Letters from Tomis

Lecture

I. Introduction: Why Financial Capital Matters

“Finance is the apex of capitalist abstraction—capital unmoored from production, parasitic yet powerful. To destroy capitalism, we must understand its crown.”

• In today’s global economy, trillions of dollars circulate daily in speculative markets while billions remain in poverty.

• Financial capital appears opaque, intimidating, and apolitical—but it is the most political expression of capital itself.

• Revolutionary communists must demystify financial capital—not to reform it, but to abolish it as a global power.

II. Karl Marx: The Foundations of Capitalist Abstraction

1. Money to Capital: The Genesis of Finance

In Capital Volumes I–III, Marx traces the transformation:

• C → M → C’ (commodity-money-commodity): typical circulation of goods

• M → C → M’: emergence of capital, where money is invested for more money

• M → M’: financial capital emerges as self-expanding value divorced from production

“The movement of capital is limitless… M-C-M’ becomes M-M’ in finance, capital in its purest fetish form.” — Marx

2. Fictitious Capital and the Credit System

• In Volume III, Marx defines fictitious capital: capital that represents a claim to future surplus-value, not actual value.

• Stocks, bonds, derivatives, and sovereign debt—these are promises on surplus-value extraction.

• The credit system, while facilitating industrial growth, creates systemic speculation, crises, and concentration of capital.

III. Friedrich Engels: Finance as Class Weapon

• Engels, in Anti-Dühring and correspondence, emphasizes:

• Finance is not neutral: it is a weapon wielded by the bourgeoisie.

• Banks evolve into collective capitalists, pooling money from smallholders to serve monopoly interests.

• Engels also predicted that state debt and finance would be tools for imperial expansion.

“The modern state, no matter its form, is essentially a machine for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.”

IV. Lenin: Finance Capital and Imperialism

1. The Apex: Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)

• Lenin synthesizes Marx and Engels to develop the concept of finance capital, drawing from Rudolf Hilferding.

• Finance capital = the fusion of banking and industrial capital under monopoly capitalism.

• It is not merely national—it internationalizes capital and divides the world among great powers.

“Finance capital does not want liberty, it wants domination.”

2. Five Features of Imperialism (Lenin’s Schematic):

1. Concentration of production and monopolies

2. Merging of bank and industrial capital (finance capital)

3. Export of capital—not commodities—is dominant

4. International capitalist monopolies and cartels divide the world

5. Division of the world among imperialist powers complete

3. Lenin and Modern Finance: Parasitism and Decay

• Lenin’s analysis explains how financial parasitism signals capitalism’s decadence:

• Idle capital seeking returns abroad = underdevelopment of the periphery

• Superprofits finance domestic labor aristocracies, corrupting working-class politics

• He thus redefines imperialism as a world system, sustained by global finance and coercion.

V. The Contemporary Relevance: Global Finance Today

1. Globalization = Financialization

• Post-1970s neoliberalism was not just deregulation—it was a reign of financial capital:

• Currency speculation

• Global debt chains

• Derivative markets

• World Bank and IMF structural adjustment

2. Finance and Uneven Development

• Following Lenin’s insight: the global South remains a debtor class, its surplus value expropriated via finance, not just trade.

• Sovereign debt crises (Mexico 1982, Asia 1997, Greece 2010) show how finance dictates policy.

3. Crisis and Accumulation

• 2008 was not an “accident”—but a manifestation of Marx’s and Lenin’s predictions:

• Fictitious capital

• Overaccumulation

• Crisis of realization

• Bailouts did not restore production—they deepened class rule through finance.

VI. The Revolutionary Position: What Is to Be Done?

“Revolution is not only possible—it is necessary if we are to unseat finance capital and liberate humanity from debt and domination.”

1. Rejection of Reformism

• Taxation, regulation, or moralizing finance is insufficient.

• Only a planned economy under worker control can abolish the anarchy of markets and the tyranny of creditors.

2. Dual Power Against Global Finance

Revolutionaries must:

• Build organs of worker counterpower (soviets, unions, cooperatives)

• Develop class-consciousness against finance—including its ideological trappings (credit scores, personal debt, meritocracy)

• Forge international solidarity with nations and peoples resisting finance-driven imperialism

3. Finance Capital’s Weakness Is Its Detachment

• Because finance has abandoned production, it is vulnerable to disruption, mass default, and revolutionary seizure.

• The proletariat has no need for Wall Street, but Wall Street cannot live a day without labor.

VII. Conclusion: From Critique to Strategy

• Marx revealed the inner laws of capital.

• Engels showed how those laws become class power.

• Lenin demonstrated that financial capital is global, imperial, and ripe for overthrow.

“We do not fear the stock exchange. We seek to destroy it, and to replace it with the collective control of the producers.”

Possible Discussion Questions:

1. How does financial capital reproduce imperialism in the modern global South?

2. In what ways can revolutionary organizations disrupt or undermine financial flows?

3. How do national struggles against debt intersect with class struggle?