FICTIONAL CAPITAL: FROM 1000 EUROS MAKE 2000 EUROS

by Achim Szepanski

The purchase and sale of money capital, be it in the form of shares, securities or derivatives, is carried out on so-called money or capital markets. It is important, however, not to overstate the concept of the market as a concrete universal, but rather to describe this type of structural-social space as a distribution of distributions, as a variety of different mechanisms of distribution, some of which are in their pricing systems converge, but in other price movements they are completely discontinuous and different. We will always presuppose this when using the term "market". If the money capital is self-setting, at the latest then it must be traded in very specific distribution networks; this trade, in contrast to that of industry's standard commodities, would be understood as a process of capitalizing money itself, making it seemingly possible from the outset, the differential accumulation of that particular form of money-capital from the recovery processes in industrial production to a certain degree or disconnect completely.

If an owner of money capital lends a certain amount of money after making an assessment of the so-called risk that evaluates the debtor's ability or inability to pay, credit money arises just as the contract is concluded, and this money turns out to be a form of duplication capitalist wealth. In fact, over the event of the credit relation a sum of money (with the potential of more) has doubled for a given interval, because on the one hand the borrowed sum, when used by the borrower to expand production processes, can set in motion new capital metamorphoses, on the other hand the lender can also regard his money capital as future surplus production, since, as finally fixed in the credit agreement, he can expect the repayment of the agreed loan amount plus its interest on the money loaned. What the time-indexing law has here is the temporary separation of the capitalist potency inherent in money capital from property, by lending the power of self-augmentation of capital for a particular period (and, at best, by another, without the creditor suffering damage himself, on the contrary, he himself can achieve a surplus of interest), whereby the money capital, which can, but need not, be the fruit of industrially organized exploitation, into the time-indexed, real power of disposal, passes into the possession of the borrower. Both the credit relationship and the issuance of stocks or bonds are accompanied by a duplication of money capital, the implications of which, as Lohoff / Trenkle emphasize in their book The Great Devaluation, have mostly been hidden in the traditional Marxist discussion. (Lohoff / Trenkle 2012: 121ff.) The lent money not only turns into the hands of the debtor in capital, as far as he acts as an acting or industrial capitalist but also on the part of the creditor capital is created, because it receives or substantiated for the lending of the money a legally codified claim to retransfer of a higher sum borrowed money, and thus this lent sum has, at least for a certain period, namely until the liquidation of the loan agreement, a double existence. (Ibid .: 128ff.) Something very strange actually happens: Because of the pure existence of the loan itself, the initial capital gains a double existence, because it is on the one hand in the real disposal of the borrower, but at the same time holds the lender a very special reflection of his Starting capital in his hands, fictional capital. Marx writes: "With the development of interest-bearing capital and the credit system, all capital appears to be doubling and tripling in places by the different ways in which the same capital or even the same claim for debt appears in different hands under different forms." - MEW 25: 488 ). But here it is not just a bill, but a real claim to at least doubled future value and this at once represents abstract capitalist wealth.

We also find a doubling in trading with fictitious capital. This happens, for example, quite specifically when a property owner buys property titles such as stocks, bonds or securities, purely for the purpose of making more out of his money. Contrary to the purchase of standard manufactured goods for either consumption or industrial use, the purchase of a title of ownership implies the specific use of the secondary use value of the money capital, ie. h., the buyer of the title of property uses the secondary or the meta-use value of his money sold in order to generate future returns, while the seller of the share, bond, etc. by no means excluded from the capitalization of the money, as in the sale For example, ordinary issuers of equities or bonds have real money for the sale of the title to them. (Lohoff / Trenkle 2012: 131f.). The sellers of the securities now find themselves able to apply this new money capital themselves as a cash-strapped demand by hiring labor and buying machinery, raw materials, supplies, etc. for the expansion of production, while at the same time buyers of property titles in the money markets act so-called fictitious capital. In addition to the amount of money received by the issuer, the so-called notional capital of the purchaser of the bonds or shares occurs. This type of business relationship by no means merely provides for the mere transfer of already existing money capital because it:
a) in the concrete disposal of a company as intensional negative value - capital - forms the basis for further profitable production processes, and
b) the buyer the share or bond with the aim of obtaining a surplus in the financial markets.

