Fictitious Capital

La banca en la sombra es un concepto cada vez más utilizado en la literatura financiera, especialmente tras su inminente papel como uno de los detonantes de la crisis de 2007-2008. Cabe entonces preguntarnos qué es, de dónde vino y si es realmente ficticia.

Este ensaio corresponde ao arrazoado (revisto e ampliado) da conferência pronunciada pelo presente autor no IX Seminário de Análise do Discurso (SEAD), que tematizou a análise do discurso e suas condições de produção, realizado em novembro de 2019, na Universidade Federal do Pernambuco. O objetivo da preleção em tela foi compartilhar algumas hipóteses no tocante à problematização de algumas ferramentas conceituais no espectro teórico marxiano/marxista, diante do desafio de dar repostas a alguns problemas políticos do nosso tempo, atinentes à questão da relação entre ideologia e luta de classes no capitalismo contemporâneo. Neste caso, abordamos a questão da luta de classes no contexto da racionalidade neoliberal no século XXI, sob a dominação do capital fictício (fiktives Kapital) enquanto forma social resultante do processo de substantivação e autonomização do valor (Wert). A hipótese primária assumida aqui é que a forma do valor (Wertform) enquanto razão econômica e social imanente ao conteúdo das relações sociais produzidas a partir do trabalho subjugado ao capital, produz determinações para as formas ideológicas desse conteúdo ser vivenciado subjetivamente pelos indivíduos na trama política da sociabilidade capitalista. Essas determinações fornecem uma nova morfologia ao caráter ideológico da luta de classes, a partir da nova morfologia do trabalho sob a dominação do capital fictício.

Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES) are increasingly popular market driven conservation
strategies which involve a willing buyer and willing provider of ecosystem services coming
together for mutual benefits through market or market-like mechanisms. My thesis critiques
Wunder’s 5 point definition of PES, and argue that it pushes PES towards a purely market end of
the spectrum while ignoring the actual reality of PES cases that involve significant government
support. I demonstrate this by conducting a meta-analysis of a robust sample of PES case
studies. I conceptually draw upon three intellectual strands namely, Manno’s commoditization,
Marxian commodity fetishism and Polanyian theories of fictitious commodities to demonstrate
that ecosystem services function poorly in market mechanisms with little or no institutional
support from governments, socio-political discursive practices, and multiple social actors. I then
recommend a re-evaluation of Wunder’s five point definition of PES, since it is canonical and
influential in the PES literature.

O objeto de análise desta tese é a empresa líder em aeronáutica no Brasil, a EMBRAER – Empresa Brasileira de Aeronáutica S.A, hoje, apenas EMBRAER S.A. Trata-se da terceira maior produtora de aviões comerciais do mundo, cujo patamar de concorrência a faz primar por tendências organizacionais hegemônicas em âmbito mundial. Ela já nasce no contexto de crise estrutural do capital, na década de 1970, e procura, ao longo de quatro décadas de existência, constantemente, dar respostas à crise para não ser absorvida por ela. O objetivo da tese é analisar como foram realizadas essas transformações, principalmente a partir da década de 1990, quando a empresa foi privatizada, e, posteriormente, de forma mais determinante, nos anos 2000, com a produção de aviões comerciais da família EMBRAER 170/190, com a posterior pulverização de capitais, em 2006, e, por fim, mudança de razão social para fins de ampliação de áreas de atuação da empresa, em 2010. O contexto em que se dão tais mudanças é o de mundialização do capital e prevalência de acumulação fictícia de capital. Segundo nossos estudos, capital fictício e capital produtivo estão profundamente imbricados e cada reestruturação societária vem acompanha de nova reestruturação produtiva. A investigação também demonstrou que quanto mais o capital é pulverizado, mais se intensifica o uso da força de trabalho através de mudanças organizacionais, terceirizações, imposição de padrões de governança corporativa, reorganização do layout da empresa, mudança no perfil de contratação, internalização de padrões comportamentais toyotistas entre outros. Procura-se, ademais, apontar as diversas contradições que acompanham tais movimentos e impactam diretamente os trabalhadores da empresa, na perspectiva da relação entre particularidade da EMBRAER e totalidade social.

