The emergence of new sources of wealth creation is one of the main factors commonly invoked to interpret changes in the way a society is shaped. On the one hand, if the different types of resource on which the accumulation of capital rests are to be valorized, they must be exploited by different types of persons. On the other hand, because a society is composed of both persons and things, as layers of wealth and modalities of enrichment shift, the orientation of revenues and the distribution of property – which is a major dimension of society – are modified.
As it happens, property is the principal arrangement that governs the composition of societies, because it fixes the distribution of things among persons and also, conversely, as Marx noted, the distribution of persons among things. For persons are dependent on the things they possess as much as things depend on the persons to whom they belong. To be sure, people have expectations (which are by no means solely instrumental, moreover) with respect to things. But in return, if only to see these expectations satisfied, people must devote themselves to the cause of the things they own, for things inevitably deteriorate if they are deprived of care and left, as it were, to their own devices. Whatever their content, and whether they are material or immaterial, the goods on which a person’s fortune rests, if they are not assisted – that is, if they do not also give rise to expenditures (of attention, time, money, and so on) – imperceptibly turn into burdens or trash. The forms of valuation we are examining are articulated with these processes on the horizon of profit: either the deterioration of things is accelerated so as to require their renewal, as in the standard form or the trend form, or their preservation is emphasized, as in the collection form or the asset form.
Whether it is displaced or stabilized, wealth must always be maintained, which is to say, kept ready for exchange. A possession that does no “work” (as Schumpeter would have put it)1 may well be endowed, on paper, with a metaprice. But, as capital, this patrimony remains imaginary as long as it is not submitted to the test of circulation, which alone has the power to make it real by associating it with a price.
This is also why kinship structures play a central role in the organization of social life, in contemporary free-market societies as well as in the old status-based societies. It is indeed on the basis of kinship that things, or most things, are transmitted from generation to generation. A thing whose owner is dead cannot remain for long “without a master” – as French law puts it – without being destroyed.2 The existence of things requires humans to choose whether or not to abandon them; and the possibility of this choice probably constitutes one of the obligations on which the primacy of kinship relations rests, a primacy that no political system, not even communism, has managed to abolish. But this possibility takes different forms depending on the relation between the lifespan of things and the lifespan of persons.
One of the most radical changes introduced by mass production of standard objects has entailed populating the world with things conceived in such a way that they will have a much shorter lifespan than people do; this is the case for most technological artifacts. And, during the same period, the life expectancy of humans has gotten longer, so that, in the case of standard products, the question of their transmission from one generation to the next has become secondary. Conversely, things of the type that occupy the heart of an enrichment economy have a lifespan with no predictable end and can thus, in principle, circulate endlessly, provided that they find human beings to take care of them – that is, to protect them against the ravages of time to which they are subject on the same basis as are all beings, animate and inanimate alike, and whether or not these are artifacts or “natural” entities. These latter goods serve the interests of their owners only if the owners take responsibility for maintaining them, for keeping them in good condition, and, as it were, for ensuring their quality of life (this was recognized in older legal structures which referred to the behavior of “a good father of the family,” a term taken from Roman law and only recently eliminated from French law). It is in fact only on this condition that a thing can retain the possibility of circulation and of being appreciated (in other words, it can retain its metaprice) and can remain a patrimonial good capable of providing income, of serving as a monetary reserve, or of being exchanged for a sum of money that can be reinvested in another business deal: that is, it can be turned into capital. In the enrichment economy, at any given moment in time, the field of possible outcomes available to persons is ballasted with the weight of the properties that they have in one way or another inherited, and that they can, or cannot, put back to work; in this sense, then, the present is always governed by the past.
When it comes to analyzing the way the development of an enrichment economy has been able to modify the composition of society, it is essential, first, to identify the goods whose possession allows one to invest in this economy and, second, to analyze the distribution of these goods. Knowing that an enrichment economy is based above all on exploitation of the past, we shall say that the goods that can prove to be profitable are goods that, in one way or another, not only come from the past – which is the case for property in general – but also signal that fact. They denote or connote the past more or less explicitly, either by incorporating it in a semantic mode (an antique is understood as such only through reference to the past) or by being charged with memorial power in certain discursive contexts (for example, that of an industrially produced perfume whose name and brand evoke a legendary past).
