Heidegger

_rossin at tin.it_ (mailto:rossin@tin.it) Dr. Antonio Rossi.writes
_gevans613 at aol.com_ (mailto:gevans613@aol.com) ha scritto:

Regarding - THE REIFICATIVE ROOTS OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS

Jud,

I consider it a privilege, having read your essay.

Just a reflection of mine.

Its title suggests me that the global financial crisis has been caused by a
(facet of) the reificative process.

I also read a Lukacs’ quote: “Just as the capitalist system continuously
produces and reproduces itself economically on higher levels, the structure of
reification progressively sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more
definitively into the consciousness of man.” [2] (Lukacs. 1971. p. 93)

both of which make me think about the hypothetical existence of some
causative relation between the two processes, capitalism and reification.

I but remember I once was told (and I humbly agree) that the laws of physics
are as old as the world they govern. It is their recognition, i. e.
formulation, i. e. reification that can be given a birth date, that of the day in
which each law has been discovered and put into a scientific formula.

Reification thus becomes a means by which a law governing the world — be it
a law of either physics or economy and biology, or of the same human
communication too, it does not matter — can be acknowledged and therefore, to some
extent let’s hope, controlled.

In short, by means of our self-conscious and responsible knowledge of our
own connatural reification modality (not just the reified entity) , we humans
could control the world going on better than before.

What do you think?

cheers, antonio

_gevans613 at aol.com_ (mailto:gevans613@aol.com) ha scritto:

THE REIFICATIVE ROOTS OF THE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS.

The world wide emergency of major financial insolvency and bankruptcy is
already transforming the world and with it the lives of millions of people. If
the collapse of the banks and the deserved demise of the impotent, formerly
upwardly mobile and now downwardly and very much declivitous, incompetent,
dabbling, interventionist transcendentalist dupes who, though employed in
positions well above their competence levels, have been in control of the money
markets, are allowed to cock up capitalism for much longer, the very real risk is
that the world faces an economic slump of proportions not seen since the
1930s, with all the human heartache that entails.

Are we to experience again the contracting of our economies? Will the
current incipient protectionism which restricts the importation of some cheap
consumer goods from third world countries be allowed to run rife and stimulate a
wholesale movement of starving blacks to clamour for entry at the borders of
the EEC? Will there be a rise in mass unemployment? If that happens it will
almost certainly engender a big increase in crime and racial tension, being the
classical mechanism of the white Christian response to societal hardship
throughout all levels of Western society as a way of redirecting and deflecting
reificative blame onto the backs of folk from other ethnic backgrounds on the
part of the guilty frustrated believer in delusory abstraction, as it did in
Germany between the wars as witnessed by the Nazis Hitler and Heidegger
amongst millions of others of thes self styled master race. Such developments can
provoke serious geopolitical turmoil – and war. The potentialities are for
utter chaos, which is such a horrific prospect it is abominable even to
contemplate.

Karl Marx’s economic and political analysis of the burgeoning capitalism of
the nineteenth century and his prescription for bringing about change to the
politico-economic horrors of the worker-capitalist relationship were eclectic
in that much of the language that Marx employed to promote his message of
the possibility of change was couched in what seemed to be the best and most
compelling of the various styles or rhetorical forms available. The powerful
and compelling opening line of the Communist Manifesto is a foretaste of the
reificational metaphysical menu within.
“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.”
[1] (Marx & Engels 1890. p. 1)

It must have frightened the shit out of the European ruling class,
particularly as most of them believed in spectres, God, ghosts and things that go bump
in the night - which includes the bump of bullets from the discharged rifles
of revolutionaries.

