Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits: A Marxist Analysis

ISBN-13: 9783030233624 / Angielski / Miękka / 2020 / 215 str.

Mello, Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti

Opis

This book provides an original account of financialisation and outlines the creation of fictitious profits as a basis to describe the present phase of capitalist accumulation in the neoliberal era. Making innovative theoretical elaborations on Marx’s notion of fictitious capital, Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits offers a dialectic analysis of the increasing financialization during this crisis-ridden period based on the original concepts of fictitious profit and fictitious wealth. Combining the most important research from over twenty years of scholarly inquiry with groundbreaking new studies, Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits is more than a collection of texts by political economists on a contemporary topic; it is a synthesis of an intense process of academic production that began with work of Karl Marx and has resulted in the formulation of a differentiated interpretative perspective on the contemporary evolution of capitalist crisis. 

Spis treści

1.      Chapter 1. Introduction

2.      Chapter 2. The place of money in Marx’s theory of capital

            Introduction

            Money in Marx's intellectual pathway to capital

            The saga of chapter three: money as the antecessor of capital

            The category money in Capital

            Final considerations

3.      Chapter 3. Speculative Capital And The Dematerialisation Of Money

            Introduction

            On the concept of parasitic speculative capital

            Redundancy, contamination and a new concept

            Exaggerated conclusions, speculative capital and fictitious remuneration

            On the nature of money

            Money and credit money

            Credit money and measures of value

            Reformulating the thesis

            From the simple equivalent to money in Marx

            Money and gold

4.      Chapter 4. Crypto-Currencies: From the Fetishism of Gold To Hayek Gold

            Introduction

            Crypto-currencies

            The creation and circulation of Bitcoin             Can bitcoin assume the functions of money in capitalism?

                        Measurement of values

            Means of circulation

            Money itself

            Money as capital

            The crypto-currencies, their theological mantras and their ideological underpinnings

            Final Considerations 5.      Chapter 5. Financialisation and the contradictory unity between the real and financial dimensions of capital accumulation

            Introduction

            Capital in general and Individual or Private capital

            The metamorphoses of capital and its cycles

            Social capital and individual capitals

            The movement of capital in the 21st century

            The State in the dynamics of capital

            Final considerations

6.      Chapter 6. Parasitic speculative capital: a theoretical precision on financial capital, characteristic of globalization

            Introduction

            From the Marxist concept of capital to that of parasitic speculative capital

          On Capital

          The substantiation of value in capital

            Industrial capital and its functional forms

            Fictitious capital

                        Financial capital

                        Parasitic speculative capital

            Final considerations

7.      Chapter 7. Profit, interest, rentism and fictitious profit

            The vicissitudes of contemporary capitalism and so-called financialisation

            Capital as a contradictory totality

            Interest-bearing capital, fictitious capital and fictitious profits

            Still on rent and its source

            On the nature of financialisation and rentier capitalism

            Final Considerations

8.      Chapter 8. The nature and the contradictions of the capitalist crisis

            Introduction

            Overaccumulation of capital, fictitious capital, and parasitic speculative capital

            Background

            Real capital, fictitious capital and parasitic speculative capital

            The recovery of fictitious capital after the crisis of 2007

            The effects of parasitic speculation on a world scale

            Monetary impacts of the 2007 crisis

            The spread of the Dollar in the global credit system

            Final considerations

 

O autorze

Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello is Professor in the Department of Economics and the Post-Graduate Programme in Social Policy at the Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil

Mauricio de Souza Sabadini is Professor in the Department of Economics and the Post-Graduate Programme in Social Policy at the Federal University of Espírito Santo, Brazil