Exploring a gap between fictitious capital and real capital

*This is a response to Salvador Medina-Ramírez recent essay in Sublation, “The Conspiracy Fantasy and its Capitalist Basis,” July 22, 2023*

In his latest piece for Sublation, Salvador Medina-Ramírez offers an excellent overview of Marx’s and Marxist literature on the role that economic conditions play in the formation and fomentation of conspiratorial or fantastical thinking, a kind of thinking most outrageously represented by the idea that lizard people control the world as a shadow government (Reptilian conspiracy theory), and more modestly represented by the belief that capitalism (or for that matter, patriarchy, white supremacy, etc.) succeeds particularly because of ontologically evil elites keen on controlling society from above.

Medina-Ramírez shows how this is a phony idea, and that capitalism itself – as the natural AND ideal mode of production – is the conspiracy:

…[I]ndividual capitalists and national governments are not free either; they are forced to act in this way to maintain the accumulation of capital. The coercive laws of capitalism force them to do so, as Marx pointed out. Capitalists cannot give up competition and remain capitalists. Likewise, governments, as part of this structure, are compelled to maintain the stability of the system, and capitalists are compelled to take all measures to generate a new wave of accumulation in the face of any economic crisis.

Here’s the problem, though. Medina-Ramírez situated this insight as a critique to what he believes to be left-wing conspiracy theorists who unwittingly forget it. I’m not against the idea that those theorists exist, but the singular example he offers is that of the Italian Marxist Fabio Vighi’s work. I’ve done enough reading of Vighi in the past two years that it hit me as very odd to suggest that he makes the assertion that the Covid-19 crisis was constructed to justify the government injection of trillions of dollars into the unstable financial and real economy without also making clear that they were forced to act this way to maintain the accumulation of capital. In other words, Vighi is quite clear that while “the manipulation of financial markets translates directly as the manipulation of reality,” the nefariousness, greediness or thirst for power of individual actors and governments are not the problem to be solved, but rather, that it’s the very logics of capitalism that are causing such extreme measures like the artificial pumping of money into the financial system (or, as we’re seeing now with interest rate hikes, the draining of money from the system, which has caused stress not just on banks but on low-wage workers who now have to pay higher rates for credit/loans and on businesses whose increasing borrowing costs require them to cut both production and labor costs), as well as the conspiratorial, scapegoat thinking across the political spectrum.

For instance, in his most recent piece for Philosophical Salon that essentially summarizes his analyses of the past few years, Vighi has this to say:

[T]he credit-doped economy that has no way of re-igniting a labour-intensive cycle of growth thrives on calculated crises and selective defaults, which must be ascribed to external rather than systemic factors. The debt-soaked system piling on risk needs a steady flow not only of liquidity (credit) but also scapegoats and alibis – from “pandemic emergency” to “regional bank failure”…

[W]hat matters is the historical process that has led to our grotesque dependence on credit creation. The qualitative leap in the function of credit within the capitalist mode of production can be traced back to the early twentieth century, when additional liquidity began to supplement the mass of value produced through investment in wage labour. This recourse to exogenous credit soon morphed from a sporadic phenomenon to the condition of possibility of real production itself.

…

The historical growth of credit is an inevitable consequence of the development of the capitalist mode of production. As profits from individual capitals are no longer sufficient to cover increasing investment in what Marx called ‘constant capital’ (e.g., machines and raw materials), credit injections become endemic…At this point, a mechanism is established that redefines the internal logic of the mode of production, while leaving its purpose intact: in order to gain new market shares, capitals need to accept the external constraint of credit, which gradually subjugates workers not only in terms of labour exploitation, but also via the financial speculations on which such capacity for exploitation comes to depend. And as capital begins to struggle to reproduce itself through profit investments, the dependence on credit turns into a chronic addiction.

And he also had this to say in a March 2022 podcast, specifically challenging the idea of immoral people being responsible for capitalism in dysfunction:

My issue is not just that there’s some bad people who do some very bad things in the financial sector. Yes, there are. The Fed, BlackRock, they’re all bad people in many ways. But, the system is kind of grinding to a halt by itself, because its increasingly unable to produce wealth through its original recipe, money that creates money through labor… This is something that we should never forget. Its not just bad guys vs. good guys. In a sense, we’re all driven by the same values. No matter how good we are, ultimately there is that desire or drive that is linked, connected, with the systemic drive. And the systemic drive is not about the distribution of wealth. Fundamentally, its about the creation of more money…Capitalism is a blind, anonymous drive.

While this may all seem like just a minor point of difference to readers of Medina-Ramírez’ recent piece, I find it important to respond in a way that more accurately represents Vighi’s point of view. But regardless of Vighi’s own accuracies, particularly regarding the claim that Covid was a constructed emergency for capital accumulation ends, I’ve noted in a prior piece for Sublation that:

In Vighi’s case, we can appreciate three insights: (1) Pointing out the way in which the present crisis of accumulation arises from a gap between fictitious capital and real capital, or in other words, the gap between speculative value and real value that arises due to contradictions that led to the ongoing difficulty for large commodity-based capitalists to extract the sufficient amount of surplus value from human labor, surplus value that is necessary in order to re-invest and stay competitive, unless you take on credit/debt. (2) Pointing out the credit system’s status in 2019 and detailing how top banks, investment firms and think-tanks wrote white papers warning about a bubbling debt crisis that called for exceptional measures in economic and biopolitical management. (3) One does not have to assume that COVID has nefarious origins, or that it’s not a serious health threat, to accept that state/central banks worked, with advice from private bank consultants, to pump enormous sums of liquidity into private banks, businesses, and households, in order to help resolve not just the pandemic but the economic crisis which was emerging prior to it.

I think, or at least I hope, that Medina-Ramírez, Vighi, and I can all agree on that.