Risk and Value: Finance, Labor, and Production

The process of financialization of accumulation brings to the fore the issue of risk and risk trading. This article explores the way finance and risk relate to capital accumulation and how risk might be integrated into Marxian value theory. It looks first at what it would mean to incorporate risk into conventional measurements of value and then opens up alternative ways of thinking about the process of production, to recognize frontier developments in finance as integral to capital. Rather than treat finance simply as “unproductive,” the analysis draws on Negri, Hardt, and Deleuze to rethink finance and risk as involving forms of production at the financial frontier of capital: the construction of globally traded securities. In so doing, the analysis opens up novel ways of framing the evolving relation between labor and capital.