A museum of great news: fictitious capital, public fund and the political economy of the catastrophe

Abstract

This article affirms the urgency of overcoming the common sense that interprets new phenomena from anachronistic analyzes. Marx's notion of fictitious capital is recovered and its predominant role in the current dynamics of capital accumulation is affirmed. Through the fictionalization of wealth, potential future wealth is anticipated as current wealth. This produces a new relationship of the present with the future. The catastrophic effects that this logic will produce in the future end up internalizing as the basis of the production of wealth itself. From this, the idea of a political economy of catastrophe is formulated. Considering the participation of the fictionalization of wealth in the formation of the public fund, we question the frequent understanding that interprets the public fund as exclusively formed by surplus value previously produced and appropriated by the State. Finally, some considerations about the horizon of social struggles are drawn from an understanding of these profound new developments that capitalism is currently presenting, which is here freely considered a museum, that tries at the same time to maintain a fixed and increasingly anachronistic form.