Decommodified Labor

A way to think labor after nanancialization, decommodifed labor refers to an emptying out of the same wage relation that nonetheless continues to structure our lives. “Working hard or hardly working” needs a new conjunction: in an age of decommodifed labor, one nds oneself working hard and hardly working. I suggest that decommodi ed labor offers cultural critics a form for isolating labor today that takes account of its relation to the wage, that may assist in periodizing the capital-labor relation, and that also highlights nancial change alongside labor’s durational necessity under capitalism. “Payment is on an unpaid basis.”—job posting How do we think labor in our economic present? In an age of nancialization, under the organization of what many commentators have explained as a FIRE ( nance, insurance, real estate) economy, what are our metrics for, and what are our theoretical orientations of, conceptualizing labor? The past few years have seen the question of labor’s contemporaneity appear in popular and theoretical discourse, presaging both its return from a biopolitics-based exile as well as its predicted eclipse by novel economic prognostications. We have witnessed new terms emerge, including, most prominently, “immaterial labor” as well as “affective labor.” Fredric Jameson has suggested that we reread Capital Volume 1 as a “theory of unemployment”—certainly an argument for rethinking the metrics of labor. Yet historians have wondered whether we have witnessed “the rise and fall of the job” or whether many of us will live a “wageless life.” To these academic discussions about labor’s scope and breadth, we should add popular publications such as The Wall Street Journal, which has not so subtly declared, “The End of Employees,” and Forbes which wondered: “Unpaid Jobs: The New Normal?” On the occasion of this special—and necessary—issue of Lateral on rethinking Marxism, I would like to suggest a return to the question of labor and a certain con guration of labor in particular: what I call decommodi ed labor. A way to think labor that becomes available after nanancialization, decommodifed labor refers to an emptying out of the same wage relation that nonetheless continues to structure our lives. “Working hard or hardly working” needs a new conjunction: in an age of decommodifed labor, one nds oneself working hard and hardly working. I suggest that decommodi ed labor offers cultural critics a concept for isolating labor today that takes account of its relation to the wage, that may assist in periodizing our current capital-labor relation, and that highlights nancial change alongside labor’s durational necessity under capitalism. Whether we classify it or not, we encounter decommodi ed labor daily. Reality television, for example, runs on decommodi ed labor: those “real” people we see on television forgo a wage in exchange for “exposure.” It was recently reported that the corporate-hipster company Urban Out tters asked its employees to “volunteer” for six-hour holiday shifts. Such volunteerism would be like work, but without the wage. In the popular HBO series 1