This article explores some aspects of money as a social relation. Starting from Polanyi, it explores the nature of money as a non-commodity, real commodity, quasi-commodity, and fictitious commodity. The development of credit-debt relations is important in the last respect, especially in market economies where money in the form of coins and banknotes plays a minor role. This argument is developed through some key concepts from Marx concerning money as a fetishised and contradictory social relation, especially his crucial distinction, absent from Polanyi, between money as money and money as capital, each with its own form of fetishism. Attention then turns to Minsky’s work on Ponzi finance and what one might describe as cycles of the expansion of easy credit and the scramble for hard cash. This analysis is re-contextualised in terms of financialisation and finance-dominated accumulation, which promote securitisation and the autonomisation of credit money, interest-bearing capital. The article ends with brief reflections on the role of easy credit and hard cash in the surprising survival of neo-liberal economic and political regimes since the North Atlantic Financial Crisis became evident.

CHAPTER ABSTRACTS

1. ‘Introduction: Cultures of Financialization’

Financialization refers not merely the increasing economic power and influence of the financial sector, but also to the political, social and cultural dimensions of the rise of speculative capital in an age of globalization. Haiven argues that approaches to finance that see it as purely an imaginary realm of speculation do an injustice to the ways that financialization both preys and relies on the everyday dimensions of debt, credit and abstract monetary flows, and the ways these are stitched into the world of meaning, representation, ideology and the imagination. Offering an overview of the book to come, Haiven outlines a case for understanding financialization as driven by social practices and cultural politics.

2. ‘The Reproduction of Fictitious Capital: The Social Fictions and Metaphoric Wealth of Financialization’

Haiven takes up Karl Marx’s description of financial wealth as ‘fictitious capital,’ suggesting that finance is a social fiction whose reproduction and power depends on and drives the proliferation of social fictions throughout financialized societies.  Haiven draws on research that argues for a more nuanced approach to the ‘cultural’ dimensions of financial speculation, as well as the effects of that speculation on ‘culture’ more broadly. He posits that, while financial assets may not be ‘real’ wealth, they play a central role in the reproduction of capitalism, and that they, in turn, transform the reproduction of social and cultural life.  While ‘fictitious capital’ may be an important category, Haiven also offers the concept of ‘metaphoric wealth’ as a means to describe the interconnected and volatile nature of speculative value.

3. ‘Precariousness: Two Spectres of the Financial Liquidation of Social Life’

The rise of precarious (part-time, casualized, temporary) labour in the era of globalization (c.1990-present) cannot be separated from the ‘financialization’ of economic, political, social and cultural life. Haiven takes up two contrasting examples.  On the one hand he points to the quintessential Wall Street trader as an iconic of the hollow ideal of success in a volatile world without guarantees, one who enthusiastically and ambitiously courts ‘risk’. This figure is contrasted to the abject ‘sub-prime’ borrower, seen as the victim and/or the cause of the 2008 financial meltdown, a subject not only rendered ‘at-risk’ by financialized neoliberalism, but whose risk itself becomes exploited as a target of speculated. Haiven argues that precariousness may be a common ground for solidarity and possibility beyond financialization.

4. ‘Securitization: Walmart’s Financialized Empire’

Walmart is the world’s largest private employer and retailer, but it is also at the cutting edge of merging financial techniques, corporate strategy, global trade and commercial culture into a devastatingly effective economic, social, political and cultural machine.  Haiven argues that Walmart is a leader in mobilizing two interconnected forms of ‘securitization’: on the one hand the reimagining of everything from labour relations to marketing to supply chains as a form of ‘risk management’, on the other, the increasing mobilization of surveillance, security, military tactics and a culture of fear. Confronting Walmart’s power, Haiven suggests, requires acknowledging the way the firm addresses its legions of shoppers as astute financialized actors, and also reclaiming and transforming the meaning of ‘security’ itself.

5. ‘Play: Coming of Age in the Speculative Pokéconomy’

Traces of financialization—the intertwined economic, political social and cultural resonances of financial capitalism—can be found in children’s play. This demonstrates both the saturation of society with the ethos of speculative accumulation and the dependence of financialization on that saturation.  Examining the case of children’s play with Pokémon cards (a globally popular collectable card game) Haiven argues that children use these artifacts to gain the skills, competencies and forms of subjectivity germane to a financialized society. He posits that Pokémon card play and trading allows children to develop skills in navigating a world of rapidly shifting, relational values, all within and as part of a broader paradigm of capitalist financialization.

