Towards a new geopolitics EDITIONS CRITIQUES
Researcher at the CNRS. Supervises doctoral theses at the Center d'Economie de la Sorbonne. Former consultant to the OECD and the World Bank. Former Executive Secretary of the World Forum of Alternatives. Works with CETIM for the UN Human Rights Council.
PauloNAKATANI
Professor in the Department of Economics at the Federal University of Espfrito Santo (UFES) in Vitoria, Brazil.
Former president of the Brazilian Society of Political Economy (SEP, Sociedade Brasileira de Economia Politica) and director of the academic journal of the SEP.
Walter FORMENTO
Director of the Center for Research in Politics and Economics, member of CLACSO, where he coordinates studies on the geopolitics of globalization. Professor at the National University of La Plata (Argentina), holding the chair “hegemony, communications and geopolitics”.
CONTENTS
Introduction................................................................
11 Chapter
I Analysis of the situation.....................................................
23 Chapter
II The increase in unproductive work
and the devaluation of work by its form and by its content........................................................................
37 1. The destructive consumption of means of consumption: loss of labor productivity by its content. . . 39 2. The
destructive consumption of means of production and the loss of productivity of labor by form........... 44 3. The
consumption of means of destruction and the loss of productivity of labor by form and content ...
45 Chapter III The
trend
towards accumulation without work...................49 1.
The financialization of the economy since the
1970s.................................................................................49
2. From the 1990s: towards fictitious capital ... .57 3.
The madness of fictitious capital.......................................
59 4. From 2008: the Great World Crisis...........68
Chapter IV
1. The separation between “work” and “money”...............
85 2. The de-substantialisation of money............................
.90 Preparing the mother of all bubbles? . . . 85
Chapter V
Financial empires and geopolitics..................93 1. The
conservative American financial faction .. 94 2. The
globalized Anglo-American financial faction . 100 3. New
Emerging Social Formations............... 103 4. The
European Union, a “State-continent” at the heart of all forces.............................................................105
Chapter VI
The geopolitical option: towards a multipolar world of currencies? 113 1.
Crypto-currencies: new forms of fictitious money 113 2.
Crypto-currencies: new social relations of
power..............................................................................
117 3. Towards a multipolar world of currencies?........
121 Chapter
VII Will there be (other) new Social Forms
Emerging?...............................................................127 1. China,
first and last Emerging Social Formation?
2. Is China reaching its point of overaccumulation? . 129 3. Is a new cycle of capitalist economic growth
possible?..............................................................131 4. Is the
reconnection of capital with the real economy possible in China? Can
this country constitute the last bastion of productive capital? 133 Chapter VIII Getting out of capitalism by trying to get out
139
1. Trying to get out of the crisis of capitalism (without succeeding)
2. The possibility of exiting capitalism due to the very fact of the
impossibility of exiting the capitalist crisis..............147
Conclusion...............................................................151
It is a well-known fact that all human production is part of a process of productive social relations which are neither permanent nor static, but subject to quantitative changes and qualitative transformations throughout history. In a market economy, they acquire monetary expression.
Among monetary relations, however, one can distinguish between those that are market and those that are not. In the same way, not all production is distributed as a commodity, because there is a non-market distribution, through the intermediary of the State, for example. In a market economy, this product, monetized and distributed in a non-market form, is accounted for at the national level. But there can also exist, at certain times of capitalism, a production that is not monetized, such as self-consumption. This category of production is neither market nor monetary. Family production of goods and services for own consumption, since it is unmonetized, does not enter the national accounts and, from the point of view of capital, does not even exist as labor.
In an economy based on monetary relations, social wealth is limited to what enters the national accounts, and anything that cannot be accounted for does not appear as wealth. In this way, nature and labor for personal or domestic consumption, and with them a not insignificant part of the existing social wealth, are not counted as wealth. Considered from the angle of its content, the production of goods or services for self-consumption creates wealth, generates a use value. However, from the perspective of monetary form or relation, this wealth does not count. This shows that, again according to capital, only the wealth that is integrated into its process of capitalist appropriation “exists”. Therein lies the basis of the contempt in which capital holds unpaid labour, which is nevertheless indispensable in the logic of the reproduction of labor power and, consequently, of the reproduction of capital itself. But it also demonstrates, implicitly, that there is a space where labor is neither organized nor directly subordinated to capital.
Nature, by its content, is wealth, but not in terms of form or dominant social relation, that is to say which is not for capital. Hence the blindness and irresponsibility of capital with regard to the ecosphere. The shortening of the useful life of consumer goods, through the obsolescence programmed by capital, implies the sacrifice of natural wealth in order to impose an ever faster, but artificial, generation of exchange values. Such a process accelerates the turnover times of capital so as to be able to increase its process of accumulation, at the cost however of an artificial reduction in the useful life of use values and of natural wealth in general. All this entails a specific and progressive subordination of use value to exchange value, but which must sooner or later meet certain limits: those of the constraints of the reproduction of nature itself, and in particular its time of reproduction. . When we consider individual capital, the fact that use-value reveals itself by manifesting itself as exchange-value, whatever its content, constitutes the clearest expression of this subordination.
Consequently, it is capital that defines “needs,” and no longer the individual subject, or still less a collective subject, and which thus pushes the fetishism of commodities to the extreme.
To “survive” in competition, individual capital increasingly shortens the duration useful life of its means of production, or fixed capital (machines, buildings, etc.), so as to put in place the cutting-edge technology that allows it to achieve extraordinary added value compared to its competitors. The generalization of such a practice leads us to see research and development (R&D) costs increase beyond the labor force savings made possible by the use of this technology, which leads to an irreversible downward trend in the rate of profit. In other words, this rise of the productive forces collides with the very relations of production and highlights that the latter cannot be eternal, which then opens the way to crises, which are so many flaws through which emerge and ma nifest other forms not yet final, but clearly and structurally in conflict.
Two hundred years after the birth of Karl Marx, we would like to address in this work the contradictions, both economic and political, of the rationality of the capitalist mode of production at the present time, as well as their implications; mode of production which increasingly reveals its inadequacies in solving the problems of a society which it no longer manages to integrate, those of a nature which it can no longer protect, and those of the different dimensions of the structural crises of more and more serious that it triggers within it. This obliges us to redefine the concepts of productive work and unproductive work according to two possible approaches: that of the form or dominant social relationship and that of the content. The specific productive labor of the capitalist mode of production is the labor which produces surplus value. According to Marx, the concept of productive labor for capital, that is, productive labor in its form, is a historically specific concept. Within the framework of the capitalist relationship, it was necessary to distinguish productive labor for capital from productive labor in general, a theme that Marx deals with in the "Unpublished Chapter VI" of and which is in line with the logic Cbpitafirst Book, where the analysis was conducted without a
distinction is made between the angle of individual capital and that of capital taken as a whole.
The conceptualization of productive labor by its combined form and content is best realized from Books Second and Third of Productive Labor from the Capital, and more in the Theories °n
capital gain. Viewpoint of Content Abstracts from the Prevailing Social Relation. For any comparative study of societies, productive work is approached from the angle of its content. Leaving aside the social relations of production, productive work is therefore that which creates material or spiritual wealth, that is to say work which generates use values. By its content, productive labor not only generates tangible wealth, but also many services. For Marx, it is wrong to conceive of services in general as being unproductive, as Adam Smith was able to do in
NatWealth of
Market and monetary relations are social relations that constitute a fundamental basis for the functioning of capitalism. The distinction between production work and work in the sphere of circulation is not always clear in everyday commercial activities. Commercialization in the strict sense refers to the formal transfer of a commodity. The notarial activity carrying out the transmission of a title of ownership of a commodity (real estate, for example) corresponds to a formal transfer which does not increase wealth in any way, regardless of the number of times this same property is transferred during a given period. However, this does not preclude a division of labor between the two activities of circulation and production ordinarily leading to an increase in the rotation or the speed of reproduction of capital, operating to the benefit of the accumulation of capital at the level of the whole. However, the fact that capital finds refuge in the sphere of circulation, to speculate there in real estate or in other securities (stocks, bonds, etc.), for example, could enrich its intermediaries, but will lead to a reproduction more limited capital at the level of the totality.
From the perspective of individual capital, the profits made in production, like those obtained in circulation, count both as equally productive. This prompts Marx to identify labor as unproductive at the level of the totality, but which is in at the same time regarded as productive when it is apprehended according to the perspective of individual capital. Circulation is an unproductive activity from the point of view of content insofar as it does not create use-value or any social wealth and, therefore, it is unproductive labor from the point of view of capital. at the level of the whole. For Marx, market relations (the act of buying and that of selling) and monetary (the act of lending and that of borrowing money), as well as the work which they imply, do not in themselves create no use value, nor any wealth, and therefore cannot generate any added value either. Their incomes and profits are the result of the redistribution of the wealth produced within society, that is to say a redistribution of surplus value between the productive sector, where it is generated, and trading capital and interest capital in the form of trading profit and interest rate.
Nevertheless, from the point of view of individual capital, all work that generates profit is productive, whatever the content or type of work. Insurance against fire, against devaluation or bankruptcy, etc., and the various forms of reinsurance, such as derivatives, represent nothing but a redistribution or socialization of losses at the global social level. What, in this sphere, can be a considerable source of profit on the scale of individual capital, presents itself only as a simple redistribution of losses on the level of the totality of accumulation. Such redistribution has the function of alleviating disasters, thereby indirectly cushioning limited reproduction. The fact that capital takes refuge in this sphere of redistribution thus opens the door to speculation, with losses or bankruptcies, which thereby encourages the concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands and, in at the same time, reinforces the limited reproduction at the level of the totality.
For 200 years, productive labor as seen by individual capital has continued to drive economic rationality and consists of maximizing the rate of private profit. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall in the productive sphere leads to capital seeking to obtain profits by carrying out less mediation through productive labor and, consequently, without the substance of
value. The increasing sum of accumulated private wealth lacks each time more substance, therefore turns out to be more and more fictitious, and finally leads to a loss of wealth at the level of the totality, i.e. leads to a limited reproduction. . What seems more rational from the point of view of private interests always becomes more irrational at the level of the totality and thereby demonstrates the “senile phase” of capitalism (as pointed out by SAMIR AMIN (2003 ) ) .
The contradiction between maximizing private profit and aggravating the loss of vitality in the reproduction of capital at the level of the totality is revealed not only each time more capital is invested in unproductive sectors, but also, and even more often, when it happens that capital tries to accumulate itself. passing from the "factor" work. Such is the case of capital with interests which tries to participate in the added value created within the framework of the real economy, by lending money in exchange for more money. It is an activity or work which does not directly generate wealth, although the process of expanded reproduction of capital may indirectly be developed at the level of the totality, by allowing productive capital to accelerate its rotation and increase its magnitude. As a result, it becomes an indirectly productive activity or work.
However, when capital takes refuge in this sphere in order to obtain profits while being less and less linked to the productive sphere, it begins at the same time to acquire a parasitic and speculative character; its profits are fictitious and the accumulation of capital itself also becomes fictional. The development of fictitious capital leads in turn to the limited reproduction of capital at the level of the totality, and accumulation at the individual level increasingly means a concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands, those of a tiny minority. National accounts that record fictitious profits as real then turn into “national tales”.
Faced with the downward trend in the rate of profit in production, capital is showing growing resistance to returning to the real or productive economy. The growing reluctance to return to the realm of production usually manifests itself when the cost of innovation and RocD no longer compensates for the savings in labor costs when using new technologies in production. Faced with the ever greater difficulty in raising the rate of profit, the flight of capital towards countries where the costs of labor power are lower has constituted an escape route for productive capital. However, not all types of capital can participate in this globalization process; some will not even easily rise above the level of the nation-state. There are capitals which have certainly been able to develop over the past decades on a continental scale (that of the European Union or the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA], for example), but which, at present, can no longer progress; still others continue to function only as capital at the national or even local level.
It is then that an unequal development between these forms of capital begins, realizing itself in favor those with the ability to operate on a global scale, whom we will call Globalists, in a battle that increasingly focuses on appropriating the already existing social wealth, rather than enhancing reproduction enlarged from the capital to the totality level. Moreover, the very development of globalization (and therefore of global capital) has also created conditions for the rise of a multipolar project, of countries and regions that could form an emerging formation, with China and Russia as the main, but not the only, drivers, and who are coming to direct ever greater proportions of their investments towards the expanded reproduction of social wealth at the level of the totality, especially in association with their global New Silk Road project .
The general thesis of this work is that this New Emerging Great Social Formation could well reconnect investment to the creation of social wealth through its content, insofar as it appears necessary that it be related to it and, consequently, that it subordinates itself to (and/or renounces to) the logic of the accumulation of capital. Under these conditions, the decisive possibility that opens up is thus that the creation of social wealth would not occur to generate value, and always more value to accumulate, but to provide use values that meet the needs of ' a Collective Subject, and no longer to the private requirements of capital.
To grow constantly, capitalism also needs to constantly develop the productive forces, which has led historically, and up to the present day, to a dynamic of technological progress leading from manufacturing to mechanization, then from the latter to automation and, ultimately, the robotization of production processes. This means that capitalist development tends to involve greater use of capital-intensive technologies—as well as greater innovation in the same technologies— or, what is the same thing, less use of labor power per unit of invested capital. In other words, capitalism presents a tendency to reduce living labor in direct production. This leads to a continuous restructuring of the professional orientations and qualifications of the labor force according to advances in technological progress. Nevertheless, what is truly determining is that such circumstances implicitly lead to a chronic process of capital invested per unit of value that it is capable of generating. What does that mean? This means that as the relative weight of fixed capital (machines) in relation to variable capital (human beings) increases in the organic cb/ifi1poctl0njoflti6a)ital, productivity can increase, but proportionally less. more value (and therefore less profit) is able to be created. Hence it comes that, when the power of labor is reduced, in relative terms, in a given process of production, the mass of value represented by this power (as
value in
more because the latter is only extracted from human beings) also falls, so that each time there is less margin for productivity gains to translate into a rise in the rate of surplus valuel. As a result, the upward trajectory of productivity is increasingly impeded in its attainment of extraordinary profit, which is the basic objective of capitalist investment. Or, what amounts to the same thing, there comes a time when the paths of productivity and profit cease to be parallel, and may even become contradictory.
With the automation of production processes, the amount of labor time deposited in each product is less and, therefore, the productivity of each worker must increase (he must "do" more products or services in the same amount of time ) so that the mass of realizable profits does not decrease; that is to say that if, today, a commodity comes out with a tenth of the value that the same commodity had a decade ago, ten times as many elements of this commodity will have to be manufactured in order to not to lose the total of the previous value, nor therefore the possibility of realizing capitalist profit.
This leads to the paradox that the more the productivity of the productive forces increases, the more it is necessary for it to rise further in an attempt to save profit. In fact, if productivity increases, for example, by 5%, accumulation must increase at the same rate to
to maintain the level of employment (and therefore also the possibilities of added value). But for this, it is also necessary thatconsumption intensifies exponentiallyn order to be able to adapt to the subsequent rise in productivity increases production. And Capitalism is thereby
condemned to maintain a continuous expansion of consumption on the scale of the planet, which obliges it to trigger changes in populations - occatslsaBEtriistthrapelwe’ic have a certain power to purchase — and leads to a permanent struggle between capitals to expand the market and appropriate larger shares of it.
With the current scientific and technical revolution applied to production (RICHTA, 1969) S the socially necessary labor time is reduced to the extreme, so that the relationship of immediate human labor to the production of wealth is increasingly untied; from this stems an increasingly significant loss of value in the new forces that drive production and generate material and immaterial wealth. "
Value becomes more anachronistic in terms of relative wealth production potential birth [...] to the productive forces to which it gives
( POSTONE, 2006, p. 270). From then on, we can begin to glimpse the enormous consequences of this phenomenon on a mode of production which is based precisely, as capitalism does, on the production of value (abstract wealth) rather than on that of material and social wealth. Its social relations of production, its rationality or raison d'etre become more and more an obstacle to human progress.
At the same time that this internal limit is aggravated, capitalist competition properly speaking intervenes. The historical process of technicization involves an exacerbation of the battle around R&D, which becomes each time more expensive because the acceleration of the obsolescence of technology does not allow a satisfactory amortization of the invested capital.
In order to be able to survive competition, companies shorten the average useful life of the fixed capital (mainly buildings and machinery) to which they have recourse in order to be able to acquire the most cutting-edge technology of the moment. The preceding trend gave, during the post-war period, a powerful impetus to productive capital, as well as to technological innovations. However, towards the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, technological substitution reached the limit possible to increase the rate of profit in the central social formations of the world capitalist system. Since then, the average useful life of fixed capital has been reduced, to the point that the lower value transferred to the product or service through technology (through the reduction of socially necessary production time) and normally also expressed in a higher cost low level of technology, and therefore better "competitiveness", reaches a level such that it does not compensate for the reduction in the cost of the labor employed to use this new technology. The very high speed of technological replacement becomes a hindrance to the rise in the rate of profit: it does not even allow time to amortize the investment in modern machines; and complicates the prevailing relation of production itself. From these processes arises a tendency increasingly difficult to conceal, which traces the internal limit of capitalist development: the decline of
2 The reader will find complete and detailed bibliographical references at the end of the book. Note of the sditoi".
3 Machines do not generate value, but constitute “dead labour” (of past value) which has already been realized by those who made them in a det&Tfffitoei way. The machines do not work; they “work”.
And in functioning, they transfer part of their value (of the human labor deposited in them to make production processes possible) to the commodity, until in use they can transfer all the rest, and thereby also be fully amortized. Only human work, each time it is put into action, generates new value. ORIO GIARINI and HENRI LOUBERGE (1979), of the University of Geneva, were among the pioneers i n issuing a warning about the diminishing returns of technology in the capitalism of the center of the world system.
