Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire?

Abstract

This article argues that an essential role that economically backward regions from Hungary play in the global economy is to provide a cheap, flexible and expendable labour force. Out of these social groupings, are the Roma people who inhabit a precarious social position and are considered superfluous: ‘the reserved army of the labour force’ to their society at large. At the same time, it demonstrates, benefiting from a multi-site ethnographic research, how these seemingly resourceless transnational migrants are using their almost only capital: their kinship network as a resource, and ‘rumour publics’ as a strategy of manoeuvre in a climate of political and economic uncertainty and unequal circumstances of domination, in the ‘one-word capitalism’ in order to pursue a better life, or what they consider socio-economic mobility.