> Interesting dilemma... but what if people are trying to apply an
> entirely
> inadequate framework to the problem? Is it material conditions
> generating
> economic chaos; or is it psychological factors causing the downturn?
> But
> here's a question: what if its absolute ideational and economic
> confusion?
> What if we weren't to attribute the "cause" to either psychological OR
> material factors and were to put it down to pure... as Sartre called
> it...
> "nausea"?
A liquidity crisis is a psychological phenomenon.
It's an expression of a psychopathological "state of character", linked aspects of which are an irrational love of money and of money- making and, particularly important in the present crisis given its link to "mathematical finance", the use of inapplicable mathematical and statistical methods to deny danger.
This idea of "irrationality" is underpinned by an idea of "rationality" as rational self-determination of feeling, thinking, willing and acting.
According to Marx, the degree to which individuals are "rational" in this sense (and, correspondingly, the degree to which they are irrational) is socially constituted by relations of production. It's in this sense that, according to him, the psychology expresses - is "caused" by - "material conditions".
These conditions are a human creation and hence ultimately open to rational self-determination.
For them to become self-determined in this way, however, it's necessary that, in their capitalist form, they work to develop a "state of character" with the degree of rationality required to transform them into conditions from which all barriers to the development of a capacity for fully rational self-determination have been removed.
Among other things, this would be a state of character with the developed capacity to escape 'fetishism", i.e. the treatment of what is in fact a human creation - "material conditions" - as the creator of the human.
Ted