The Crisis of the Golden Calf / When the hyperreality of symbols Fracture Material Reality

Theology of Money (IV) The crisis of the golden calf When the hyperreality of the symbols of material reality fracture Ernesto Sabato once observed that the simple operation of changing a sheep for a sack of wheat and involves an exercise in abstraction. We can also consider later the occurrence of the earliest forms of money, even before the ancient Mesopotamia, materialized this abstraction and involved the invention of an implicit state. Since then, the money was linked to a material reality. In a historical ultimately went gold. But gold, represented by money, was also a symbolic rather than material reality. Not only because it required an act of faith on its mysterious collective existence in a London bank or U.S. but because the very value of gold bullion as the value of any currency or financial role is symbolic. In the first instance depends on the collective faith. In turn, this faith is guaranteed and stabilizes the power of the state through their ministries of economy, its legislative and judicial apparatus, and ultimately, the police and army.

The difference of our time with the time of Hammurabi or the first centuries of capitalism is progressive and radical separation between the symbol and reality, between the value attributed to capital and consumer goods and production. The abstract value of postmodern capital is no longer a reality-for example, the number and quality of scarce goods, but modifies it twice: first (1) is able to modify the material reality and on the other (2) is able to declare itself the value of that reality. A brief example is to remind people in the U.S. real estate values. In 2007 there were houses for N N 'people with a value A' constantly growing. In 2008 there were the same N houses and the same N 'value to people but the same had''fallen sharply while X percent of the N' evicting people mortgaged their homes. What sudden change of material reality caused the sharp drop in the value A '? None. The reality was still there, just as blindly indifferent, but the abstract value of A 'had fallen dramatically.

Behind the change in the abstract reality, represented by the dramatic curves of Jones and Nasdaq Down came the changes in the material realm, first with the contraction of consumption, then the decrease in production of goods and finally the expulsion of the workers. The Wall Street charts superstition measure that relates the abstract world of values ​​and the material world of goods and services. It is not a simple expression of the state of the latter, but the measurement of pulse nervous investors move in this abstract world that strategically is called "the real world?" The pragmatic world of men?. It is no coincidence, because the social myths always refer to a phenomenon with names that contradict, deny or muted.

One of the oldest laws in economics, law of supply and demand, the value of something related to the material world. This material world is composed of goods (supply) and needs (demand). This law still binds the material world and the symbolic in a way close. Example: During the rising price of oil in the first half of 2008, the explanation and the possible reason for the phenomenon arising from this law. The increase in industrial consumption of China and India worth the price of a barrel of oil at $ 145. Leave aside the factor of speculation and price manipulation by Big Oil. In any case the law of supply and demand continued to be closely linking the price / value of a product to a particular material reality. At that time we said that such escalation could only be a bubble, because it was difficult to imagine an increase in demand proportional to the tripling of oil prices in just a few months. From the hysteria of Wall Street in September 2008 the oil price collapsed to less than $ 40. Before they had the prices of U.S. homes.

What happened to the material side of reality? A tsunami devastated the twenty percent of the houses and killed five percent of the population of the world? No. Not even the terrible tsunami in Indonesia in 2004 had the slightest effect on the global economy. Any earthquake shook the foundations of China's industry? Any plague devastated the crops in the Midwest? No. Any global drought stopped the machinery of food production? No. Any philosopher infested the world with anti-consumerist ideology that contracted demand of useless products to thirty percent? Less. So what is new but a rupture in the relationship that usually keeps tied (1) the material world (2) the tyrannical reign of abstraction of capital? The current global crisis is a crisis of symbols-credit and investment capital, which ended up dragging the material world to a real crisis. It's as close to the situation where the old European conqueror, who was behind the gold or diamond in America? Africa, not just brute force needed to achieve the object of his desire but also the ideological force to impose the worldwide recognition of the value of these minerals first and the recognition of abstract representations in the form of paper money, interest and bad debts later.

But both money and debt are worthless if the debtor and creditor between half an implicit and explicit on that. This relationship joins benefited harmed by mutual agreement, usually given implicitly and unquestionable, but ultimately the relationship is guaranteed by the State that not only legalized but the relationship has the power to validate the cases benefited the injured questioning the symbolic recognition of that relationship. In the current crisis that "implicit agreement? between the material and the symbolic is maintained despite a break between classes, between the abstract and the concrete, between the symbolic and the material. Without giving news of the break, both sides are desperately seeking their self-healing under the laws and formulas above. This is what is called "botton up?, Or rebound in the Dow Jones charts, for example. When this happens, it means that investors have come to trust the material world and the capital (the agent of the symbolic world) to flow back into these financial temples. Some months after workers move into new jobs, not obeying the laws of the material world but the laws of the abstract world, symbolic, that capitalism has broken in a desperate company to create material values.

And we all strive to learn the new laws of the game in the struggle to not fall out of one system with no alternative in sight within the culture in which we were born, including the countries that call themselves socialists, who are not a world apart but variation within the capitalist world-financial. As outlined in an earlier essay, the world today can hardly be understood in the classic Marxist model where the infrastructure (the material world) determines or influences the superstructure radically (the symbolic) but is increasingly symbolic world, through an ideological tyranny grounded in financial power centers, the area does orbit the material world according to their interests and needs. A systematic tyranny, ideological and monetary policy. Or is tyranny suffered by workers of the world absolutely at the mercy of the mood of investors, ie, the revered masters of the world? It is a tyranny with a personal face, bitter and dark. It is a tyranny that is expressed in the media smiles confinement. An ideological tyranny that demands recognition that the world works and there because of it.

A tyranny of the symbolic world torn the material world and the human world. A tyranny of consumerism and psychological instability. A sweet tyranny, sometimes orgasmic, but tyranny nonetheless. Jorge Majfud Lincoln University, March 2009.