[zodium]

Originally Posted by Fictitious Capital

In high-income countries, fictitious capital has ceased to be a dynamic factor in accumulation, instead becoming a dead weight on the social reproduction process as a whole. The regulation of financial projections has become chaotic. It proceeds by way of financial and macroeconomic shocks that call for powerful political interventions. The insufficient profits from the molecular process of accumulation-through-production thus make the sovereign state responsible for resolving an ever more acute conflict over distribution, both domestically and abroad. This return of the political is thus paradoxical. The hegemony of finance – the most fetishised form of wealth – is only maintained through the public authorities’ unconditional support. Left to itself, fictitious capital would collapse; and yet that would also pull down the whole of our economies in its wake. In truth, finance is a master blackmailer. Financial hegemony dresses up in the liberal trappings of the market, yet captures the old sovereignty of the state all the better to squeeze the social body to feed its own profits. Is this still capitalism? This system’s death-agony has been heralded a thousand times. But now it may well have begun – almost as if by accident. Alas, we cannot see any sign of the tomorrows bearing the song of emancipation. Since the plutocrats cannot settle for stagnation, they now resort to a strategy of crushing the rest of us. Capital stole people’s hopes. The dead weight of fictitious capital deprives them of what they thought they had won for good.