6. ‘Creativity: Parables of the Financialized Imagination’

The growth in the popularity and salience of the discourse of creativity over the past forty years (and especially the past fifteen) cannot be separated from the rise of financialization and the power of speculative capital.  Ideas of ‘creative capitalism’, ‘creative destruction,’ the ‘creative class’, ‘creative cities,’ and the economic potential of creativity are, Haiven argues, germane to an era dominated by financial speculation and the globalization of financial markets. Tracing this intertwined history through a variety of case studies, Haiven suggests that creativity’s euphemistic wooliness is its greatest asset in both explaining and enabling the sorts of neoliberal transformations of institutions and subjects that are part of financialization, from speculative urban property markets to a new breed corporate philanthropy, from the growth of precarious labour to the self-image of financiers.

7. ‘Resistance (and its Discontents): Finance, Regulation, and Cultural Politics’

With the financialization of the global economy, and the attendant rise in global volatility, debt, economic precarity and inequality, many have sought to imagine forms of resistance to and regulation of finance capital’s power. In response, Haiven makes three provocative arguments.  First, he suggests that finance already relies on resistance, depending on the state and on popular resistance to regulate its otherwise renegade and reckless power. Second, he argues that we might do well to imagine the growth of debt (both that of  individuals and of political entities) as a problematic form of resistance to the austere conditions of neoliberalism, an ironic reclamation of wealth.  Finally, Haiven offers that resistance is already factored in to the financial sector’s operations, and as such a different vision of agency and change is required.

‘Conclusions: The Dialectics of Financialized Culture’

Haiven argues that finance capital, while a massive and destructive force in economic, social, political and cultural life, also possesses the seeds of its own negation and its replacement. He notes the importance of reclaiming concepts like ‘security’, ‘debt’, ‘creativity’, ‘speculation’ and ‘play’ from financialization.  He also argues that, in an age where the global economy is predicated on the reproduction of financialization at the level of culture and everyday life, the work of creating new meanings, relationships, subjects and forms of material and cultural power are more important than ever.  Calling for a more militant tenor to the study of financialization, Haiven warns of speculative capital’s capacity to incorporate and digest critique and asks ‘what would a cultural politics look like that took seriously the desires that feed financialization?’

Marx’s theory of rent as presented in the Third Volume of Capital has been a well researched area in the history of political economy but not many of these studies discuss the theory with respect to the exposition of the labour theory of value and primitive accumulation in the First Volume. In this backdrop, the chapter will attempt to retrace the trajectory of the theory of rent in Marx’s exposition of capitalism by focusing on the status
of land as a ‘commodity without value’ (not produced by labour) within this framework. The chapter will explore three broad themes that are interconnected: (a) the methodological innovation in the deployment of ‘rent’ within a value-based interpretation of the capitalist mode of production; (b) the productive ambiguity in positing the distinction between rent and interest in a capitalist society, especially in terms of return on
‘fictitious capital’; and (c) the significance of the theory of rent in the contemporary context of valorisation of land and infrastructure. The primary objective of this chapter will be to think through the highly textured theorisation of rent in Capital to see how it may help us map the contours of capitalism today, driven by the conjunctive momentum of finance capital and infrastructure.

O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar a contribuição feita por um grupo de autores do Departamento de Economia da Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo, doravante denominados Escola de Vitória, para compreender a realidade contemporânea do capitalismo. Essa contribuição reside em uma releitura particular da obra de Marx e na avaliação do capitalimo recente. Da leitura de Marx extraiu-se uma compreensão anti-ricardiana da teoria do valor, a avaliação do capital fictício e do ciclos de reprodução das formas funcionais do capital industrial. Da análise do capitalismo recente surgiu a necessidade de compreender o maior peso dado ao capital fictício como forma social e isso se deu a partir da cunhagem de três novas categorias: capital especulativo, capital especulativo parasitário e lucros fictícios. Este artigo busca expor esse processo analítico.

One of Polanyi’s most important contributions to critical social science was his insistence that land, labour, and money were fictitious commodities and that the liberal propensity to treat them as if they were real commodities was a major source of contradictions and crisis-tendencies in capitalist development – so great that society would eventually fight back against the environmentally and socially destructive effects of such treatment. Polanyi wrote during the epoch of industrial and financial capitalism when land, labour, and capital were considered as the primary ‘factors of production’. Contemporary capitalism is widely seen as a knowledge-based economy (or KBE), however, on the grounds that knowledge has become the most important factor of production and the key to economic competitiveness. This raises interesting questions as to whether knowledge is also a fictitious commodity, whether it has been disembedded from wider social relations and whether its disembedding and fictitious commodification also entail a ‘double movement’. This chapter explores these questions and deploys the answers to interrogate Polanyi’s analysis of the other fictitious commodities.

