Fictitious Capital, Fictitious Profits, and Their Extreme Fetishism

Abstract The purpose of this chapter is to characterize fictitious capital and fictitious profits as extreme expressions of the fetishism of capital. Considering the incessant search for valorization and allowing for fictitious forms of capital, the subject of this study is at the center of the dynamics of recent capitalist accumulation, especially when we take into account the capitalist crises over the last four or five decades. Its mechanism of fictitious valorization (M – M′), a decisive dimension of contemporary capitalism, is contradictory, based on the growing obstacles to the extraction of surplus value on an expanded scale, and therefore the real valorization of capital. At the same time, we support the idea that this mass of overaccumulated capital produces profits unrelated to surplus value, that is fictitious profits, further intensifying the fetishistic and contradictory nature of capitalism.