Following the 2014–2015 oil price crisis, service companies in Kazakhstan went through a process of industrial restructuring centered on workforce reduction and a concomitant increase of labor outsourcing. Taking the restructuring – or “optimization” – of state-owned service companies in the region of Mangystau as a starting point, this paper illustrates the heterogenous precarization effects and forms of precarity catalyzed by the process. Taking a multidimensional approach, the paper describes and analyses the effects of precarization in both socio-economic and political terms, as well as the implications for the production of differentiated laboring subjectivities. It situates the ethnographic trajectories of workers within the framework of Kazakhstan's authoritarian neoliberalism, highlighting the punitive and pastoral techniques of goverment deployed in the restructuring of the regional oil complex. In the first part, the article describes how precarization was experienced by workers as “slavery”, entailing the loss of social recognition as well as the intensification of economic exploitation and political domination, heightening their exposure to social and bodily vulnerability. The second section looks instead at the workings of a governmental agency in its effort to remake redundant workers into small business owners through the acquisition of entrepreneurial skills and the abandonment of the Soviet “dependency mindset”. The third and last section of the article concentrates on the individual trajectory of a dismissed worker joining a multi-level marketing scheme in order to cleanse himself from the bodily and social toxicity of precarized work in the oil industry.

2014-2015年石油价格危机后，哈萨克斯坦的服务公司经历了以减少劳动力和随之增加的劳务外包为中心的产业重组过程。本文以曼格斯托地区国有服务公司的重组（或“优化”）为起点，阐述了这一过程所催化的异质不稳定效应和不稳定形式。本文从多维度的角度描述和分析了不稳定化对社会经济和政治的影响，以及对差异化劳动主体性产生的影响。它将工人的民族志轨迹置于哈萨克斯坦威权新自由主义的框架内，强调了政府在地区石油联合体重组中采用的惩罚性和牧养手段。在第一部分中，文章描述了工人如何将不稳定状态视为“奴隶”，导致社会认可的丧失以及经济剥削和政治统治的加剧，从而加剧了他们在社会和身体上的脆弱性。第二部分着眼于政府机构的运作，通过获得创业技能和放弃苏联的“依赖心态”，将多余的工人改造为小企业主。本文的第三部分也是最后一部分集中于一名被解雇工人的个人轨迹，他加入了多层次的营销计划，以清除石油行业不稳定工作对身体和社会的毒害。