From Marx to Goldman Sachs: The Fictions of Fictitious Capital, and the Financialization of Industry

Classical economists developed the labour theory of value to isolate economic rent, which they defined as the excess of market price and income over the socially necessary cost of production (value ultimately reducible to the cost of labour). A free market was one free of such ‘unearned’ income – a market in which prices reflected actual necessary costs of production or, in the case of public services and basic infrastructure, would be subsidized in order to make economies more competitive. Most reformers accordingly urged – and expected – land, monopolies and banking privileges to be nationalized, or at least to have their free-lunch income taxed away. In keeping with his materialist view of history, Marx expected banking to be subordinated to the needs of industrial capitalism. Equity investment – followed by public ownership of the means of production under socialism – seemed likely to replace the interest-extracting ‘usury capital’ inherited from antiquity and feudal times: debts mounting up at compound interest in excess of the means to pay, culminating in crises marked by bank runs and property foreclosures. But as matters have turned out, the rentier interests mounted a counter-Enlightenment to undermine the reforms that promised to liberate society from special privilege. Instead of promoting capital investment in an alliance with industry and government, financial planners have sponsored a travesty of free markets. Realizing that income not taxed is free to be capitalized, bought and sold on credit, and paid out as interest, bankers have formed an alliance between finance, insurance and real estate (FIRE) to free land rent and monopoly rent (as well as debt-leveraged ‘capital’ gains) from taxation. The result is that today's economy is burdened with property and financial claims that Marx and other critics deemed ‘fictitious’ – a proliferation of financial overhead in the form of interest and dividends, fees and commissions, exorbitant management salaries, bonuses and stock options, and ‘capital’ gains (mainly debt-leveraged land-price gains). And to cap matters, new financial modes of exploiting labour have been innovated, headed by pension-fund capitalism and privatization of Social Security. As economic planning has passed from government to the financial sector, the alternative to public price regulation and progressive taxation is debt peonage.