Fictitious Capital

Posted on | April 3, 2009 | No Comments

Was Marx right? Richard Metzger asks in this thought-inspiring post at the Boing Boing blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

“Watching the news with the G20 protesters in London carrying banners reading “Capitalism Failed Us” and “Marx was Right!” I felt quite good about the day’s events. In 1983 and 1984, I was living in London and going to protests like this myself and it brought back long-forgotten memories. When I was younger, I considered myself a staunch socialist, but as I got older that way of identifying myself fell away. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, it seemed like Marxism was something that the world had moved on from and so did I. During the dotcom era, I was as greedy a capitalist as the next guy. Five years ago, slimming my library down for a cross country move, I unemotionally tossed all of my “Karl Marx and related” books. Boy do I regret doing this now!

One recent evening, I was writing something and I thought I’d coined a nifty new phrase to describe a major factor in the economic meltdown: “fictitious capital.” I decided to Google the term and it’s a good thing that I didn’t pat myself on the back too hard because it’s something that Karl Marx came up with about 150 years before me.”

Read the whole post here.

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