Centring labour in financialization

ABSTRACT

This article draws on an engagement with Marx’s notes on money and finance to reconsider the relationships between labour, working classes, and financial accumulation. In recent years, these dynamics have often been understood through the lens of ‘financialization’ – referring to a trend towards the growing prominence of financial sector profits, logics, and power at the expense of productive activity. This lens has tended to produce analyses of labour and finance that are (1) unidirectional and (2) that often lump a wide range of developments under a single heading without considering how these trends might intersect in potentially contradictory ways. Marx offers a useful alternative insofar as his approach to money and finance centres on a continual and fraught dynamic between the ‘abstract’ social labour embodied in money and the ‘concrete’ labour performed in particular places at particular times. This argument is illustrated through brief vignettes from South Africa.

KEYWORDS:

• Finance
• labour
• financialization
• Marx
• South Africa

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Susanne Soederberg, as well as the anonymous reviewers and editors at this journal, for their very helpful comments on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term vignettes is taken from Harberger (1980), it highlights that ‘South Africa’ in this context is not a self-contained case, but rather a particular vantage point on global processes.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by a Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship [grant number 756-2016-0297].

Notes on contributors

Nick Bernards

Nick Bernards is Assistant Professor of Global Sustainable Development at the University of Warwick. He is the author of The Global Governance of Precarity: Primitive Accumulation and the Politics of Irregular Work (Routledge, 2018), and recent articles in Review of International Political Economy, Environment and Planning A, and Geoforum.