Letters from Tomis

Lecture

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

Let us begin with the truth. In today’s world, trillions of dollars move across borders at the speed of light, while billions remain in poverty, unemployed, or locked in precarious labor.

Finance capital—hedge funds, investment banks, sovereign debt, derivatives—appears esoteric, intimidating, even apolitical. But that is its greatest illusion.

Finance is not merely a sector of the economy. It is the commanding height of capitalist rule. It is capital in its most abstract and most dangerous form: no longer producing things, but extracting value from everything—wages, pensions, housing, education, even future labor.

To abolish capitalism, we must confront its most sacred institution: finance. Not to reform it, not to regulate it, not to make it “inclusive”—but to break it.

This lecture will trace financial capital’s rise from Marx’s critique, through Engels’ and Lenin’s revolutionary synthesis, to its modern imperial form, and conclude with the strategic tasks before us.

Marx laid the groundwork in Capital. He shows how money transforms from mere medium to capital, through three stages:

1. C → M → C’: Commodity sold for money, then used to buy another commodity. This is simple exchange.
2. M → C → M’: Money used to buy labor and means of production, yielding surplus value—industrial capital.
3. M → M’: The final stage—financial capital, where money expands without producing anything.

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

Here, we witness the complete fetishism of capital: its ability to seem self-generating. But there is no magic here. Behind every financial transaction lies the extraction of surplus labor—past, present, or promised.

In Volume III, Marx introduces the concept of fictitious capital:

• Shares, bonds, and credit instruments are not capital in the productive sense.
• They are claims on future surplus value—instruments of expectation and domination.
• The credit system becomes both the engine of expansion and the architect of crisis.

Case Example: Look at today’s stock market. Apple, Amazon, Tesla—worth trillions. Not because of their current production, but because of speculated future earnings, built on global labor exploitation and supply chain domination.

This detachment from real value creation is what makes finance fragile, but also lethal.

Engels, too often overshadowed, sharpened this critique.

In Anti-Dühring, he makes clear: finance is not neutral. It is a weapon of the bourgeoisie.

• Banks appear to “serve the people,” pooling savings.
• But in reality, they concentrate wealth, becoming collective capitalists.
• The small savings of workers and petty bourgeois are repurposed to fund monopoly expansion, imperial wars, and capitalist consolidation.

And importantly, Engels foresaw the rise of state debt as a means of imperial expansion:

• War bonds, national banks, and public debt become the infrastructure of empire.
• The modern state becomes a debt manager, beholden not to its people but to bondholders.

“The modern state is but a machine for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie.” — Engels

We see this today in how governments serve bond markets, not workers. Social programs are slashed to protect credit ratings. Public policy is dictated by investor confidence.

Engels reminds us: Finance is not above class struggle. It is class struggle, in its most distilled and institutionalized form.

Lenin picks up the baton in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916).

He builds on the work of Marx, Engels, and Hilferding, identifying finance capital as the merger of banking and industrial capital under monopoly control.

This is the moment when capitalism ceases to be a competitive system of producers and becomes a global cartel of parasites.

Lenin outlines five features of imperialism:

1. The concentration of production in monopolies
2. The fusion of bank and industrial capital into finance capital
3. The export of capital as dominant over the export of commodities
4. The rise of international capitalist monopolies dividing the globe
5. The division of the world among imperialist powers

Finance capital, in Lenin’s analysis, is globalized exploitation.

• It exports capital, not to develop but to plunder.
• It underdevelops the periphery to extract surplus value.
• It creates superprofits, which fund labor aristocracies in the imperial core.

“Finance capital does not want liberty. It wants domination.” — Lenin

Modern Reflection: Look at the IMF and World Bank. These are not neutral institutions. They are enforcers of global finance. They use debt to restructure economies, dismantle unions, privatize health and education, and guarantee Western capital a return.

Finance capital is the lifeblood of modern imperialism.

Since the 1970s, we have entered a new phase: financialization under neoliberalism.

• Deregulation removed all constraints on speculative capital.
• Labor protections were gutted to restore profit rates.
• Production was globalized, but finance was centralized.

The result?

• Derivatives markets worth over $1 quadrillion.
• Sovereign debt used to discipline entire nations.
• Asset bubbles in housing, tech, and carbon trading.

The 2008 crisis exposed the fragility of this system:

• Banks collapsed under the weight of fictitious capital.
• Governments bailed them out, transferring private debt to public shoulders.
• Austerity followed, further immiserating the working class.

Lesson: This was not a failure of capitalism—it was capitalism working as designed.

Contemporary Example: Today, the global South pays over $200 billion annually in debt service—more than it receives in aid or investment. This is neocolonial extraction via finance.

Financial capital is the core logic of modern empire.

We cannot reform this system. We must abolish it.

1. Rejection of Reformism

• Calls to “regulate Wall Street” are illusions.
• Taxing speculation won’t end the logic of accumulation.
• Only a socialist planned economy, democratically controlled by workers, can put capital in its place.

2. Dual Power Against Finance

We must build institutions of resistance:

• Unions that challenge austerity and demand control over pensions and budgets.
• Cooperatives that remove production from the credit system.
• Tenant and debtors’ unions that refuse to pay and organize collective defaults.
• International solidarity with countries resisting debt imperialism

We must also destroy the ideological hold of finance:

• Credit scores are not moral indexes.
• Personal debt is not personal failure.
• Meritocracy is a mask for structural extraction.

3. Exploiting Finance’s Weakness

Because finance is detached from production, it is vulnerable:

• General strikes disrupt value flows.
• Debt refusal breaks creditor discipline.
• Bank nationalizations turn finance into a public utility.

The proletariat produces everything. Wall Street produces nothing.

Let us act accordingly.

Comrades,

Marx revealed capital’s laws.

Engels unmasked finance as class domination.

Lenin situated it as global imperial power.

Today, we face an empire of digits—of indexes, ratings, and debt. But behind every Bloomberg terminal is the ghost of a factory, the weight of a collapsed union, the crushed life of a global worker.

Our mission is clear:

• Not to democratize finance, but to destroy it.
• Not to lobby Wall Street, but to seize it.
• Not to play by the rules of creditors, but to unleash the power of debtors.

The only solution is a revolutionary rupture—a world where the producers, not the profiteers, rule.

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

Let us build the power, the discipline, and the clarity to make that vision real.

Thank you.