Such a warning, however, went unheeded until evidence of this trend became apparent.
We should therefore underline, as a singular example, that of Japan, where the shortening of the useful life
average rate of profit. This phenomenon is at the root of the recurrent crises of this system, at the origin of its "chronic disease", as has been said - with the difference that, in this case, it enters into crisis because of the abundance , rather than scarcity)4 1. Great depressions begin when this trend manifests itself in a decline in the mass of profits; in other words, when the total mass of value produced is less than the total capital set in motion. The mass of profits, basically, translates a crisis of the acquisition of which is the raison d'etre of the capitalist economy. value as capital gain,
As Marx wrote: “Considered in itself, the absolute value of commodities is indifferent to the capitalist. What interests him is only the surplus value which contains and which is realizable by sale. [...] [Rjelative surplus value increases in direct proportion to the development of the productive power of labor, while the value of commodities is [decline] in inverse proportion to the same development; since thus the same processes which lower the price of commodities raise the surplus value [the surplus value] which they contain, we have the solution of the old riddle; we no longer have to wonder why the capitalist who has nothing but exchange value at heart constantly strives to lower it. (MARX, 1977, Book One [Volume II], Fourth Section, Chapter XII, pp. 13-14) .
The total value decreases with the increase in productivity in the sense that the socially necessary production time is reduced. However, this does not concern individual capitalists: although they generate fewer portions of value, they can share more of the surplus value.
THEproblem for capital in general is that the tendencyof value (timeto move ever further socially necessary) to downwards can only be counteracted to a certain extent by greater surplus value (excess time, that each workeemploys for the solebenefit of capital), involvingless human labor.
If human beings are replaced by machines, there will simply beno surplus labor left at the end.
It is in this elementary contradiction that the evils are rooted of the capitalist economy and its recurring crises.
Until now, individual capitalists have circumvented this problem mainly through the production of more goods. The latter, although they each contain less value (less abstract human labor time, socially necessary), can, by increasing their number (and by increasing productivity), compensate - and even exceed mean of technology was an official policy in the 1970s. The goal was to achieve a position at the forefront of technologies. The country has effectively managed to become world champion in the replacement of "old" fixed capital by a more "modern" one. During the 1980s, Japan was considered "the economic miracle" that would take over the world. The reality, however, was that the rate of profit there fell even more rapidly than in the other central social formations, leaving the country in a recession from which it has not always emerged today. The Japanese state has sought to inject money into the economy, going into debt internally like no other and accumulating more sovereign debt than any other economic power today. There was hope that sooner or later the upswing of a new economic cycle would come, but Japan suffered one recession after another and the long-awaited recovery did not come. Gradually, they also entered this same minute spiral to avoid overaccumulation: the devaluation of capital through its massive
destruction. This is the terrain of War, which we will also discuss later. So many mechanisms of counter-tendencies have ended up casting doubt on the real existence of this tendency, including among certain authors claiming to be Marxists themselves.
Nevertheless, this set of processes was effective in partly counteracting the fall in the mass of profits, but not in reversing the trend (a clear illustration of this argument in MAITO (2013)). And finally, this manifests itself forcefully in the development of the productive forces, and especially the current scientific and technical revolution. Moreover, the gravity of the present moment is such that all counter-trend measures, which cannot act indefinitely, are reaching their limits, as we will see in this work. This makes sense if we take into account the fact that the scarcityof value tends to becom^ore important as each
business cycle is overcome by an increasing level of productivity.
beyond — this loss of value. Moreover, individual capitalists can lower their prices, and thus supplant competition. In other words, the loss of value associated with productivity has so far been solved by selling more goods at a lower price and, therefore, permanently expanding the market (albeit with fewer competitors); which requires both a certain “socialization” of the purchasing power of the population and the consequent construction of (certain types of stable societies5). This is what Fordism managed to do for a short time. But this solution only works Company
times for the
the development of new clothing products for Andenlargement sufficiently [of the production capacities] exceed those intended “•the implementation
new procedures [Manufacturing] ^rearniNrnnig to arto [of production processes]” (KURZ,
2009, p. 40). To do this, the only condition is that the increase in productivity (which goes hand in hand with a tendency to shrink jobs and reduce value) is less than the extension of internal and external markets which makes possible .
At a certain level of technological development, market expansion has in turn accompanied by new possibilities for the integration of labor power into production processes, thus further guaranteeing the reproduction of value, in what seemed to be an indestructible virtuous circle. But once overcome a determined limit of development of the forces productive, with the current scientific and technical revolution, the elimination of labor power exceeds the possibilities of expansion of capital (which should produce and sell volumes of merchant
say tending to infinity when the value tends to zero) (PIQUERAS, 2017a). " In front of steps
relatively saturated, further advances in productivity growth produce the opposite effect, i.e. they outpace the expansion of commodity labor markets and provide
( KURZ, 2009, p. 41). Today, the market has become global and cannot no longer be enlarged, nor even in any way extended at the rate at which productivity increases, which accompanies the automation of production processes. With the exponential increase in the organic composition of capital (fixed capital [machines] over variable capital [human beings]), even the possible new extensions of the market do not lead, in parallel, to an incorporation of labor power , given the extremely high levels of productivity already achieved. In other words, the rate of increase of productive work, from the point of view of the valuation of capital, does not correspond to the rate of growth of productivity. And consequently, the rate of profit (necessarily linked to the quantity of value embodied in each process of production) falls at such a rate that it carries with it the mass of profits (i.e. the mass value starts to decrease). Added to this, if these evolutions leave a greater part of the population unemployed, and, consequently, accentuate the tendency towards its impoverishment, as we shall see, it will be even more difficult for the market to expand from any way.
The frenetic pace of today's capitalist technological competition eventually completes the cycle, causing an increase in the rate of decrease in value mass. Also the evolution of the average rate of profits in the social formations of the center of the capitalist world system over the very long period is clearly oriented downwards.
Globalization and its dynamics of corporate relocation, jointly launched with the neoliberal political-economic offensive, are processes that were neither natural nor accidental, but the results of the obligation to compensate, over a determined period of time. , the fall in the rate of profit in the central economies of the capitalist world system. It was about,
on the one hand, to invest capital in the peripheral economies - better known as the "Third World" - where a process of overaccumulation had not yet occurred and where more could still be integrated in order to to extract silVel upvalue, and thereby relaunch an extensive accumulation of capital; but also both to expand the market, accelerate the capital turnover rate and shorten the life of products.
On the other hand, the compensation for the fall in the rate of profit at the center of the
system has passed through the imposition of higher rates of exploitation of the labor force
and a lesser redistribution of profit (going downward) conceded to the general population;
but also by the search for new spaces of valorization where the common goods and the
human activities of preservation of life had previously been installed - that is to say the totality of the
social wealth still remaining outside the market —; which also supposes, at the internal
level, a new extensive accumulation of capital. All this implies, in the same way, an accentuation
of the reduction of the price of nature as energy and various resources (by accentuation of
fossilism). The combination of all these processes has provided capitalism with some
leeway in time, enabling it, since the 1970s, to buy
little time a ( STREECK, 2014). However, one after another, these same processes al
finally revealed their limits and exhausted themselves in their attempts to continue
to compensate for the downward trend in the rate of profit: overaccumulation arrived faster
than the capitalists wished in the peripheral economies converted into "emerging countries"
under the effect massive investments of foreign capital (even though it always proves more
difficult to reinvest massively, in other peripheries as there is less production left to do so);
the speed anchmifnitude with which the market reproduces cannot counteract the intensity
with which it declines; the exacerbation of exploitatioitl)ete,^aCHfg to temporarily increase the
surplus value obtained, as we have underlined, does not compensate for the reduction of;
while, an aggravatin^a'ctor, the impoverishment of society comes into contradiction with
capitalist realization (or the sale of what is produced). With regard to the processes of
commodification of activities for the preservation of life and social wealth in general, their
objective, in most cases, is to appropriate ever more portions of an already generated
value, rather than to create a For their part, the eB§w gica^imits inherent in these
dynamics prove to be inconceivable; and therefore, it is important to take into account
here that it is the very “internal” limit of capital that squeezes the system and pushes it to its
“external”, or ecological limit.
The controversy surrounding the concepts of “productive work” and “unproductive work” is endless. We will summarize it by arguing that any activity involving work can be considered productive or nonproductive by its content (substantially) or by its form (formally). The latter is linked to value as ductive by form is revealed in the perspective of individual capital, and is understood as more i n value. professional work any work that generates surplus value; it is only this type of work that generates surplus value, in any sector of the economy. It thus happens, for example, that weapons of mass destruction would be “productive”, just like buying or selling a home. On the other hand, productive labor by its content corresponds only to that which generates value (more in value) in the production of commodities in the productive sphere in the strict sense, but not in that of circulation or social reproduction, if it turns out that the commodities produced in new this latter sphere do not contribute to the (productive) cycle of capital expansion—even indirectly.
If commodities contribute to the cycle of capital, the labor that makes them possible can in its turn also be considered productive. For example, serving meals to students would not be productive, but serving them to industrial workers would. Weapons would not be “productive”, because they do not favor the expansive cycle of capital, but rather shorten it. And reselling a home several times consecutively does not create any new wealth, but simply entails a different distribution of a value that has already been produced. Here, the only difficult point is the question of where to stop when looking for what constitutes an “indirect contribution” to productive work. In short, through content or substance, productive labor aims to create new collective wealth, and unproductive labor aims to redistribute it once it has been created.
Being “unproductive” does not mean not being necessary or useless; absolutely not. But if, in an economy, predominates, from the point of view of content, unproductive labor over productive labor or, even more, if, in a general way, productive labor by its form is placed above productive labor by its content, profit can be oriented upwards on the individual scale of a few capitalists, but this may soon constitute an obstacle to the collective dynamic of capital accumulation.
Substantial productive efficiency on a collective scale is what demonstrates the vitality °f economy as a whole, while the prevalence productive by its form alone, or unproductive by its content, reflects the efficiency of thiffecoftomy. Thus, what so frequently seems to be "rational" from the point of view of private interests turns out in reality to be "irrational" or ineffective from the prism of the totality, and the sum of individual interests, far from leading to the "common good", the annihilate (DIERCKXSENS, 1998; CARCANHOLO, 2015). These processes gradually and inexorably lead to a generalized devaluation.
1. The destructive consumption of consumption means : loss of labor productivity
by its content
When the physical or moral wear and tear of use-values increases, the average lifespan of use-values intended for “sustainable” consumption decreases, and what is called the propensity to consume increases. When the average lifespan of these use-values is reduced, the labor necessary to produce a commodity reduced by technological progress must be repeated with increasing frequency, insofar as the i ifespan
average of these use values has been shortened. The wealth produced, in the form of value, increases at the expense of the reduction in the average lifespan of wealth as use-value. What is needed then is for the wealth produced and present in society, considered by its content and increased by technological progress, to be replaced by the reduction in the average useful life of use values.
In terms of content, the creation of (almost) equal use values must be repeated, because their socially useful life becomes obsolete more quickly. By content, labor productivity has decreased due to an increased velocity of capital turnover. By the form, on the other hand, the productivity of labor increases as the rotation of capital accelerates, since, during the same period of time (generally a year), the creation of wealth increases in terms of value . A faster turnover of capital means a greater realization of value and surplus value in a given time, that is to say a higher general productivity of labor seen by the form.
With the phenomenon of planned obsolescence, the content qualities of a product tend to be subject to the possibilities of its valuation. There are different ways in which use values lose social useful life rather than technical useful life. The valorization process can be repeated with fashionable products because, although the existing wealth is still present, it no longer counts socially. Obsolescence can also be programmed technically from the lack of spare parts.
Planned obsolescence, whatever the modality, means a loss of general productivity of work seen by the content, even though, seen by the form, it will be exactly the opposite.
This subordination of use value to exchange value goes even further. As the consumer society develops, the use value of all that is produced derives more and more exclusively from the limits within which it manifests itself as exchange value. Insofar as one manages to sell an item (whatever it is), the fact that it is sold or valued validates its usefulness in the eyes of the market.
Therefore, the needs are no longer defined by the individual subject, and even less by the Subject Collective; it is capital itself that generates “artificial desires”, which deviate from the real needs of the majority of populations. As useless or harmful as a use value may be, the mere fact that it is sold proves that it has been valued and that it enters into the “Wealth of Nations”. Here we really come to the pure fetishism of commodities.
In late capitalism, exchange value increasingly comes to be the sole evidence of use value.
Precisely because of its superior technological position, monopoly capital can afford the luxury of producing products that are at the same time useless, cheap and unsustainable. These are products whose futility consists only in the fact of having been provided through another unproductive work from the point of view of content: advertising. In this logic, the “needs” appear infinite. Thus, monopoly capital extends its market not only in space (thanks to new geographical outlets), in time (by a faster rotation of capital due to the reduction in the average lifespan of use values ), but also through the creation of “desires” through advertising. It is at this level of reasoning that we can speak of the “subsumption of the consumer to capital”. From the perspective of content and of life itself, it is an economy of waste. From a form perspective, however, wealth can continue to increase dramatically.
This accelerated valuation of capital implies a spiral of wastage of wealth
material (waste) and natural resources (looting). The permanent accumulation through the increasingly aggressive realization of represehltsNfie triggering of a spiral of consumption of raw materials, that is to say an ever more violent assault on nature.
However, while natural wealth reproduces itself or proves to be substitutable in space or replaceable by another material, this destruction seen by the content of the wealth does not correspond to a loss of value and, by therefore, does not enter as such — as a loss — in the accounts of a monetized economy.
The waste of resources and the generation of mountains of polluting waste do not represent losses only if they are seen by the content. Capital does not conceive of them as a loss or destruction of wealth, but as an important source of its process of valorization.
Capital conceives of nature, as it does of population, as mere "factors" external to the economy.
The destruction of nature and the damage caused to the environment are not taken into account. account in the national accounts, any more than the deterioration of the health of the population. Economic development itself, by form, is thus in the process of exhausting the fundamental content of all wealth. In terms of value, there is indeed a "development", but in terms of content and life, it emerges, in general, that more destruction than production of wealth actually takes place. Moreover, the “national accounts”, if they established the true balance between the wealth generated and all that which is destroyed, from the point of view of content, would probably lead to a negative balance. In other words, the general productivity of work, seen by the content, would highlight negative values.
The regeneration of finite natural resources or biotic resources requires much longer times than those imposed by the reproduction of capital, which causes an ever deeper imbalance between the two reproduction processes. And this imbalance between these two processes will affect the sustainability of the development of capital itself.
2. The destructive consumption of Fqgrmjtiby means the labor productivity and loss
The consumption of the means of production is also subject to the trend towards planned obsolescence. The struggle through competition itself leads to a situation of increasingly rapid substitution of the means of production. Even though the technical lifespan as use value has not yet been exhausted, the means of production have already been replaced by others, considered as corresponding to the cutting-edge technology of the moment.
In such circumstances, we can speak, from the content point of view, of a loss of productivity. However, over the period considered, and seen from the angle of form, it increases the rate of profit and, with it, labor productivity. The previous trend gave a huge boost to productive capital, as well as to technological innovations in the post-war period. As a result,
R&D has become a productive sector in its own right.
To maintain a competitive capacity for a certain time, due to the existing social relationship, the knowledge acquired through R&D is generally patented. Owning a patent means living off a monopoly rent on knowledge. It is an unproductive and parasitic means of temporarily obtaining an extraordinary profit. This is an unproductive rent.
More and more patents actually turn out not to have any application in the productive field. As RocD costs are not linked to the productive sector, these investments become unproductive also from the point of view of form. In the medium term, the patent policy does not guarantee a lasting trend towards the reactivation of the rate of profit. With
that, more and more of the costs of the RocD must be transferred to the product or service, which tends to lower the rate of profit in the other productive sectors and to reduce the general productivity of labor by form.
consumption and losdejjtcuotiisansf labor productivity by the form 3
content by
Faced with the downward trend in the rate of profit in the real civilian economy, the war economy constitutes an "alternative" and explains the accelerated rise of a vast military-industrial complex in the United States from the Second World War. It is there, on the basis of this military-industrial complex, that US interest capital is developing. This requires closer liaison between politicians and big business.
The work done in the military-industrial complex in preparation for war, with the programmed destruction of human lives, of natural and material wealth, is unproductive work. By content, which is transformed into the most productive sector seen by form, and which tends to abandon the civil sphere.
Seen by the content, the sale of military products and means of destruction in general allows, in a determined cycle, the realization of added value and profit. During this cycle, commodities have been produced that count as real wealth at the national level.
Even when military products sold to the State are not "consumed" for destruction, in this case when they are not used for war and therefore do not cause direct destruction, these products, which are kept in the next economic cycle, do not contribute to the expanded reproduction of capital at the global social level.
Indeed, in the production cycle that follows, these weapons are not among the means of production to renew or to increase the fixed capital of the real economy, nor among the means of consumption necessary to rehire the same labor force, or still more workers, in the economy in question. By its content, the wealth or the real capital generated in a cycle becomes under these conditions an obstacle for the next economic cycle.
The relatively autonomous development of capital in the military-industrial complex leads to a limited reproduction of capital at the global social level through different cycles of production. Its development lowers the rate of investment in the production of the civil sectors, which affects economic growth and, consequently, reduces the general productivity of labor in form and content. This limited reproduction may not manifest immediately, but only years later.
The defense industry is becoming a sector with apparent autonomy, but its excessive development will ultimately have a negative impact on the broader reproduction of the economy as a whole. The expanded reproduction of the military-industrial complex means the promotion of growing false spending for society as a whole. Although it constitutes a false expenditure, the burden of the military budget can nevertheless be transferred to third parties, depending on the degree of openness of an economy, through arms sales. But for that, it is necessary to multiply the wars - or the propagation of warmongering threats of real aggressions or invented conflicts.