He had obviously already grasped that the only effective language capable of
swaying the masses over to his ideas was the very reificative abstraction
that was being used against them, by the church, the gutter press, the
parrot-type, rote-learning which passed for working class education in those days,
and by their industrialist and political masters. My mother at the age of 92
was still word-perfect in a hymn to the German Kaiser learned parrot-fashion in
her working-class crap-crammer in 1910. (For readers who may be
interested in seeing this poem which characterises the
false bonhomie between Britain and Germany prior to WW 1 - here is the
link) _Click_  http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…)

It seems obvious to us now at this distance that he would choose to
concentrate on a reificative nomenclature which out-concretised the top-hatted
thingifiers of “labour, production, profit and entrepreneurial enterprise and just
reward.” Marx embarked upon a thingification-enterprise himself – the
project of fighting the capitalist class with a form of noble reification redolent
of Plato’s notorious noble lie on behalf of his clique of lying, reificating,
paederastic Athenian aristocrats - but Marx’s hypostatised abstractions were
of a sanitised, humanist, democratically acceptably working class variety.

Although the Hungarian Marxist György Lukacs was well aware of the
ontological distorting mirror of reification and wrote the quotation below, he failed
to identify the reification in his mentor’s own writings. The truth of the
matter is that Marx and most critics of linguistic reification, including
eliminativists like me, find it very useful to employ reification in our
criticisms of reification, mainly because it is so embedded in our language and makes
light work in areas of persuasion (the politicians, lawyers and the church
love it for this reason) and secondly because we have been as much brainwashed
by it from birth as anybody else. The big difference of course is that they
truly believe in the existence of their Platonist phantoms and we make known
our contempt for it overtly and merely exploit thingification instrumentally
as useful rhetorical fictions on the basis of: “why should the devil have all
the good tunes?”
“Just as the capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces itself
economically on higher levels, the structure of reification progressively
sinks more deeply, more fatefully and more definitively into the consciousness of
man.” [2] (Lukacs. 1971. p. 93)

Thus as Mike Rooke of Ruskin College, Oxford points out [3] (Rooke. 1998)
Georg Lukacs begins the chapter in ‘History and Class-Consciousness’
entitled ‘Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ Following Marx’s
analysis in the first chapter of Capital, and in particular the section
entitled ‘ The Mystery of the Fetishistic Character of Commodities’, he identifies
the essence of the commodity structure of capitalism as its tendency to make
the social relations between people appear as relations between things,
possessed of an autonomous power and objectivity. This commodity fetishism is, he
claims, both an objective form and a subjective stance corresponding to it,
by which he means that it is no mere illusion, but rather the actual lived
experience of people in capitalist society. [4] (Lukacs p. 197)

A General Theory of Reification
My General Theory of Reification splices together elements of nominalism
with an expanded, societal version of the Churchlands’ neurologically orientated
eliminative materialism with a full-blown eliminativism. It comprises of an
ontological analysis of almost everything under the sun, from logic and
science to the problems of freedom and religion, from biology and politics, to
education and the natural language of the road-sweeper and the refuse-collector.
This means that any abstraction or obvious reification like: *being, mind,
consciousness, reality, existence, knowledge, movement, energy* etc., is *up
for de-constructional grabs.*

The disparate theories fit like a glove and together form a very powerful
form of philosophical argument which the poor trannies have never experienced
before. To date, most of them thrash around gasping in their reificative life
belts like fish out of water and nobody has come up with any viable arguments
against it - because - it is a new form of anti-platonic attack system,
which has the destructive force of an existential exocet missile.

Historically there are three main anti-reificational philosophers, all of
whom are now dead, I respect the ideas of this trio in particular. The first is
the great Polish philosopher Tadeusz Kotarbinski. I have most of his stuff in
English displayed in The Athenaeum Library of Philosophy. James W. Woodard
was an American author, a professor who wrote in the thirties and forties,
his great work (practically unknown) is his Intellectual Realism and Culture
Change. (a foundational book, but almost impossible to find nowadays) I had to
employ a specialist book-finding agent in order to secure one - he eventually
found a copy in a small village bookshop in Alabama.

The third one is of course the Hungarian philosopher György Lukacs, but like
Marx (who he worshipped at the time - he had to in order to survive in
Communist Hungary) ) he mainly deals with the Marxian theory of the reification of
labour, money and profit etc. Ironically, of the three, Lukacs’ work is more
reificationally relevant right now in view of the latest breakdown in the
banking systems of the global community.

