Finance Capital Today

Coronavirus, Capitalism in Crisis and the Perversity of Public Health in Bolsonaro’s Brazil

“…Still, as already described by Roberts in The Long Depression, 3 in a moment of long depression of capitalism, mainly from the 1970s, there is, on the one hand, a fall in the profit rate of productive capital, as provided by the law tendency of Marx, 18 and, on the other hand, the exacerbated growth of fictitious capital, occupying the center of economic and social relations. 13 It is in this context that the recovery of profit has demanded ultraliberal policies from the ruling class; at the same time, the advance of conservative social forces (and many neofascists) is perceived in an attempt to reheat accumulation and "encourage" market projections. This effort to save capital today cannot take place without the extremely intensive exploitation of the environment, destroying it inexorably.…”

“…For this author, it must be recognized that the capitalist mode of production can only be understood historically, transforming and becoming more complex, according to its different phases, as its contemporary times (from 1980s onward) dominated by fictitious capital. 13 It is also a matter of seeking his understanding in what Marx called the capital appreciation process (the law of value) and its consequences in the whole of capitalist society, the bourgeois society. Marx considers that capitalism is oriented toward the search for capital appreciation and its accumulation, through the production of surplus value, with labor value as the central determination of the social relations of production and development of the productive forces.…”

USA’s trade policy in the context of global crisis and the decline of North American hegemony

“…The monopoly-financial capital, both the one that operates in the financial sphere, and the one that moves and delocalizes in the productive sphere towards other geographical spaces, requires the external markets for its reproduction and valorization. The global value chains in which this capital participates, forged over decades of internationalization of capital, cannot be removed quickly or easily, even if the governments wish to do so, since these chains were built to a large extent to the super-exploitation of workers from the peripheries and to raise profit rates of TNCs (Smith, 2016;Chesnais, 2016).…”

Cédric Durand, Fictitious capital: How finance is appropriating our future.

“…While some might dispute the expanded conception of ‘fictitious capital’ vis-à-vis other categories (such as interest-bearing capital; Lapavitsas, 2013), its consistent use within the book serves well to enrich existing (Marxist) accounts (e.g. Arrighi, 1994; Chesnais, 2016; Krippner, 2011; Lapavitsas, 2013; Magdoff and Sweezy, 1987). It is, however, important to note that despite its prominent role, Durand also disentangles these other categories logically and often does so by means of intuitive illustrations that readers from heterodox economics, geography and political science alike will certainly find useful both in research and teaching.…”