CHAPTER III
The tendency to accumulation without work 1. The financialization of the economy since the 1970s
According to data from the World Bank, the main indicators of the capitalist system show a persistent downward trend in the rate of growth of production, as well as in profitability, highlighting an overaccumulation of capital, evident since the end of the 1960s decade.
Originally, the overproduction of capital intended to maintain or restore profitability after the crisis of the 1960s led the world economy to move from a relatively regulated system, within the framework of the Bretton Woods agreements, to a completely different system, increasingly deregulated. This has led to an aggravation of the cyclical instability of the world system and a volatility of the growth rates of production, of employment, but also of other important economic variables, such as interest rates and exchange rates. A deregulation which was consolidated in the so-called “neoliberal” period, but which continues to be applied today. This instability and this volatility, mainly of interest and exchange rates, have increased the risks associated with greater difficulty in predicting the future and calculating the probability of future contracts relating to debt or foreign exchange, due to the proliferation of variable rates (but things also got more complicated for fixed rates). This paved the way for what have been called "financial innovations", which aimed to seek greater security with regard to future commitments: on the one hand, the contracts qualified as exchange&afeJapital which made it possible to transfer risks by betting on the future trajectory of interest rates; and on the other, swap contracts, which allowed1 cye substitution of a debt denominated in one currency by another in a different currency. On the basis of these instruments, new derivative financial products have arisen, which have been constantly developed and sophisticated, both in national credit systems and on an international scale, thus opening wide the doors of a large "financial casino". overall ". For us, this period was inaugurated in the 1970s, following a vast movement of financialization of capitalist expansion - with the "speculation infrastructures" that accompanied it -, and is characterized by a predominance of forms of capital which have become autonomous: monetary capital and interest-bearing capital Their observed cyclical evolutions express 1. Industrial capital has three distinct functional forms, but it is a single capital. It can acquire the form of monetary capital, that of productive capital and that of
merchandise. Monetary capital assumes the functions of money as a general means of purchase and payment, as a representation of the immateriality of the value social. It is said that this money becomes capital when it allows the creation of productive capital, through the purchase of very special commodities: means of production and human beings (or “labour power”). In this process, capital seeks not only to but also to continuously create value, generate additional value (or surplus value), which is obtained through labor. human exerted on the means of production and leading to the consequent production of commodities. Once produced, commodities contain, deposited in them, new (added) value, as surplus value, which turns into profit when sold, which constitutes commodity capital, in that it it is through the commodity that value materializes. Once the commodity is sold, capital reverts to its silver form, again ready to begin the cycle again. In this way, the capital which, throughout the cycle of production-circulation, adopts
successive functional forms (of money capital, productive capital and commodity capital, to become new money capital), is called industrial capital. Whatever the basic cycle of the functioning of capitalism, it happens that it is confused withcapitastrial capital (industrial capital represents the simplified synthesis of three autonomous capitals which separately fulfill three different functions, but which together represent the whole cycle capitalist). However, the different forms of capital can acquire their own autonomy. When the commodity-capital becomes autonomous, it is converted into commercial or merchant capital. Autonomous money-capital becomes interest-bearing capital, while productive capital remains productive capital. For its part, money is transformed into capital when it is spent directly in the valorization of abstract labor, thus becoming, starting from a determined value, a value that is valorized, that is to say that increases itself. Money without commodities (or money for oneself the phases of expansion and crisis associated with these forms of capital.
In the United States, the process of centralization of capital in its financial form resumed in the 1950s, without really attracting attention, as the effects of the crisis of the 1930s and the consequences of the Second World War gradually faded. In Europe, the origins of contemporary financial accumulation can be dated back to the mid-1960s. As exchange controls came to a head during 1958, London was allowed to become a city “”, with its own rules which brought it closer, so to speak, to the status of a tax haven, witfPffsparecular an interbank market for liquid capital denominated in US dollars called the “eurodollar market” (CHESNAIS,
2005, pp. 3738 ) . It was there that the foundations of interest capital operations were laid for the first time on an international level.
Thus, since the 1960s, the overproduction of capital has become a process by which accumulation takes place mainly in the form of money capital and is amplified in the form of interest-bearing capital, mainly through the intermediary of the City of London, pushing and accelerating debt alone as a commodity) is social nonsense. To deepen this category and the forms
empowered derivatives, such as fictitious capital, see the Fifth Section of Book III of the Capital-. "Sharing the profit in
business interest and profit. Interest-bearing capital” (MARX, 1977b).
exterior6 of the majority of peripheral and dependent social formations. The capital accumulated on the London market was initially recycled through the eurodollar market, then through the petrodollar market, in the form of debt. This is how a process of external indebtedness of the economies of the South developed from the first half of the 1960s, on the pretext of helping to finance industrialization in this way7.
The wars in Central and West Asia also contributed greatly to this increase in external debt, and this eventually gave rise to what was called the "oil crises" of 1973 and 1979, which forced the countries which imported this essential raw material to accelerate the increase in their indebtedness in the years that followed.
The latter thus grew even further and converted the Eurodollar market in London into that of petrodollars. In addition to severely affecting hydrocarbon-importing economies, this movement deepens the crisis in the main countries of advanced capitalism. The worsening of Debt crisis occurred as a consequence of the monetary policy measures, especially those concerning the sudden rise in the interest rate8, decided by Paul Volcker, at the
6 Another indebtedness mechanism is reported by J. PERKINS Confessionesde un asesm° ec°n6mico (2005). in 7 During the period 1950-1963, the total amount of foreign capital inflows flowing into Latin America, in the form of foreign direct investment, public credits and private donations, amounted to $4.342 billion; and the total outflow of capital, consisting of depreciation, interest and profits, reached 5.122 billion
dollars. This corresponds to a drain of some $780 million (measured in 1960 dollars), according to FURTADO (1969, p. 245). Thus, contrary to the theses defending the contributions of foreign capital and indebtedness as sources of financing for industrialization in Latin America, it was in reality the latter which financed, between 1950 and 1963, the big international capitalists.
8 The>iprimiienrate, i.e. the base interest rate of the Federal Bank of the United States (Fed), has changed from
10.47% in July 1979 to 20.0% in April 1980, then was reduced to 11.0% in July 1980, before being sharply increased
again to 21.5% in December 1980. It was again lowered to 17.0% and rose above 20.0% just a few months later. Thus, between
August 1979 and December 1982, the average Fed interest rate was 16.3% (FED, 2017). Paul Volcker, chairman of the Fed
from August 6, 1979, was the one who laid the foundations for this “speculative infrastructure”.
head of the Federal Reserve (Fed) in August 1979.
Indeed, the attempt of the United States to overcome its crisis at the end of the 1970s, through the through a monetary policy that led to a very sharp rise in the preferential interest rate, gave rise to generalized convulsions in all peripheral social formations, particularly in Latin America, starting with the Mexican moratorium of 1982, which culminates in what has been called the "lost decade".
Obviously, the 1980s were lost for the workers in the capitalist world system, but not for the ruling classes of these peripheral countries, and much less for those of the countries of the center. According to data provided by the World Bank, the annual growth rate of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita9 was, on average for Latin America, for example, -0.54% between 1981 and 1990. In the largest economies in this region, the same rate was -0.34%, -0.22% and -2.87% respectively in Brazil,
Mexico and Argentina. On the contrary, the other major economies of the world (with the exception of China, whose trajectory has been completely different, due to its central planning and singular performance, as we will see) have shown growth rates of GDP
per capita rather enviable, given the crisis circumstances capitalist. The United States recorded an average annual growth rate of 2.39%, Germany 2.19% and the United Kingdom 2.78%. The rising economy of the time, Japan, exhibited an “extraordinary” per capita GDP growth of 4.06% on average over the period 1981-1990.
The unfolding of this episode of crisis and contraction of capital, conditioned by an accumulation of capital in its financial forms, at the same time as it produced and disseminated misery, chaos and multiple fruitless attempts at solution10 through of the most diverse measures of economic policy applied in the states of peripheral or dependent capitalism, has forced the way for the advance of ideological decisions and so-called neoliberal economic policies. In other words, the field was cleared at the same time for the domination of the financial forms of interest-bearing capital and its fictitious manifestations, which we (CARCANHOLO and NAKATANI , 2015 ) and which we will qualify as going to discuss in more parasitic speculative capital depth later.
Thus, the United States drew up proposals aimed at bringing a "solution" to the debt crisis through the voice of its Secretaries of the Treasury: first with the Baker plan (1985), which had relatively little effect , then with the Brady Plan (1989). Above all, the latter proposed, in addition to the renegotiation of debts and some discounts, the conversion of the public debt contracts of the debtor countries into negotiable securities on the stock exchange, or a process better known as debt equity swaps,
debt securitization.
This moment of crisis gave way to a new period of relative stability and attenuation previous contradictions of the world system, that is to say to a phase of renewed expansion, but also to explosions of conjunctural crises which broke out all over the world and took on the appearance of financial crises throughout the 1990s and 2000.
2. fF0m the 1990s: towards fictitious capital
The 1990s began, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the collapse of the European Union
9 These data were calculated from information available on the
basis of the World Bank: http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD.ZG (Worid Bank, 2017).
10 The debt crisis expressed itself in Latin America through acute inflationary processes, several of which reached levels of hyperinflation. All the countries (except Cuba) began to implement the “packages” of measures of the orthodox neoliberal economic plans.
Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The conversion of the former Soviet socialist republics to capitalism, combined with the opening of the Chinese economy following the rise to power of Deng Xiaoping, provided the big international capitalists with a gigantic mass of workers for the production of surplus value11, while exacerbating, between the different components of the world working class, competition for jobs and wages. At the same time, the logic of the financial sphere continued and deepened with the “Washington Consensus ”12 and the surging wave of neoliberalism.
These changes within the world system made it possible to record a seemingly satisfactory yield where the greatest capitalist development on the planet had taken place. Thus, the growth rate of the US economy reached an average of 3.45% per year between 1991 and 2000, while during the same period, the OECD countries13 posted an average growth of 2.70% and the European Union by 2.25% (The World Bank, 2017). The average growth rate of the world economy was 2.81%, mainly driven by the phenomenal rise of China, with an average annual rate of 10.45% over the period considered.
This period was also characterized by the rapid increase in operations carried out by the managers of mutual funds, hedge funds, pension funds and insurance companies, (hedge funds), of the articulated on or associated with those of the large banking establishments, which manipulated resources amounting to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, and who sought to obtain maximum profitability throughout the deregulated financial world14. In concrete terms, the 1990s witnessed a euphoria of interest-bearing capital in its most diverse and sophisticated ramifications, especially in those relating to fictitious capital, and especially with regard to shares and public debt securities.
3. The madness of fictional capital
Interest-bearing capital contains within itself an illusory expression; he suggests that money could generate money on its own, without involving human labor. In fact, this may at the same time suggest that the phenomenon is the opposite, in this case that any monetary rent comes from a capital. We say that this illusion is linked to the present value of the regular yield of any sum of money deposited at interest. This does not lead to major problems, beyond knowing how it affects social conscience. Nevertheless, interest-bearing capital, "illusory", becomes when the right to such remuneration, or to such a yield of the interest, or of the debt i ncurred, comes to be represented by a negotiable instrument, with the associatedFpossibility of being sold to third parties; that is to say when capital begins to be marketed which is a debt and which, in reality, does not exist — this is the very basis of , which finance will subsequently make extraordinarily complex15. This sale — or the
her fiction 2
later—generates the entire fictional cycle of interest-bearing capital. A debt can thus be resold many times. In this way, the supreme (but “illusory”) dream of the capitalist class is realized, in appearance: that capital reproduces itself beyond human labor, beyond material wealth and the energy resources that make possible this wealth.
Absurd dimensions of fictitious capital16 thus go hand in hand with the explosive growth of any of its forms or the combination of several of them or all of them at the same time. This causes extreme distortion in the credit system. The absolutely exorbitant sums of fictitious capital which accumulate cease to maintain a relation of proportionality with production, in order to increment themselves more and more, also increasingly dissociating themselves from real wealth, so that the becomes more and more parasitic, that is to say p@tfflsttsoa=l|ytslpeculative.
In the end, generally speaking, a larger fraction of the capital becomes rentier, and a greater part of this same rentier capital becomes fictitious. As a result, speculative fictitious interest-bearing capital will also dominate other forms of the rent system, which will consequently lose their economic importance and social relevance (PIQUERAS, 2017b)17.
Under this name of fictitious capital would be counted not only the financial products resulting from the renegotiation of the external public debt of peripheral countries, caused by the extremely serious external debt crises, but also the shareholder and social capital of companies. But this is counted twice, as real or physical capital, on the one hand, and also, on the other hand, as shareholder capital, in terms of title deeds, and this for a value which is very away from real capital. It can then be expressed by:
1) ordinary shares (whoever owns them has the right to vote and decide in the owners' meetings);
2) or preference shares (which are non-voting but have, in exchange, a priority in the collection of any interest and dividends to be distributed).
Stocks can have a quotation far removed from the real value of the assets of the company, but also convert into negotiable securities which will be bought and sold in order to gain on the variation of the prices of these assets.
Similarly, the rise of internationalized banking capital would also actively participate in the process18. Despite the essentially speculative nature of the movements of these forms empowered by capital, the latter still seek, in the end, their valorization through the extraction of surplus value produced by industrial capital, by exerting continual pressures to increase the rate of exploitation, not only of labor in their country of origin, but also of the work force all over the world, resulting in the recurring booms and busts of the world's major stock markets. Embedded in the cycles of capital - both industrial and in its monetary form, also called financial periods of expansion and retraction have affected a very large part of the world economy and have been —, THE reflected in crises which we have chosen to call "monetary" or "financial" in different countries that were hit.
The contemporary period has also offered the spectacle of the accelerated development of other forms of fictitious capital on international financial markets: those of derivatives. These correspond to securities that are derived from other securities. Let's take an example: a financial institution grants a loan to someone for the purchase of a car, then, on the basis of the invoice, issues a bill of exchange which is sold on the financial market with a maturity equal to the term of the loan. The debt can be resold many times over, increasing the fictitious capital—and with which the means of production or goods in general can be purchased.
Under these conditions, the different components of capital have come to devour each other, that is to say, profits and losses basically represent transfers between individual or particular units of capital by which what the one wins, the other loses. The contracts, established mainly on future interest rates and exchange rates, have reached stratospheric levels, the total result of which can only be calculated at their settlement, after their expiration, on a case-by-case basis. The expression “notional value” was then created in order to represent the global estimates of the stocks of these future contracts.
During the 1990s, the crises that stemmed from the overaccumulation of capital and propelled the various forms of interest-bearing capital (let us remember that if there is no rate of profit, the debts of the interest capital are not recovered), have continued to spread their negative effects in many countries. Peripheral economies in the South were also hit successively and hard hit. After the 1982 moratorium and the renegotiation of its external debt, Mexico was hit again in 1994, with the crisis known as the "Tequila effect", which was characterized by strong speculative movements, capital flight and a risk of insolvency. In 1997, it was the turn of several Asian countries, including Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, the Philippines and Malaysia, which faced similar problems. The scale of capital flight thus forced these economies to devalue their national currencies and provoked internal phenomena of accelerating inflation, at the very time when they were suffering from speculative attacks resulting from the insufficiency of foreign exchange reserves to satisfy the remuneration demanded by international capital. The following year, Russia was to be harassed by similar mechanisms and behaviors, stemming from this speculative logic of capital accumulated in the world financial sphere. Also in 1998, Brazil was also suffering from the same devastating impact, which prompted them to end the Plan Real. In the second half of the year, speculative attacks on its currency siphoned off its domestic reserves to meet demands for the repatriation of interest, profits and dividends due to capital foreigners*, which forced the government to seek new international support, with consequences that are still felt today.
The decade that followed opened with the attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center. of New York on September 11,2001 and ended with the real estate crisis or crisis known as "the subprime in the United States, which broke out with the vertiginous fall of the Dow Jones index from July 2007.
Despite their enormous negative repercussions in political terms, but also in international relations, the attacks of September 11 seem not to have significantly altered the underlying general tendencies of world economic behavior, even taking into account the intensification and the deepening of localized wars in the Middle East after the start of the Gulf War in 1991. With regard to economic performance, the average growth rate of the world economy, which had been 4.40% in , reduced
1.94% in 2001, then recovered to 2.14% in 2002 — with U.S. GDP growth rates themselves recorded at 4.09%, 0.98%, and 1.79% for those three years respectively (The World Bank, 2017).
These negative inflections observed from 2000 were the result of an enormous movement of speculation and the bursting of the "Internet bubble" or the "dot.com companies", causing the collapse of the share prices of these firms on the NASDAQ_(the stock exchange where the securities of high-tech, computer and e-commerce companies are traded). It was a matter of the very continuation of the expression of the necessity of depreciation of the overaccumulated monetary capitals in gigantic proportions. Meanwhile, Argentina, among many other examples in the South, was still feeling the lasting destructive effects of the debt crisis of the 1980s — unrelated
none with the attacks of September 11 — and suffered a succession of falls in the growth rate of its GDP of -0.79% in 2000, -4.41% in 2001 and -10.89% in 2002 (The World Bank, 2017).
Throughout this period, the “overaccumulation” of monetary capital continued to evolve in the global credit system. After the deregulation of international capital flows, followed by market de-compartmentalisation and banking disintermediation, the process of fictitious valuation of interestbearing monetary capital advanced as never before.
On the one hand, the so-called institutional investors, represented by banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, pension funds, especially American ones, but not only, have accumulated gigantic masses of monetary resources in search of valuation all over the world These institutional investors have received the support of major international organizations, such as the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD, through rules and standards of conduct established in the so-called “” ( or corporate governance), stemming essentially from the separation between ownershipoapdrafagavemantef companies.
