By GUILHERME PREGER*
Speculation as a new accumulation regime takes the lead even from the post-Fordist mode of economic regulation, in the mid-1970s, with the emergence of the neoliberalism program.
The history of capitalism is one of its enclosures. It all begins, according to Karl Marx, with the primitive accumulation of land enclosures. What was a common good (commons) and guaranteed the food sovereignty of thousands of peasants was surrounded (enclosure) and the deprivation of natural goods began. It was at this time, in the mid-16th century, that the problem of poverty began to become evident and was portrayed in Thomas More's classic, Utopia (1516). The poor man, or the Beggar, then appears as the one who has been deprived of his subsistence.
Land then became the first “fictitious commodity” in the words of Karl Polanyi, in his classic the great transformation (1948). It is fictitious because in reality it has no exchange value. Exchanging land for money only becomes possible after the fiction of its ownership becomes legal, as a legal right.
Thus, capitalism begins with the expropriation of land. A multitude of peasants become “free,” that is, poor, and migrate to the cities to become industrial labor (we are already in the 18th century). And, in fact, now with the wage worker, the second wave of enclosures begins, creating a new “fictitious commodity,” which is precisely labor. Just like land, no one really sells “labor power.” The worker who sells his existential force for a salary goes along with it, which is not really a fair exchange, not even an exchange in any sense of the word.
Note that in this important period it was necessary to create a segregated space for social production in factories and offices. These are the new capitalist enclosures, where “capitalist exploitation” takes place, which means, according to Karl Marx, that part of the worker’s work, or the time he dedicates to the boss, is not remunerated.
The third fictitious commodity is money. It is true that money is exchanged, but it is always money for money. More than fictitious, it is a false exchange. One can exchange a 100 dollar bill for two fifty dollar bills, but that is, in colloquial terms, “exchanging six for half a dozen.” This creates the mode of accumulation known as “financial speculation.” Banks are the enclosures of money, they are financial institutions that magically make money multiply.
The observation that capitalism becomes financial is already part of Vladimir Lenin's analysis in his classic Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism (1916). Lenin observes the association between banks and companies and that the latter begin to be directed by the former's purposes. This intensifies inter-imperialist competition, leading to war.
However, we can say that, under Fordism, industrial capitalism still rules the roost, and financial speculation is an “amplifier” of productive capital. The big problem, which generated the 1929 crisis, is still the problem of overproduction, the excess of goods that cannot be “realized” through sales in the markets.
Thus, based on the model of 19th-century Parisian shop windows, an advertising industry developed in the 20th century that created another figure for the “other of capital”, in addition to that of the free worker: the consumer. Consumption must be encouraged to alleviate crises of overproduction. If the beggar was previously a poor person, the consumer is first a worker. The consumer, who lives in the extra-economic existential spheres, is the other of the factory enclosure of production.
Speculation as a new regime of accumulation took the lead even after the post-Fordist mode of economic regulation, in the mid-1970s, with the emergence of the neoliberal program. This is a “higher” stage of financialization: not only do banks take the lead in the system, but they merge with the companies themselves. “Productive” companies now become rentiers, financial entities.
It is from neoliberalism that a new figure of the other of capitalism begins to be created: the homo economicus, which in our days is called an “entrepreneur”. This figure, whose main creator was the theorist Joseph Schumpeter, but also appears fictionally in the work of the Russian-American writer Ayn Rand, is the individual entrepreneur who must open his own business. Why does the figure of the entrepreneur become so important for capitalism? Because with neoliberalism there is a shift from capital for profit to capital for interest.
This passage, crucial to what is now called rentier capital, was already described in Marx’s magnum opus. An entrepreneur will be someone who will go into debt precisely to “consume” capital at interest, or share capital. Money thus becomes a commodity par excellence, being consumed by the new “entrepreneurs of the self,” that is, the newly indebted, who are workers disguised as entrepreneurs. Thus, it is no surprise that private debt exploded at the end of the 20th century. It is a sign that the system has exchanged profit (productive capital) for debt (unproductive capital).
The enclosure of the financial sector that is becoming “autonomous” becomes viable due to the emergence of a new fictitious commodity, not foreseen by Karl Polanyi: information. Like other fictitious commodities, information has no exchange value. Those who have information, when selling it, keep the information, and do not need to “replenish the stock”. With the old common goods, information is also abundant, but it can become scarce due to new enclosure. The first form of enclosure was through the so-called “society of the spectacle”.