How are these goods distributed? The answer that comes immediately to mind is that they are in the hands of those to whom old objects belong, objects from which these owners can profit by reselling them (surplus value) or – if the goods take the form of real estate – by renting them (income): in other words, these goods belong to possessors of a patrimony. But this answer is insufficient, because the age of a thing is not, or not only, a physical quality; it also obeys a narrative mode of determination. An old object is not only aged, it is also associated with a story (a history), and it is in large part with reference to this story that its price is justified. Now, such stories have to be composed and maintained if their memory is to be preserved. Story-makers thus play a considerable role in the valuation of goods whose prices are justified by their memorial dimensions; these actors may be historians, critics or historians of art or of literature, anthropologists (when so-called ethnological objects are involved), or even novelists whose narratives help adorn certain places with a prestigious halo and increase tourist activity in these places to a significant degree. It is thus conceivable that actors who “produce” the past benefit, or might benefit, from the opportunities offered by the development of an enrichment economy, even if they do not themselves own goods anchored in the past and do not trade in such goods. The same holds true for all those who are responsible for restoring, preserving, or displaying objects from the past, such as museum conservators or the various experts involved in restoring prestigious objects or buildings. Plastic artists may also contribute to the fashioning of the past, or aspire to do so, to the extent that their works – if the artists succeed in gaining recognition for them – will be positioned among things that, presumed to be immortal, are already, in the present moment considered from an imaginary standpoint, projected into the future and thereby adorned with the aura of a past.
Of what order are the goods held by actors of the sort we have just enumerated – goods that, being anchored in the past, ought to place those actors at the heart of an enrichment economy – when the actors are not themselves owners of memorial objects but, rather, are among the personnel charged with inventing and maintaining the memory of things? The mere fact of participating in the preservation of a heritage is an insufficient criterion, for this is also the case of staff members, significant in number, who ensure the material maintenance of exceptional objects and places; in an enrichment economy, people in this category play a role more or less comparable to that of servants in pre-industrial economies, since they are assigned to the service of things without being given the power to transform them by endowing them with a history. The goods in question clearly equate with culture, which is determined entirely through reference to history, since it is composed of proper names, verbal statements, schemas of thought, and objects that, following a series of selections, have found themselves embodied in works deemed worthy of being preserved in libraries, monuments, or museums. This heritage, transmitted by families and schools, can be reinvested with each new generation in new cultural operations and can generate profits. It is thus quite fitting to speak, following Pierre Bourdieu, of cultural capital. This form of capital clearly has a mode of existence that is at once individual – since each of the individuals in which it is deposited may profit from it personally – and collective – to the extent that its maintenance, transmission, and deployment depend on the participation of a large number of actors and on the way their actions are coordinated. But this is no more and no less true than for the other forms of capital, and especially industrial capital, whose private appropriations, to be profitable, must be immersed in a productive fabric consisting mainly of infrastructures that are not privately owned but typically belong to governmental entities.
It is thus reasonable to think that an enrichment economy benefits different types of actors who can profit from the past on various grounds, and that it is beneficial above all to those in possession of a heritage that can give rise to a commercial exchange which will turn it into capital. Patrimony of this sort may be incorporated into objects or embodied in persons. In relation to these two possibilities, actors can be ranked more or less hierarchically in terms of the importance of their holdings measured in the first instance by an estimate of the metaprice of their possessions – an estimate produced for tax reasons, for example, or during the transmission of an estate – and in the second instance most notably by the actors’ educational level, their professions, or their earnings. The two possibilities are of course not mutually exclusive. Still, while it is presumably rare for collectors and traders in art, antiques, or even expensive real estate to be totally lacking in embodied cultural capital, it is conversely quite common for holders of this latter sort of capital, even at the highest levels, to be totally lacking in costly patrimonial objects. From this situation we can deduce that patrimony incorporated in things takes precedence over patrimony incorporated in persons, since those who benefit from the second sort and who seek to valorize it – that is, to transform it into capital – have to place themselves at the service of those who hold patrimony embodied in things or, at the very least, of those who control access to such patrimony.
How can we characterize the individuals or groups least likely to profit from the development of an enrichment economy except as “losers” or “servants,” people who have been left behind or left out? These are not simply actors who possess little or no patrimony – whether incorporated in things or in persons – in their own right; the category includes, more radically, all those who belong to groups whose anchoring in the past has not been the object of a collective work of valorization, or even of shaping, so that memorializing that past, which is at best strictly a family or community affair, not only brings no external benefits but can even stigmatize the group.