On the other hand, the leaders hired for management themselves, mainly those of the large transnational corporations, began to receive an additional incentive: the stock options , or stock options of their own company at the market price on the date admission (JAFFRE and MAUDUIT, 2002); options that they could exercise after a period of management in this company. Thus, the major incentive of these managers and senior executives, in
plus millions of dollars collected as wages, was to continually seek the rise in market value or shareholder value, i.e. the market price of their own company's shares on the various stock exchanges. . This set in motion an increasingly rapid and severe spiral of increases in all types of rewards paid to shareholders, from the distribution of retained profits in the classic form of dividends to the payment of fictitious profits or the most more varied20 — which incidentally also contributed to accentuating the fall in NASDAQ* prices, not only for what concerned “dot.com companies” of the new economy, but also for other firms, inextricably linked in the process general reproduction of capital.
To 4. from 2008: the Great Global Gray
2007 was an extremely turbulent year for the credit systems of the main capitalist economies of the world, starting with the United States. The original manifestation of the crisis, in the US market for real estate securities and their financial derivatives, led most analysts to interpret the crisis as “financial”. However, strictly speaking, this crisis is far from having been just that: it was rather a new demonstration of the overaccumulation of capital and the accompanying financial exuberance, which had in fact been unfolding since the 1970s. The latest episode of this crisis has been specifically linked to the contradiction resulting from the conversion of capital from the financial sphere in the civil construction sector in the United States, and in particular in residential real estate.
In all cases, the chain of causalities appeared reversed, as if the policy of the Fed and the functioning of the financial market in the United States had been the main sources which had determined the crisis, and not its real origin. that is, the process of capital accumulation and the insufficient production of surplus value.
The discussion to which the crisis gave rise gave rise to a controversy, but it too was situated at the level of appearances. First, there was controversy over whether or not this crisis would "take the shape of a V": a significant fall in production and employment to be followed by a recovery, with periods of contraction and recovery can be more or less long. Opposed to this thesis, there were those who defended the idea that the crisis was going to "look like a W": either a first moment of fall, then another of recovery, then a new sequence of retraction and finally recovery. Finally, a last interpretation thought that the crisis would have “the shape of an L”: that is to say a fall without foreseeable recovery. And it is in fact this L-shape that we can observe over the past ten years.
The concrete unfolding of the Great Depression spread throughout the world, disseminating successive extremely serious crises in the main countries of the European Union, such as Germany, the United Kingdom, France and Italy, detonating the public debt crises in the “PIGs” (for Portugal, Ireland
and Greece) and when arriving in Japan. The results in Latin America were no different: even the largest countries, such as Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, are still feeling the effects today. Thus, the United States, but also the European Union and all the other economies affected have recorded very marked falls in their growth rates of production per capita: between 2008 and 2016, these economic growth rates were very close zero on average.
It should nevertheless be underlined that in 2008, countries such as China and India did not suffer a significant impact from the crisis — at least initially. But the effects
of the latter were not long in affecting them too, and spread over several years.
Despite everything, over the period 2008-2016, China had an average annual growth rate of its GDP of pATSapMd India of 5.72%.
A. THE SUBPRIME CRISIS
AND THE GREAT FINANCIAL CRISIS
The initial manifestation of the crisis arose in the first months of 200721, but accelerated under the impact of the collapse of New Century Financial (NIELSEN, 2007), with the sharp fall in its stock price, its shares passing between December 2004 and March 2007 from US$64.00 to just 10 cents. This establishment, founded in 1995 and specializing in mortgage loans, had climbed to the top positions in this sector and, alongside the Countrywide Financial Corporation, it was in the lead for the granting of subprime loans ( ) 22 subprime
in the US market, with a cumulative amount of loans granted of 56.10 billion dollars of mortgages up to 2005. The problems began to appear during the first quarter of 2006, in connection with the interruption of the rise in housing prices, which had been very rapid. New Century Financial, however, continued its distributions of risky loans on the assumption that borrowers would subprime, continue to be able to refinance their mortgages at variable interest rates, and that Wall Street would also be able to easily recycle the financial derivatives created from these loans. At the end of 2006, the whole system began to crumble with the exhaustion of processes for recycling contracts through derivative products23. On March 12, 2007, shares of New Century Financial fell 90%, suffering a loss in market value of $1.5 billion—the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) even suspended trading. , which are created by means of very complex financial instruments, are not restricted to the US mortgage market, but extend
Drifts subprime to all the main countries of the center of the capitalist world system. Indeed, the unfolding global crisis was met with an aftershock through another, fast-moving event: the first UK bank run since 1866 (2007). For three days, depositors of Northern Rock Bank, the nation's fifth-largest mortgage lender, lined up outside its branches in panic. This bank, like the financial market institutions of theTJWitiSRStiitSs1* had captured resources through savings deposits and various loans, and had formed mortgage loans by packaging them in derivative products, CDOs or Bonds. asset-backed) and selling them on international financial markets. In other words, and in a certain way, these banking establishments used short-term resources to apply them over the long term.
(<Collaterized Debt Obligations term, dispersing them throughout the system.
This device collapsed when the "investors" began to flee such titles. The bank rush only stopped after the announcement by the British government and the Bank deposits. Following was they themselves who would guarantee a few unsuccessful ultimately from England that it attempts to sell, Northern Rock was state-owned in 2008. Another example of the socialization of losses...
The whole unfolding of this crisis concerned many other institutions and other countries. In August 2007, BNP-Paribas, the leading French bank, decided to freeze the operations of its hedge funds (hedge funds) because of their negative impacts on the international real estate
derivatives market, particularly for those originating from the United States. But the outcome of this process, generally seen as the start of the financial crisis, came with the backing of creditors from Lehman Brothers, the fourth largest investment bank in the United States, on September 15, 2008, after the takeover Merrill Lynch, the largest broker in the world, with more than 15,000 brokers and 2.2 trillion in assets, by the Bank of America, for an amount of some 50 billion dollars24.
B. DERIVATIVE PRODUCTS:
A VULTURE CAPITAL PAR EXCELLENCE
The policy followed by the Fed at the end of the crisis of the early 2000s, known as the "dot.com companies" crisis, was to decide to drastically reduce the interest rate on the interbank market, and more precisely to lower it , on average, from 6.24% in 2000 to 1.82% in December 2001, then to keep it below the 2% mark until November 2004. From then on, this rate was to be gradually increased until to exceed 5% by mid-200525. According to data provided by the largest insurer of the mortgage market, Freddie Mac26, the average domestic interest rate for 30-year mortgages was also reduced. As for the average weekly values, this rate rose from 8.05% in 2000, to 5.94% in 2003, 5.95% in 2004 and 5.87% in 2005, before starting to increase again at from 2006, up 6.46% in 2007h As a result, the real estate market, which was already expanding, with rising house prices, received an additional boost due to transfers to this market from monetary capital from other spheres of the financial market in crisis.
In its effort to obtain ever higher profits, the banking network, with the support and the resources of large banks, property market insurance companies and investors of all kinds in very many countries, has turned to the poorest families, without a regular source of income and even for some with a history of unfavorable payments. They were offered loans at relatively low interest rates, but with a period of two years for the revision of the contractual conditions, that is to say in fact of the interest rate itself. Thus, while deposit rates were very low, payment charges for
24 This story being told in films, books and articles, we will not detail it. For example : Capitalism:
a history of love
(2009) , BondUliimos Dias Lehman Brothers (2009), Trabalho Interno
(2010) , Wall Street- O Dinheiro Nunca Dorme (2010), Margin Call -
O Dia Antes d° film (2011), Grande Demais para Quebrar (2011) or (20IG)eat Aposta
25 Here we use the effective federal funds interest rate, which commercial banks, savings and loan institutions, credit unions and credit unions use for interbank transactions. See: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FEDFUNDS .
mortgage interest and principal remained at relatively bearable levels for these families. In addition, the recovery of the economy, after the difficult beginning of the 2000s, had generated jobs and income for this category of workers, which enabled them to meet their debt maturities. During this period, the expansion of the economy, based on the dynamism of the real estate market, produced additional surplus value which was partly appropriated by interest-bearing monetary capital.
The differential between deposit and lending interest rates was reaching levels that stimulated the distribution among the various components of the credit system, from the lender at one end of the market to the large banks and investors at the other. institutions, both within the United States and in international financial markets. The distribution mechanism for these contracts has changed from these initial formats to the sale of these same contracts on the credit market. However, they were ultimately 'bundled' together with other contracts to form what are known as CDO-type real estate financial derivatives, through which the respective performance and risk were distributed between different levels of the system.
The mechanism that characterized this process was worked out by means of very complex diagrams in which the differential between the interest rate depositing resources and the interest rate levied on debtors was shared among the various participants in the credit system. Added to this, it was claimed that the intervention of the major rating and risk control agencies and the supposed way of overcoming the latter through the use of very complex and difficult to understand mathematical models, such as that of Black and Scholes by example, guaranteed the holding and sustainability of the market, and thus allowed the reproduction of the system.
These agencies, each with its own criteria, evaluated these “packages”, called derivatives of real estate contracts, and assigned them ratings according to their composition.
Loan contracts for families presenting risks, known as subprime , were mixed,
combined in varying proportions, with the contracts of households with regular sources of income and a history of satisfactory payments, but also with various other types of debt, such as those related to credit cards or university credits. Even though these "packages" contained securities sometimes amounting to 50% of their combination, the three main csadiip riarbieng agencies, namely Standard 8c Poors, Fitch and Moody's, according to their respective scales, granted them the best ( AAA), that is to say, they judged them to be virtually risk-free. ranking
The collapse of the system began with the change in the interest rate policy of the Fed. On the one hand, the rise in the base interest rate began to discourage economic growth, which caused a reduction in the supply of employment. On the other hand, the renegotiation of contracts involving sharp increases in interest rates for mortgage loans, especially for low-income households, triggered a process of gloom. The reduction in the rate of GDP growth, combined with the contraction in employment, affected more acutely the families affected by the high-risk contracts. A vicious circle then set in, in which the tendency for unemployment to worsen led to a fall in wages and other incomes, while accentuating the insolvency of these families.
As a result, the banks that had formed a pyramid of highly risky real estate contracts subprime , found themselves without resources to remunerate the derivatives.
initial, affecting all CDOs. The consequence was then a frantic race to get rid of these securities by selling them hastily on the stock markets, resulting in a drop in their prices, which fell well below their nominal values, thus contaminating all derivatives. , including the contract (or solvent) segment, regardless of their composition. Similarly, CDS (settee default hedges), which were backed by CDOs, also suffered a violent devaluation in just (Credit Default Swap s Or a few months. The mechanism worked as follows: as agents transacting at one end of the market began to default, they ran out of money to pay what they owed to other institutional investors, banks and to everything else. At the same time, the institutions involved in this scheme remained subject to an imperative of short-term profitability. In the gloom, the insolvency of low-income families, which had been one of the main sources of profits, began to generate losses for banks28 and other players in the credit system. These damages, which remained limited but significant, especially for small banking establishments, were multiplied by the grouping of contracts into "packages" in derivative products, and amplified to ever greater proportions for large institutions. . Expected earnings and dividends then fell precipitously, causing the market prices of the shares of major financial institutions, such as New Century Financial, Countrywide Financial Corporation, and all other participants in the credit system, to crash. that we mentioned. The consequence of this sequence was the bankruptcy of many creditors, and their purchase by the most powerful institutions, this with the support of the Fed, in the case of the United States.
vs. THE DOMINO EFFECT OF THE GREAT CRISIS
The effects of this crisis manifested themselves, from the year 2009, by a violent fall in GDP growth rates in the main capitalist economies of the world system. The average growth rate of the world economy, which was still 4.26% in 2007, thus fell to -1.74% in 2009. In the United States, these rates were respectively 1.78% and -2 .78%. The European Union's performance was worse, with GDP growth rates falling from 3.09% to -4.38% over the period.
In 2009, Japan's GDP fell by -5.42%. For Russia, the loss of growth reached -7.82%. The declines observed that same year for the major European economies, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and Italy, were respectively -5.62%, -2.94%, -4.33% and -5.48%. In Latin America, the situation was hardly different; the three largest economies on the continent posting negative results of -0.13% in Brazil, -4.70% in Mexico and -5.92% in Argentina (The World Bank, 2017).
Moreover, the countries least integrated into the international credit system, that is to say in less developed countries, or those which had relatively effective controls, such as China and India, recorded surprising dynamism. In 2009, these last two economies had GDP growth rates of 9.40% and 8.48% respectively. The economies of East Asia and the Pacific (except those with the highest incomes) experienced growth of 7.66% in 2009 and even 9.77% in 2010. The least developed countries , according to the classification developed by the United Nations, grew at rates of 4.95% and 5.99% during these two years, and the countries of sub-Saharan Africa by 2.87% and 5.43%
(The World Bank, 2017). Also, the spread of the harmful impacts of this crisis has not taken place in a homogeneous way; and this, taking into account the very characteristics of the capitalist world system, including regions more or less integrated into the credit system of northern imperialism.
In Europe, and as the collapse of US financial institutions hit just as much as the large European establishments (with losses measured in the billions recorded by their shareholder values and consequent damage to investors and all those who had moved their savings or excess wealth into monetary form), the sequence of the crisis unfolded. then concentrated hard on the public debts, called "sovereign", of certain countries, with for emblematic cases Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain, which were very elegantly baptized the "pigs", or “PIGS” (for Portugal, Ireland,
GreeceAnd Spain), a country to which Italy later joined to form what has been called, provocatively and insultingly, the group of “PNGS” (GONTIJO and de OLIVEIRA, 2012).
The mechanism of deregulated, deregulated and decompartmentalised credit systems allows a continuous transfer of the investments of interest-bearing capital between the different financial markets, in this case: commercial stock exchanges, securities markets, such as stocks and bonds , but also the various places where the The latter is future , as well as Xopen
market. characterized by the fact that it is the market used for the operations of central banks, and on which the main assets traded are public debt securities.
Thus, as the collapse of the major credit institutions, whether in the United States or in Europe, provoked a movement of devaluation of the capital committed in the form of derivative products with institutional risks, in subprime , all these investors, and in particular the investors an attempt to escape from a one way or another, transferred their resources, already devalued, to the public securities markets.
The “PIIGS” crisis, in addition to being a consequence of the effects produced by the global crisis, was triggered by a specific regulation of the credit system of the euro zone. All the participating countries of this common monetary zone have renounced all sovereignty over their monetary policy, as stipulated in the European Constitution, i.e. they have abandoned any decision on the process of primary creation of the currency. national; and even though the single currency is created by the European Central Bank, so far it has been determined by the private interests of the big commercial banks. These countries have therefore accepted that the monetization of their economies be controlled by private banks, and more specifically by the most important banking establishments in the credit system29.
credit system that determine the interest rate that the treasuries of different countries must pay to provide a very important part of the monetization of national economies and credit systems.
1 The separation between work » And " money »
The preparation of the mother of all bubbles?
In 2007-2008, the bursting of the huge fictitious capital bubble that had swelled since the 1980s caused a veritable banking and financial cataclysm. From then on, the hole that was created in the banking system was continuously filled by the issuance of money without counterpart. As soon as Ben Bernanke assumed the presidency of the Federal Reserve of the United States (Fed), beginning in February 2006A it was decided that it was legal to be able to solve a problem by creating billions out of nothing. “, thanks to a simple issue of money by the Central Bank without any basis in the real economy, and this in order to buy with this money the greatest possible quantity of assets. Nothing seemed easier then for the Central Banks: each time the stock market went down, the solution was to create new money, to buy and buy ever more securities of the stock index, and the problem was solved in this way, since the stock market stopped its fall and rebounded quickly thanks to the support of the Central Banks.
This massive silver supply, generated ni-hilo, ex was mainly achieved through
cross-debt between banks 3,",,r' as well as through the invention of money by
an ever-increasing number of Central Banks — what was elegantly called “quantitative easing” (for “”). Thus, the United States Fed came to create $50 billion out of nothinquiavSiryilroeniaswgile the European Central Bank invented, out of nothing, $60 billion. monthly, and this until December 2017. In total, since the year 2008, the United States, the European Union, Japan and Great Britain, have raised an amount of money greater than 10 trillion dollars, more than 10 times the GDP of Spain, and more than all the profits recorded by the first 500 companies on the list drawn up by S&P 32 33 - a sum to
Appointed by George W. Bush in 2006 and confirmed by Barack Obama in 2009, he launched an aggressive stimulus policy through a program that amounted to several trillions of US dollars in securities purchases, while lowering base interest rates to between 0% and 0.25% - where they have remained for most of the time since 2009.
31 When a commercial bank grants a loan, for example to an individual who takes out a mortgage, it registers on the account of this individual a deposit of “assets” of an amount equivalent to that of the mortgage. From this record, the bank created a new currency, that is, debt works like money, which is why banks are much more interested in us being indebted to them without the use of real money accounts, as these involve accounting as the bank's ' debt', as its own ' liability' - in reality, our accounts are not really ' at the bank', but are only indicative as listings. Nevertheless, banks can fictitiously multiply their amounts. Currently, in many countries, the cash ratio (share of reserves that cannot be lent) is 33%, which means that out of 2 euros that we deposit in the bank, the latter can lend 98 euros, as if it were real money. The issue is compounded when debts are securitized as if they were real assets, and find themselves bought back time and time again at higher and higher prices, in an insane
spiral of “fictions”. As soon as the mortgages or the debts incurred are no longer paid, all the money that has been invented from them is finally seen as pure fiction; but even if the original debt is eventually repaid, a colossal mass of fictitious money has already formed around it. "
In reality, during the years of crisis are rid that followed the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, the Central banks issuing money to of all their inhibitions. They flooded the economy devoid of substance and directly from received in exchange devalued certificates as “collateral”; they buy government debt securitieswithout more to take the t rouble to make a detour via the banking system andhe in
private investors, thus passing the last embankment before the rotten credits worth several trillions of dollars of monetary units ( KURZ, 2015, p. 15). And as a result of this rise in the price of devoid of substance, but getting bigger and bigger, there was a boom in civil construction - which the players in the market took for real.
to which should also be added the currency printed on its side by the Central Bank of China.