This paper deals with the current financial crisis from a Post-Keynesian and Marxist perspective. The more objective character of Marx‟s crises conception is compared with the more subjective origin of crises in Keynesian‟s ideas. This analysis is used to conduct a revision of critical literature about the antecedents of the current crisis, verifying its teachings. The central relationship between capitalist logic, credit and fictitious capital is emphasized, and also the relation with neoliberalism.
KEY-WORDS: Credit, Fictitious Capital, Financial Crises,

RESUMO Esse trabalho objetiva dissertar sobre a relação entre Estado e capital fictício no Brasil, realizando uma recapitulação histórica da financeirização do capital, processo em que Estado e capital fictício estiveram envolvidos organicamente, e identificando os impactos sobre a América Latina, em geral, e sobre o Brasil, em particular, em que se parte de um exame da dívida pública enquanto forma concreta do capital fictício. Ademais, apoiado numa sumária investigação da conjuntura brasileira recente, realiza-se uma análise do Novo Regime Fiscal desde o prisma da relação Estado-capital fictício.

The Financialization Hypothesis is a popular argument in contemporary heterodox and also mainstream economics. It maintains that capitalism has undergone a radical transformation over at least the past three decades. The financial system, through a series of innovative mechanisms, has conquered the commanding heights of capitalism and has changed the whole system according to its own prerogatives. Concomitantly, the global capitalist crisis of 2008 is considered to have been a financialization crisis. This article disputes the Financialization Hypothesis and argues that instead of casting light on the actual workings of modern capitalism, it misconstrues them and leads into an explanatory blind alley. The spectacular ballooning of the financial system during the recent decades of weak profitability and accumulation does not constitute a new epoch, let alone a new capitalism. Instead, it represents a familiar capitalist response to periods of weak profitability. This does not preclude the proliferation of new financial instruments, which lend specific new forms to a well-known capitalist process. The Marxist theory of crisis and fictitious capital offers an analytically and empirically superior understanding of this process.

O objetivo deste ensaio é compartilhar alguns resultados parciais da minha pesquisa no tocante à problematização teórica da relação entre Estado, ideologia e luta de classes no capitalismo contemporâneo. A ênfase da minha investigação está no trabalhador enquanto sujeito de classe determinado pela contradição estabelecida entre, de um lado, o conteúdo objetivo das relações sociais e como este adquire poder político no Estado, e de outro, os processos ideológicos de subjetivação enquanto forma de os indivíduos vivenciarem politicamente este conteúdo por meio da experiência em sociedade, sob a trama política da luta de classes. Neste caso, abordo a questão da luta de classes a partir da perspectiva do sujeito enquanto ser social no contexto da racionalidade neoliberal sob a dominação do capital fictício (fiktives Kapital) , recorte que denomino por capitalismo contemporâneo.

Este artigo consiste em uma leitura imanente de parte do livro terceiro d'O Capital, no que diz respeito especificamente ao conceito de capital fictício (fiktives Kapital) e como este se constitui a partir do sistema financeiro de crédito e daquilo que Marx denominou de negócios fictícios (Scheingeschäften). Apresenta o conceito de virtualidade real para tentar contribuir na compreensão do processo global de produção capitalista, e seu movimento fetichista estabelecido como uma contradição entre conteúdo e forma na constituição das relações sociais sob a forma do valor (Wertform) autonomizada. Relaciona a leitura imanente do livro terceiro com outros textos marxianos e, de maneira sincrônica, problematiza como ficam as formulações de Marx no que tange à contemporaneidade da era digital, com o propósito de demonstrar a atualidade da crítica marxiana diante do tempo presente.

This paper starts by asking the question: is the magnitude of the current economic crisis due to COVID-19 alone, or did the pandemic compound an underlying crisis? We use Kontratieff cycles (K-cycles) to study quarantine-related economic losses in context. Capital accumulation is global in its essence, but takes the form of national processes, so for this study we focus on the United States of America. We took the GDP of the US and estimated the implicit price deflator measured in gold prices from 1790 to 2020. For the GDP, we used an exponential adjustment to get a time series without trends. Five K-cycles can be identified in the period, the last of which reached its low point in the 1980s, before rebounding to a peak in 2002. This was followed by a period of contraction that is ongoing at the time of writing. Where are we in the K-cycle? It appeared to have bottomed out in 2012, but stagnation continued, with rises and falls from 2015 onwards, exacerbated by the pandemic. We argue that a new period of economic growth will only arrive with increased labour productivity through the introduction of new technologies, such as robotization and A.I., to the labour process. Despite general hope for a quick economic recovery after most of the world’s population has been vaccinated, recovery from this crisis might take much longer than expected, either because the bottom of the cycle has not been reached yet, or because there will be a period of stagnation or very slow growth.

