The social risk–rent thesis: A reply to Harney

The paper responds to Stefano Harney's critique, ‘Accounting, Risk and Revolution’ and in doing so offers a further extension of Toms, 2006 and Toms, 2010 perspective on labour rents and capitalist risk. Harney's challenge, to ask what is left out of critical accounting's account of risk, is an important one. Therefore the social rent–risk (SRR) hypothesis extends the analysis of critical accounting from systematic risk to include firm specific risk and primitive accumulation risk. It is argued that the SRR approach provides a generalised method of accounting for social relations of production and the necessary conditions of social transformation.