Similarly, when high interest rates inhibited lending and economic growth, the solution was to create a few trillions of "new" money out of thin air and buy enough sovereigns to reduce interest rates to zero — and even below zero, until they have negative rates. The same was true when demand for real estate fell due to high prices; the solution then was to create unrequited money, which, in the hands of local government officials, was used to buy the apartments in the empty buildings. And again, if a decrease in demand leads to deflation, one possible solution will be to issue a lot of money, billions of dollars in the form of government securities; money with which mega armament projects will be financed, the possible ripple effect of which on the real domestic economy will only be guaranteed (at least partially) insofar as substantial sales are recorded with customers in the stranger.
This mechanism for solving economic problems, by creating billions of money out of nowhere again and the maintenance of interest rates close to zero, seemed to work without limits, like a perpetual motion machine, insofar as the interest payments themselves can be financed with fictitious money, issued without any consideration. Moreover, the Federal Reserve even buys Treasury bonds (without any real basis) and, thanks to the income that this "money from nowhere" generates, thus bringing money to the Treasury in order to reissue more securities, thus setting in motion a perpetual motion money creation machine. This policy of creating billions out of thin air to buy billions of assets has caused a "mother bubble" to inflate in the various categories of assets, bonds and money backed or purchased by Central Banks and their representatives, without any counterpart in
value real.
The entire global asset market—stocks, bonds, bonds, real estate, and “commodities”— essentially constitutes a typical “Ponzi pyramid” scheme in which the rapid expansion of credit given that these serve as (fictitious capital)propels asset prices upwards and, being
collateral for additional debts, profit rates
(fictionahigher make it possible to initiate a new cycle of hyper-credit expansion.
This pushes asset valuations even higher, creating the scenario of a further credit boom from a presumed skyrocketing(mcceasfflfiiiathe “value” of the collateral backing the new debt. Central Banks promoted this pyramid scheme by buying bonds and stocks with currencies created out of nowhere and, through this, fostered a worsening of economic and social inequalities as never seen before in history. of capitalism (DIERCKXSENS and FORMENTO, 2017).
This is another giant step towards the separation between "work" and "money", the detachment of the latter from the former, because, in these precise circumstances, money desubstantiated, devoid of any foundation, no longer even passing through the ordinary financial markets; rather, social reproduction in the form of commodities is directly fueled by volumes of money created out of thin air, on the basis of mere decisions by the state.
Obviously, the unbridled need for credit could not allow money to retain the attitude shape it had hitherto adopted. Its convertibility into any real value had to return to
earth, as must also do, consequently, the real substance-value of monetary systems.
After the loss of convertibility into gold, the preservation of value by means of silver rests only on convention and subjective acceptance, and no longer on an objective basis.
2. Therede-substantialization of money
This means that capitalist society is still and increasingly dominated by the logic of value, and less determined by use value. The commodity itself is always more
value and each time less use value. There is a parallel process of dematerialization of wealth. Its use value—its materiality—thus loses its relevance, insofar as it passes from the simple form of value to the total and general form.
The same phenomenon that occurs with wealth happens with money: it has a materiality, but becomes more and more dematerialized. We can say that the development of the form of the value is a process of gradual dematerialization of the equivalent, until the value manages to reach its purest and most abstract representation. To put it with CORAZZA (1998), it is a process of “liberation from materiality” (CARCANHOLO, 1993) h
What conclusion can we draw from all this? The gold itself, though it may go on to be able, in the last instance, to fulfill the functions of an international means of payment, is no longer necessary as a measure of values, at least under the “normal” operating conditions of the capitalist economy. With the development of value, of capital and of capitalist society, we even observe, on the contrary, a gradual process of dematerialization of the equivalent and, ultimately, of money . In reality, this dematerialization is the reverse of the rise and domination of parasitic speculative capital.
34 Moreover, Corazza formulates in a clear and synthetic way the following question: “The success of the forms of manifestation of the value of commodities always goes in the direction of a liberation from materiality, towards forms that are more and more independent, autonomous and freed from materiality, which imprison immaterial value, like a straitjacket, a limit, a barrier to the social, abstract and expansive nature of value. In many passages, Marx emphasizes this aspect” (CORAZZA, 1998). The consequences of all this i n social terms, as well as those on the reproduction of capital itself, are examined in PIQUERAS (2018).
The current systemic crisis of capitalism forces us to redefine global geopolitics, the form of the state, and therefore also that of dominant capital. Today, the geopolitical context is complicated by multiple contradictions, and very many possible alliances. The future of the world will depend to a large extent on the correlation of the forces existing between the different fractions of capital and, at the same time, on the social struggles which will undoubtedly arise
in this battle which obviously accentuates the danger of Total War.
1. The conservative US financial faction
If the policy conducted by “globalist” capitalists, personified in globalized finance capital35, translates the structural dismantling of national sovereignty, not only of dependent social formations, but also and specifically of those at the center, there now exists in the United States a powerful neo-conservative financial bloc — the “Continentalists”
—, led by the Tea Party in particular, which resolutely opposes it. These neo fractions conservatives seek to perpetuate the old imperialism of central hegemony and, for this, promote a strategy of unilateral unipolarism, supported by the Pentagon and the military-industrial complex. The companies in this complex are the major arms suppliers, Lockheed, Boeing, General Dynamics, Northrop, and others.
This power bloc includes within it the financial faction led by JP Morgan Chase, which was the first commercial bank in the United States, and by the Bank of America, the second.
Next is Goldman Sachs, one of the largest investment banking and securities groups in the world. This financial capital depends on the survival of the dollar, as the international currency of reference, defended thanks to the support of its military-industrial complex.
Its project is to initiate another "American century" and to maintain the unipolarity of its world, composed of other continental power blocs, but still subordinate to it, as is the case of the pre-European Union. Brexit, including the UK, and Japan, controlling Southeast Asia.
To this financial capital also belong the great transnational corporations of the empire. Rockefeller. The link between the military-industrial complex and JR Morgan Chase (and the Rockefeller dynasty)1 was very direct. Just as the Globalists — with the Rothschild dynasty — attempt to run NATO as their military arm, the Rockefellers have done the same with the Pentagon. JP Morgan Chase also controls Esso and Hulliburton. The Rockefeller oil empire is also expressed through oil companies such as Exxon Mobil,
Chevron Texaco, BP Amoco and Marathon Oil, which have recently been very oriented towards energy self-sufficiency through the extraction of shale gas in United States and their Canadian and Mexican neighbors in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The Rockefellers still control the aircraft manufacturer Boeing, the airlines United Airlines, Delta and Northwest Airlines and, among other transnationals too, huge pharmaceutical companies. In its political expression, the Rockefeller dynasty has instead been better represented by the Republicans.
By linking their investments much more to national and continental territories (especially
35 In accordance with the definition given by HILFERDING (1980), later taken up by Lenin, finance capital is monopoly industrial capital that has merged with monopoly banking capital. This conception is not found in Marx, who refers, among the functional forms of capital, to the expressiorirtte^test-beari^lviE^hta'v.e used until now. However, in the following pages, we will take the liberty of speaking of as it also corresponds to a power bloc, linked aoi (that giaptball autonomization of interest-bearing capital and to the powerful strategies it engenders.
within the framework of NAFTA), these neo-conservative forces need to defend national sovereignty at all costs, in the face of the policies of globalized finance capital which tend to weaken it. They can in no way accept that the United States loses its power as a central country and hegemonic power over the capitalist world system. During the era of globalization, which began around 1979-1982, the reality of this neo-conservative finance capital consisted of a loss of ground and power at the economic, political, cultural and ideological levels in the face of its adversaries, the Globalists. For this reason, this politico-strategic project is on the defensive and only holds up by clinging more and more to the nation-state and the region-state, through the deepening of controls over geographical areas. Its project is to contain the advance of global finance capital, as a new dominant form currently on the offensive and encroaching on the sovereignty of the United States itself.
This large unipolar conservative capitalist fraction retains its power through gigantic investments made in the military-industrial complex. Its expenditures concern not only the
technological development of military industries, but increasingly also the installation and maintenance of a network of very numerous and costly military bases in the
whole world1, what a constant argument at NATO. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, these military expenditures have been carried out mainly from growing debts in United States dollars. This is done concretely by issuing Treasury bonds, that is to say by resorting to a certain form of fictitious capital. As long as these securities can be sold abroad, the transfer of this "fictitious capital" to third countries can be ensured.
From the early 1970s, countries importing hydrocarbons were forced to buy oil denominated in US dollars. Under these conditions, as long as these countries continue to buy oil at prices that remain high, the demand for dollars will itself remain high. We then understand that financial capital supported by the national or continentalised, unipolar and unilateral State, tried to maintain its control of the petrodollar, even if this implied the outbreak of wars. In fact, it is mainly in the Middle East that these wars have taken place, i.e. in the region where the majority of oil transactions expressed in dollars are concentrated and where the "emerging" economies are present, which are vying for supremacy over these resources. . At present, the petrodollar is subject to competition resulting from the alliance between
Russia
— the world's largest producer of fossil energy — and China — the world's largest consumer of this same energy —; countries that already buy and sell oil and gas outside the dollar's sphere of influence. This non-dollar circuit has also been integrated by Iran, which has stopped selling its oil in the currency of the United States. While the media agitates the nuclear threat that Iran would still represent, the reality is that this country was sanctioned for having sold hydrocarbons without denominating it in US dollars.
In 2018, the United States imposed new sanctions on Iran with the intention of driving up the value of the dollar and keeping the price of oil high. Because of Iran's economic and military power, and the weight of its international support, what happened with Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Muammar Gaddafi's Libya has not been repeated. But the fact is that the current sanctions have produced the opposite effect to that intended by their initiators, since since then Iran has sold more oil eastward, to Asia, to denominating these transactions in Chinese yuan, and much less to the “West” in US dollars. Accompanying Russia, China, and Iran, more and more social formations in Eurasia — and even in Africa — have stopped performing
their trade in oil and gas in dollars.
With the recent introduction and accelerated acceptance of petro-yuan-gold, the prevailing "faith" so far in the petrodollar has been contested. Countries holding large quantities of United States Treasury bonds and recording a large trade surplus vis-a-vis the United States, as is particularly the case with China, have thus acquired great power over a possible manipulation of the dollar rate, because they are able to carry out more or less massive sales of these securities issued by the United States. China no longer only requires the purchase and sale in petro-yuans for hydrocarbons, but also for the trade of raw materials in general, and especially for metals.
Andre Gunder Frank (2005) vigorously supported the idea that in the event of the destabilization of one of the two pillars of the hegemonic power of the United States - in this case, the dollar, as international referent cm-rency —, the other pillar—namely, its military support—is
would suddenly be shaken, because the latter itself depends on their debt capacity. When Treasury bonds cease to be in demand, the ability of the United States to finance the military-industrial complex will collapse, revealing its unproductive and sterile character, or In other words, the United States fictitious-will not will be better able to sustain their huge military expenditures and, above all, the cost of maintaining so many overseas military bases. Their gigantic economic, political and military power, which allowed them to dominate the world in a unilateral and unipolar way, will therefore be called into question.
2. The globalized Anglo-American financial faction Nevertheless, a certain number of transnational firms, in particular those positioned in the "new economy", do not have the slightest interest in investing in their country of origin alone, as the industrial sectors linked to the military-industrial complex and dependent on state funding and orders placed by the state. The reason lies in the fact that it is the States of the economies at the center of the capitalist world system who decide and who carry out military war operations, even though the "externalisation" and the "tertiarisation" of the latter tend to develop. through armed conflicts subcontracted by mercenary private entrepreneurs h Transnational firms generally function better without the slightest commitment attaching them to
national politico-economic borders, and even less to the citizens of the countries in which they operate ( DIERCKXSENS , 1998). Among them are the main communication platforms, which are no longer just “media”, but rather essentially digital social networks: WhatsApp, Facebook,
Instagram, Google, etc., in addition to CNN, BBC, Deutsche Welle, Reuters News, Associated Press, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNBC and other television stations and newspapers around the world which already produce and circulate massively in digital format, using knowledge technologies. It is not surprising in such a context that these intertwined and globalized investments control what is called the “Fourth Estate”. These entities are the promoters and defenders of globalization.
In the field of production, we also find companies like Apple,
Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon.com, Netflix, Uber, etc. This capital is embedded in powerful investment banks with greater mobility across borders, since they are not governed by international laws—unlike commercial banking institutions, which are. We can mention here banks such as: City Group, the largest investment bank in the world (until the fall of Lehman Brothers), headquartered in New York; HSBC, the world's second largest investment bank, based as for her in London; Lloyd's, the main player in the insurance and reinsurance market, which is also in London; or Barclays, the world's fourth largest investment bank, also headquartered in London. It should be remembered that the Rothschild dynasty partially controls the Bank of Central Banks, based in Basel in Switzerland and, thanks to it, manages to ensure domination over a globalized financial network. However, not having control over the Pentagon, this financial capital finds it difficult to get its hands on, among others, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as on NATO, which nevertheless would like to transform into a sort of global armed arm.
This new configuration of capital can and must deny the nation-state - starting with that of world hegemony—which thus becomes a means of organizing and producing a State withoutppwgrapHiiiiBal reference or territorial ties. But this is a global network-state of financial cities, the center of which is located in Wall Street and the City of London, with branches in Hong Kong, Frankfurt, Paris, Sao Paulo, Mumbai, etc. .
(FORMENTO and MERINO, 2011).
The increase in loans at zero interest rates for financial banks, granted by the Federal Reserve of the United States, the European Central Bank, the Bank of England and other Central Banks, allows global finance capital to invest indirectly through its transnational firms operating in the markets of emerging countries, especially in China . By connecting this same capital to productive investments (until 2008...), the latter is therefore transformed into real global capital. This process of financing outsourcing by debt thus creates fictitious capital, which leads to its conversion into globalized productive capital (“type 1” fictitious capital). Moreover, and in addition, the fictitious capital is still multiplying by itself, following a chain of money issues without any counterpart, so that the companies are able to buy their own shares, so that their capital self-reproduces (“type 2” fictitious capital).
3. New Emerging Social Formations
Until recently, grouped into "BRICS", China, Russia, India, Brazil and South Africa were qualified as "emerging" economies due to the fact that they constitute territories for the relocation of capital to global interests. Such a movement mainly began in 1995. The BRICS phenomenon initially represented a relationship of strategic rapprochement subordinated to the financial interests of globalist transnationals. But, in a second phase, it was China, realizing that it was not accepted as a true partner within IMF bodies, despite its increasingly remarkable weight in the real world economy, which began to seek its own geopolitical space (Dierckxsens and Formento, 2016).
It should be clear that China is not just any emerging country, as we will soon see. In 2010, the IMF had initially suggested the inclusion of the Chinese yuan in the composition of its basket of international reserve currencies, then reiterated this proposal in 2014. However, under pressure from the United States, and in particular from the Globalists, this integration of the yuan into the framework of the IMF was to be postponed several times.
The introduction of the Chinese currency was finally accepted on September 30, 2016. This is the first firm and concrete step for it to be considered as an international reserve currency in its own right.
We can characterize China and all the other BRICS countries as part of a non-financial strategic project, specific to hitherto peripheral formations, which took advantage of the politico-economic war between "Globalists" and " Continentalists” in the United States
United. This conflict has indeed opened room for maneuver for the IMF to align itself with an autonomous project in confrontation with the unipolar financial power bloc - considering for the occasion both the Globalists and the Continentalists in one piece. The "emerging dependent whole" of the BRICS was already manifesting itself as a new polycentric unit of production and consumption of social wealth, like Heu where productive labor and real capital prevailed, and contrasting sharply with the two components of the unipolar financial bloc, which essentially feed on fictitious capital.
The presence of Russia, its military agreement with China and other Asian countries, conferred a greater geopolitical deterrent force to the project of the enlarged BRICS group in the face of unipolar aims. This strategic project of global scope has to its credit a Development Bank, as well as an Emergency Reserve Fund, and is moving in the direction of its own International Transfer System, to mention here only the instruments the most significant. It can also count on an Asian Investment Bank
and Infrastructure (AIIB), fundamental to successfully achieving this flagship ambition and its economic-strategic plan for the New Silk Road, which aims to stimulate productive and commercial development on a global scale ( DIERCKXSENS and FORMENTO , 2018).
4. The European Union a "state-continent »in the heart of all forces
The European Union constitutes in this environment a regional block of central power, a “State-Continent” in the weak sense, today made up of 28 countries. Coming out of the Cold War, European capital no longer needed to migrate to other countries in search of cheap labor or outlets for its products. The big German financial capitalists, and those of Deutsche Bank in the first line, with also those of France in second position (BNP-Paribas, Credit Agricole...), broke away from their national base and transformed into financial capital of the European Union, in order to achieve better hegemony of this continental bloc.
The very integration of Eastern and Southern Europe into the European Union did not require that European capital spreads over the world in the same way that unipolar American finance capital did36.
The immigration of a lot of cheap labor force, from outside Europe, was also not essential since the citizens of these countries of the South and especially of the East (often highly qualified) had the freedom of movement towards the central core of the Union. Nor was it necessary for the interest-bearing capital of the European continent to seek new markets beyond European borders, given that its large companies concentrated in the North had succeeded in "conquering" the outlets of Europe from East and South to the detriment of smaller local businesses — decisively affecting employment in these economies. European integration allowed German capital to remain linked to the real economy, with a relatively favorable associated rate of profit. The consequence has been that fixed capital in the countries of the European Union — and not only in Germany — has not aged excessively since the 1970s, contrary to what happened in the United States and Japan ( GORZIG , 2007).