En los últimos años, un grupo de autores marxistas ha destacado en sus investigaciones el enorme peso de las finanzas sobre la economía utilizando la noción de financiarización, sin embargo, dentro del seno mismo de esta tradición no se ha llegado a un consenso claro sobre cuál debería ser la definición universal de esta palabra. El presente trabajo tiene como objetivo analizar la financiarización desde una perspectiva marxista, identificando las controversias teóricas que están presentes en las discusiones en torno al marxismo contemporáneo, desde el diálogo entre autores localizados en diferentes latitudes, hasta los debates más personales entre autores que conviven como compañeros de trabajo en la misma institución. Así, frente a este mar de interpretaciones marxianas, buscamos rescatar los elementos clave que podrían dar pauta a la construcción de una teoría marxista de la financiarización. Primero, se analizan diferentes perspectivas sobre el concepto financiarización que han sido propuestas por autores que se identifican a sí mismos como marxistas y después, se aborda la discusión teórica inspirada en el marxismo clásico sobre las categorías capital que devenga interés y capital ficticio.

The following paper aims at dealing with the presence of transnational rural real estate companies in the region known as MATOPIBA. From the methodological movement of the critique of concrete totality (SCHOLZ, 2016), we here observe the possibility of such transnational companies invest in land as an autonomous financial asset, moving the increase of its price in a speculative way. This seems to occur as a process of crisis of the capitalistic accumulation, which characterizes itself by the expulsion of labor from the productive process mainly from the 1970s on. After the 2001-2008 commodities price peak in the international markets and after the reversion of this cicle, we can observe the “detachment” between commodities’ prices and land prices.  Real Estate speculative investments reached the MATOPIBA region in the 21st. century, turning it into a privileged place for transnational investments, especially after the 2008 crisis. The low costs of illegal land appropriation and of farms formation and the rapid land prices increase in recent years fed back such increase and fostered recent transnational demand for those sorts of investment, allowing the prices to keep increasing independently in relation to commodities prices in the international markets.

O presente artigo visa dissertar sobre a presença recente de transnacionais imobiliárias agrícolas na região conhecida por MATOPIBA. A partir do movimento metodológico de crítica da totalidade concreta (SCHOLZ, 2016), observa-se a possibilidade de tais transnacionais investirem na terra como ativo financeiro à parte, ao moverem a subida de seu preço de forma especulativa. Isso ocorre como processo de crise da acumulação capitalista, que se caracteriza pela expulsão do trabalho do processo produtivo, a partir da década de 1970. Após o ciclo de alta dos preços das commodities nos mercados internacionais, de 2001 a 2008, e da reversão deste ciclo, nota-se o “descolamento” entre os preços das commodities e os da terra. Os investimentos na especulação financeira em terra atingem o MATOPIBA, no século XXI, locus de investimento privilegiado de diversas transnacionais, especialmente após a crise capitalista de 2008. O baixo custo para grilagem de terras e formação das fazendas e a rápida s...

The following paper aims at dealing with the presence of transnational rural real estate companies in the region known as MATOPIBA. From the methodological movement of the critique of concrete totality (SCHOLZ, 2016), we here observe the possibility of such transnational companies invest in land as an autonomous financial asset, moving the increase of its price in a speculative way. This seems to occur as a process of crisis of the capitalistic accumulation, which characterizes itself by the expulsion of labor from the productive process mainly from the 1970s on. After the 2001-2008 commodities price peak in the international markets and after the reversion of this cicle, we can observe the “detachment” between commodities’ prices and land prices. Real Estate speculative investments reached the MATOPIBA region in the 21st. century, turning it into a privileged place for transnational investments, especially after the 2008 crisis. The low costs of illegal land appropriation and of fa...

