A Class Focused Marxist Understanding of Financial Capital

The emergence of contemporary financialisation has sparked scholarly interest within post-Marxist thought, prompting a renewed examination of Marx’s concept of financial capital, understood as capital engaged in monetary and speculative activities that may, under certain historical conditions, be distinct from the real economy. Financialisation refers to the ‘increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies’. It specifically addresses how financial interests permeate every facet of the economy through the vantage point of globalised financial capital, which is more liquid, fictitious and volatile than in the eras of Marx, Hilferding and Lenin. Financial capital dominates the global neoliberal space through financialisation, emphasising short-term speculative logic and market psychology. This article aims to decipher the meaning of financial capital by taking a Marxian class-focused approach. It solely focuses on Marx’s concept of finance, including interest-bearing capital and fictitious capital, as described in Section V of Capital, Volume III and links this idea to the heterogeneous class and non-class processes, which form the foundation of Marx’s work from a class-focused perspective. JEL: B14, B24, P16