1. Fictitious Capital/Real Psyche: Metalepsis, Psychologism, and the Grounds of Finance

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-44
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Louçã Francisco ◽  
Ash Michael

The concluding chapter surveys the prospects for more democratic governance of national economies and more equitable outcomes in the global economy. The backdrop for the chapter is the marriage of shadow finance with the conservative governments that have achieved electoral success on the basis of popular dissatisfaction with the response of neoliberal governments to the global economic crisis. The conservative movement and its governments are incoherent and unwilling to address, even in terms of modest reform, the power of finance and its responsibility for inequality and crisis. Effective reform could emerge from the union of professional expertise, whose commitment to technocratic aspects of the neoliberal project may have weakened, with democratic social movements.


Author(s):  
Miguel D. Ramirez

This paper analyzes the very important notion of capital from a Marxian perspective as opposed to a neoclassical one. It is argued that when capital is viewed as a historically determined social process (relation), rather than as a thing or a col-lection of things, it tends to assume certain specific forms more often than others depending on the particular stage of economic history. Capital thus refers simulta-neously to social relations and to things. Given this frame of reference, notions such as money and property capital are more easily accommodated and conse-quently are not written off as financial or fictitious capital - not real capital because they produce nothing. The paper also focuses on Marx's important analy-sis of the time of production and the turnover of capital in terms of the production of surplus-value (profit). It then examines Marx's equally important and prescient analysis of how the turnover speed of capital is affected by the time of circulation of commodities (the realization of surplus-value) and the growing use of credit (in its various forms) in the capitalist system. Finally, the paper turns its attention to the economic role of time as it relates to interest - bearing capital - one whose clear comprehension rests on viewing capital as a social construct.


Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Holt

Fictitious Capital is a book that looks to the history of the Arabic novel and reads an untold tale of finance that precedes the familiar narrative of the nation. Beginning in 1859, Khalīl al-Khūrī serializes a novel in his official newspaper Ḥadīqat al-Akhbār. Like many an Arabic novel to come, al-Khūrī’s readers find themselves dreaming of gardens set apart from the rush of the industrializing world, and at the same time, of a future of “material and literary progress.” Textiles are central to this alchemical dream, hinged to the fate of the silkworm, caught between the collapsing Ottoman Empire and the rise of the French in the affairs of Mt. Lebanon. Reading the silkmoth’s serial reapperances in the turn-of-the-century Arabic press and in theories of capital, Novel Material argues that finance capital and its fictions were reconfiguring time itself in an age of hope, fear and speculation.


2000 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy Merrifield

As the financial system tailspins and ‘Asian Flu’ reverberates everywhere and as 950 million people in South-East Asia struggle to get by on less than one dollar a day, Marx's ideas continue to nourish radical critique and action. If anything, his vision is more economically meaningful and more politically viable today than ever before. In this paper I try to bring Marx's insights on the “laws of motion” of modern capitalism to bear on prevailing global political-economic disorder. I discuss, more specifically, his theory of crisis and the dialectics of accumulation and circulation of “real” and “fictitious” capital as sketched out in the Grundrisse and Capital (volumes 1 and 3). I end with an exploration of the famous political prognosis from The Communist Manifesto of mass collective class struggle and the development of a “world literature”, and set all this within the context of a newly emerging workers' internationalism and social-movement unionism.


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