A POSTCAPITALIST PARADIGM: THE COMMON GOOD OF ...

the owners of capital can only delay the devaluation of the excess capital
placed on the financial markets. It can certainly not avoid it.
The crisis has been caused by the logic of the dynamics that lie at the
heart of the US economy with, on the one hand, a re-balancing of the
internal and external imbalances created by the draining off of foreign
durable capital - which can be seen as an operation by the dominant US
classes, tapping the wealth of the rest of the world; and, on the other
hand, as the greatest concentration of wealth within the United States
that has been seen for a century. This can be shown by some statistics:
out of total revenues, the proportion of income monopolized by the
wealthiest 1 per cent was 10 per cent thirty years ago: it is now 25 per
cent. The share of the wealthiest 10 per cent was one-third of the total
in 1979 and in 2009 it has risen to a half. The tremendous inflation of
the financial profits (from fictitious capital) of the dominant classes
hugely deformed the economy of the United States, particularly the rate
of savings which had become negative just before the crisis. Hence, via
the sphere of the real economy, we are experiencing the present catastrophe.
How does this catastrophe manifest itself?
2. The manifestations of the crisis
A. The financial manifestations and the real ones
a. The first manifestation of the crisis was a brutal destruction of fictitious
capital. In the year 2008, the total capitalization of the world stock
exchanges dropped from 48.3 to 26.1 billion dollars (whether millions of
millions or thousands of billions, this equals 1012)! This descending spiral
in the value of assets was accompanied by a loss of confidence and
a situation of illiquidity on the interbanking market – in a world which
was already over-liquid, the most probable explanation being the insolvency
of numerous banks.
As a consequence, in a context in which the price of composite bonds
and the risks which they carried was increasingly badly assessed (because
assessment was impossible, not to speak of the aberrant behaviour
of the rating agencies like Moody’s), the problems moved from the
subprime sector to that of the credits of housing credit (i.e. from ficti-
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