Activity

[...] financial crises occur when the gap between fictitious capital and the real value it claims to represent becomes too great. The culture of belief and credulity that underscores the financial sector and the proliferation of fictitious capital stutters or grinds to a sickening halt [...] Financ…

The reasons why capital never accurately measures the value of labour as embodied in commodities are varied, but one key reason is the tremendous influence of finance and banking over the value and quantity of money. At no moment has capitalism been free from the influence of finance, and at no mom…

[...] For Harvey, fictitious capital represents not a claim on actually existing value but a share of future surplus value yet to be extracted (2006, 265–268). But, for Harvey, finance does not exist purely as the realm of elite skulduggery, it is a crucial set of economic institutions by which cap…

Importantly, Marx makes the key point that a stock or bond is, in essence, a claim on the future surplus value yet to be extracted from labour. In other words, a share in BP may have a price for which it exchanges on the speculative market, but its underlying value is really a claim to a certain sh…

[...] Finance’s goal, according to Lazzarato, is to compel us all to imagine ourselves as “financiers of the self,” and embrace precariousness, risk, and economic and existential insecurity. For Lazarrato, debt and finance operate biopolitically: they are techniques of power whereby both bodies a…