On the "essential condition" of intellectual capital: labour!

Following Marx and Engels' identification of the "essential condition of capital", the purpose of this paper is to begin an initial critical exploration of the essential condition of intellectual capital, particularly the ownership rights of labor. Adopting a critically modernist stance on unitarist HR and OB discourse, and contextualized within a background on the stock option phenomenon and recent accounting regulation, the paper argues that the fundamental nature of capital-labor relation continues resiliently into the IC labor (intellectual capital-labor) relation. There is strong evidence that broad-based employee stock options have become institutionalized in certain firms and sectors -- but the future of such schemes is very uncertain. Overly unitarist HR/OB arguments are challenged here with empirical evidence on capital's more latently strategic purposes such as conserving cash, reducing reported accounting expense in order to boost reported earnings, deferring taxes, and attracting, retaining and exploiting key elements of labor.