Abstract: Rethinking Marx’s Fictitious Capital: Banking Capital, Accounting Perspectives, and the Modern Uno School

Conventional interpretations of Marx’s “fictitious capital” focus on capital fetishism and on financial crises associated with price fluctuations in long-term securities. However, these interpretations tend to overlook the internal complexity of the term in Volume III of Capital. Marx employs the term “fictitious” in several distinct senses, particularly in his analysis of banking capital in Chapter 29, without establishing a clear dichotomy between industrial capital and banking capital. As a result, difficulties arise when the conceptual framework of industrial capital is applied to banking capital, leading many components of banking capital to appear “fictitious”.

This paper draws on accounting concepts and modern Uno School approaches to clarify this problem. Marx implicitly adopts a balance-sheet perspective: he characterises not only long-term securities, but also short-term financial claims on the asset side and credit money not backed by gold on the liability side as fictitious, while excluding banks’ equity capital and gold reserve. In addition, accounting retains the dual meanings of “capital” and differentiates the calculation of profit between industrial capital and banking capital. Furthermore, recent Uno School contributions extend Marx’s credit theory by theorising both credit creation and the long-term securities market, thereby clarifying the multiple meanings of “fictitious”.

By integrating these perspectives, this paper identifies the theoretical core of fictitious capital and contributes to reconstructing credit theory within the logical structure of Volume III of Capital in the era of financialisation.