This article was submitted to the World Socialist Web Site by the Ukrainian socialist Maxim Goldarb. Persecuted by the NATO-backed Zelensky government, Goldarb was forced to flee the country and was recently granted international protection by the European Union.

Capitalists, no offense, but your entire stock market with its prices and quotes is a deception and illusion, working on your desire and the desire of “investors” to get rich quickly and unjustly solely on speculation. Without producing anything, without creating useful products and real, tangible added value.

I put the word “investors” in quotation marks, because most of them are future victims and losers who have money and want to get rich quickly.

The stock market created by you is a huge bubble inflated by the air of wild desires for quick profit, the figures of which have nothing to do with real assets and the product produced.

The recent days are a vivid confirmation of this. Can real wealth of tens of trillions of dollars disappear without a trace in a few days? A few hours, or even minutes—and they are gone, the share value of the largest companies has collapsed, they have lost half of their value. Wow! What a trick! Is it that half of the production assets of notional Apple, Tesla, Amazon, Walmart, Microsoft, Google disappeared? Half of the iPhone factories, trading floors and warehouses, programs and intellectual property products, finished products and goods in warehouses disappeared or self-liquidated?

Of course not, all the manufacturing assets of these and other companies are in place, working as they have been. They’re just not worth what the stock markets say they are. And they can’t be worth it. Their billion and trillion dollar valuations are fiction. The real value of an object cannot first fall by half in a few days, and then recover in a few hours. It is a fiction, a manipulation. Only a balloon can be inflated and deflated so quickly so that you can see its transformation before your eyes.

Let us remember: once upon a time, the shares of an enterprise reflected the real value of its assets, its capabilities: machines, machines, buildings, equipment, goods and so on. The acquisition of shares gave an opportunity to become the owner of a business or a part of it and hope to receive a part of the profit (depending on one’s share in it).

However, later the stock market, under the pressure of the irrepressible desires of capital to get a quick profit (quick and huge money exclusively by speculation), began to live its own life. Stock quotations on this market, inflated many times, in most cases no longer correspond to the real value of enterprises/businesses. When the nominal par value of a share was 10 dollars, it began to sell for 100, 200 dollars and even more! Do you believe that those who bought it will receive dividends in proportion to how much they overpaid on the stock exchange? I don’t. At best their dividends, like shares, will be calculated on the par value of the stock. 

Or do you believe that Apple or Amazon really own trillions of dollars worth of goods and production assets? And then all of a sudden they don’t. And then, once again, they do.

No, of course, not. It is only a stock exchange quotation, a wish. All these wild jumps that we have all seen recently, multi-billion or even trillion dollar values of companies on the stock market, their collapse and sharp recovery, all this super value is a balloon inflated by the desire for quick profit. The movie The Wolf of Wall Street has become a documentary.

I understand, it is human nature to want to be rich, even more so to become so without doing anything. Well, all the profits will be made by the organizers of the stock markets, while the “investors,” in the vast majority, will become losers and ruined.

Yet the most worrying thing is that such “inflated,” essentially fictitious, values are fake. They are not real hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars, but the organizers of the stock market will try to exchange them for real assets. These real assets are what gives people life, work, meaning, what makes up peoples and countries: minerals, water, land, other real national wealth. They are already trying to seize them, changing their “empty” trillions with the help of corrupt local governments into real value, which is priceless for people and states riches. In the process, they are plunging the majority of the population into poverty.

Ukraine is a vivid example of this:

1) The strategic industries—energy, metallurgy, coal, coke, and the chemical industry—upon which the state budget rests, are all in the hands of 4 oligarchic families;

2) Some 80 percent of elderly Ukrainians live below the poverty line;

3) Every second working person receives a minimum wage (according to UN standards);

4) Paying for housing and services takes on average 60 percent of a family budget;

5) Half of the able-bodied population is in the process of labor migration, i.e., they earn their income abroad.

And this is data from the eve of the war. Now the situation is even worse.