The present serious financial crash is a classical result of monetary
reification, with an ass-about-face concentration on the predicational belief in a
global societal
*financial network* with a childlike faith in a reified *pseudo-stability*
based upon a reified version of a non-existent valuta winging its way to and
fro in cyber-space between far-flung lending nodes.

The directors and service chiefs are completely naive idiots who spend their
time between playing golf and hypostasising the ability of their
institutions to go on lending more and more money ad infinitum to insufficient and
incompetently appraised recipient-subjects of dodgy loans to buy houses they can’t
afford by lending five or sometimes 6 times annual income without any
deposit etc., whose credit-worthiness was simply based on the fact that they had an
address, a telephone number, could speak English and a burning desire to
borrow money.

The computers the moronic money-lenders use for this abstract hyperspatial
activity have of course all been programmed with the same reificative shit
that their programmers employ for their fantasies of credit-worthy ness. Now the
whole reificational mess has come crashing down around their ears and we
have to suffer for their moronic trannie stupidity too. At stake are our present
manifestations of man’s technological genius, and last but not least the
ultimate stake and fate is that of our civilization. The trannies have H-Bombs
now.

Of the three philosophers, Woodard is more sweeping commentator with a wider
view of the reificative landscape and in his book he identifies the effects
of reification on practically every aspect of human behaviour. I might scan
his book and but it in the library - I wonder if 1935 means it is out of the
copyright period in America now?

Tadeusz Kotarbinski is more structured and *scientific* with his *reism,*
and like Lukacs concentrates on Marx’s version of reification.

The central thesis of Woodard’s book is that the pristine tendency of the
human mind is toward intellectual realism, that the long-term tendency is
towards a clearing of the trannie fictive faeces clogging up the Augean stables of
philosophy and to a much lesser extent science. For Woodard, all that all
individual and cultural development consists of a constant process of
correction and refinement in the direction of “reality-contactedness.” This process
is thought of mainly in terms of biological or evolutionary differentiation and
adaptation. Reality is accepted as the common-sense-reality of the
Nominalists. “Intellectual realism,” thus understood, signifies the inherent tendency
of the *mind* to deposit moral and intellectual concepts, principles and
ideas as encumbering dross in that process of growth and adjustment, and to take
them and hold to them as absolutes.

“Reification,” then, “except for its connotation of depersonalisation” is
not essentially different from what is ordinarily called hypostatisation.
According to the author there are various types of reification, which may be
classified as follows:
(1) The conceptual extension of perceptual reality;
(2) The hypostatisation of the relational into the existential;
(3) The projection of the fictitious into concrete reality;
(4) The transposition of the merely subjective into the objective;
(5) The interpretation of the particular and relative as general and
universal;
(6) The assertion of the problematic as self-evident; and
(7) Negative reification, (de-reification) which stresses the claim to
exclusiveness contained in many positive reifications and is therefore “only an
obverse aspect of some one of the above mentioned forms.” [5] (Woodard. 1935.
pp.9-13)

Addressing the more devious forms begetting wealth, such as the derivatives
market, that most people would indentify precisely as the method of obtaining
profit via invisibles unethically, and surely falls under the category
described in the bible as usury, or the act of lending money at an exorbitant
rate of interest without any physical or mental contribution whatsoever, Dr..
Rooke refers again to Lukacs as he illustrates the effects of reification with
the category of interest-bearing capital (or money generating money).
In this case the social relation which generates value (the capitalist who
buys labour power and puts it to work extracts surplus value and thus augments
the value of his capital) is obscured by the relation of money to itself.
The actual transformation of money into capital becomes invisible, a form
without content. Marx says that in this reified form of thinking, money acquires
the property of generating value and yielding interest - we arrive at a fetish
form of capital. The reified category of ‘capital-interest or
‘capital-profit’ is complemented by those of ‘land-ground rent’ and ‘labour-wages’, the
economic trinity of political economy as Marx calls them.
[6] (Lukacs. ibid) quoting [7] (Marx. 1957. p. 48)

Following the two great world wars of the twentieth century, Marx’s
successfully polarised thingification of the mutual activities and behaviour of the
capitalist speculators and their exploited work-slaves evaporated back into
the mist-covered shelves of Plato’s emporium of reificational forms and
transcendent templates from whence they came. The intervening period which, though
short term by historical standards, lasted right through until the time
following Gorbachov’s failed attempts at a reform of the Communist state —
characterised by the usual welter of gerundial abstraction characteristic of tyrants
or a dominant social strata desperate to hold on to power.

