Gustavo Moura de Cavalcanti Mello – författare

This book provides an original account of financialisation and outlines the creation of fictitious profits as a basis to describe the present phase of capitalist accumulation in the neoliberal era. Making innovative theoretical elaborations on Marx’s notion of fictitious capital, Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits offers a dialectic analysis of the increasing financialization during this crisis-ridden period based on the original concepts of fictitious profit and fictitious wealth. Combining the most important research from over twenty years of scholarly inquiry with groundbreaking new studies, Financial Speculation and Fictitious Profits is more than a collection of texts by political economists on a contemporary topic; it is a synthesis of an intense process of academic production that began with work of Karl Marx and has resulted in the formulation of a differentiated interpretative perspective on the contemporary evolution of capitalist crisis. 

This book analyses contemporary capitalism from Brazil and from the Marxian critique of political economy, particularly; the co-dependency of wealth and poverty and of civilization and barbarism; the current tendency towards capital over-accumulation and the specific form assumed by the capitalist crisis in recent decades; the financialisation process of capital accumulation, its effects on the world of labour; and the place that the state assumes in this broad process. Current trends toward increasing social inequality, impoverishment of large sections of the population, precariousness of labour and rising unemployment, environmental destruction, the spread of austerity policies and the suppression of social policies, the rise of the far right (together with the strengthening of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, political and religious fanaticism and all manner of intolerance, etc.), low economic growth, the primacy of the financial dimension of capital accumulation, all need to be understood in their multiple and complex articulations, as fundamental and inherent elements of contemporary capitalism, associating empirical analysis with conceptual construction. Because they are strictly contradictory processes, a dialectical approach is required that reclaims the Marxian legacy, and aims to contribute to updating it, seeking to bring new and relevant elements to the Marxist debate, based on a specific interpretation of Marx''s work, and as an immediate empirical basis the Brazilian reality.