Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.1, 2016

Contradictions between Financialized World and Spiritual World

(Abstract)

Zhang Xiong

The financialized world in the 21st century is a world with high economic rationality, high secularity and high value commensurability. Profit-driven financial voluntarism spread, directly bringing on the “financial internalization” of individual lives and the increasing decline of human holism. The development of the world has to depend upon innovation in a financial system, but the financial system in reality has departed from its essence. It is undeniable that in comparison with the capital in Marx’s times, the nature of capital to seek for surplus value does not change in the 21st century; the essence of capital in terms of its social relations does not change; and the leverage effect of wealth of capital does not change, either. However, a great change has taken place to the development of capital logic in the 21st century: with the forceful drive of global financial system of capital, it has become more abstract and less limited to particular regions, and the orientation of capital as a subject shows heterogeneity and diversity, and its operational mode has become virtual and psychedelic. Especially, with the intelligentization of instrumental rationality, the spiritual dimension of capital has become more subjective. An interpretation of the financialized from the point of view of phenomenology of spirit can deeply disclose the problem of mutual alienation of man’s spiritual nature and his objectified world in the 21st century, and thus offer consideration in a spiritual dimension for objectively understanding the category capital in the 21st century.