But Marx bequeathed us a powerful insight into the way in which reification
and the concretisation of abstraction comes into being and how it is applied,
Dr Rookementions Rubin who in 1923 published his Essays on Marx’s Theory of
Value. and Rooke supplies us with the following quotation from this work: [8]
(Rooke. 2007)

In the opening chapter, addressing Marx’s Commodity Fetishism and
Reification Theory of Fetishism, Rubin declares:
Quote: ‘’Vulgar economists’ (the representatives of political economy after
Ricardo), employ categories such as value, money and capital, which are
considered not as expressions of human relations ‘tied’ to things, but as the
actual characteristics of the things themselves. They come to focus exclusively
on, and study, the ‘natural-technical’ characteristics of these things,
believing that it is in the analysis of the movement of these that the true science
of economics resides. It is the reification of production relations
therefore which considers the social characteristics of things as natural
characteristics belonging to the things themselves. ‘Vulgar economy’ remains imprisoned
within the reified conceptual limits of capitalism. Insofar as it only
considers the quantitative relations between fetishised categories it can neither
arrive at a real understanding of the mechanism of capitalist production, nor
provide a prescription for its transformation.’
[9] (Rubin. 1972)

The Fall of the Soviet Union

Thus it was from the lips of Michael Gorbatchov that the west came to hear
of the latest series of reificative linguistic instruments of metaphysical
transcendentalist manipulation being the so called hypostasised reforms called
uskoreniye (acceleration) glasnost (liberalisation, opening up) and finally
perestroika ((restructuring. ) It was too late. The ascendancy of the
metaphysically mysterious over the physically obvious was over and Marx’s
reificatively inspired revolution ended with the destructuring and eradication of real,
steel-wire and concrete and down with it came the abstractive concatenational
chains which formed the internalised mental bonds of totalitarianism. The
real bricks and mortar material of the East Berlin wall tumbled and down with it
crashed the thingified pseudo–entity of Socialist Freedom - a shattered
concrete symbol of a separated hammer and sickle lying in the brick-dust..

The final act ensued with the storming of the building in which the
traditionalist rump or junta which represented the last gasp of communism cowered as
shells fired by Russian army tanks exploded into the fabric of the building
whilst a drunken Yeltsin swayed, smiled and waved from a gun turret
pronouncing the cabal’s actions illegal. Declarations of independence by the
constituent republics followed shortly afterwards with the abolition of all-Union
institutions and the transfer of their assets to the republics. Increasing
international acceptance of these developments sapped what little strength there had
been in the Union. On February 7, 1990, the Central Committee of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union agreed to give up its monopoly of power..

This was a radical historical change, as control of formerly suppressed
citizen-generated reification critical of government leadership was relaxed and
people were now free again to conjure up as many meaningless religious or
transcendentalist dualist abstractions as they had been able to do so in Czarist
times (as long as those criticisms were not levelled against the royal family
or the Czarist state of course. With the abolition of the suppression of
government criticism. which had previously been a central part of the Soviet
system, the gave way to a spate of public and media adoration and repugnance for
the system which lasts to this day.

Thus the traditional, specialised Marxian type of reification was a dead in
the water and the scene was set for an orgy of abstractive, triumphal western
capitalistic reification that would reverberate through the corridors of
government, industry, commerce and academia, manifesting its most virulent form
in the conduits and cloacas wherein bobbed and floated the personal and
corporate evacuant deposits of pecuniary abstraction and virtual money on their
way to the globe wide gambling dens or sewerage farms in which bathes the naked
speculators in an orgy of short-and long term debt, anal retention and
private and corporate self deception.