A incorporação da Renda da Terra ao capital urbano industrial é aqui vista como uma necessidade de acumulação que
expressa a insuficiência do lucro urbano industrial na reprodução das relações sociais de produção. Assim, ao contrário de
seu aparecer, a expansão agro-industrial, ao compor o sobrelucro a sua acumulação, é fundamentada pela crise da
reprodução e não por uma acumulação ascendente. A expansão extensiva e intensiva é uma necessidade precária de
resolver contradições da acumulação posta no e pelo desenvolvimento das forças produtivas no campo, tornando a própria
Renda da Terra uma insuficiência da reposição dos pressupostos do capital, sendo a extensão da agroindústria leiteira uma
determinação do capital financeiro, mais do que da produção de valor, revelando-se, tal expansão agro-industrial, um
fenômeno do capital fictício. O caso estudado é a Cooperativa Itambé, no Estado de Minas Gerais, Brasil.
Palavras-Chave: Modernização, Agroindústria, Relação Campo-Cidade, Capital Fictício, Tempo e Espaço.

Resumo/Abstract
A incorporação da Renda da Terra ao capital urbano industrial é aqui vista como uma necessidade de acumulação que
expressa a insuficiência do lucro urbano industrial na reprodução das relações sociais de produção. Assim, ao contrário de
seu aparecer, a expansão agro-industrial, ao compor o sobrelucro a sua acumulação, é fundamentada pela crise da
reprodução e não por uma acumulação ascendente. A expansão extensiva e intensiva é uma necessidade precária de
resolver contradições da acumulação posta no e pelo desenvolvimento das forças produtivas no campo, tornando a própria
Renda da Terra uma insuficiência da reposição dos pressupostos do capital, sendo a extensão da agroindústria leiteira uma
determinação do capital financeiro, mais do que da produção de valor, revelando-se, tal expansão agro-industrial, um
fenômeno do capital fictício. O caso estudado é a Cooperativa Itambé, no Estado de Minas Gerais, Brasil.
Palavras-Chave: Modernização, Agroindústria, Relação Campo-Cidade, Capital Fictício, Tempo e Espaço.
Abstract
In this paper the incorporation of Soil Rent to the urban industrial capital is seen as a necessity of accumulation that
expresses the insufficiency of the urban industrial profit for the reproduction of the social relations of production. As that,
contrary of its appearance, the agro-industrial expansion, incorporating the over profit to its accumulation, is fundamented
by the crises of the reproduction and not by an ascendant accumulation. The extensive and intensive expansion is a
precarious necessity to solve contradictions of the accumulation put in and by the development of productive forces in the
countryside, becoming the very Soil Rent an insufficient reposition of the capital presuppositions. So that, the extension of
the milking agro-industry is an determination rather of the finance capital than of the value production, what reveals the
agro-industrial expansion as a phenomenon of the fictitious capital. The matter in case is Itambé Corporation, in State of
Minas Gerais, Brazil.
Key-Words: Modernisation, Agro-industry, Rural-Urban Relation, Fictitious Capital, Time and Space.

O presente artigo visa dissertar sobre a presença recente de transnacionais imobiliárias agrícolas na região conhecida por MATOPIBA. A partir do movimento metodológico de crítica da totalidade concreta (SCHOLZ, 2016), observa-se a possibilidade de tais transnacionais investirem na terra como ativo financeiro à parte, ao moverem a subida de seu preço de forma especulativa. Isso ocorre como processo de crise da acumulação capitalista, que se caracteriza pela expulsão do trabalho do processo produtivo, a partir da década de 1970. Após o ciclo de alta dos preços das commodities nos mercados internacionais, de 2001 a 2008, e da reversão deste ciclo, nota-se o “descolamento” entre os preços das commodities e os da terra. Os investimentos na especulação financeira em terra atingem o MATOPIBA, no século XXI, locus de investimento privilegiado de diversas transnacionais, especialmente após a crise capitalista de 2008. O baixo custo para grilagem de terras e formação das fazendas e a rápida s...