Among these “losers,” one finds persons and groups who made their living until recently as blue-collar workers in industrial centers that are now in decline, and who lived in nearby urban areas. These centers and the associated housing clusters have generally been either abandoned or “rehabilitated.” But for the most part their former occupants have not profited from the recent reclassifications of production sites and relocation zones that have accompanied the (re)valorization of the industrial patrimony. In fact, rehabilitation efforts have been focused exclusively on buildings and material infrastructure whose arrangements and destinations have been profoundly modified; their former populations, excluded, no longer had any place in the landscape. These processes of gentrification – which have been the object of much recent study3 – have been characterized chiefly by the way they combined respect for things whose anchoring in the past had been valorized with disdain for persons whose anchoring in the present condemned them to degradation. But the things in question still had to be old enough to attract attention once again, and this was by no means always the case. Workers who had lost their jobs when factories closed and residents in inferior or dilapidated housing thus met the same fate as the so-called soulless sites where they had ended up: abandonment.
The possibility of reinterpreting local memories within the patrimonial frameworks established in France especially from the 1980s on, and thus the possibility that workers could profit from the past, played out very differently depending both on how much commercial potential the external actors responsible for policy implementation saw in the workers involved and on the workers’ ability to exploit that potential. Thus farmers who stayed “on the land” (a small fraction of the old peasantry) could profit from heritage-creation arrangements that allowed them both to give a traditional allure to their products – local cheeses, for example, as in Laguiole – and also to initiate a shift toward environmental (“green”) tourism.4 This was particularly feasible in moderately mountainous regions, where agricultural industrialization was less extensive than on the plains; folklorists and, later, ethnologists had been taking an interest in those regions for decades. Through contact with ethnologists, the members of the populations in question had acquired the ability to see and present themselves as they were seen by others, from the outside. Thus they could offer proof, as it were, of their ancestral authenticity by surrounding themselves with objects bearing the marks of a tradition (often reinvented, moreover) while blending into their environment. Those who work the land are expected to be one with the landscape.
By contrast, other subaltern actors, even though they too came primarily from traditional cultures, had not had the same opportunities because, having been transplanted, they did not enjoy the same ancestral traditions as the objects present in their environment. Lacking memorial power in the broader context, their memories were conflated with their personal and familial histories, so that, even conveyed to a third party (such as an ethnologist or a sociologist) in the form of stories, they had little chance of coinciding with any “site of memory” and thus little chance of contributing to the success of an effort at heritage creation. This is the case par excellence of the immigrant populations from the other side of the Mediterranean, who are stigmatized by being treated as though they lacked a past, no matter how long they have been on French territory and in spite of efforts on the part of novelists “from an immigrant background” to inscribe them in a history. This is true, for example, of “former North African miners” from a mining operation in Loos-en-Gohelle in the Pas-de-Calais discussed by Michel Rautenberg: objects of a “cultural action undertaken at the initiative of a ‘National Theatre,’ these actors have never risen to the status of subjects in the enterprise of “patrimonialization through culture and art.”5 The study by Stéphane Gerson cited earlier offers another example: Gerson focused on the unsuccessful attempts on the part of various actors in Salon-de-Provence to create a patrimony for that community, which had been affected by industrial decline, by turning to the ancestral figure of Nostradamus.6 Among the numerous initiatives, generally focused on celebrations of “Provençal culture,” that accompanied the collective effort at heritage creation, an association of students of Algerian origin (“Nejma”) had the idea of highlighting Nostradamus as a “cosmopolitan figure,” “open to other cultures,” so as to valorize “a ‘biculture’ blending the North African origins of its members with the local patrimony.” In 1984, they set up “an Arab suk [street market] and a seventeenth-century slave market in the Village Renaissance.” But this creative effort led nowhere.