The European Union is a supra-state construction intended to maintain relations of imbalance between its participants, a system of deficits and surpluses designed to transfer collective wealth from certain states - the most numerous - to others - by first and foremost Germany and its hinterland or “Central European” — and this especially through the mechanism of currency. In this, it constitutes the best example of
the institutionalization of neoliberalism on a regional scale37. At present, the Union is experiencing
36 From 1950, US expansionism was deployed to confront (and defeat) the Soviet Union, first by integrating in a subordinate position both the European Economic Community and Japan, with its economic community
in the South - East Asian. Subsequently, between 1973 and 1991, it embarked on an even broader expansion, attempting to create a kind of world state, of multilateral global unipolarism, denying all sovereignty or national citizenship, including to the States States even, insofar as it then confronted the forces of continental unipolarism in this country.
37 The weighty reasons of the current conjuncture closing institutional politics are mainly two in number: the
myriad of 1)The degenerative capitalism in which we find ourselves has constitutionalized, that is to say armoured, the
neoliberal socio-economic and political apparatuses by which its power over the whole social metabolism is founded and regenerated. 2) This shielding goes hand in hand with a systematic weakening of the capacities for
social regulation expressed through the state. This means that the mechanisms of exploitation and command of capital are transnationalized, and sometimes inserted into the state-region (of which the most advanced example is the European Union), while the operational possibilities of the different labor forces remain attached to the local level Thus there first occurred a de-substantialisation of the institutions of popular representation, creating or giving in return more and more power to supranational entities outside any kind of democratic election
(Central banks, European Commission, G-20, IMF, WTO, Davos Forum, etc.). Then, the laws of the State are subordinated to supra-State legal norms which liquidate its sovereignty - even its power to dispose of a policy very serious tensions, which come from its internal components — because of the euro, but also from the lack of fiscal and financial compensation mechanisms, breaking up countries with deficits, including France itself38. And at the same time, it must face a delicate redefinition of its relations with the United States - in connection with the new sanctions against Iran imposed by Washington, as well as with the measures recently taken by the latter to the against China and Russia — which could be at the origin of possible economic, financial and monetary wars (or crises), potentially damaging for European interests, visibly despised by the United States.
Europe is losing ground and importance in the world, at an accelerating rate, but still remains a key player in planetary power relations. For now, US plans have been to confront Russia, while striving for Europe to once again be a global battleground, but away from America's shores. The states without sovereignty that make up the European Union, with the exception of Germany, see themselves completely subject to the last desired of tNs
countries regarding its future. Within Europe, its capitalist classes find themselves torn between their commitments in matters of security (both militarily and economically, in particular with regard to investments), around the unipolar Anglo-Saxon axis, and their interests which make them inclined to strengthen ties with the emerging Asian world.
NATO's military deployment in Eastern Europe (now emphasizing Poland) and the economic war being waged against Russia, aim to dissuade the German capitalist class from choosing to orient itself more towards the emerging Asian world. And the fact is that the consequential economic damage suffered by the European Union as a whole is already visible. The latter will not emerge from its economic and political crisis, not to mention the energy impasses in which it is engaged, as long as it has not established good relations with Russia; a country that Europe should see as being European too and able to contribute to its energy supply and military security, rather than as a threat. And all the more so since, according to some observers (including MARTYANOV , 2018), Moscow even seems to currently have military superiority over NATO, which, in the event of a conflict, would leave Europe defenceless. This is an additional reason why Europe really has no other choice in the short term than to come to an agreement with Russia. Therefore, the "ally"
economy and, in the case of the states of the European Union, a sovereign currency — and which submit themselves to the financial markets (and their risk rating agencies), which are not exactly democratically elected , so that whatever is voted must constitutions themselves are modified in such a way that any ultimately obey dictates coming from outside. Finally, the attempt to end the lack of sovereignty becomes "unconstitutional", at the same time as measures begin to be taken aimed at directly expelling minority parties in the electoral race (through the requirement of a large amount of prior support in order to stand for election, for example). And if all this failed, then there would be the threat of chaos - organized by the famous "strikes" or capital flight - which would occur in the event that no "acceptable" option for the markets appeared, and again the pressure of repeated elections, political and economic blackmail... In this way, we manage to transcend the framework of the relative democratization of the State (specific to "Keynesian capitalism") to which social struggles had historically led, in order to to limit politics to the exercise of supra-state institutions over which these same struggles have not hitherto taken hold. The transnationalization of capital also weakens the bargaining power of the workforce in all areas (economic, social and political). This is why current degenerative capitalism does not need to formally abolish liberal democracy: it has already emptied it of all effective content; he has already succeeded in
Convenient handling of
politics.
38 From the point of view of capital, only a combination of the euro with national currencies could save the European project. There would be the internal currencies of each State, only convertible into euros, the parity of each of which could be adjusted regularly against the euro, especially when intra-zone trade deficits and surpluses became too great. The euro would then continue as the currency for international trade within the euro zone (GEAB, 2017).
American, which impoverishes Europe and makes it run new risks, could begin to prove, in the eyes of the European populations themselves, as an increasingly dangerous "friend". Will all this lead to dusting off the old common European defense project, freed from US tutelage?
Some signs of change can be seen today, even in some of the more subaltern countries (like Italy). It is therefore on Europe that it depends that the ascent of Asia becomes, in reality, that of
Eurasia.
For now, Germany, France and Russia are still trying to defuse the conflicts that the Globalists have created, in conjunction with their armed arm of NATO — and the use of additional local armies at their disposal. The two most flagrant conflicts at the moment are those in Ukraine and Syria. These sticking points still exist because globalist forces have sought to prevent the development of the Silk Road — an initiative consisting of multiple land routes, but also sea routes — and the incorporation of Europe within it. With Great Britain leaving the European Union following Brexit, and a Donald Trump in the White House who presents himself as wanting to put distance between the United States and NATO, the interests and forces likely to support the European Union militarily have been noticeably reduced; as NATO's decisionmaking capacity is also diminished (FORMENTO and DIERCKXSENS, 2018).
Faced with this, Germany and France have indicated their intention to take the lead in a project intended to strengthen the European capacity to direct their own security operations. The ambitions of cooperation at European level in military matters and mutual defense seem to be becoming more concrete. If such a project (which is still barely sketched) were to succeed, it would be a defeat for the Globalists who still dominate NATO - even if the latter are no longer hegemonic.
All this, coupled with the nationalism and protectionism championed by the current president United States and manifested by its decisions to withdraw from globalist trade treaties (TransPacific Economic Cooperation Agreement, Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership and Agreement on Trade in Services) and to question the terms of the continentalist trade agreement (NAFTA ), would also mean an ever greater isolation of the United States and could overthrow the plans of globalist unipolarism in favor of a multipolarism which, more and more clearly, is opening up a path.
1- Cryptocurrencies: new forms of fictitious money
As the capitalist mode of production develops, money appears more and more fetishized and comes to be converted, under the domination of capital, into the main form of expression of wealth, like a fetish, to hide the capital itself. From the beginning, and in its various ways of existing, wealth empowered as money took the most varied monetary forms, but also those of commodities, the maximum materialization of which took place in the form of gold coins. - this, since antiquity - without there being any capital at that time. However, the diversity of currencies and monetary standards, as well as the fundamental contradiction between their nominal content (or their denomination) and their real content (their quantity of gold), opened the way for their replacement by representatives, or signs of value. The history of currencies is extremely rich in descriptions of these contradictions and the problems they created.
With the intensification of commercial transactions, places have been established whose purpose was to keep the gold, in order to reduce circulation costs and ensure its security. In return for these gold deposits, goldsmiths, and later silver merchants and banks, began to issue certificates. From the outset, the possibility existed of distributing more certificates (which were lent with interest) than the quantity of gold kept. Over the long term, banking crises have highlighted the contradiction between the quantity of gold on deposit and that of certificates or banknotes issued. In other words, the confusion engendered by these different systems, leading to recurrent crises, bankruptcies or bank collapses, led certain banks, according to their political and economic power in their respective countries, to perform functions which today fall under the powers of central banks.
Cryptocurrencies or virtual currencies, which we should also call "fictitious money", are characterized by extreme instability and volatility of their exchange rate regimes which considerably exacerbate exchange rate risks. The first of these currencies, which has been called “was invented and latinohTed>»n 2009. One of the initial expectations of its
designers was that bitcoin could convert into a global currency as the number of people and businesses accepting it as currency grew exponentially. After the successful launch of bitcoin, hundreds of other virtual currencies poured out in a decentralized network created from a technology called "
blockchain ". Most of them were created as a sort of means of circulation or payment between the different national currencies. Their specificity is to allow direct contact between a creditor and a debtor, escaping the centralization mechanisms of the global banking system and, more importantly, bypassing the various national tax systems.
The creation of bitcoins sets in motion an extremely sophisticated and complex process of networked data processing, on a global scale, called, not coincidentally, “mining” or “exploration”. Without going into technical details, the solution was to form a “point-to-point” network with client and server at the same time. This network is (peer to peer ), where each “point” or each team that constitutes it is connected around open source software (open
software source) and each member receives two keys, one "public", known to the entire network, and the other private, which he keeps secret.
The issuance of bitcoins involves a production cost arising from the wear and tear of equipment
and energy consumption. At its starting point, the cost of producing each bitcoin was quite low; but it rose as larger quantities were drawn.
As these cryptocurrencies are denominated in their respective national currency units, it is necessary to establish a certain exchange rate between bitcoin and the chosen currency. And in this process, from the moment an exchange rate between bitcoin and one of the existing national currencies is determined and thereby makes it possible to denominate all economic transactions in bitcoins - with a measurement standard that is also decimal -, the latter could replace national currencies. The most important problem to solve would come from the calculation of this conversion rate, precisely because of the spectacular increases in the market price of bitcoin and its very high volatility, characteristics of a highly and essentially speculative market.
Available information indicates that bitcoin tends to be used more and more frequently on a world scale as a means of circulation and payment, that is to say that it participates in the final metamorphosis of capital—the metamorphosis of commodities into virtual money. This then pushes more and more towards the creation of credits expressed in bitcoin, or in any other virtual currency, entirely free of all constraints and all regulations, like what is happening today. The exchange regimes of these crypto currencies are defined on virtual markets, where thousands of currencies are thus issued.
Under these conditions, we understand that bitcoin, like any crypto-currency, could replace national currencies, and even become a global currency. But for this, a necessary condition would be that bitcoin, or the cryptocurrency that would assume this role, or the attribute of standard of value, manages to exercise it daily as a medium of circulation, as money capital and as a world currency, in place of the currencies which already assume such a function within the capitalist world system. Economic and geopolitical difficulties would then arise, stemming from the interest of the United States in preserving the status of the dollar as a world currency, as well as that of other countries which might wish, in one way or on the other, to assist them in this task.
2. Cryptocurrencies: new social relations of power
The geopolitical battle between the main fractions of capital at the global level acquires a new, and special dimension, with the arrival of cryptocurrencies. Now, with the introduction of the latter, and in particular bitcoin, the monetary system has been considerably expanded. And that resulted in a currency war. Any form of money is a social construction and therefore also the expression of socio-economic interests and power relations. What makes cryptocurrencies potentially so different is the fact that they allow their users to gain increasing independence from the current monetary system, which is dominated by the US dollar, but also, among others, from the SWIFT system ( for worldwide interbank financial telecommunications]).
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication [or Society for
Crypto-currencies make it possible to carry out a different social construction, a new mediation in the social relations of production and power, by introducing the possibility of freeing oneself from the old economic, political and social powers. However, such an evolution will not be able to take place and develop without engaging in a great battle between the powers which are rising and conquering positions of power and those which are declining and losing ground economically, politically and strategically.
All this has already materialized in Latin America, with the launch of the first ), which was introduced national cryptocurrency in Venezuela (the petro with the aim of escaping the economic sanctions imposed on this country by the United States, by labeling the sales of Venezuelan oil outside the field of influence of the dollar. To explain this initiative, there is, at the origin, the decision taken by Washington to block the possibilities of access to credit, in an attempt to asphyxiate the economy of Venezuela through financial mechanisms. The purchase of Venezuelan Treasury bonds by China and the restructuring of the country's debt negotiated with Russia were palliative measures. Since February 20, 2018, anchored on oil, trade®tnoVenezuela.
More broadly, we observe that globalist forces have now entered the world. cryptocurrency market, issuing bitcoin futures beginning on December 17, 2017, when the world's derivatives market Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), the largest market in
inaugurated bitcoin trading. But with this launch is at the same time opened the way for a possible manipulation of the prices of crypto-currencies. Companies that are registered on Wall Street buy and sell futures contracts in the form of bitcoins in Chicago, thus throwing this “digital asset” into the {futures deep end of finance. Banks and institutional investors (pension funds and others) can under these conditions trade derivatives expressed in bitcoins, but only a few of these operators will have the capacity to hold stocks of cryptocurrencies in wallets and to pass effective orders in bitcoin while managing to retain power in this new market.
The unipolar and global financial elite, in conjunction with their CEOs acting in the boards of central banks and the Bank of Central Banks in Basel (BIS) — partially controlled, as we have said, by the Rothschild family — was quick to formulate the project of imposing a global crypto-currency.
This was done in September 2017. This project is called “” (USC). It is driven and driven by giants like Barclays, HSBC, SanttyiSettlemadit Soisise and Deutsche Bank, among other financial institutions. Its aim is to prepare the ground for Central Banks to hold cryptocurrencies in the future, which would make it easier for global entities to conduct a wide variety of transactions with each other through the use of assets that would be secured in a blockchain. Globalized finance capital would then introduce a decisive new phase in the (crypto)currency war. Virtual Central Bank currencies would simply become an extension of the current global debt-based system, but no longer centered on the US dollar. Whoever had power over such cryptocurrencies would dominate the whole.
Because this is indeed a question of the geopolitics of power.
China embarked on a crusade against the appearance of these crypto-currencies in the same month of September 2017. The Central Bank of China^PB^Btenifclefl tissue its own digital currency in a public and sovereign manner. The aim is to guarantee money laundering. This country had already recording system s^iire trai-isfer against and / tax evasi°n and
carried out a first test at the end of 2016. The Chinese digital currency acquires an openly geopolitical character as a medium of exchange in the construction of the New Silk Road, insofar as it would replace the US dollar and, more importantly, would at the same time stop the Globalists' attempt to introduce their own currency regionally. The latter are also confronted with the interests of American Continentalists who want to launch the “Fedcoin”. However, China is far from willing to attack the dollar head-on, contrary to what the globalist media claim, concealing the fact that it is they themselves who are trying to weaken it.
Towards a multipolar world of currencies?
Everything seems to indicate that the US dollar is about to take a huge step backwards. In 19441945, the gold dollar had been imposed replacing the British pound sterling as the world's reference currency, but in the early 1970s the crisis that had been simmering since 1967 manifested itself. In 1971, the dollar ceased to be pegged to gold. It is from this moment that the
petrodollar was installed, following an agreement between the former US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and the Royal House of Saud of Saudi Arabia. The petrodollar was the currency that came to express the interests of US transnationals, which had already extended their hold over Western Europe and Japan. It was also these same powerful firms that dominated the production, international trade and global consumption of hydrocarbon-based energy. They therefore had all the power to pass such a pact and to impose the new world reference currency, the petrodollar, as a tool of extortion forcing all the countries of the capitalist world system to exchange real product and labor for a currency without counterpart and supported by the force of promises to pay, that is to say in fact by a pure process of indebtedness.
Today, there are more and more countries that question the dominance of the US dollar, perceiving it as an obstacle to their sovereignty and their better deployment within the global economy. This questioning is an additional demonstration of the current crisis of the hegemony of the United States and their central country transnationals.
Recently, relatively small countries such as Iraq and Libya have been embroiled in war and invaded for pretending to trade their oil outside the US dollar zone. At the present time, there persists a serious threat of invasion of Venezuela, which has also established the right to trade its oil outside the dollar. Yet it is in this same situation that the multipolar countries, such as China and Russia — the axis which has shown the strongest economic growth in recent years — and Iran with them, have decided to launch the
petro-yuan-gold and to try to establish it as an alternative currency of world reference having very important prospects in the immediate future to replace the US dollar as the dominant currency.
The petro-yuan-gold is a global currency project that not only relies on matter first key, oil, but which is also anchored on gold - a feat that is no longer within the reach of the United States on a global level. China's advantage lies not only in its economic dynamism, but also in the fact that it happens to be, along with Russia, the main producer and buyer of gold. China and Russia have built up huge reserves to support the
yuan. In March 2018, Beijing took the initiative to promote on the stock exchange international energy the oil-yuan-gold exchange system, then, the following May, that of metal-yuan-gold. These events will fundamentally change the international monetary system. China proposes to exchange yuan received in gold against deliveries of oil and against purchases of metals. The Hong Kong Stock Exchange will also issue yuan futures contracts for oil and metals derivatives that will be convertible into gold. Oil exporters will even be able to withdraw these gold certificates outside of Chinese territory, i.e. the "petro-yuan" will be available to be paid for, including in what are called " " from London.
Bullion Banks
Pricing oil in yuan — along with the Hong Kong Stock Exchange's mechanism to sell physical gold contracts denominated in yuan — creates a system through which a country will be able to circumvent the US banking system, not just the global dollar-linked interbank payment scheme
(SWIFT); and even the entire Bretton Woods system. In addition to the oil, gas and metals that enter into this new global system, several other raw materials will also be affected very soon. In this context, one might therefore expect China to quickly get rid of US Treasury bonds for dollars, in order to then exchange the latter in turn for yuan.
