A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

capital that ensues from the very anarchy of production and leading to
a pressure on the tendency for the rate of profit to diminish when countering
tendencies (including the new ones, linked as we shall see, to the
new financial instruments) have dried up. And this over-accumulation
manifests itself through an excess of sellable production, not because
there are not enough people who need and desire to consume, but because
the concentration of wealth tends to prevent an increasingly large
proportion of the population from being able to buy the goods. But, instead
of it being a question of a standard over-production of goods, the
growth of the credit system makes it possible for capital to accumulate
in the form of money-capital, which can take forms that are increasingly
abstract, unreal and fictitious.
2. The concept of ‘fictitious capital’ is, I believe, important in analyzing
the crisis. Its basic principle, which is the capitalization of revenue based
on future surplus value, as well as its various forms (banking capital,
stock transactions, public debts etc.) were identified by Marx in his time.
He sketched out the study of this, along with studies of interest-bearing
capital and the development of the capitalist credit system, in Section 5
of Volume III of Das Kapital, particularly from Chapter XXV onwards and
above all in Chapter XXIX (“components of banking capital”) up to Chapter
XXXIII.
The ideas were incomplete – and they remain so still (in spite of the
work of important writers). Things have greatly changed since the times
of Marx (money has changed form, becoming even more immaterial,
and the exchange markets have immeasurably expanded since the system
has no longer been tied to the gold standard).
But Marx left us elements that are still useful in comprehending the fictitious
movements of capital, which integrate the credit system and
monetary capital. Analysis of these leads to that of ‘expanded reproduction’,
together with the exorbitant development of ever more unreal
forms of capital, as sources of autonomized valuation that appear to be
separate from surplus value or appropriated without labour, as though
‘by magic’. Marx talks here of capital functioning as an ‘automat’ – one
could call it an ‘autocrat’, as one could, elsewhere, have called the State
machinery.
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