Since at least the nineteenth century, struggles over the past have played an important role in class struggles. Testifying to this, for example, are the efforts undertaken by unions and competing parties claiming to represent the people – first of all the French Communist Party, especially from the 1930s to the 1970s – to endow themselves with a tradition that would have its own pilgrimage sites, its monuments, its heroes, and its folklore. Reference to these “traditions” supported the “repertory” (to borrow an expression from Charles Tilly)7 of actions carried out by workers during strikes and social conflicts. Reference to the past plays at least as important a role – although a different one – when the claims emanating from subaltern groups are translated not in the idiom of social class but in the language of ethnicity. They then take the form not only of demands bearing on working conditions and standard of living but also, and perhaps especially, of demands for recognition.8
These demands for recognition are often supported today by activities that, in different ways, are related to the world of art, as is the case when so-called traditional objects, often connected with the sphere of religion, valorized for their decorative aspects and introduced into circuits of exchange, undergo a process of ratification; the same process can occur with practices that claim both to express the subaltern condition in its specificity and to be aesthetically innovative, as was the case with hip-hop starting in the 1980s.9 These displacements of social demands toward identitary expressions are an indication, among many others, of the way the development of an enrichment economy tends to modify manifestations of belonging and of social conflict, going so far as to affect even those who are a priori the most excluded from such manifestations.
Let us add that some of these outsiders – who are deprived of a past susceptible to valorization – can nevertheless earn salaries in an enrichment economy, either because the economy has been implanted in a former industrial zone (such as the Louvre satellite museum opened in Lens in northeastern France in 2012) or because the outsiders in question have moved toward zones where such an economy is developing; however, they are relegated to the least stable and most subaltern positions. Often temporary or seasonal, these jobs are stimulated by the expansion of tourism but also of cultural activities, including activities that depend on the central government or on regional entities. At the bottom of the ladder, outsiders may find work as custodians (“surface operators”) or as “maintenance agents” and, at a somewhat higher level, as security guards (those in museums have the highest status); they may even win positions in administration, hospitality, or event organizing, although the latter positions are often reserved for students. The enrichment economy is associated in this way with the formation of something like a “proletariat,” but one whose contours have little in common with those of the industrial proletariat. Scattered and transitory, the new proletariat is virtually devoid of organization. Its members, judged in part in terms of personal qualities (flexibility, congeniality, likeability, honesty, and so on) that evoke the qualifications for domestic employment of yesteryear, but also in terms of youth and physical beauty, have no access to the “repertory of actions” set up by decades of workers’ struggles.10 Mobilizing them constitutes a difficult task, a daunting challenge for the new union organizations that are trying to establish themselves by invoking above all the fight against job insecurity; the organizers are struggling to find specific forms of action that would give them leverage to defend personnel who have very little legal protection, and whose employers have a vast “reserve army” at their disposal.11
The term possédant (owner), which has been part of the vocabulary of social critique in France for two centuries, whether that critique is from a socialist perspective or linked to the revolutionary right12 (as was the case with the writer Georges Bernanos, for example), has long been used to designate a vast aggregation stretching from the upper industrial bourgeoisie to a lower bourgeoisie of rentiers, people whose income came exclusively from their ownership of property. The term was often used in critical contexts where heritage, and consequently family, were stressed alongside an ethos marked by money, calculations, rapaciousness, and avarice, long embodied in literature by the figures of the local factory owner or (although with lower status) the shopkeeper. By the 1970s and 1980s, the term was tending to disappear from ordinary taxonomies, or else it was retained specifically because of its somewhat old-fashioned flavor; this was the case in the Communist Party in its waning years. The term gave way to other modes of classification that had initially been proposed by academic sociology. These modes placed emphasis less on the possession of material things that were “transmitted from father to son” – that is, inscribed in a patrimonial order – than on the transmission of immaterial and embodied values such as language, culture, relationships, and (especially) competencies sanctioned by academic degrees, any of which could give access to privileged social positions.