If a borrower turns not to a private person who could act as the owner of the money, but to a bank where he already holds a deposit of € 50,000, then there will be two if there is a loan agreement between the borrower and the bank property titles: the repayment claim of the private individual as a debtor to the bank and the repayment claim of the bank against the private individual as debtor. A direct loan between a private lender and the private borrower would have been written on the recording surface of the full capital body only as of the capital of € 50,000, while have been recorded by the intermediary appearance of a bank € 100,000. If more money capitalists now slip between the creditor and the debtor and thus insist on the credit relationship in iterative chainings with scheduled delivery deadlines and potentially constantly changing addresses (of claims), then an increase of the initial capital is created at each intermediate link. (Ibid .: 134) The multiplication of the fictitious capital or the title of second-order property is, of course, never identical with the productivity or increase of the material wealth, but which in the first place does not really matter in capitalism, because In the full capital corpus - and this with an all-pervasive, obsessive performativity - one first of all records the functions, parameters, variables, and configurations of the capital flows that constitute the continuous abstract wealth, and on that the creation of fictitious capital is direct and indirect Influence. However, the creation of fictitious capital, at least in terms of the form of credit money, does not lead to a doubling of initial capital, since the doubling eventually lapses as soon as the creditor's claim against the debtor ceases, either through the final realization of the creditor's monetary claims by the creditor-debtor or through his elimination from the credit chain, eg. B. by bankruptcy. In the case of the realization of the loan, the debtor repays the original amount of the loan plus interest, whereas in the case of devaluation the debtor proves insolvent and the creditor, therefore, has to write off his claims. (In the case of a stock corporation, the doubling of the money capital lasts as long as the company exists or until it repurchases the shares.) That this type of doubling by the creation of specific property titles represents only a limited increase in the money capital does not mean that it is here The level of money capital as a total complexion is something like a zero-sum game, which may simply be exhausted in the redistribution of existing funds. As long as a title (securities, shares, bonds, etc.) flows and is encoded in the distribution channels and networks, as long as it is neither 100% realized nor devalued, it increases its potential use as so-called productive capital just the same virtual wealth of a fictional capital and this as writing, whereby writing here always implies real wealth. According to Marx, capital is a so-called fictitious capital (we shall return to this provision), but as far as its function for total capital is concerned, its usefulness in terms of its usability differs from the so-called productive one Capital based on processes of production and exploitation in the »real economy« may nevertheless be the fictitious capital and again used to fuel the production of standard goods in industrial production. Even the state is able to provide "productive" financing of infrastructure, armaments and social benefits with government bonds, just as it can do so with tax revenues.

​Now, if more money transactions are constantly being linked to an existing series of transactions, or if the transactions are being transformed into securitized claims, the process of replicating cash flows in the form of quasi-postal procedures continues with the type of doubling of capital described above, so that with each new chain link a new fictitious capital arises. (See Lenger 2010: 196f./Lohoff/Trenkle 2012: 134f.) The integration of various money capitalists in the concatenation of money and payment flows, all of which include the relationship creditor-debtor, leads at least temporarily to the additive increase in the initial capital; money capital functions as a self-referential relation in these processes/streams whose code is profit / non-profit. Both current and code each have their own materiality - while the electricity is based on electricity, the code is stored as a script on hard drives, a script that also owns a virtualization, not with their coding, which today rather under the If the word "cyber" or "digitality" is to be understood, the circuit updating / virtualization (of the value) has always affected capitalist money or even credit money, because it can at least potentially and without regard to its digitization as securitize debt and then make its way through quasi-postal systems (Lenger) go, without that at certain points necessarily an addressee would be responsible, which breaks even in any financial crisis orbit. In this context, the fetish character of monetary capital u. a. in that money capital appears as a mere property of a thing, as a number or a script, or, in other words, the reciprocal relation of current and code appears purely as the rule of the code, or, to turn it again. The processes of the interaction between current and code produce new properties that appear purely as those of things /script/numbers (which they are, but not primarily). The digitization of money cannot, therefore, be equated with virtualization (which can theoretically also be analogous); on the contrary, virtualization defies any superficial fetishization, if one understands fictional capital not only as quantities but as vectors of the capital movements circulating current-virtual (and instantaneous) to at least potentially multiply to infinity. Although virtual circulation with its features of magnitude, flow, and code remains inscribed as a continuously updating variation in the digital processes (which process with discrete units readable as numbers), it is by no means equated with the latter the Z. Arthur Kroker, for example, who consequently sees capitalism disappearing into the simulation space of digital technologies. (See Kroker 2004) As a pure vector of circulation, fictitious / speculative capital means, and a rate constantly fluctuating in magnitude and direction (scalar magnitudes or differential vectors) and deterritorialization, and it is not surprising that the highly-paid research teams in finance work with scaling laws and power distributions to describe, for example, the volatility of prices and prices of securities to the analysis of abnormal probabilities and extreme events, but with less focus on factors such as profit maximization or asset optimization than on the fluid integration of all essential elements (including the actors) in money flows within and in networks, by the computer statistical Time series can be calculated in which, for example, the actors should behave analogously to the movement of securities prices and stock indices.

There is no question that credit is broadening the competition between capitalist companies with each other, which is far from affecting, as we will see, the division of profits into entrepreneurial profit and interest, and thus the division into functioning and interest-bearing capital. The borrower, when acting as the embodiment of the performing capital, has to direct his investments and projects per se to the future, which, however, the lenders finance only after an accurate analysis and evaluation of the profitability implied by these investments. And this procedure also means that in the future, the borrower treats returns and profits that are already available, and thus, within the loan relationship, payment entitlements and promises actually mutate into capitalized means of payment on both sides: Compared to a precisely fixed interval in advance, the debtor already has a sum of money to help him realize his business in the future, while the creditor arranges receivables which he already calculates as growing financial wealth (during the task assigned to him or her remains to generate additional money under conditions that have signed the two actants of the lending business as a fixed fact.) ​And finally, the quality of the debt always depends on the possibility of insolvency, because it appears non-stop that the risk is realized for the lender in a form that the borrower can not repay the borrowed money, so the careful examination of the Financial status of the borrower by the lender as well as the provision of collateral by the borrower today are the non plus ultra of the credited ability to work.

translated by Dejan Stojkovski

taken from:

non.copyriot