Fictitious accumulation, speculation and financial instability. Part I: conjectures on financialization based on Marx, Keynes and Minsky

Abstract

The essential objective of this text is to understand the main features of financialization in light of the contribution made by classical authors such as Marx, Keynes and Minsky, who emphasizes some peculiar analytical categories, both different and alike. In doing so, it seeks to investigate how these authors established the foundations to analyze the subject matter, and uses this approach to analyze the contemporary contributions, which will be addressed in a later essay. It surrounds the perspective that it is essential to distinguish the content from the form, i.e., the general progress of financial capital as the superior and unregulated stage of capitalism, from the concrete and historical forms that it assumes. On a more general and abstract level, financialization constitutes the resumption and deepening of the patrimonial, fictitious or speculative logic of capital accumulation. This latter level should be distinguished from that of morphology, related to the main agents and markets involved in this process, and to its relations.