Thus to the old bourgeoisie consisting of “owners” we can contrast cadres, members of the managerial class, a group whose extensive media representation throughout the same period has been extended by novelists, film-makers, and social scientists. During that time, the old lower middle class typified by shopkeepers, a group once denounced for stinginess and narrow-mindedness, was replaced by the “new middle classes,” which made a thundering entrance into the sociology of the 1970s and early 1980s. These new classes were characterized no longer by an ethos of restraint and thriftiness but, on the contrary, by the amount of their consumption, most notably of cultural tools (such as hi-fi equipment or cameras) and also by their cultural practices, which often took associative forms.13
This change was linked to the fact that the members of the upper bourgeoisie and the middle classes were earning salaries in increasing numbers. This trend began in the period between the two wars during the currency devaluation and then the crisis of the 1930s; it became massive in the postwar years.14 Most analysts of that period associate it with modernization – that is, with the supremacy of industrial society, in which access to affluence or even to wealth, and thus to consumption, validated the competencies deployed in salaried work within large companies that produced goods.15 Production of the standard objects that came out of these enterprises depended on personnel made up not only of laborers and employees but also of supervisors, engineers, and managers. In that context, there was emphasis less on the possession of a patrimony – in the form, for example, of a large house in a provincial or rural environment that had been received as an inheritance – than on the income that people earned as a function of their diploma-attested competencies or, to use an expression that was just starting to emerge at the time, on “human capital” invested on the market of salaried work.16
The question of social inequalities and their causes tended to shift onto the same terrain, whether inequalities had been considered as “just” recognition of unequal gifts or competencies, or whether critics had attributed them to the transmission of “cultural capital” via families and schooling. During the last few decades in particular, the study of social inequalities has ceased to focus exclusively on salary differentials (or on the risks of unemployment) but has also taken into account income differences tied to the possession of a patrimony. Struck in particular by the increased costs of housing in large cities, scholars have stressed the differences in income, especially among young people, between those who rent their homes or make monthly mortgage payments and those who have a house or an apartment thanks to an inheritance. This is the case for the synthesis presented by INSEE on earned and unearned income in 2014;17 the factors on which its estimations are based include ownership of the housing in which “households” (in INSEE’s sense) reside and the rising costs of real estate during the 2000s.18 Taking into account what can be estimated as the rental value of the residential units people own meant a “change in standard of living” attributed to 37 percent of the persons involved: a shift to a lower level for tenants and to a higher level for property owners, the latter being much more numerous when we look at the upper levels of income distribution, especially from age fifty on. Ownership of a residence, especially when it is received as an inheritance and not purchased on credit, constitutes an important asset that makes it possible to rise in the world of enrichment, where working conditions often differ from those in the wage-earners’ world in its stable forms; those conditions are characterized by interplay among a plurality of forms of activity ranging from independence and solo entrepreneurship to participation in associations or involvement in short-term projects.
But the gap in standard of living that has to do with housing conditions, and whether one owns or rents, is just one indicator among others of the role, undoubtedly once again a very important role, assigned by the development of an enrichment economy to patrimony in the formation of income. In fact, in large cities and in zones and regions where the economy is chiefly residential and, even more clearly, in proximity to patrimonial and touristic sites that attract large numbers of visitors, real estate and building lots, which may long have been viewed by their owners as an agreeable inheritance whose maintenance costs had to be met from salaried income, turn out to be important sources of income, either in the form of rent payments or in the form of added value when they are offered for sale. This process of enrichment, which benefits from the considerable expansion of tourism, has been stimulated by the creation of Internet sites and legal arrangements that make it possible to rent secondary or even primary residences for short periods to visitors passing through. As one ad for a site set up for person-to-person rentals (Airbnb) noted: “My guest room pays for my vintage motorcycle! Extend your income by renting your home in Paris.”
These new opportunities favored the formation of a large stratum of lower- and mid-level households relying on income from property ownership. Although they do not constitute an explicit category in France (that is, the category is not recognized as such by the government, so it doesn’t figure in administrative nomenclatures), these people nevertheless manifest de facto solidarity in the defense of their specific interests, which leads them to privilege territory, conceived not as a space of production but as a place for living and vacationing that can be valorized through reliance on processes of enrichment. Examples of this phenomenon include buildings in historic city centers that have been classified as historical landmarks, “authentic” cottages belonging to fishermen or winemakers in “the loveliest villages in France,” ancient terroirs, with their high-quality foods and great wines, or ancestral manors where investments with guaranteed returns have allowed them to be turned into “Relais & châteaux” offering prestigious tourist accommodation.19
The members of this stratum of independent wealth profit, to varying degrees according to the size and nature of their patrimony, from new economic opportunities that have arisen chiefly from real estate, buildings and building sites, and land transmuted into “places of memory.” These latter attract affluent visitors seeking cozy, nostalgic places of refuge, in which the past, which owes its calming power to the fact that nothing more can happen there, finds itself reinscribed, as it were, in a present that, as a simple staging of a past, is disconnected, positioned at a safe distance from danger and above all from conflict. But these environments retain their value only if they are protected, not only from natural risks, not to mention war, but also from the sort of permanent risk that the presence of poverty has always constituted. The patrimonial class, whose re-emergence has been fostered by the development of an enrichment economy, is inclined to ensure such protections in order to maintain the conservatism, regionalism, and nationalism that are the political attitudes most in harmony with the interests of the things whose survival they are responsible for ensuring and from which they profit.