To avoid what happened to the dollar at the beginning of the 1970s, when the United States had to abandon the gold standard, it should be anticipated that in the future, China will also gradually introduce the yuan as a currency of exchange (commodity against raw material) so as to maintain a volume of gold sufficient as consideration. The strategy of multipolar China, moreover, is not to tackle the petrodollar system head-on, but rather to see the yuan occupy a space large enough to be able to function with a sovereignty that tends to draw the contours of a Multipolar World of Currencies. There are also agreements between the Central Bank of China and the European Central Bank to allow direct exchanges between the yuan and the euro. These agreements were signed so that it eventually becomes possible for these two currencies to reinforce each5 ‘other autonomoiis, while promoting the interpenetration of the financial systems of the two regions. This could well be interpreted as a clear signal that the European Union is keeping the door open to eventually join the Multipolar World.
So China has very big plans to keep the US dollar out of its become economical. In September 2017, Russian President Vladimir Putin gave instructions that the dollar cease to be the currency of payment in all ports of the country before the end of this year. And on February 14, 2018, Arkady Dvorkovich, Deputy Prime Minister, announced that Russian financial institutions were ready to operate without access to the global dollar-based interbank payment network (SWIFT). Insofar as the SWIFT system constitutes a mechanism which makes it possible to block international bank payments, and thus to strike the people and/or the countries no free by the United States, Russia tries by considered the adoption of these measures to neutralize the effectiveness of the sanctions imposed against its ec
1 ThereChina, first Andlatest Emergent Social Training ?
The successes of the Chinese economy, with the strongest GDP growth rate in the world over the past four decades — at least — are nothing short of prodigious. But this economic dynamism was already very marked before the "opening up" reforms of 1978. Using original time series of Chinese physical capital stocks from 1952 to 2015, reconstructed by Remy Herrera and Zhiming Long, we observe growth rates high for these variables. The average growth rates of productive capital were 9.7% over the period 1952-1978 and 10.9% between 1979 and 2015.
This means that the Chinese “emergence” goes back to dates well before the western neoliberal era. In the same way, it must be underlined that the level of scientific and technological development of China is not a recent phenomenon and has risen in many fields to the height of the most advanced capitalist countries. It is truly the development strategy of the Maoist revolution that established the conditions for this current success of the Chinese economy, which is basically nothing more than a continuity of the past (HERRERA and LONG, 2019).
This leads to a very clear conclusion: this “emergence” cannot be transferred to different social formations, such as India, for example, which has not experienced such an earlier stage. As a result, it is very unlikely that when China reaches its level of "over-accumulation" and excessive speed of technology replacement (the so-called "Japanese disease"), it will again be able to practicing outsourcing and sub-contracting towards other social formations, even other continents. The process of globalization has obvious limits here, as we can see.
We must add that today, land ownership remains state or collective in China - even if its forms are often degraded. Access to land for the peasantry makes it possible to avoid the phenomena of dispossession of peasants by expulsion from their land (primitive accumulation) and massive rural exodus towards the large metropolises which are so frequently observed in other peripheral countries. and which
the central countries themselves experienced during the first and second Industrial Revolutions, when millions and millions of peasants were dispossessed of their means of existence and transformed into proletarians.
2. There Is China reaching its point of overaccumulation?
Herrera and Long also calculated several profit rate indicators at the micro and macroeconomic levels for China from 1952 to 2015. The literature on the subject very rarely provides this type of indicator. The results obtained by the different methods they use show a clear downward trend in these profit rates over the long period, for the two levels of analysis considered (micro and macro). Above all, it is the increase in the organic composition of capital that tends to weigh on the rate of profit.
As we have seen, technological development in China is not recent. In 2013, no less than 629,612 patents were approved in this country, ie approximately 200,000 more than in the United States over the same year. The Yearbook of World Intellectual Property Indicators (
World Intellectual Property Indicators) for the year 2014 indicated that 32% of the 2.57 million patents registered in the world came from China. The latter country considers increasing the number of patents filed as its key strategy in order to be a major player at the international level in the sectors of technological innovations, as was the case of Japan in the 1970s and 1980s. This race to renew technologies leads to an increasingly rapid rotation of fixed capital, which implies a permanent increase in the costs of RocD in the country's manufacturing production, and growing difficulties in transfers to the final product. This means that the profit rate of productive capital exhibits a clear downward trend. Context to which we must still add the increase in the cost of labor, and the logical requirement of an ever more qualified labor force. The end result is the relative abandonment of the productive sphere by capital and, consequently, a diminishing rate of economic growth.
In 2014, China officially announced a growth rate of just over 7%, the lowest figure recorded in the last 24 years. If we examine the growth rate of electricity consumption (which, as for that of energy in general, seems to be a fairly reliable instrument for measuring the dynamics of economic growth), we see that it does not grew by only 3.8%, so that we can see that the growth rate of the real economy could actually have turned out to be lower39. Because historically, electricity consumption (or more broadly that of energy) and GDP have evolved in relatively parallel ways in China. Thus, for a GDP growth of 1%, a 1.09% increase in electricity consumption was generally required. Based on this historical correlation, this could mean that an estimate of around 3.5% would be a more likely economic growth rate for the year 2014. And as for 2015, consumption Electricity consumption in February even fell by 6.3% compared to the previous month, and a further fall of 2.2% was still recorded in March. All this indicates that, even if the levels reached remain quite high, the growth of the Chinese economy is on the downside.
3. Is a new cycle of capitalist economic growth possible?
The downward trend in energy consumption can be observed all over the world. The reduction in the growth rate of oil use is a sign that the world economy is entering stagnation. It therefore seems that the possibilities of realizing a relative surplus value are being exhausted everywhere, so much so that, in such conditions, the prospects for a new reconnection with the real economy seem to vanish at the level overall.
Due to the downward trend in the rate of profit at the global level and the growing impossibility of reconnecting to the productive sphere, capital flees to the financial sphere, where it obtains profits independently of the labor “factor”. Thus the data from the Federal Reserve Statistical Release, for the period 2000-2017, indicate a certain correlation between the growth rate of public debt and that of GDP in the United States. In reality, public debt is not intended to create new wealth. In this way, making profits without creating any wealth seems like pure magic. What happens, in fact, is that these profits are fictitious. In the United States, no growth in energy consumption has been observed since the end of the 1990s, even though the “national accounts” show positive economic growth rates.
It could thus follow that the GDP growth rate recorded by the national accounts of the United States since the mid-1990s, in a context where there has been no increase in energy demand, corresponds for party to a fictitious economic growth.
The explanation here lies in the fact that the increase in debt at interest rates close to zero (from 2009) allowed speculative interest-bearing capital to obtain credit at no cost to acquire on the markets its own shares and thus raise the prices of these
39 According to the Bloomberg website (2016), China's GDP, expressed in US dollars, increased by 4.25% during the fourth quarter of 2015.
the latter, and consequently the profits — which are therefore also fictitious and speculative. This helps to understand why, currently, the real growth of the United States is most likely negative, undermined by a debt of the Central Bank (Fed) higher than the GDP of the country: 21 trillion dollars against 19. This situation is characterized as a moment of debt saturation, and carries a very high risk of collapse (HOLTER , 2018). It therefore clearly appears that it is increasingly costing all the economies to return to a connection with the productive sector, which suggests a crisis not only of globalization, but, even deeper, of a systemic nature. .
4. Is the reconnection of capital with the real economy possible in China? Can this country
constitute be the last bastion of productive capital?
Faced with the decline in investment in the real economy, indebtedness has been the recipe for promoting Chinese domestic demand at an unprecedented rate, by boosting the wages of workers and peasants, which are rising sharply, but also by very significant public spending on infrastructure. Between November 2014 and October 2015, the Central Bank of China lowered its interest rates on six occasions, while on five other occasions it reduced the ratios of balances (i.e. the proportions of reserves that banks are required not to lend ). In this way, Chinese banking establishments lent some 70.2% more in January 2016 than in January 2015, and Chinese indebtedness trended more strongly upwards. In other words, China too has become dependent on debt.
Even the Central Bank of China now has a policy of buying its own securities and issuing money without consideration. One after another, the main central banks of the world have been forced to print money without counterpart, increasing credit at harm or negative interest rates.
And here, China was no exception.
Given the limits placed on obtaining high returns in the real economy, capital is beginning to look for alternative investment areas that do not require much labor “factor” — due to their increasingly speculative character. . In China, large-scale investments have been made, for example, in housing construction projects in urban areas without the slightest guarantee on the occupation of these dwellings. A certain number of these buildings remaining empty, and even entire neighborhoods (sometimes with construction sites that remained unfinished), these investments ceased to be linked to the real economy40.
At the very time when its economic growth was showing signs of slowing and when several "bubbles" were in danger of bursting, China chose - instead of a further rise of fictitious capital of a purely financial nature (in the style of Globalists”) or military (in the manner of the “Continentalists”) an extremely active state strategy oriented towards production, with the intention of extending its reach to the scale of the entire planet. Eventually, the profit obtained through the military-industrial complex could be guaranteed by the state, but the latter would not be able to transfer the unproductive expenses to third countries to bear the burden, because the yuan n is not an international reference currency with a monopoly position, as was the case with the US dollar. It is therefore not surprising that China's military expenditure in 2015 was three times less than the defense budget of the United States, knowing that the two economies are of roughly similar sizes.
What the New Emerging Great Social Formation , under the leadership of the
40 China's property prices have fallen in 66 of the country's 70 largest cities, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. In 2014 alone, for example, real estate prices fell by 7.6%.
China is therefore above all an impetus given to productive and commercial development at the world level, and especially in the Eurasian space. With the creation of the Asian Bank for Investment and Infrastructure (AIIB), China has set in motion this planetary project, the launch of which is called the New Silk Road. What is targeted by this program is, at the very least, the consolidation of Eurasia as an integrated economy. And the fact is that the Europeans hastened to accept Beijing's invitation to participate in the AIIB (London in the lead, immediately followed by Berlin, Paris and Rome... and even Israel!). Only the United States (or Wall Street) and Japan remain the main absentees from the BAIL
The New Emerging Great Social Formation has already created the conditions to reinvent an international plurimonetary system — which we called a Multipolar World of Currencies in the previous chapter — without subordination of the participating countries to a dominant and potentially hegemonic power: the New Silk Road involves gigantic infrastructures (pipelines, highways, railways, airports, ports, etc.) with a view to integrating Eurasia through massive investments in major works.
However, the objective of this project is not only to connect China to Russia, Europe and Africa, but also to extend it to Oceania and Latin America, in order to promote a real economy of production and trade on a world scale. The center of the New Silk Road will be the capital of the Chinese region of Xinjiang; not by chance: it is indeed a Muslim province located in the northwest of the country, precisely where the Anglo-American globalized financial capital seeks to destabilize China with the mercenaries of the "Islamic State" - for which the invaded and destabilized Syria was until a short time ago the fulcrum.
In total agreement with the geopolitical vision announced by Harold MacKinder, China is in the process of penetrating the island of the World41 and is trying to rethink the geostrategic foundations of world power. By establishing across the vast expanse of Eurasia elaborate and expensive networks of high-speed railway lines for transporting huge volumes of goods, as well as oil and gas pipelines, the New
Great Emerging Social Formation hopes to shift the nerve center of geopolitical power from the maritime periphery to the interior of the continent, Heartland.
It is clear that the integration of Eurasia goes beyond the financial capacities of China alone, whose public debt is increasing at a sustained rate. This is one of the reasons why this country is looking for allies likely to provide it with additional capital to develop these infrastructure works. More and more States see in the New Silk Road project the possibility of stimulating a kind of “productive developmentism” on the Eurasian scale. Quite tellingly, the United States and Japan, opposing any Eurasia integration, are recalcitrant and remain outside the project. As we have pointed out, the efforts of the Globalists are aimed more specifically at preventing Europe from turning its gaze to Asia. By design, NATO has established itself with ever-increasing military equipment and manpower in Eastern Europe. And his intentions go so far as to undermine the very project of “European Union”. Among many other notable examples, the "
41 The maxim proclaimed by H. MacKinder (considered a precursor of modern geostrategy) is famous: “Who reigns over Eastern
Europe will command will command We1 island of#ie Wor^Whoregns on the island of the World will command the World”. The "island of the World" is none other than Eurasia, of the planet (becabs^SteRi! importance of its resources, its territory, its population, its history and its civilization, its potentialities. ..). In contrast,
Kissinger recognized, the United States is, geopolitically, geographically and psychologically, “just an island off the coast of the great continental mass of Eurasia” (MASDEU, 2012, p. 104 ) . .
migrant crisis”, coming from Syria or Africa, has clearly highlighted this.
The fundamental question is therefore the following: can we stimulate this development of the real economy on a transcontinental scale by again orienting upwards the
profit rate trend? If this is not the case, and it proves impossible to find a solution to Chinese overaccumulation, then capitalism will undoubtedly have revealed its definitive limits.
1. Trying to get out of the crisis of capitalism (without succeeding)
With the Trump administration, not only the crisis of the agony of capitalism, tormented and conflicted, but also the impossibility of getting out of this crisis is becoming more and more evident.
Expressing industrial nationalism, opposed to the financial oligarchy, President Donald Trump is trying to get the United States out of the crisis, at all costs. This implies, in the first place, a direct confrontation with the forces of the globalist power system, which are today notably represented in the United States by the globalist politico-financier at the head of the Democaf&Paif^But secondly, it also clashes with the continentalist system, with
xestablishment politico-financier of the Republican Party itself, and especially the Tea Party, with which, insofar as it is not the main conflict, he was able to negotiate a government coalition in order to ensure a minimum of stability. So far first, but not unique, this contradiction internal to the world hegemonic power significantly complicates the possibilities of exporting the crisis to other countries.
All this can be seen from the positions taken by Trump in relation to the major trade treaties: one of his first measures was to withdraw from the free trade and economic cooperation treaties under discussion within the framework of the Partnership Agreement Transpacific Partnership (in English acronyms TPP, for ) and the Transatlantic TraderEands-fPassliimPHlirtni^rtrlijpBhip (in English TTIP or TAFTA, for ), with the stated aim of dismantling the globalist geostrategic construction Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement
set up by his Democratic predecessors Barack Obama and William Clinton. Its confrontation with continentalist projects was manifested, for example, in the denunciation of the Agreement on Trade in Services (TISA for its English acronym: Trade
in Services Agreement). Donald Trump's government, on the other hand, is showing more caution with regard to the treaty linking the United States with Mexico and Canada (North American Free Trade Agreement or NAFTA), but it has declared that it intends renegotiate it separately with each partner State. Burying NAFTA would, however, meet with considerable resistance within the Republican party.
The common denominator of all these policies is to try to relocate transnational corporations to the territory of the United States—in a last-ditch attempt to "make America great again."
[Make America
Great Again ]).
Flagship companies of globalism, operating in the news sectors technologies (telecommunications, IT, Internet, robotics, artificial intelligence, supercomputers, etc.) and very often massively investing in China, are in turn attacked by verbal interventions, even decisionmaking by Donald Trump, who has started a war economy not so much against China as a country, but rather and above all against the Anglo-American transnationals carrying out heavy investments outside the national territory of the United States, in the hope that this capital will "relocate" there. On the New York Stock Exchange, the last sessions of March 2018 very often closed sharply for the shares of Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Alphabet, Google, Apple, Instagram, Amazon or Microsoft, subjecting these companies to
heavy losses.
Facebook, the social network that caused an earthquake in the sector after suffering a data breach of some 50 million users, was the company most affected, posting since this event a loss of approximately 20% of its market capitalization. Donald Trump has proposed to modify the tax regime of the firm Amazon and plans to impose on the latter,
as well as Netflix, a tax on local sales. Google (Alphabet) suffered a serious setback in the legal battle between it and Oracle over the patent issue42.
The stock market plunge of these “star stocks” sealed the hopes of witnessing a new technological cycle controlled by globalist finance capital. But beyond this sectoral view, what was pointed out is essentially that current capitalism is not in a condition to generate a cycle of expansion in the sphere of production. And added to this, as we have said, the sudden declines on the New York Stock Exchange in the stock prices of companies spearheading globalism, operating most frequently with capital relocated outside the United States and investments concentrated in China, reflect the anti-globalist policy of the power fraction that supports Trump and still seeks the same objective: the return of transnational corporations to the United States.
The recourse to the trade war implies a reorganization of the chains of transnational values which globalization had established. These chains are no longer integrated as before, but now through geopolitical conflicts of increasing scale and magnitude. When it comes to the restructuring of the Sino-American value chain, the European Union, and more concretely Germany, could then see itself seriously affected by the costs of such a crisis. Hence the urgency before which it is placed to seek a change in overall strategy.
The current protectionism championed by President Trump could temporarily offer opportunities for the US real economy, particularly insofar as its trade deficits vis-a-vis China and Germany would be reduced. Nevertheless, the responses of the affected blocs and countries will also materialize in the immediate future, because everything indicates that we are tending towards generalized protectionism, with ever more nationalist and clearly anti-globalist policies.
If this protectionism were to become widespread and if more and more customs tariff barriers were erected, this would lead to a deceleration in international trade and, consequently, to a reduction in world economic growth. This would most likely lead to shrinking net profits, or even losses, and—following a generalized recession—a global crisis. And from there, in all likelihood, could occur a collapse of the world stock exchanges, concerning all kinds of bubbles (real estate, automobile, credit card sectors, etc.).
Such a global crisis, combined with extremely limited prospects for getting out of it, makes possible the accentuation of struggles for "national sovereignty" all over the world.
Nevertheless, if the national level remains closely linked to transnational capital and devoid of effective sovereignty, if it does not coincide with a vision and a policy of sovereignty popular , there will be very little chance that the living conditions of the populations will be improved.
