Search results
The starting-point for the book is its chapter on methodology. Found here are not only critiques of conventional Soviet Marxism-Leninism and post-modernism, but also a new rethinking of the classic dialectic. For the most part, however, the book focuses on revealing the new quality now assumed by commodities, money, and capital within the global economy. The market has become not only global, but a totalitarian force that is not a ‘socially neutral mechanism of coordination’. It is now a product of the hegemony of corporate capital, featuring the growth of new types of commodity: information, simulacra, and so forth. The book demonstrates the new qualities acquired by value, use value, price, and commodity fetishism within this new market, while exploring the contradictions of non-limited resources (such as knowledge) and the commodity form of their existence.
Money is now a virtual product of fictitious financial capital, possessing a new nature, contradictions, and functions. This analysis of the new nature of money helps to reveal the essence of so-called financialisation.
Capital has become the result of a complex system of exploitation. In the twenty-first-century context this exploitation includes the ‘classic’ extraction of surplus value from industrial workers combined with internal corporate redistribution of income by ‘insiders’; international exploitation; and the exploitation of creative labour through the expropriation of intellectual rent.
undermining of commodity production see Chapter 5 ); the transformation of the nature of money under the conditions of twenty-first-century capitalism, making it a product of virtual financial capital; new forms of exploitation; capitalist forms of the ‘knowledge economy’; the peculiarities of the modern capitalist cycle; the new role of financial capital; and changes in the role of the state. While these works no doubt have value in themselves and as contributions to the development of a Capital for our times, we are not aware of any works that
since the Great Depression and will continue to arise when virtual financial capital crosses a certain boundary of its expansion (over-accumulation). From the qualitative angle this boundary may be provisionally defined (this is no more than a hypothesis) as that degree of over-accumulation of virtual capital (a substitute for money) that no longer allows it to perform functions analogous to money in the modern market. The precondition for this is an excessive disconnection (again, the degree needs to be defined) of this capital from (1) real production, and (2