For Marx speculation is an imaginary act detached from actual asset value

Evidence

Marx’s groundbreaking inquiries into nineteenth-century capitalism broadly considered the imagination as a destructive force, undergirding the parasitic function of speculative capital and the alienating power of money ideology. Imagination thus appears in his texts predominantly as a specter or a dark shadow—most vividly in the famous formulation of commodity fetishism, in which finance haunts social life like a phantasm, obscuring and commodifying relations between people. Marx writes of the mysterious commodity qualities that “are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses” (1887, 1:48)—properties that are therefore at once imagined and real. Finance is a key conduit for traversing between the worlds of imagination and reality, of material and fictitious values. And speculation is paradigmatic of this oneiric function of finance: an imaginary act, entirely detached from the value of the assets it refers to (or the value it could yield), relying instead on how speculators imagine it might appeal, in the future, to others like themselves (Haiven 2011). Volume 1 of Capital visualizes poignantly this rapidly growing gap between fictitious and material value forms of capital as a true “horror specter” of blood-sucking vampires. — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 138

Categorization

• XREF: This prefigures the definition of speculation the book uses: betting not on value but on how other speculators will imagine an asset’s future appeal — the exact mechanism later mapped onto populist voting.
• ADDENDUM: Commodity-fetishism mystification of social relations parallels the sacrificial/grief logics of mystification treated in ‘On Sacrifice’.
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that speculation depends on imagining how similar others will imagine the asset’s future appeal is a dense reflexive-social mechanism well worth sitting with — it is the microfoundation of speculative populism.