As a retired Sales Negotiator and subsequent manager of the North West Urban
Renewal Sales Department for Wimpey Homes (Britain’s largest homebuilder) the
recent unrealistic income-to-borrowing-quotient made my hair stand on end.
It began with the idiot mortgage lenders that retained credit risk (the risk
of payment default) and were the first to be affected, as financiers of the
naive house-purchasing borrowers, totally bewildered by being offered vast
amounts of money which their meager incomes predictively guaranteed would never
be any chance of them servicing became unable or unwilling to make payments -
it ended in the collapse of many of the world’s leading banks and other
corporate building societies and other borrowers pawn-shops, it ended too in the
casinos of the futures markets, were risks that would raise the hairs on a
croupier’s neck at Monte Carlo took place every day.
Subprime Mortgages

But most notoriously of all – in the reifications of all reifications – the
mother of all euphemisms, commercial mega-lie of all time – the subprime
mortgage crisis (a term that will live in infamy) characterised by a contracted
liquidity in the global credit markets and banking systems. It was a
reificative undervaluation of real risk in the subprime market is which cascaded,
rippled and ultimately had its effects in even the most humble of the outposts
of the world economy, including of course the very ex-Soviet citizens who had
clawed down the reificative barriers of one socio-political abstraction only
to be confronted with another system of mass-reification where global,
metaphysical macrophages borrowed money from other monetary phagocytes; with which
the gobbled up any free cells that were vulnerable. As with the Soviet
hierocracy there was a similar credulous faith in the ordained teleological
omnipotence of the globally structured financial arrangements which cloaked the
nature of the real world until the whole house of cards collapsed putting a quick
end to the metaphysical mess in a cognitive clutter of obfuscation and
surrealist fantasy.

The Derivatives Monster

Out of all the incredible financial developments of the 1990s, one of the
most important fundamental structural changes in the nature of the operation
and interaction of the global financial system was the literal explosion of the
use of derivatives. Derivatives are often highly complex financial
instruments that “derive” their value from some other underlying asset. As the use of
these instruments evolved and advanced to a stunning degree in the 1990s, an
intriguing bifurcation of opinion on the merits of the hybrid instruments
developed. Among the Wall Street power players and aggressive private
speculators, derivatives were seen as a wonderful financial innovation that would lead
to highly customizable risk management and a huge new profit stream for Wall
Street. Outside of the financial halls of power, however, derivatives began
to acquire a reputation of being staggeringly risky financial instruments that
could turn sour in a heartbeat and devour the financial wizards who created
them like hungry sharks. Like the young sorcerer’s apprentice in Walt
Disney’s classic 1940 masterpiece “Fantasia”, a general public perception of
derivatives gradually evolved that perceived the growth of derivatives as a
dangerous experiment being recklessly played out in the financial world. Like the
sorcerer’s apprentice dabbling in powerful magic when the master was not around
to manage the unleashed forces, derivatives creation was increasingly seen
by the average investor as being hazardous attempts to harness enormous
financial tides and forces that were simply too big and too complex to be
decisively tamed. A string of massive derivatives debacles in the 1990s helped
buttress this negative popular perception of derivatives and provided strong support
for the “derivatives are very dangerous” side of the great derivatives
debate.[10] (Hamilton. 2008)

So what now?

According to commentator Edmund Conway writing in The Daily Telegraph
Britain’s most right wing newspaper, there are five ways in which the financial
crisis is already changing the world:

1. The world is about to take a major leftwards lurch. Welcome to the 21st
century’s first bout of soft-socialism. The last time there was a comparable
period of economic and financial turmoil, coupled with record inequality both
within and between nations was – well, that was the 1930s again – but the
fact is this is classical social democratic territory. This big shift is still
in its nascent stage, but when the recession takes hold over the next year or
so I suspect parties of all hues will be shuffling swiftly away from the
free market and towards the side of greater state intervention and more wealth
redistribution.

