A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

Fictitious capital is above all formed in the credit system, which links
capitalist enterprise to the capitalist State. At this intersection are to be
found the stock exchanges and the banks, but also the pension funds,
the speculative investment or hedge funds, that are situated in the tax
havens, and other, similar bodies. The most favoured vehicles of fictitious
capital these days are securitization (which transforms assets [for
example debts] into financial securities) and the trade in derivatives,
which are the ‘supreme powers’ of fictitious capital.
3. But there are problems here both theoretical and practical, multiple
and delicate. Among the theoretical problems there is, for example, 1)
how to distinguish the different sources of fictitious capital, according
to their support from the sphere of the real economy or their detachment
from it; or 2) how to show that the profits from fictitious capital
are also real: or 3) how to show how these “fictitious profits” (which
are also real) can be attributed as a countering tendency to the reduction
in the rates of profit. There are also empirical problems: 1) how to
demonstrate the origin of fictitious profits; or 2) how to recalculate the
rates of profit and to know to what extent fictitious capital plays a part
in rectifying the rates of profit; or 3) how to divide the surplus value between
the different capitalist segments.
Fictitious capital is by its nature complex, dialectic, at the same time
both unreal and real. Its nature is partly parasitical, but this kind of capital
benefits from a distribution of surplus value (its liquidity gives its owner
the power to convert it, without loss of capital, into money, ‘liquidity par
excellence’). And this capital nourishes an accumulation of additional fictitious
capital, as a way of remunerating itself.
In a more general way, one of the most serious problems of this subject
is the virtual impossibility of formalizing it, whether or not one is a Marxist
in economics, without being obliged to separate the real and financial
spheres. This is not very satisfactory. Even if it is true that capital in the
form of goods and in the form of money must be separated only to become
finally inseparable.
Let us return to the origins of the crisis.
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