Capital fictício e crises econômicas: a dominação financeira no contexto do capitalismo contemporâneo

Abstract

Marx assesses, right at the beginning of Capital, that the wealth of society in the capitalist mode of production is based on a collection of commodities that satisfy human needs of any kind, regardless of whether the satisfaction will meet the needs of the stomach or the imagination. , or even if the merchandise will be used for the direct enjoyment of those who acquired it or as a means of production for other merchandise. In the same work, Marx already mentions the credit system, the public debt, the stock market and a banking development that will give rise to a class of idle rentiers that forms a financial aristocracy that constitutes parasitic wealth. However, in book III of Capital, he admits that financial securities of fictitious capital are also commodities traded in a specific market and relatively insubordinate to the production of real wealth. Thus, the subject of study proposed in this thesis seeks to understand the changes that the capitalist system performs during its recurrent crises when financial capital serves as a necessary measure for the reproduction of capital. The objective of the research is to understand the functioning and implications of fictitious capital in contemporary capitalism, whose consequences have deepened the crises through a process of financialization of the economy. The financial domination of contemporary capitalism emerges as a countertrend measure to crises, which reappear in the future with more intensifying and destructive aspects. In order to reach the objective of our studies, a bibliographical research was carried out, using dialectical materialism as the guiding method for understanding the movement of reality, capable of mediating the relationship between consciousness and the effective concrete. Furthermore, we have as main theoretical references: Marx, Hilferding, Bukharin, Chesnais, Mészáros, Harvey, Coggiola, Carcanholo, Grespan, Mollo, Nakatani, Sabadini etc. The thesis is divided into five sections, the first being the introduction and the last the final considerations, dealing with fundamental categories for the development of the research, both to understand the genesis of fictitious capital and to understand the developments that led to financialized capitalism. The second section deals with the commodity, the theory of value in Capital and interest-bearing capital. In the third section, the foundations of fictitious capital and the capitalist crises that unfolded in the concentration and centralization of capital in monopoly capitalism are discussed. In the fourth section, the result of decades of capitalist overaccumulation and the consequences of the US rupture with the Bretton Woods agreement are analyzed, allowing speculative orgies and the global casino to be free to create fictitious wealth. From an ontological and dialectical analysis, it is concluded that the origin of fictitious capital depended on the formation of interest-bearing capital, in the same way that interest-bearing capital had its ontogenesis in the relations of abstract work in the production of goods. The attempt to transform the financial system into the guardian of capitalist interests has only led to misery and the destruction of humanity, leaving no alternative but human extinction or the overcoming of capital.