Abstract
The Matter of Fictitious Capital
Though Karl Marx stands an irrefutable and even obligatory
touchstone in most trajectories of materialism, his historical materialist
analysis of capital proceeds by way of a number of formulations that subsequent
Marxists would, and do, critique as idealist: conceiving labor as a differential
substance that “is more than it has” and that marks the human’s distinction from
animals (or, at least, from “bees” as the example goes) by virtue of its
ineluctably ideational aspect; conceiving capital as “illusory, but (with) its own
laws of motion for all that”; conceiving value as “in reality impossible”; and
conceiving capitalism as a mode of production that is simultaneously a
metaphysical system. As our present financial crisis has prompted various returns
to Marx, particularly to his theory of fictitious capital, this entwining of the
material and the ideal once again demands critical attention. This paper focuses
on a few signal moments when thinking capitalism requires a materialism merged
with its other – moments when it is a necessity, rather than a weakness, for
Marxian materialism to have been something more multifaceted than we epigones
generally avow.