Speculation is an imaginative act detached from asset value, pricing others’ future desires

Evidence

Marx’s groundbreaking inquiries into nineteenth-­century capitalism broadly considered the imagination as a destructive force, undergirding the para­ sitic 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 fe­ tishism, 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 impercep­ tible by the senses” (1887, 1:48)—­properties that are therefore at once imag­ ined 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). — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 215

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Keynes’s ‘beauty contest’ view of speculation and to the book’s core thesis on how speculation reshapes the social imagination. — connects to: Speculation fuses fatalistic accumulation desire with risk-taking ingenuity — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 82; Speculation is an imaginative act confronting uncertainty, not mere risk-taking — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 85; Derivatives reveal how people relate to their own imagined futures — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities: Living with…, 93 (+9 more)
• QUESTION: The shift from Marx’s oneiric finance to the reader’s financialization framing — where does the social-imagination claim depart from Marx’s?

Broader Connections

• Speculation prices assets by imagined future appeal to others, not actual value. #corroborates (0.95) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 138
• Speculation is relational, depending on anticipating others’ expectations #expands (0.85) — Aris Komporozos-Athanasiou, Speculative Communities, 8