How Finance Exploits Us
The new era of financial capitalism, with its explosion of household debt and its dependence on complex derivatives, has caused fundamental changes in the way capital exploits labor.
Traders gather around a post as they wait for shares of Slack to start trading at the New York Stock Exchange on June 20, 2019 in New York City. (Drew Angerer / Getty Images)
Australian political economists Dick Bryan and Mike Rafferty have been collaborating for twenty years, rethinking how Marxism should understand finance. Capitalism with Derivatives (2006) argued that financial derivatives are transforming twenty-first century capitalism as much as the joint-stock company did in the nineteenth century. In their most recent book, Risking Together: How Finance is Dominating Everyday Life in Australia (2018), they deal with the integration of ordinary households into financial markets, and the consequences for labor and capital in a post-2008 world.
Llewellyn Williams-Brooks
This is the third book you two have written together — can you say something about how it fits into your long-standing project?
Dick Bryan
Mike and I have been working together for a long time. We worked out, I think quite early in the piece, that innovations in financial markets — financial derivatives in particular — were really important innovations. And they weren’t just technology, but were actually changing the way in which capital organizes and values itself. Capitalism with Derivatives was published in 2006, but we’d been working on it for four or five years. We knew there was a class politics in there. The book was actually about how capital is reorganizing, but we couldn’t really think through quite how to discuss labor, and how to think about surplus value, and how to think about Marxism more widely. So this new book was actually quite a long time in the making, because we were trying to nut through some of these theoretical issues. We couldn’t just solve that by sitting in a dark room and theorizing. We decided we would try and think about the class dimension of financial innovation in an applied way. We had to look at some history and evidence, and the evidence we had most immediately at hand and by background was about Australia. That’s how the book came to be as a strategic, intellectual, and in its own way, political venture.
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