Resumo O artigo delineia um entendimento sobre a fronteira agrícola que a pensa como historicamente constituída e passível de ter seus conteúdos modificados pelas transformações mais gerais da sociedade. Para tanto, retoma compreensões da Geografia tradicional e da Geografia crítica acerca da frente pioneira. Posteriormente, lidamos com as particularidades da formação nacional, chamando a atenção para a importância da universidade e da ciência no processo e na caracterização diferenciada da colonização em cada momento histórico. Por fim, adentramos a particularidade do MATOPIBA, trazendo três exemplos de formas de produção do espaço que podem revelar transformações mais gerais da maneira de se relacionar socialmente com a fronteira agrícola. Pesquisas recentes na região do MATOPIBA, tida como a última fronteira agrícola no Brasil, mostram um desmatamento da vegetação nativa já realizado por meio de maquinário moderno e uma alta incidência de trabalho análogo à escravidão. Ademais, a ação recente de imobiliárias transnacionais sugerem a presença de um capital financeiro antes avesso à imobilização em terras. O que poderia parecer como busca desses capitais pela extração direta de mais-valia absoluta e relativa em novas paragens pode todavia ser entendido igualmente como inversão de capitais fictícios sobreacumulados em busca de dar aparência de solidez a seus portfólios ou carteiras de "produtos". Palavras-chave: Territorialização do capital; land grabbing; MATOPIBA, capital fictício; crítica do valor The "pioneers" of MATOPIBA, Brazil: the race for lands and for thesis over the agricultural frontier Abstract This paper grasps an understanding of the agricultural frontier which thinks of it as historically constituted and able to have its contents modified by the overall changes in society. Thus, it returns to formulations over the pioneer front made by the traditional Geography and by the critical Geography. Afterwards, we deal with the particularities of the Brazilian national formation, calling attention to the importance of the university and of science in the process and in the characterization of colonization in each historical moment. Finally, we focus the MATOPIBA region, in North and Northeast Brazil, bringing three different examples of space production forms that can reveal overall changes in the way to socially relate with the agricultural frontier. Recent researches in the MATOPIBA region, took as the final agricultural

The ups and downs of silk, cotton, and stocks syncopated with serialized novels in the late nineteenth-century Arabic press: Time itself was changing. Khalīl al-Khūrī, Salīm al-Bustānī, Yūsuf al-Shalfūn, Jurjī Zaydān and Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf wrote novels of debt, dissimulation, and risk—increasingly legible at a moment when French and British empires were unseating the Ottoman legacy in Beirut, Cairo and beyond. As silk dominated Beirut's markets and the hopes of its reading public, Cairo speculated in cotton shares, real estate and the stock market, which crashed in 1907. At the turn of the twentieth century, serialized Arabic fiction and finance at once tell the other's story.

Financial speculation engendered a habit of looking to the future with hope and fear, an anxious disposition formally expressed in the mingling of financial news and serialized novels in such Arabic journals as Al-Jinān, Al-Muqtaṭaf, and Al-Hilāl. Gardens appear and reappear in these novels, citations of a botanical dream of the Arabic press that for a moment tried to manage the endless sense of uncertainty on which capital preys. Attuned to the economic and cultural anxiety animating this archive, Fictitious Capital recasts the historiography of the Nahdah and its oft-celebrated sense of rise and renaissance. Reading Nahḍah as Walter Benjamin might have, as “one of the monuments of the bourgeoisie that is already in ruins," Fictitious Capital shows instead how this utopian, imperially mediated narrative of capital encrypted its inevitable counterpart, capital flight.

https://www.scribd.com/book/346659173/Fictitious-Capital-Silk-Cotton-and-the-Rise-of-the-Arabic-Novel

https://books.google.com/books?id=GDsoDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=elizabeth+holt+fictitious+capital&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwifnfGiutPYAhVCYt8KHcKwA7MQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=elizabeth%20holt%20fictitious%20capital&f=false

https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823276035/fictitious-capital/

This paper focuses on the ideological transformation of
modernistic aesthetic fetishism into what Professor Rastko
Močnik has termed “aesthetic imperialism” in contemporary
art. Our hypothesis is that this transformation is an effect
of the overdetermination of artistic production to fictitious
capital. In order to examine this hypothesis, we shall explore
the transformation of the simple, modernist work of art into
the twofold, contemporary work of art (which must first
be a claim to aesthetic evaluation and only then a work of
art). We do not suggest that modernism did not know the
term “artwork,” as applying to those art products that were
not recognized as works of art, but rather that there was a
change in the very process of aesthetic evaluation. We believe
that, unlike the unitary modernist recognition of products as
works by the institution of art, there is twofold recognition
in the contemporary age. Here the claim to aesthetic evaluation is allowed to every product but confirmed only to those
that successfully reproduce the ruling “aesthetic imperialism.” Even though the ideologists of contemporary art present
this change as a result of progressivism that is inherent to
the institution of art, we would like to argue that it is an
effect of the abovementioned overdetermination of artistic
production by fictitious capital, that is, its effects in aesthetic
and legal fetishism. This hypothesis will be examined in two
relatively autonomous instances: economic and ideological
(artistic).

