Feminist International by Veronica Gago

Author:Veronica Gago
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Overspill II: Consumption and Finance

Finance has been able to skillfully and quickly detect the vitality from below that is woven into popular economies; that is where it roots its extraction of value, which operates directly over the labor force as living labor. This dynamic can be considered “extractive” since it does not have the wage as the privileged mediator of the exploitation of labor power.29 What finance exploits in this mode of value extraction is a willingness to work in the future that is no longer measured in the form of the wage. As Marx indicated in the Grundrisse: “But now, it is money which in itself is already capital; and, as such, it is a claim on new labor.”30

If there Marx was referring to capital’s command over “future labor” as the substance of “exchange” between capital and labor, in the third volume of Capital he highlights the same temporality—an expanded, multiplied, and accelerated form—in his analysis of “interest-bearing capital,” that is, financial capital. Underscoring its tendency to accumulate “claims or titles” to “future production,” Marx enables us to discover the expanded reproduction of control over labor to come (that is, the necessary labor to produce “future wealth”) that lies behind financial processes.31

Today, this demand for future labor is translated into the compulsion to accept any type of work, even without the guarantee of a stable or secure job. This type of compulsion to work without the obligatory element of the wage setting redefines the obligation to the future that debt produces. Thus, there has been an important change in the way debt is understood; up to now, a system of debt for which the wage was the horizon reinforced the obligation and commitment to one’s job and to the successive conditions of precarization that it may have imposed. It is something else entirely to go into debt without having a job: it structures a different relation between money and the future, since debt constrains people to accept any labor conditions, and even to invent forms of work that can quickly provide income.

The suppression of the mediation of the wage in contracting debt highlights how the apparatus of financial capture takes root in a vital force, making living labor visible in its dimension of pure potencia. I do not want to suggest a linear transition from the wage to debt, because there is a multiplicity of situations that continue being waged, due to which the dynamic of indebtedness has also been modified. However, the indebtedness of the non-waged is a prism that allows us to see how debt functions in general as a privileged apparatus of value extraction in contemporary capitalism, highlighting its key characteristics.

The compulsion to do any type work that debt enforces is what drives the versatility and labor opportunism appropriated by popular economies in their intersection with illegal economies, in a way that is analogous to how finance reads and captures that plebeian energy beyond the wage. This form of compulsion is, in turn, also codified by the dynamic of consumption encouraged by debt.

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