2. Coupled with this, the return of major re-regulation for the first time
in decades. After all, there has to be a quid pro quo for the billions of
dollars/pounds of taxpayer’s money put at risk in order to shore up or save those
financial institutions that are salvageable. A ban on short-selling is only
the start of it. The financial sector will be more heavily regulated than it
has been since the Big Bang sounded the modern City revolution 22 years ago..

3. The City will no longer be the most attractive destination for Britain’s
brightest graduates. This is a serious about-turn. When I was at university
at the turn of the millennium, careers in corporate law, management
consultancy, investment banking, private equity and hedge funds (more or less in
ascending order) were the target for many of the smartest graduates. There will, of
course, still be extremely lucrative positions in the City, but with
regulation clamping down hard, with investors more tentative than ever and – most
importantly – with far less capital sloshing around over the next five years or
so, those jobs will be far scarcer. This is good news. Britain is home to
some of the world’s most intelligent people, but until recently they had been
holed up in the City working on spreadsheets and financial weapons of mass
destruction. Many other industries will soon see their talent deficit reversed.
Those particle physicists who were working on complex derivatives for a hefty
sum may return to science. I wonder if the phones at the Large Hadron
Collider are already ringing. Perhaps some will beat a path towards financial
journalism, though I imagine that might be that little bit too much of a
remuneration shock.

4. The return of real meaty, controversial economics. Economics has been in
something of an ideological rut in the decade and a half since the collapse
of communism. The demise of the Soviet Union, the defeat of the monetarists,
the apparent success of inflation targeting: all of this seemed to signal not
just the end of history but the end of macroeconomic debate. Although there
has been lively economic dialogue in academic spheres it has mainly been over
the more arcane end of microeconomics. This is about to change. The current
consensual model, best embodied in Gordon Brown’s claim about having laid to
rest the “boom and bust” of previous generations, has been exposed as
hubristic in the extreme. Its high priest, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan
Greenspan has already suffered the most painful fall form grace since Enron.. The
real debate about how we shape the world economy for the next 20 years is
about to begin, and it promises to be a compelling one.

5. China’s rise will continue, but not after some major economic - and
perhaps political - turmoil. Though most of our attention is on the financial
markets, there are growing worrying signs that China and the rest of the emerging
markets are heading for a major slump. I will look at this in a later blog,
but clearly this will pose some danger to those assumptions firstly that the
emerging market would help support the rest of the world through the coming
slump - in fact it might make it worse - and secondly that China’s rise to
greatness and world economic domination would be fast and smooth. [10] (Conway.
2008)

Jud Evans. Sept. 2008.

References:
1. Marx. Karl and Engels. Frederick. ‘The Communist Manifesto.’ 1848.  http://evans-experientialism.freewebspac…
2. Lukacs, György . History and Class-Consciousness (Studies in Marxist
Dialectics). p. 93. 1971. Merlin.
3. Rooke. Mike. ‘Commodity Fetishism & Reification’ Common Sense No. 23,
1998.  http://libcom.org/library/commodity-feti…
4. Lukacs, György . History and Class-Consciousness entitled ‘Reification
and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’ p. 94.
5. Woodard.James W. ‘Intellectual Realism and Culture Change.’ 1935.
pp.9-13. The Sociological Press, Minneapolis. USA.
6. Lukacs, op. cit, .
7. Karl Marx, Capital (in 2 volumes), Volume 1, translated from the 4th
German edition by Eden and Cedar Paul, p. 46. Dent 1957.
8. Rooke. Mike. ‘Commodity Fetishism & Reification’ Common Sense No. 23,
1998.  http://libcom.org/library/commodity-feti…
9. Rubin. I. I. ‘Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value,’ trans. Fredy Perlman
from the 3rd Moscow edition. Black and Red, Detroit 1972. rooke
10. Hamilton. Adam. ‘The JPM Derivatives Monster’ Sept 2008. Gold Digest.
Zeal Research.  http://www.gold-eagle.com/gold_digest_01…
11. Conway. Edmund. ‘Five Ways in Which the Financial Crisis is Already
Changing the World’. Daily Telegraph. Sep 19, 2008. London.

Posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 6:01 am
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