas field to negotiate, promising an end to outsourcing and stop the optimization. Strong off their partial victory, oil workers around the region started to discuss the unification of working groups and trade union organizations in a Unified Coordination Center (Rus.: Edinyi Coordinatsionnyi Tsentr), whilst anticipating a coming “persecution of activists, from forgery of drugs [possession] to transfer to another workplace, or bribery in the form of promotions and bonuses.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Then, in January 2017, the expected happened: facing an increasingly hostile and restrictive environment—especially after the promulgation of the new law on trade unions and the Labour CodeFootnote ⁵⁷—an administrative court in the city of Shymkent ruled in favor of the dissolution of the Kazakhstani Federation of Independent Trade Unions. Workers at Oil Construction Company in Aqtau entered another hunger strike, this time ending with its leaders arrested, the participants fined, and those identified as “instigators”—like Kuspan, Maksot, and Zhambyl—fired.Footnote ⁵⁸

In the following months all three tried unsuccessfully to appeal their dismissals in court, while becoming progressively marginalized by their former colleagues who feared their own exclusion from the now inevitable implementation of the optimization program. Concomitantly, with the appearance of articles on successful transitions to entrepreneurship in the local press, I started noticing job ads stuck on the entrance doors of apartment blocks and on street light poles. These were targeting directly those who had been dismissed through the 5/50 program (see Figures 2 and 3). I asked Maksot what he thought about them, and whether he was considering calling. He felt anger and disillusionment at what he considered an unjust and painful experience, and had thus decided not to look for jobs that offered ignoble working conditions. Among these, mattered chiefly the impossibility of forming workplace organizations, a condition that signified the descent from the status of citizen-worker to that of a “slave.” As he told me after lastly signing up for unemployment benefits:

Figure 2.

Job ads. On the top lefthand side: “We hire (former) oil workers.” Aqtau, May 2018

Figure 3.

Job ad. “Oilmen! Were you laid off with the program 5/50? Call us, we are hiring!” Aqtau, May 2018

Maksot's wife started to work at the laundry of a kindergarten, earning thirty thousand tenge per-month, and together with Maksot's son was sustaining him. Zhambyl, on the contrary, divorced and hosted by a relative in Aqtau, had to make it on his own. During a meeting I had with all three of them, Zhambyl said he did not bother himself with the dismissal anymore, he was not interested in any laws now and didn't care about the state, even if it would disappear (Kaz.: Quryp ketse de maghan baribir). The exhausting court appeals and the frustrating calls for solidarity were distracting him from the multilevel marketing company he recently joined. This was a pyramidal scheme, Kuspan told him, skeptical. Zhambyl said he could not do anything else: he had been living at his sister's for a while but could not any longer, nor did he want to go back to Beineu, his native village. He noticed, with the others nodding, that they would not be offered jobs due to the stain left on their workbooks as a consequence of the strike. In fact, Kuspan too had been encountering problems in finding new employment: “people agree to give you a job but then change their mind the next day,” or they just look at the workbook and keep silent. The only work Zhambyl had been able to find was as a contract-less security guard at the city port. But not for long. He decided it was time to change his mindset.

Zhambyl's vision of the future became, quite suddenly, one where everyone would earn for oneself: “There are dismissals all over Kazakhstan, enterprises are being shut down. The only work available for people is at construction sites or as security guards, although it pays very little. Our political system does not think about people, I realized that while I was at the commission where they confirmed our dismissal.” His decision to join a resale networking company was due to the wish of cleansing himself from the bodily and social “dirtiness” of dependent labor for the state, as well as recovering from the feeling of abandonment and marginalization he had suffered after the strike:

For the following months, Zhambyl was haunted by negative thoughts and was “very angry at the state.” He maintained that anger and worries affected his capacity to concentrate on resales, impacting on the confidence he needed to enlarge his network. But he had to go to court and battle, becoming nervous and irate. He started reading motivational books to calm down and—since entering the Tiens networking company—studied the life of businessmen such as Robert Kiyosaki and Donald Trump, their path to wealth and their philosophy: “A person who does not risk will not drink champagne,” he would say. He reckoned that, since he had already taken risks which did not bring anything positive, it would not hurt to try being a businessman. He changed his clothing too: he now wore a suit—white shirt and red tie, smart black pants and belt—and held a folder stuffed with promotional material and leaflets propagandizing the miraculous effects of the company's products: “Simply put, this is my business. In MMG you will do what they ask you to do. But here, I can leave my work anytime I want. I even can stay home.” It was not only a desire to become rich that pushed Zhambyl into multilevel marketing, but a desire to become autonomous while forging new relationships of care and support after the marginalization following his dismissal.Footnote ⁵⁹ He tried to attract people who had “escaped”Footnote ⁶⁰ the oil industry with the 5/50 program, because they had money but did not know what to do with them—Bolat was of the same opinion on this. When I showed the job ads I collected, he was confident they had been posted by people engaged in multilevel marketing. As the optimization continued, Zhambyl foresaw that more and more people would feel disappointed with dependent labor and turn to “business”:

He would stroll around the city sticking ads to attract former oil workers, but it was difficult to find committed people. Most of them, Zhambyl thought, were negativshchiki and angry, suspicious that they were being deceived by networking marketing as well: “They say they poisoned my mind and turned me into a zombie (Kaz.: olar senin miyndy ulap tastagan, zombie qylyp tastagan deidi). But I say I am not a zombie, because I tried these products myself and my health improved.” Working for Tiens meant cleansing himself also bodily, from physical as much as political dirt. The pollution at the oilfield, Zhambyl maintained, made human blood become thick, this leading to different diseases that needed diluents such as vodka or injections at sanatoriums. “It is a kind of death to work in this way” (Kaz.: Osylai jumys jasau da, bir olim goi),” he said, pointing to how many workers would not even reach retirement age or die few years after. He joined Tiens also to invest in his health. He drank vitamins and health supplements, advertising them as having miraculous effects, after trying them first: eye-drops improved his eyesight, toothpaste healed his tonsils and burns. Differently from his previous company, in the current one they had “health,” not only in physical terms: his current business was “clean” (Kaz.: taza), in comparison to the former one, also in moral terms. He was trying to establish relations considered honest and pure, where his own pursuit of wealth and meaning would be based on making other people's lives healthier. Moreover, it was a clean business because it was a “free” one, meaning it fed from the desire to be completely detached from the state: the company did not pay taxes, and neither did its resellers; and differently from traditional businesses, these did not need to have much money in order to build or buy a shop, neither would they need protection—a “roof” (Rus.: krysha) —in order to run it, nor had to bribe officials or police officers.

By the end of 2018 Zhambyl had done little progress in recruiting people and earning money from his business though, starting to make me notice a mismatch between his expectations and the current outcomes, as it is commonly found in multilevel marketing.Footnote ⁶¹ Nevertheless, he continued to work in what he called side jobs to share rent for a former dacha in the outskirts of the city with two other men. He continued reading motivational and business books to keep learning how to become rich independently and in a clean way: “What I have been observing in the company,” he said during our last meeting, “is that people join this company when they are full of emotions—I realized it just recently myself—and after they leave. But I did not. I stayed, because I am patient.”