The impossibility of getting out of the capitalist crisis also resides, in the last instance, in an inability to shorten the average lifespan of fixed capital beyond limits which have already been reached. However, in such a context, extending the average useful life of fixed capital is not only possible, but also strictly necessary given the losses observed on a global scale. Resuming investment in the real economy inevitably leads to a lengthening of the average lifespan of the fixed capital (machines and buildings) of all companies, and especially large firms. With a longer capital reproduction cycle, the technological costs of transfers to the final product fall, which may even avoid losses for some companies. This proposal is more feasible
42 Read: www.cincodias.elpais.com, March 28, 2018.
again by closing the borders, that is to say by resorting to more protectionist measures, but this then risks triggering a spiral of downward accumulation. Just as the protectionism of medieval guilds ultimately proved to be suffocating and killing its economies, thereby facilitating the rise of the capitalist mode of production, so today, similarly, the protectionism of the final phase of the capitalist system senile will suffocate it and open the way for an exit from capitalism.
In the Great Emerging Social Formation, offering integration potential to countries very different, these dynamics are already clearly tinged with “disconnection”, sometimes even with marked anti-imperialist traits, as demonstrated in particular by the cases of China and Russia. In any case, it is very likely that the world of capital that we have known until now, commanded by the Anglo-Saxon Axis since 1700, with its successive globalizing unipolar expansions which have frustrated all attempts at sovereignty national popular, is coming to an end. The collapse or implosion of this last phase of globalization will also affect — and this is already happening in practice — even the processes of building economic and political blocs, like the the European Union.
Faced with this decadence, the Great Emerging Social Formation, having China as its epicenter, and the Sino-Russian axis as its driving force, proposes to reconnect fictitious capital to the productive economy, to commercial networks, to massive investments in infrastructures. and the use of energy sources compatible with an energy transition.
It would ultimately be a Zone of Stability that would leave some time for the world to consider a possible smooth transition to post-capitalism.
For its part, the Anglo-Saxon Globalist Axis is reluctant to relinquish its position of global hegemony. It strives to undermine the progress of the "silk highways", by digging
craters in its path (in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now in Syria) or by destabilizing entire regions (in Pakistan, even in India, in Central Asia in general, as well as in northern and central Africa). For his part, Donald Trump intends to further increase his military budget, while still supporting his plan to reindustrialize the US economy, which has the opposite effect of rolling back direct Yanki military interventionism in the world, reducing support (financial) to NATO and to contract the endowments intended for the imperialist military bases abroad. US defense budgets vastly exceed those of any other country. The United States has indeed, with very many extraterritorial military bases established in 70% of the countries of the world43, extremely high military expenditure, while also maintaining enormous numbers of soldiers in the Army, the Navy and the Air Force44. But their ability to support such a deployment in the future is increasingly exhausted. And it would be worse if the peg of the petrodollar were to escape them.
President Trump is likely aware of — or aware of — the petrodollar's inevitable pullback against the petroyuan-gold. Of course, his administration does not officially align with the Emerging Great Social Formation, but to this day does not cause further destruction and "black holes" of disorder and barbarism where the Emerging Axis claims to build an economy. productive and trade networks, as the globalist government of Barack Obama did recently. The objective of the interventions of the Axis of Chaos — Anglo-Saxon globalist axis, plus NATO as an armed wing — was, and remains, to prevent a New
43 HERRERA and CICCHINI (2013).
44 Ibid.
Social Formation with sovereign power cannot impose itself. The wars waged in Libya, Syria, Somalia, Yemen and Sudan must also be seen in this context. The globalist project is nonetheless losing ground. The question is therefore posed whether this will open up a possibility for the New Great Emerging Social Formation to be able to unfold without the cataclysm of military wars.
2. Therepossibility of exiting capitalism by the very fact of the impossibility of exiting the capitalist crisis
Among the possibilities envisaged within the framework of such a scenario, there is the total destruction, the accentuation and the generalization of the barbaric character of the globalist project, or a situation of interface of minimal stability with a multipolarity based on the advances of this New Great Emerging Social Formation, which should be interpreted as a pre-postcapitalist period - during which a “market socialism” could be established for a time, while waiting for something better. We present here a possible synthesis of causality that would allow us to embark on a post-capitalist path. These are hypothetical processes, but entirely feasible and based on current dynamics.
In the middle of the Great Depression of the 21st century, all escape from the economic logic of capitalism seems to have run out. This is why an option presents itself to begin to develop another type of rationality, and other social relations of production. Thus, for example, the lengthening of the average lifespan of everything we produce would lead, in terms of value, to a downward evolution of the monetized economy, even if it is only by this way that it will be possible to reach superior and authentic well-being. The same is true when priority is given to the satisfaction of collective needs over individual desires: there will be less creation of wealth in terms of exchange value, but more wealth in terms of the satisfaction of needs.
A systemic crisis of the magnitude that is brewing also provides the conditions for a growing realization that needs should be formulated more from a communal subject, situated above the autistic individualism of the strict economic perimeter (i.e. the famous “capitalist”). The sustainable use of goods and the priority given to the satisfaction of collective needs will become^? ,n£teS§§R9 miPthat nature can reproduce itself and at its own pace, thus putting an end to the logic of valorization for valorization. Without being subject to the imperative of obtaining ever more competitive advantages, innovations could then be declared common heritage of humanity, to which each and everyone would have free access.
By extending the average lifespan of products in general, and by substituting individualized consumption with a more collective consumption of goods and services, natural resources will also be released in the central formations of the capitalist world system, i.e. say precisely where they are rare. At present, 80% of natural resources, most of which are exploited in peripheral countries, are intended for the individual consumption of barely 20% of the world's population, concentrated mainly in central countries. Consequently, if in these central formations, the average lifespan of products were multiplied by two, to take an example, it would save more than 40% of the natural resources exploited on the whole planet. The same impact would be noted if products and services became twice as collective. The importance of these positive effects of the combination of such formulas speaks for itself.
Moreover, as far as the countries at the center of the capitalist world system are concerned, it would be advisable to invent and generalize an “economy of the sufficient”, which would replace that of the superfluous -denounced by political ecologism - and this, coupled with the promotion of an "economy of the necessary", especially in peripheral social formations (most of which are the site of internal socio-political struggles). These two new types of economies, those of the sufficient and the necessary, combined, constitute the only real possibility of improving the quality of life of the vast majority of populations, and also contribute to extending the planetary ecological frontiers. But all this turns out to be antithetical to capitalism; as are also the major consequences that should necessarily accompany these new economic systems: a further decentralization of production and a thorough democratization of the various decision-making processes as to what, how, where and for what. who to produce45. We are therefore talking here about economic democracy, the essential basis of an integral political and social democracy.
CONCLUSION
We end with a short final summary. In TherMroduction to Ecgpit)0aics
policy (Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie ), Karl Marx studies pre-capitalist
economic formations and tries to establish the modalities and sequences of the process of social change, in this case the definition of the social relations of production corresponding to a determined stage of advancement of the productive forces and to the " epochs of social revolution" in which such relations are necessarily transformed in order to adapt to the new level and scale of development of these forces. Historically, the period of transition from one mode of production to another can be analyzed from the categories of productive work and unproductive work by content. We consider that the arguments set out in this book could undoubtedly provide the reader with greater power of prospective analysis by offering him a brief — and modest — retrospective on the history of humanity.
By following Marx two centuries after his birth, it is possible to examine the development or the exhaustion of the relations of production based on these same categories of productive or unproductive labor. Permanent wars (as unproductive labor) conducted by the Roman Empire were an indispensable condition for maintaining the capacity to replace slaves. Without the latter, the reproduction of slave production relations proved impossible. Slave relations reached their peak during the first wars of the Empire, when this capacity for replacement reached unprecedented levels, coinciding moreover with the episode of the cruellest treatment of slaves. The burden of these wars increased as the Empire expanded into more distant territories, even as the costs of replacing slave labor increased dramatically. Moreover, all this imposed on him the necessity of recruiting, in place of Roman citizens, ever more numerous mercenary forces, to which one was sometimes obliged to grant Roman citizenship. The reproduction of slave-like social relations became ever more costly and difficult to sustain, particularly as the burdens occasioned by military campaigns more and more frequently exceeded the benefits that wars brought through productive slave labor. Where did the need to gradually emancipate slaves and initiate a transition to new relationships come from?
45 If, in the time of real socialism, similar planning suffered from errors - or even from horrors - of application,
at the present time - the digital age -, it no longer seems a utopia and, in the near future, this may well become a reality. Cockshott and Nieto (2017), extending the line of research of Cockshott and Cottrell in have made a major effort to Towards ha,New Socialism, show how could be carried out today
the accounting of the various works (direct and indirect, more or less complex...), as well as the distribution and compensation of what they produce within the framework of a planned economy.
46 We invite the reader to refer here to: MARX and ENGELS (2018), THEColonialism , Critical Editions, Paris.
social production.
Marx also explored what he called the “Asian mode of production,” although in reality this social formation was not exclusively confined to the Asian continent. Also, one can observe that such a social formation did not only develop in Asia, but also, and among other examples, in ancient Egypt or in various cultures of pre-Columbian America. The category of productive labor can thus be identified in the joint work of building terraces and irrigation canals, as well as in the resulting collective productions. The works of worship are unproductive, but they represented one of the ways of making socially legitimate the social relationship established between the “higher community” and the “lower communities”, by fundamentally occupying a directive function in the conduct of these community works. To the extent that the
worship activities reaffirmed the principle of solidarity, they can in a sense be considered indirectly productive. However, if these works surpassed, in their exuberant (unproductive) luxury, the obligations of labor and cash contributions borne by the productive laborers of the fields, then the unproductive labor might challenge the basis of their own existence ( DIERCKXSENS, 1983).
Subsequently, in the capitalist system, the subordination of use value to exchange value - by confirming that a commodity, however useless it may be, has a use value if it manifests itself as a value of Exchange — brought about a supremacy of unproductive labor over productive labor. We can then see how the destructive consumption of means of consumption (through planned obsolescence, in particular) implies a loss of labor productivity through its content; how the destructive consumption of the means of production (by inevitably reducing the rates of profit) results in a loss of productivity of labor by form; and finally how the consumption of means of destruction and production for war cause a loss of labor productivity both in form and in content (DIERCKXSENS, 1994). These tendencies, by which exchange value superimposes itself on top of use value, always push the capitalist system to its limits, and, at the level of the totality, plunge the reproduction of capital into a situation of global structural crisis. herself.
We can further observe, as a consequence of the above, that there occurs a prolonged downward trend in the rate of profit. Under these conditions, individual capital then seeks an enlarged accumulation, extends from the central countries - which at the same time, for this very reason, are slowly beginning to cease to be so - in search of cheaper productive work, and moves towards certain peripheral economies, which thereby contributes to transforming them into "emerging countries" and to causing a qualitative leap in their internal structures, making them capable, first of all, of moving from the national scale to the continental level , then globally.
The globalization of capital means the globalization of the general laws of accumulation and value, by universalizing the fundamental contradiction between capital and labour. The contradiction appears in the form Globalization of capital against Universalization of the national, where all productive labor and all the real economy are contained within while it is within the global that fictitious- WaptedJctive and parasitic capital expresses itself. The Universalization of the national includes the necessary defense of the preservation of nature and the natural cycle of reproduction of life - including humanity itself. From the investment of global capital in the "emerging economies", and especially from the development of the emerging economy with a global character that is China, the conditions have matured for
a New Great Emerging Social Formation arises in its wake, which no longer necessarily clings to
the capitalist logic of value, even if, as is well understood, it is still partially developing within its metabolism.
If global capital fails to reconnect with productive labor through its content, it It is also not possible to find a solution to get out of a crisis that is structural or organic, systemic, which not only gives rise to the ongoing implosion of the globalization of capital (PIQUERAS and DIERCKXSENS , 2011 ), but also opens up
the historical perspective of an exit from capitalism itself, for its overcoming. But such an “opportunity” is converted at the same time into a strategic conflict whose interests are of a truly global dimension and which manifests itself as a challenge as well as a danger.
The national heterogeneity and diversity contained in the universal is the way in which appear the new social formations that are developing and providing answers that the globalization of capital itself no longer finds or does not find. see you. Moreover, this lack of internal solutions to the global accumulation of capital represents, in itself, an extreme threat to humanity, because globalized capital can only understand the problem in terms of a mass of excess populations — which means that he could even go so far as to envisage the pure and simple extermination of several tens or hundreds of millions of human beings. Come to think of it, and all things considered, is this not how capitalism solved other obstacles that have historically presented themselves to it, such as, for example, the World Wars of 1914-1918 and from 1939-1945? However, such a means would not constitute a viable exit from this mode of production, because its real problem is not that there are too many human beings, but rather that more and more people are missing.
value and of more
value. And this, precisely because of the ongoing scientific and technical revolution and the acceleration of the distancing of human beings from productive processes.
On the other hand, the national-in-the-universal can manifest itself in the New Social Formation only by consolidating and perpetuating itself. Its only possibility of prospering is to aggregate into large national blocks (regionalization) which contain and express the multiple historical national identities, by affirming them in their diversity and in their historico-cultural heterogeneity. This allows the universal to reveal itself as containing, recognizing and promcpingivdlrsiaik diversity and heterogeneity of the national, the social and the natural - giving this last dimension an absolutely crucial importance as an irreplaceable common denominator, and thus to " manage” collectively as an intrinsic wealth, and not as a source of value.
We will say by way of a final synthesis that we therefore find ourselves in a strategic historical moment of transition, as Marx would say; moment that would allow us to make observable the rise of the development of global interest-bearing capital, as a form of growth in a mode of accumulation specific to the old social formations of capitalism, and to relate it to a New Great Emergent Social Formation composed of very different particular social formations. We believe that this transition is underway, still in full process and subject to extremely powerful forces currently in conflict, and that it shows one of its most important concrete manifestations in the field of the subordination of exchange value. to use-value and, consequently, also that of the subordination of productive labor by its form to productive labor by its content. In this struggle, our own possibilities as a species will decide.
To increase surplus value in absolute form (more hours of abstract human labor devoted to production), it is necessary to incorporate more committed human labor or to extend the working time of employees who are already hired (but these have obvious physiological and natural limits, in addition to those of a political nature - class struggles -). And to raise the surplus value in relative form, it is necessary to increase
productivity and, with it, the efficiency of the work carried out. So productivity saves human labor; which results in a glaring contradiction: a tendency to reduce value. Although fundamental, this phenomenon is not the only cause of periodic crises, because, in a capitalist economy, the negative impact of technological change on profitability is always accompanied, in greater or lesser proportions, by difficulties in achieving stemming from competition and the anarchic growth of production; difficulties that can give rise to imbalances between branches and overproduction, among other problems. However, this is fundamentally the chronic disease of capitalism, from which it cannot escape, and which marks °veraccumulationin the long term its structural tendency to enter not only into crisis, but also into decadence.
20 The documentary “Enron, los mas expertos de la sala” by Alex Gibney is a good illustration of this process. The film is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5DKwOJKHgJM .
21 For a detailed chronology of the emergence and evolution of this crisis, see, in particular, chapter II of the monograph by CORREA (2008).
22 Loans subprime corresponded to those granted to families without a regular source of income or favorable payment history. They are distinguished from the so- prime. The first had received notes
called high risk rating loans, and the others of low or no risk, with the best classifications. Both types of contracts were “wrapped” in derivative products called “CDOs” or Asset-Backed BCjlldserized Debt Obligations
23 These CDOs, derivative products that are more intelligible if we interpret them as securities representing
debts and guaranteed by any kind of asset, appeared at the end of the 1980s. They were securities backed by mortgage loans, credit card debt loans or even University payments... As these derivatives included debts, they were associatdapKwrtte .exchange contracts, CDS (or Credit Default Swapsfor default hedging,
derivatives on credit events or even permutations of unpaid debts), through which CDO buyers sought to secure themselves by paying part of their income. At that time, they entered American International Group (AIG), then the largest insurance company in the world, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which guaranteed mortgages. All collapsed
in 2008.
26 Together, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) and the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae) owned or guaranteed half of the US housing market, worth 12 trillion dollars (July 11,2008). Information available at:
http://wwThe New York Times,37/ll/ -
business/llripple.html?ex=13735152008cen=8ad220403fc- fdf6e6cei=51246cpartner=permalink6cexprod=permalink (site visited on 09/30/2017).
27 Data available at: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US . Source: Freddie Mac, Thirty Year Average Fixed Mortgage Rates in the United States [MORTGA-GE30US]. Retrieved from Fed, St. Louis Federal Reserve: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US (site visited 10/11/2017).
28 The banking system of the United States today is extremely oligopolised, but it had more than 10,000 banking establishments at the time. The crisis led to a long series of bankrubtcimpeoceedings during which thousands of small banks were acquired by the Big Bank.
29 The mechanism of sovereignty of monetary policy is organized through the primary creation of money by the respective central banks, creation through which, despite all the contradictions and the interests involved, the purchase and sale operations of public debt securities constitute one of the main instruments of autonomy of these banks. The latter use this monetary creation thanks to a relative control of an average or base interest rate from which all the other rates, the most diverse, are built, in all the particular forms of loans, up to the extremes. of the market. In the current credit system of the euro zone, the primary creation of money is carried out by the purchase of private debt securities issued by the large banks at the base rate. As the crisis deepened, the European Central Bank significantly reduced the base rate, which enabled banks to monetize their debts at the lowest possible cost, including at negative rates. From there, the Central Banks of the countries of the euro zone sold the national securities of their respective Treasuries to the private banking system and the interest rate was then that which was determined on the international credit markets, according to the evaluations of the major credit rating agencies (Standard & Poors, Fitch and Moody's). All the countries whose primary budget execution balances were negative were given unfavorable ratings by these agencies, and the interest rates which were to remunerate the public debts of the countries most
dependent on this capital thus increased. inconsiderately, especially in the "PIIGS". In short, they are the dominant participants in