The development of an enrichment economy has contributed to a degree that is undeniably difficult to measure with precision to the reconstitution of the “patrimonial class” based on independent means that Thomas Piketty’s studies have brought to light. Analyzing the evolution of the capital-to-income ratio during the twentieth century, Piketty has shown how this ratio, which was very high up to 1914 (the value of the national capital was equivalent to six or seven years of the national income), sank in the wake of the First World War until it was reduced by two-thirds, before it began to climb back up. It has continued to rise over the last several decades, especially since 1990, so that, “by 2010, the capital/income ratio had returned to its pre-World War I level.”20 The relation between the enrichment economy and the re-emerging patrimonial class is even more apparent if we take into account the nature of the goods that comprise this capital. Its principal component today is no longer agricultural land, whose value has plunged since the early twentieth century, but real estate: in other words, private capital, which, in France, constitutes more than 95 percent of the national patrimony.
What Piketty calls “capitalism without capitalists,” which characterized France in the 1950s, when “public power in France held between 25 percent and 30 percent of the national patrimony,” and when the French economy was driven by growth, has thus been replaced by “a quasistagnant society” in which “wealth accumulated in the past will inevitably acquire disproportionate importance.”21 We have been witnessing “a strong comeback of private capital in the rich countries since 1970, or, to put it another way, the emergence of a new patrimonial capitalism” accompanied by an increase in inequality.22 In addition to real estate, which is in first place, this private capital includes financial assets and also “valuables” such as jewelry or works of art, held above all as “reservoirs of value” (estimated to amount to between 5 percent and 10 percent of the national income).23 Alongside a patrimonial class made up of the extremely wealthy (the top 1 percent – in France, some 500,000 people), a significant “patrimonial middle class” is developing; according to Piketty, its emergence is “an important, if fragile, historical innovation” in recent decades.24 It contributes to the formation of an “inheritance society … characterized by both a very high concentration of wealth and a significant persistence of large fortunes from generation to generation.”25 Evidence for this can be found in the rise, since the 1980s, “in the annual flow of inheritances over the long run, that is, the total value of bequests (and gifts between living individuals) during the course of a year, expressed as a percentage of national income,” which had fallen to its lowest point around 1950.26 Inheritance “has thus nearly regained the importance it had for nineteenth-century cohorts.”27
Piketty’s conclusions are confirmed by the trends of recent years.28 The surveys used by INSEE29 show that inequalities have continued to increase since 2010 owing to the rise in poverty among the unemployed and among wage-earners who were already poor, and above all owing to the “dynamism of those with very high incomes,”30 “nearly two-thirds” of which is driven by the “growth in property income.”31 Revenues from property represent 30 percent of their total income, as compared to 22 percent seven years earlier. Now, “the patrimony of households is very concentrated within the population: at the end of 2009, more than 20 percent of the net patrimony was held by the wealthiest households – 1 percent of the total population.”32 While almost all of those with “very high incomes” benefit from transferable securities (between 95 and 99 percent), income from real estate is also very high, since 70 percent of the households in this category also declare real-estate income, as compared to less than 15 percent of “the great majority” of people.33 The proportion of patrimonial income in overall household incomes goes from 3 percent for lower-income households to 30 percent for those at the top of the scale. Finally, the analysis of the relation between the level of patrimonial wealth and savings shows that, if the rate of savings generally rises in correlation with the patrimonial level, the holders of expensive inherited real estate have a tendency to save less because the patrimony they hold itself constitutes savings.34
Let us note, nonetheless, that the available indicators do not allow us to establish with precision the difference between patrimony and capital – that is, to distinguish actors for whom the possession of inherited assets plays the role of a back-up savings account and/or of a resource that can be rented, temporarily or permanently, in order to draw income (a possibility in most cases only when the inheritance consists in real estate) from actors who give themselves the means to put their patrimonial holdings to work by multiplying transactions in order to gain added value – that is, in order to transform their holdings into capital. This last possibility opens up opportunities that also concern patrimony in the form of transferable securities, because operations of this sort can be carried out by buying and selling objects of value.