We can see that the spectacle is an enclosure of information, transforming it into a condensed image. In Guy Debord's classic treatment (1968), the spectacle is an image whose production was alienated from its producer (the common man) and presented to him as something distant, in which he does not recognize himself as a producer. The entire theme of the cultural industry, initially raised by the Frankfurt School, was worked on to elucidate this passage of enclosure over information that produced cultural fetishism, initially for aesthetic purposes. At this time, intellectual property laws were consolidated.
But with the emergence of the Internet and the digitalization of communications, a phenomenon typical of the 21st century, another information enclosure has emerged, namely, platforms, which are veritable “walled gardens” of information. Because of these new walls and communicative fortresses, obtained thanks to proprietary and opaque algorithms like new “Coca-Cola formulas,” some theorists have been talking about “technofeudalism” to characterize the new phase of capitalism, or even post-capitalism. They refer to the primarily rentier nature of the economic exploitation of information and communication technologies. But the social logic of enclosures has always been inscribed in the historical movement of capital itself. There is nothing really new in this movement.
The platforms have absorbed the spectacle and created yet another figure of the other outside the enclosures: the influencer. In particular, a figure that combines the figures of the entrepreneur and the influencer into one: the coach. Why has the figure of the influencer become critical to this new phase of capitalism and its enclosure? Basically, because this new regime of accumulation, speculation, is a “second-order” activity, formed by the observation of information flows in the broader society.
Economic exploitation for profit is “first order” because it is based on direct (immediate) operations of feedback: if there was a profit, there was accumulation; if there was a loss, money (capital) was lost. But speculation, in turn, plays with investors' future expectations, that is, it plays with temporal variables. Speculation needs to deal with market uncertainties. Now, it is known that information serves to reduce uncertainty (or is what measures uncertainty).
Hence a certain paradox: enclosure means clearly drawing a boundary between a space inside capital, where valorization and even self-valorization take place, and an outside space, where consumption and the wear and tear of goods, i.e., devaluation, take place. The more rigid the enclosure, the more “closed” (sealed) informationally is the inner space of capital. But speculation needs to know “what is happening outside” the enclosure, because it deals with the uncertainties of business.
After all, there is always a world beyond the economy, which Marx called the sphere of use value. If capital tends to see it as a space of devalue, of “unproductive labor,” that is its problem. The use of objects and information by the inhabitants of the “world of life” is something that has values specific to its users.
Influencers then seek to “direct” these uses, and provide the system with information about the “outside world”, that is, about the environment of the capitalist system. Just as advertising sought to direct and accelerate the consumption of produced goods and thus accelerate the “rotation of capital”, today it is influencers who try to induce speculative waves of appreciation or depreciation of stock markets through all kinds of fictional (“narratives”) or fallacious (the famous fake news).
Expropriation, exploitation, speculation and spectacularization are the names of four regimes of capital accumulation, all driven by enclosures that create “fictitious commodities”. It is through these key commodities that capitalism creates its illusion of a closed and autonomous world, with its own laws, relegating the social environment and other truths and lies of life to its exterior, which, in its view, have no “value” and are therefore unproductive. It is also responsible for creating the characters of its fiction: the beggar, the consumer, the entrepreneur and the influencer.
But here we must be careful: these characters are projections, heteroreferences of their own self-referential image. They are alter egos, while the capitalist ego is, in the words of Karl Marx, an automatic subject. Therefore, less autonomous than automatic.
As ghostly projections, these characters are inserted into the script and the fictional dynamics of the system. These ghosts are what guarantee its free rotation, deaf to objections, the incessant and tireless rotation of capital. It is known that it cannot remain still, because devaluation is always lurking around it. Capital rotates ever faster, expelling this entropy (wear and tear) from itself, to society “out there” where the living beings who are deprived of property circulate, incapable of building their own shelters of defense.
Because of this, it is no surprise that this unbridled and automatic rotation of a globalized system powered by fossil fuels ends up dumping an immense amount of entropy into its environment, which happens to be precisely the planet that serves as the setting for such insane and miserable fictions: the Earth and its biosphere. The name for this entropy expelled by the system in large quantities is “global warming.” As we know from thermodynamics, entropy is an irreversible trend. Goods may be fictitious, but climate change is real.
* William Preger é PhD in Literary Theory from UERJ. Author, among other books, of General theory of devices (Caravan).
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