A way to think labor after finanancialization, 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 finds oneself working hard and hardly working. I suggest that decommodified 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 financial change alongside labor’s durational necessity under capitalism.
Articles by Leigh Claire La Berge
Leigh Claire La Berge is assistant professor of English at the City University of New York, BMCC campus. She is the author of Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s (Oxford, 2014) and the co-editor of Reading Capitalist Realism (Iowa, 2014). Her articles on the political economy of culture have appeared in American Literary History, Criticism, Postmodern Culture, South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Radical History Review. Her new book, Wages Against Artwork: Socially Engaged Art and The Decommodification of Labor is forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2019.