Value, Fictitious Capital and Finance. The Timelessness of Karl Marx’s Capital with John Milios

Karl Marx’s monetary value theory constitutes a radical break from the David Ricardo’s classical notion of value; it conceives value not as a “quantity” of labor contained in the commodity but as a social relation expressing the immanent regularities of the capitalist mode of production. Starting from his value-form analysis in Part One of Volume 1 of Capital, Marx develops the concept of “fictitious capital” in Volume 3, which depicts the role of interest-bearing capital and the financial sphere. Marx’s analysis allows for an understanding of contemporary capitalism, financialization and crisis: financialization cannot be isolated from “real” economy; it should be conceived as a “technology” of exercising capitalist power and hegemony over the working classes and the society as a whole. Marx’s analysis provides the terms to rethink the contemporary neoliberal form of capitalism and its crisis as expressions of the contradictions inherent in the organization of capitalist power.

JOHN MILIOS is Professor of Political Economy and the History of Economic Thought at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece. He has authored more than two hundred papers published or forthcoming in refereed journals (in Greek, English, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese and Turkish) including the Cambridge Journal of Economics, History of Political Economy, History of Economics Review, Review of Political Economy, European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, The American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Science & Society, Rethinking Marxism, Review of Radical Political Economics, and has participated as invited speaker in numerous international conferences. He has also authored or co-authored some eighteen scholarly books. His most recent books in English are A Political Economy of Contemporary Capitalism and Its Crisis: Demystifying Finance (Routledge 2013, Paperback Edition 2014, co-authored with D. P. Sotiropoulos and S. Lapatsioras) and The Origins of Capitalism as a Social System: The Prevalence of an Aleatory Encounter (Routledge 2018). He is director of the quarterly journal of economic theory Thesseis (published since 1982 in Greek) and serves on the editorial boards of four scholarly journals.

All events are sliding scale—choose the level at which you choose to contribute to The Marxist Education Project. No one is denied admission to any event or class because of an inability to pay. Send an email to info@marxedproject.org to obtain an entry url to any event or class presented by The Marxist Education Project.

Art by John Heartfield