U ovom radu bavimo se ideološkom transformacijom modernističkog estetskog fetišizma u ono što je profesor Rastko
Močnik nazvao „estetskim imperijalizmom” savremene
umetnosti. Naša teza je da je ova transformacija efekat nadodređenja umetničke proizvodnje fiktivnim kapitalom. Kako
bismo ispitali ovu tezu, pozabavićemo se modifikacijom jednostavnog modernističkog umetničkog dela u dvodelno savremeno umetničko delo (koje prvo mora biti pretenzija na
estetsko vrednovanje pa tek potom delo). Ne tvrdimo da
modernizam nije poznavao kovanicu „umetnički rad” (eng.
artwork) za one umetničke proizvode koji nisu priznati kao
umetnička dela (eng. work of art), već da je došlo do promene samog procesa estetske valorizacije. Smatramo da, za
razliku od modernističkog jedinstvenog priznanja proizvoda kao dela od strane institucije umetnosti, dolazi do savremenog dvodelnog priznanja. U njoj se pretenzija na estetsko vrednovanje priznaje svakom proizvodu, ali se potvrđuje
samo onima koji uspešno reprodukuju „estetski imperijalizam”. Iako se među ideolozima savremene umetnosti ova
promena predstavlja kao rezultat progresivizma inherentnog
instituciji umetnosti, mi tvrdimo da je reč o efektu pomenutog nadodređenja umetničke proizvodnje fiktivnim kapitalom, odnosno njegovim učincima u estetskom i pravnom
fetišizmu. Ovu tezu ispitujemo u dve, relativno autonomne,
instance ekonomskog i ideološkog (umetničkog).

The commoditization of money is often viewed as a precursor to the current state of economics; this is especially true for the U.S. where financial markets, as of the recent decades, became increasing prominent in the sphere of circulation (of capital) and production. Money is inherently complex; however, to simply define it by its function, as a standard unit of exchange, limits its role in modern capitalist society. This paper seeks to investigate the function of money within financial markets and within the greater capitalist society. We will draw upon Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism to better understand the current characteristics of the US financial market and apparent necessity of debit and credit. Though money is fictitious, its influence of the social relations between men is anything but; as such, we will explore its role as both “the product and yet the non-product of man,” why financial markets can be viewed as the epitome of fetishism, and finally explore how fetishism within financial markets create the necessary conditions for the expansion of social inequality by providing an account of the 2008 financial crisis and bailout.

This article explores some aspects of money as a social relation. Starting from Polanyi, it explores the nature of money as a non-commodity, real commodity, quasi-commodity, and fictitious commodity. The development of credit-debt relations is important in the last respect, especially in market economies where money in the form of coins and banknotes plays a minor role. This argument is developed through some key concepts from Marx concerning money as a fetishised and contradictory social relation, especially his crucial distinction, absent from Polanyi, between money as money and money as capital, each with its own form of fetishism. Attention then turns to Minsky’s work on Ponzi finance and what one might describe as cycles of the expansion of easy credit and the scramble for hard cash. This analysis is re-contextualised in terms of financialisation and finance-dominated accumulation, which promote securitisation and the autonomisation of credit money, interest-bearing capital. Th...

Resumo: A desigualdade social no Brasil se caracteriza por ser estrutural, a qual não é somente desigualdade de classe, ela é também de raça e de sexo. Em uma perspectiva de consubstancialidade entre classe, raça e sexo, temos por objetivo, neste artigo, analisar os fundamentos sócio históricos da PEC 55, proposta pelo Governo Temer (2016-), e como, se implementada, poderá afetar, de forma ainda mais contundente do que já ocorre, as mulheres da classe trabalhadora brasileira. As raízes dessa proposta estão assentadas em um movimento internacional de financeirização da economia e suas expressões na forma de capital fictício. No caso específico da PEC 55, a forma concreta central da expressão dessa relação financeirizada é a dívida pública. O congelamento de gastos em despesas primárias, que envolvem saúde, educação e assistência social, em resposta às necessidades de pagamento dos juros da dívida, têm impactos imediatos sobre o cotidiano das mulheres trabalhadoras, ao mesmo tempo em que alimenta a sanha especulativa da classe dominante. No artigo, aborda-se sobre o contexto de mundialização do capital e a sua expressão na política econômica nacional; o que seja a PEC 55 como resposta e necessidade desse movimento capitalista; e, por fim, apresenta possíveis impactos sobre as mulheres trabalhadoras brasileiras nos próximos 20 anos de congelamento previstos pela emenda. Palavras-chave: PEC 55. Capital fictício. Mulheres. Classe trabalhadora.