As food and fuel run out, Gaza’s doctors appeal to the world to end the ‘genocide of children,’ reports LINDA PENTZ GUNTER
What is ‘fictitious capital’?
Today stocks, shares and other securities are completely divorced from actual products. What started as a promise to repay loans has become entirely spurious, explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

“FAIRY gold” in kids’ fables is magic money — a fortune that soon crumbles to be revealed as leaves, dust or worthless rubbish. More colloquially, it is precarious or illusory wealth that may vanish as swiftly as it is acquired. That was certainly the case with some speculators following the global banking crisis of 2007–2008.
The real victims, of course, were ordinary working-class families who lost their savings, their homes, their jobs and, sometimes, their lives as a consequence.
The crisis wasn’t some kind of aberration. Marx pointed out that while crises are endemic to capitalism, those involving what he called “fictitious capital,” a subset of financial capital, were central.
More from this author

Most currently popular arguments for degrowth describe a real problem without recognising its true cause – capitalism’s insatiable need to accumulate, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

Most phenomena have an explanation, writes the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY, but occasionally ‘anomalous’ events have led to new scientific understanding

The fight to defend public services is as important as the struggle over wages, but presents different challenges to workplace organising — especially with regards to bourgeois propaganda and conditioning, writes the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

Marx and Engels’ concern with soil provides a focus for understanding the relationship between capitalism and the environment, argues the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY
Similar stories

Labour’s fiscal policy is already in trouble. But simply printing money is not a solution, says the Marx Memorial Library and Workers School

Far from being a revolutionary force levelling the financial playing field, cryptocurrency markets are rigged in favour of wealth accumulation by the wealthy, argues MYLES TRAPPERBY

The ‘degrowth’ debate raises critical issues to which only a Marxist approach can provide answers, argues the Marx Memorial Library

The fight to defend public services is as important as the struggle over wages, but presents different challenges to workplace organising — especially with regards to bourgeois propaganda and conditioning, writes the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY