The recurrent and devastating economic crises, the widened reproduction of inequality and misery, militarism, the unmeasured thirst for surplus value, advancing predatorily not only on the working population but also on nature, to the point of putting at risk the very existence of humanity, in short, the barbaric dynamics of capital once again silenced the death sentences of Marxian criticism to political economy. In particular, after the 2007–8 crisis and amid the popular revolts that responded to their effects, Marx’s thinking was revived, leading to a proliferation of efforts to mobilize its analyzes for a critical understanding of contemporary capitalism. As one of its most salient features is the prominence of the financial dimension of accumulation, Marx’s analysis of the fictitious forms of capital has acquired particular interest and in recent years has been the subject of increasing research. It is precisely this investigation that constitutes the fundamental object of the studies gathered in this book. Composed of seven chapters, besides this Introduction, three of them unpublished and the other four revised and expanded versions of articles already published (but unpublished in English), this book tries to synthesize more than 20 years of research and debates fictitious wealth and fictitious capital . Its content suggests the need to distinguish the present stage of capitalist accumulation from the period that stretches from the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s. This distinction goes beyond the traits of the so-called globalization to the consequences of the restructuring of production and the application of neoliberal policies. The authors seek to emphasize the fundamental characteristics and contemporary specificities of the current stage of the evolution of capital: the domination of fictitious capital over other forms of capital, together with which it forms a contradictory totality.
In this sense, the book presents a close reading of fictitious capital and the place it holds in the Marxist exposure of the process of autonomization and subjectivation of capital, emphasizing the power and topicality of the work of Marx. In addition to this logical approach and considering the development of capitalist social formations, the authors explore the historical uniqueness of today’s dynamic of capital accumulation , guided by the appropriation of fictitious profits. From this analysis, the authors provide an explanation of the recent economic crises, highlighting the 2007–8 crisis, and make considerations about the gloomy prospects for capitalism in the immediate future.
The fictitious reproduction of capital as a modern novelty is not at issue. The proposal is to consider the special character of this stage of the accumulation of wealth in which the strong dominance of fictitious capital is reproduced over and above other forms of capital throughout the world, particularly going forward from the economic stagnation that began in the late 1960s. This means that the logic of capitalist expansion is currently based on the fictitious production of wealth and the centralized appropriation of fictitious profits. Such conclusions did not, however, arise instantaneously. They began with concerns of researchers Paulo Nakatani and Reinaldo A. Carcanholo, Professors at the Federal University of Espírito Santo since the early 1990s, about what they considered to be limits in the interpretations of Marxist economists of the economic crisis that had been deepening over the preceding decades.
The great challenge, proposed by these authors, was to overcome the resistance against updating the embryonic concepts developed by Karl Marx in Capital. They were convinced that dialectic categories, and not finished definitions, should always be considered in the process of transformation, ready to be used at any time and place. If social phenomena are by nature dynamic, in a continuous metamorphosis, then the simplicity of the definitions fails to capture and interpret them with adequate precision. The dialectic perspective overcomes some of the obstacles to the processual construction of knowledge about the current capitalist crises from the Marxist viewpoint.
In the face of somewhat imprecise interpretations and to qualify the phenomenon of the current capitalist crisis, the general use of the term financial capital seemed lacking, both in designating the distinct forms that capital interest assumes and in referring to the various modes of speculation that have multiplied since the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in the early 1970s. The quest for greater precision led them to look at the Marxist category of fictitious capital, little investigated at the time, which then became the springboard for the theoretical effort that these researchers undertook.
From this point onwards, the authors were able to better interpret the capitalist crisis, seeing it not as inherently problematical, but as an important moment in the search for solutions to the growing contradictions that periodically threaten the widening reproduction of capital. The researchers’ choice was to explore the process of the dematerialization of wealth under capitalism, seeking to understand more precisely the production of fictitious wealth and the various operational practices used for their unequal appropriation. This would be based on the analytical assumption that the journey to the most recent stage in the development of capitalism has required the creation of ever more advanced forms of mercantile relationships. In these relationships, both money and capital are mainly dematerialized from their concrete forms, a phenomenon that gains more significance as speculative creativity advances. This is the result of an intense process of value nullification in which there is an increasing social relevance of the command, by some class factions, over the stock of wealth and, especially, of wealth that could be produced in the future by more sophisticated speculation mechanisms.
Along the same line of investigation, we attempt to make explicit the double character of fictitious wealth and its connections with distinct forms of speculation. According to the authors, a substantial part of fictitious wealth appears as if it were a real wealth. In other words, as appearance is also a dimension of reality, this form of wealth is both fictitious and real at the same time. This means that a unit of fictitious capital can realize the portion of fictitious wealth under its command. From the point of view of appearance, a portion of fictitious wealth can be exchanged for tangible commodities (land, factories, means of consumption, etc.). In other words, in the process of circulation, each new holder of the right granted by possession of a title (which represents a unit of fictitious wealth) could exchange it for any other commodity (real wealth).
However, if considered in a broader context (separate from isolated exchanges), a considerable part of the fictitious wealth produced today is revealed. Derivative titles, for example, are a right and can be passed from hand-to-hand, being transferred uninterruptedly, in individual transactions. They can, therefore, be transferred but cannot be consumed or used materially. Their destruction would only happen with the suspension of the belief that their holder could convert it into any real wealth in the future. From an even broader perspective, one realizes that this form of fictitious wealth has no material connection to its effective realization. It exists only as a command power over a promised future wealth, which does not ensure that it will be produced at any future point.
Capital has, for decades, found ways of managing the current global economic crisis, creating all sorts of speculative and regulatory instruments that have maintained a system that exponentially multiplies fictitious rights over wealth that, supposedly, will be produced at some unknown point in the future. It is, therefore, a single moment in which fictitious value , in the more sophisticated forms of speculation, contradicts the social relations of current production. The interpretation is, therefore, that this is a structural crisis in which the search for alternatives have only deepened its reproductive dynamism. Starting from a more abstract analysis of the evolution of the forms of current fictitious wealth production , the book sets out concrete relations on the contemporary stage of accumulation, demonstrating how the new management of imperialism has been used for the maintenance of the dollar as a world currency under strong pressure from the European Union and Asian countries, which has required great upheavals in the metamorphosis of state intervention, generating large-scale geopolitical crises.
In the second chapter, “The Place of Money in Marx’s Theory of Capital,” Adriano L. Teixeira seeks to place Marx’s theory of money in relation to the major objective of his intellectual thinking, which sought to reveal the shape of capitalist sociability through a theory of capital. Marx’s theory of money appears as a theoretical snapshot before the advent of capital, which, notwithstanding the category of money , assumed the role of protagonist in the process of social reproduction, modifying the forms of capital (money ) and reconfiguring the elements of a possible Marxist monetary theory.
In the next chapter, “Speculative Capital and the Dematerialization of Money,” Reinaldo A. Carcanholo explores in more detail the process of the dematerialization of wealth under capitalism and presents the practices employed for unequal appropriation through speculation, which has meant the creation of ever more advanced forms of mercantile relationships. As the creative forms of parasitic speculation advance, both money and capital are dematerialized in their concrete forms, throwing off the operational impediments to the expanded reproduction of speculative capital, including creating new forms of regulation of securities transactions, which have come to dominate decisions throughout the capitalist world.
Still with the aim of apprehending the concept of money as a moment of the concept of capital, but having as its immediate object the emergence of crypto-currencies, in Chap. 4, “Crypto-currencies: From the Fetishism of Gold to Hayek Gold,” Paulo Nakatani and Gustavo M. de C. Mello, based on the Marxist perspecti...