The Duality of Labour and the Financial Crisis

The current financial crisis has meant a sudden drying-up of the widely-assumed basis of profitability and capital accumulation — reward for entrepreneurship or risk. In this context, it is timely to revisit the Marxian concept that profits derive from the dual role of labour, as both a commodity and a non-commodity. Surplus is created by the difference between the commodity dimension of labour, the value of labour power, and its non-commodity dimension — the value added by labour, over and above the value of inputs, or the cost of reproducing the workforce. Since the 1980s and 1990s, however, labour has become a commodity in a new sense. Risks to working class self-reproduction in the form of wage decline and withdrawal of state welfare, have pushed workers into becoming entrepreneurs of their own lives, calculating the risks of debt servicing and involuntarily buying services from privatised and financialised utilities and health care providers. In this sense, newly commodified labour is required to treat itself as a commercial entity, and it is thereby a player in the market for risk. The reproduction of labour power has itself become a source of surplus value, in the form of interest payments. But, as indicated by the US sub-prime housing market and its fall-out, capital now shares in the risk, through a fall in the value of labour power (lower consumption), and through incalculable financial instability.